Why don’t our real problems get solved? For instance, I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t want to do what’s best for kids. Whether it’s their own kids, or the kids of a relative/friend/neighbor/colleague, the vast majority of people generally care about the next generation. Regardless of their political affiliation, most people want to protect kids, keep them safe, make sure that they’re physically and mentally healthy. Right? That’s what many Republican politicians say is their goal, too. So why then, here in Wisconsin, was one of the first acts of our newly elected state legislature to propose legislation that,

“You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.” I’m not opining about the high cost of eggs, although omelet lovers across the country are in mourning right now. I’m talking about the idea that sometimes, you have to break things to make something better. Meet some “eggs” that are currently being scrambled and broken in order to “make a better omelet”: -Farmers who signed contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve infrastructure, who paid up front to put in fences, plant different crops, and install renewable energy systems with the promise that the government would provide them

I thought long and hard about posting my last essay. In fact, I’d written it and then let it sit, like a chicken marinating in the fridge. And based upon some of the comments I’ve received, my hesitation about the post was based on a solid foundation. I hesitated to post it because I feared it might sound as if I was plopping an entire marinated chicken on a plate already overflowing with food. The metaphorical plate belonging to a woman, of course. To all women. Because I don’t know one woman whose plate isn’t more than full. And many

I had a telephone conversation with a family member the other night, someone I haven’t connected with in a long time. We’ve always been on opposite sides of the political aisle, and although our past political conversations were often passionate, just as often, they were punctuated by laughter and gentle ribbing. We often ended our conversations by agreeing to disagree. Yet, during the past few years, we hadn’t found a successful way to talk with each other. But for me, hope springs eternal. Unfortunately, hope seemed to fly out of the window the other night. What struck me most during

If you donated money to the Republican National Committee, are you at all curious about how it’s being spent? According to a report in the New York Times, both parties typically spend donations and energy on “turning out voters — funding extensive organizing operations that knock on doors, run phone banks and track voters.” But this election cycle, according to the article, chances are your GOP donation is being spent on law suits and other so-called “election integrity efforts.” No matter that there is no legitimate study or source proving that our elections are anything but secure and legitimate, since

First, let me be crystal clear: here in America, we must settle our differences at the ballot box. Never with violence. Ever. Assassination attempts are always horrifically, terribly wrong. But I’m curious: is anyone really surprised? Surprised that in a nation where there are more guns than in any other country in the world—more guns than people—that someone would turn to using a gun to settle a perceived score? So then, is anyone really surprised how difficult it must be to protect presidential candidates from those millions of weapons, unless you lock the the candidates in a heavily-guarded, secret and

I’ve been interested and active in politics for a long time, starting as a little kid when my mom took me to my first protest rally. It stuck. Some of my young family and friends recently have asked me, “Do you think we can win?” I think they’re asking me because I’m old. Which is fine because it’s true. And it’s nice that those early and long-ago lessons from my mom are still with me. Last night, I attended the Harris/Walz rally at Fiserv Forum along with 15,000 other wildly enthusiastic people, including a young friend who’d asked me that

When I was a kid, the nightmare I had over and over again always began the same way: I’m eating a bowl of Cheerios at the Formica-topped table in my mother’s kitchen. Her pretty, white ruffled curtains, encouraged by a gentle breeze, float in and out of open windows. A loud bang, like an unexpected gunshot, jolts the spoon out of my hand, the milk sloshing from my bowl and spilling across the table. The noise is coming from the closed door leading to our basement, and it grows louder with each rhythmic thud, the thumping in my chest doing

I was fresh out of college when I first read the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, which is now also a TV series. It depicts the US as a police state ruled by Christian fundamentalists who oppress women while surveilling and regulating the lives of its citizens. When I read it, I was struggling to reconcile my Catholic upbringing with my staunch feminist beliefs. My Catholic feminist mom was struggling with the same. Given that the church we both attended back then was widely regarded as the most liberal in Milwaukee, we were in good company among plenty of Catholics who

Just about every woman I know has told me the same thing: “I’m so tired.” Women who are young mothers. Women who are retired. And women in between each of those stages of life, all saying and feeling the same thing: “I am so, so tired.” I feel the same. And this sentiment is not going unnoticed. Books, articles and podcasts offer similar antidotes to wake us from our communal slumber: Take more bubble baths and naps. Schedule more massages. Demand that your husband/partner/co-worker/boss do more, and/or expect less. In one article offering 50 Ways to Better Self-Care, I found

There are two things I wouldn’t want to be right now: an employee at Twitter or a pollster. Especially a pollster. They sure got it wrong–again. To be fair, the reasons why are becoming more clear. For one thing, right wing media aggregated the polls showing Republicans in the lead, and they spread those “results” far and wide. The mainstream media fell for it as well, and the polling certainty that Republicans would win spread faster and wider than manure on a Wisconsin cornfield in the spring. And just how did pollsters get it so wrong? I think that maybe,

Inflation and crime. Did anyone think we’d make it through several years of a worldwide pandemic and the resulting economic shutdown without repercussions? If COVID is why we are where we are, moving forward, perhaps the questions we should be asking are: what’s been done to recover from these problems? Are the measures working? And who has the best plans to continue our recovery? Let’s start with inflation. The GOP candidates running for office say inflation has been caused by Dem’s “overspending” on measures to jumpstart our stalled economy. Huh? How can that be true when inflation is happening all

