Archive | Politics

Looking Back—Looking Ahead

As I sat down to write this last blog of 2022, I looked back at the blog I wrote at the beginning of the year. Here is the opening paragraph. I don’t know how to start this new year that feels already old. The usual resolutions seem irrelevant, the questions bewildering, the answers out of […]

Continue Reading
flag split

Now Comes the Test

Election 2022 is all but over. A few races are yet to be counted, and we don’t yet know the final count of the US Senate, but we have enough to see the road ahead. We are an evenly divided country with an evenly divided government, but the Democrats have escaped decimation. Will we have […]

Continue Reading

No Red Wave!?!

Election Day plus one, and liberals are shaking their heads in amazement. Conservatives are shaking their in bewilderment—or disbelief. No red wave swept the Democrats out of office. In fact, some red states started popping blue spots. Yesterday, election day, I had nothing to write; it was a day of waiting for the axe to […]

Continue Reading
american-flag-1020853_640

Fear of Chaos

  Two weeks until Election Day and former President Obama declared he was through giving speeches—he was out of words. Amen—my feeling exactly. In an election that is more vital than any midterms of recent history, we cannot communicate with—cannot reach—half the voters of the country.  Both sides believe the oligarchy of the rich has […]

Continue Reading
dreamstime_s_176155152

It’s Time to Act: VOTE!

I was browsing through my blogs today, looking for topics and wondering why nothing seemed appropriate. Then I realized I’d committed the chief failing of my academic upbringing—analyzing causes when the time has come for action. So enough reflection. The upcoming election is more vital to the nation’s welfare than any in history. It’s time […]

Continue Reading
dreamstime_s_176155152

Take Back the Flag

One of the saddest developments of the national crisis is that we’ve come to identify the American flag with the far right, and assume that residents of houses flying the flag must be Trump supporters. It’s hardly new that the far right believes they are more American than liberals. Calling opponents “Un-American” was a favorite […]

Continue Reading
dreamstime_s_176155152

To My Fellow Midwesterners

    I’m a Midwesterner. It’s been a long time since I left, but I’m still a Chicagoan—from Carl Sandburg’s “Hog-butcher of the World” Chicago. The Chicago of my day was the rail center that brought the farm to market. Though I was born, raised, educated, and married there, my roots are in the small […]

Continue Reading

Words Change Us

I’ve talked before about how shifts in the language have changed the political climate. How, when “opponent” became “enemy,” “debate” became “battle,” and “compromise” was called “selling out” politics went to war. Our minds followed the words, and the climate soured; war words became an accurate description of political life—except to those of us who […]

Continue Reading
dreamstime_s_211694006

Respect

  In my last blog, I talked about the power of respect, the effect that being respected as a woman had in my own life as well as the cruelty of mockery and belittlement. In writing it, I realized how central respect is to our democracy. In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt call lack […]

Continue Reading
Constitution

Educating Citizens

Education has always been a hot topic, and it probably should be. Teaching racial history is the current controversy, and I can’t imagine any justification for not teaching it—which does not mean uncritically adopting anybody’s theories about the nature of the white race. It’s too bad this needed conversation about how we are educating our […]

Continue Reading
heartland

Spreading the Word

    I’ve been writing about the political and social crisis in America for months, and the inevitable question becomes louder and louder in my head. And in yours too, I suspect. What do we do about it? My only answer has been—Write! My gratitude to those who have responded to my blogs, for language […]

Continue Reading
Sixties war protest

Progress and Progressives

Looking back through my lifetime (which is long), the Progressives of today are the age my grandchildren would be. And that’s using the traditional definition of “generation,” not social science’s current definition, which names a new generation every ten or twelve years. Indeed, the younger Progressives are the age of my “would-be” great-grandchildren. That tells […]

Continue Reading
Find us on Google+