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Hello?

Betrayed by our textbooks

August 26, 2020 by Solveig Torvik

Lately I’m hearing a lot of laments from white people of a certain age, summed up by one woman in her 70s: “I feel betrayed by my history textbooks.” I share this shame about my own cursory grasp of the unrelenting, race-based cruelty that attends American history. Many whites I know feel duped by the […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

Can we survive self-rule?

July 29, 2020 by Solveig Torvik

Whatever made those Founding Fathers think we could govern ourselves? After the first attempt sputtered out in Greece, no one dared to try democratic self-governance again for 2,000 years. Little wonder. Just look at our failure, as individuals and political leaders, to control this pandemic. We blew it. Bigly. “America drank away its children’s future,” […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

Can America’s ruinous birth defect be cured?

June 24, 2020 by Solveig Torvik

“Our country has a birth defect: Africans and Europeans came to this country together — but one group was in chains.” — Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State. Slavery, our 400-year old birth defect, hasn’t troubled the sleep of white Americans for some time. It was abolished in 1865. We forget — actually, we whites barely were taught — that slavery was […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

What wants fixing

May 27, 2020 by Solveig Torvik

We’re a short five months away from replacing our president. Time to drag ourselves out of the Slough of Despond. But let’s not “return to normal.” Let’s do better. Fix what needs fixing. How about protecting the lives of “essential” workers in Washington’s orchards and packing plants and safeguarding the elderly — and those attending them — in our […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

Careless capitalism meets Coronavirus

April 22, 2020 by Solveig Torvik

Pandemics, it turns out, expose national weakness and strength. Strength? How about those unprotected front line health care workers, some draped in garbage bags — here in the world’s sole superpower — sacrificing their lives to save ours? Weakness? This virus has unmasked the deeply embedded economic dysfunction and disparity that bedevils our society. Yes, our president’s […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

The buck no longer stops at the Oval Office

March 18, 2020 by Solveig Torvik

“I don’t take responsibility at all …”  — Donald Trump’s answer to a reporter asking if he feels any responsibility for his administration’s failure to provide COVID-19 tests. Well, then, people. Here we are. As long promised by scientists, a pandemic has arrived, triggered by a new virus humans have no immunity against. There is no […]

Filed Under: COVID-19, Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

A brief personal history: the price of petroleum

January 29, 2020 by Solveig Torvik

“We don’t need Mideast oil.” — Donald Trump, after his Jan. 8 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Quassim Suleimani When I first started driving as a teenager, a gallon of gas cost 29 cents — $2.73 in today’s money. That was in 1953, the year the United States and Britain saw fit to overthrow a democratically elected Iranian prime […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

A lump of coal for Christmas

December 25, 2019 by Solveig Torvik

“Our Founders … suspected that there could be a rogue president. I don’t think they suspected that we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.” — Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi                       […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

Lift a glass of thanks for life in the Methow

November 27, 2019 by Solveig Torvik

The other day I read about once-thriving rural Midwestern towns losing population — and a basic amenity of life: their grocery stores. This set me to thinking. How is it that while so many rural communities wither, we, tucked away in the upper reaches of an isolated rural valley, have four grocery stores that are not only […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

Doing something about the weather

October 2, 2019 by Solveig Torvik

Wilbur Ross, the “Bankruptcy King,” has rendered a public service to the republic that commands our attention. Ross is our nation’s Secretary of Commerce. During the last government shutdown he confessed that he couldn’t understand why unpaid furloughed federal workers were going to food banks when they could get loans to put food on the […]

Filed Under: Hello? Tagged With: Hello?, Torvik

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Today is June 29, 2022

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Twisp
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73°
Sunny
5:02am9:05pm PDT
Feels like: 73°F
Wind: 11mph NW
Humidity: 32%
Pressure: 29.98"Hg
UV index: 7
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86/54°F
88/57°F
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