Well, hello again. It’s been far too long since I last posted and I’m sorry about that. But here’s the thing: I needed a break. I (naively? hopefully?) thought that once He Who Shall Not be Named was out of office and a grown-up was back in charge, things would get better. Less chaotic. Less stressful. More civil. I knew that things wouldn’t go back to “normal.” In fact, I hoped it wouldn’t. I hoped that our leaders would see the cracks in the foundation of our society that, thanks in part to an international health pandemic, had opened up

It’s 1933 and Wisconsin is emerging from The Great Depression. Thanks to FDR’s New Deal program, federal dollars are beginning to flow into communities around the country, including Milwaukee, where visionary leaders years before had hired Frederick Law Olmsted, most famous for designing New York’s Central Park, to create a network of parks for the growing city. Olmstead believed that landscape architecture could serve various social purposes, including providing relief from crowded cities and encouraging people of varied backgrounds and social status to engage in community. Olmstead once described his park work as a “democratic development of the highest significance.”

A tree falls on your house. Instead of using the insurance money to fix it, would you instead use that money to pay your regular operational expenses, like food, gas, rent/mortgage? Wisconsin Republican legislators think that would be the wise way to go. And heaven forbid you use the money to repair your house so that it’s even better than it was before. They’d think that’s whack. In their proposed education budget, WI GOP legislators say we should use federal Build Back Better money to fund WI schools. Never mind that this federal funding is meant to cover additional expenses

Should Wisconsin include funding for the testing of our surface, ground and drinking water in our state budget, in order to be able to hold accountable businesses that release toxic “forever chemicals” into our environment? Should Wisconsin be the only state in the country that has refused to expand health insurance to more adults and kids living in poverty, resulting in a loss of $1.6 billion in federal funding to cover the expansion? Do you think big box stores like Walgreens should be able to lower their tax assessments by comparing their stores to shuttered retailers with lower values? Should

You’ve been vaccinated (yay!) and you want to take a trip, only you’re not sure where to go. It’s March, so heading to Phoenix sounds nice. But Chicago is always fun and you haven’t been there in ages. How to decide? Many of us would think about where we’ve been, as well as where we are, in order to figure out where to go. Reviewing your past vacations (hmmm, I’ve been to Phoenix a half-dozen times in the last few years) and surveying your current condition (I have two vacation days to use right now), might help you make the

A CEO carrying a leather briefcase and dressed in a cashmere overcoat hurries through the glass doors and into the marble-floored lobby of his office building. He pushes the elevator button as he’s done every week day for the past thirty years. He waits, but the elevator doors fail to open. He pushes the “up” button again. Nothing. Perplexed, he gives it another try, but still, nothing happens. He impatiently checks his watch and then pushes the button three more times. Still, the elevator doors refuse to budge. A scowl crosses his cleanly shaven face as he leans forward to

For those Wisconsinites who’ve waited far too long to collect unemployment benefits and can’t understand what in the damn hell took so long, perhaps a trip in the Wayback Machine will bring some clarity. Please stay seated during the trip. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Our first stop is 2001. Wisconsin’s jobless fund, which pays out unemployment benefits, has been severely weakened by the recession. If you look out your windows, a quick stop in 2009 reveals that the jobless reserve is now borrowing money from the federal government in order to keep paying benefits.   I ask

I feel embarrassed. Demoralized. Angry. Afraid, even. But what I don’t feel is surprised. And that, more than anything, makes me heartsick. Anyone else feeling similarly? We’ve heard so many lies during the past four years, thousands of them, told over and over again. Yesterday’s lie (shouted from a podium to thousands gathered in Washington, DC) was that the vice president could somehow break his oath to the Constitution by overturning the results of a free and fair election. And when it failed to come true, the mob attacked. Why would that surprise anyone? After four years of near-constant vilification

The American economy is like a schizoid yo-yo: On the way up, when times are good and getting better, some say “Government regulation of industry slows down growth–it’s anti-capitalist.” But when times are tough and on the way down, it’s all “Government to the rescue—where’s my bail out?” And it isn’t just industry or businesses sharing this seemingly bi-polar economic belief system. Take this quote from a recent poll regarding whether the federal government is doing too little to deal with the health and economic repercussions of COVID-19: “Gary Tidball, 52, a Republican from Overland Park, Kansas, has been relying

Dear citizens: Some of you, mostly my enemies, wonder how I’ve become such a great and adored leader. The ones who hate me puzzle over how I am able to do and say outrageous things, and still maintain the love and support of an adoring public. My approach is really quite simple and based upon the following: The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. Therefore, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of

We Americans are known for our “rugged individualism,” a term coined in a 1928 campaign speech by Herbert Hoover, who fancied himself a “self-made” millionaire. What’s interesting is that during the early days of the Great Depression, Hoover launched the largest public works projects up until his time. So I guess getting help from the government is sometimes okay—like during the middle of a pandemic, maybe? Speaking of pandemics, how has this idea of rugged individualism, of “going it alone” served us here in America, where absent a national strategy or coordinated federal effort, each state (and often, cities/counties within

As a kid growing up in the 1960s, I remember watching the nightly news and seeing Black people marching for civil rights, only to be attacked by dogs and police welding batons and guns. But still, they heroically marched on. I recall watching war movies about brave, young American soldiers risking their lives for us back home, marveling at their bravery. In school, we read inspiring stories about American heroes from the world of sports, medicine, science, academia, art—tales of ordinary people facing their fears, taking huge risks because, most often, they wanted to make the world a better place,