Leadership matters and is done most effectively by example. Why so many Americans choose to follow someone who sets an abysmal example—obsessively self-centered, habitually deceitful and callously cruel—is beyond me.

Why so many are convinced professional journalists are lying to them and propagandists are telling the truth is beyond me.

Why so many feel following the news and voting are a waste of time but shopping, gambling and obsessing over fantasy sports leagues are not, that’s beyond me.

Why so many are eager to let machines think, write, draw, compose and otherwise create for them is beyond me.

Why vice on a modest or even miniature scale offends people more than corruption on a massive scale is beyond me.

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Why so many believe those with very little are undeserving of more while those who possess unimaginable wealth deserve all that they have is beyond me.

Why so many are accepting of policies that produce the conditions described by these charts is beyond me.

Why so many think spending $14 trillion on wars in the first quarter of this century alone was necessary but spending small fractions of that amount to provide universal health care and debt-free education, build a nationwide high-speed rail system, house the homeless and end world hunger would be overly costly and wasteful, that too is beyond me.

These are confounding times.

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I did indeed look it up after the event. One dictionary defines allegory as “the expression of truths or generalizations about human existence by means of symbolic figures and actions.” Another says it’s a story “in which the apparent meaning of the characters and events is used to symbolize a deeper moral or spiritual meaning.” A third gives this highfalutin description: “A representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.”

When I sat down to write Miracles Along County Q, I wasn’t saying to myself how cool it would be to whip up a good allegory. Just wanted to pay tribute to my late brother Dan. Suspected a straight biography would struggle to find an audience. Lacked confidence in my ability to get across in a biography the miracles Dan worked on his younger brother, the magical effect he had on me. Settled on a fictionalized account of his life story. May have stumbled on writing an allegory in the process, without knowing it.

Wasn’t trying to make some grand moral or spiritual point, under any guise, abstract or concrete. Was simply trying to spin a good yarn and repay a debt I owed Dan. I am not a churchgoing man, and neither was he. Once gave him this shirt as a birthday present bearing the inscription: “Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself.”

Dan loved that shirt, wore it ragged. He was no saint, far too devilish to qualify. His passion was hunting, loved guns, drove recklessly, drank too much, was a meat-eater to the point of gluttony. Another dimension of his lived experience altered the course of my life, put me on a path I fear I never would’ve taken if he hadn’t been my brother. Opened my eyes, made me a better, more compassionate, more principled man than I ever could have become flying blind. Weird how he inspired me to write a story another author called “a parable for our troubled times.” Parable, another one of those churchy words. Dan would get a good laugh from that if he were still with us.

Labels like allegory and parable surely scare off some readers. Among the secular, these are loaded terms, off-putting ones. They see too much hypocrisy in worship. It’s been seen for ages. Hell, Mark Twain once wrote, “If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.” Near the end of Miracles Along County Q, one of the central characters—old man Morger—says: “For all the worshipping going on, there’s very little faith, certainly not in each other, not even in a power higher than ourselves. I swear, if a second coming actually happened, the messiah wouldn’t be persecuted, wouldn’t be crucified. Would be overlooked entirely, I’m sure of it.”

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Setting my novel in a fictional Wisconsin town named Faith was a deliberate choice, one that undoubtedly put off a few more readers. Chose it because of what’s being lost, what’s gone missing in too many lives. Like a thousand Faiths scattered throughout the country, faith is withering in America. It’s shriveling because it’s not properly understood, and that miscomprehension is causing it to be downsized.

Faith is equated to piety, but the two are not synonyms. When I say I am a man of faith, I am not proclaiming a religious bent. Faith is far more ambitious than that. Faith is not merely worship; it’s a deep understanding of the importance of belief in what’s possible. I have faith in democracy, which means I believe in my fellow citizens. I have faith in humanity, meaning I believe in the goodness in people despite an abundance of familiarity with cruelty and savagery.

We have invented machines that can gather information far faster than we can, write faster, calculate faster, make things faster. As intelligent as we’ve made them, they are not capable of empathy or generosity. They do not have faith, nor do they possess faith’s sibling, imagination. They only know what is, not what could be. They can sift through a hundred information sources, or a thousand, or a million, in a matter of seconds, then give you an answer. They cannot imagine a previously unfathomed possibility, or believe in it.

Faith is imagination, imagination is an act of faith. Nothing is more central to what it means to be human. Nothing is more intelligent.

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Frank’s 2004 book titled What’s the Matter with Kansas? became a national bestseller. His publisher boasted that the book “unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests?” Called it “a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People.”

The publisher gushed about Frank’s analysis of a “thirty-year backlash”—a popular revolt against establishment liberals—where he “reveals how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans” in a “place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation’s most eager participants in the culture wars.”

I read Frank’s book at the time with great interest, but was left unpersuaded. I heard a great many people here in Wisconsin parrot Frank’s main takeaway that rural working-class folks are voting against their own interests. I wasn’t buying it, considered it condescending and slanderous, have tried again and again and again and again—without much success—to disabuse people of that notion. I’m spitting into the wind. Frank’s portrayal has become an article of faith among liberals.

Frank didn’t seem altogether comfortable with this and began rethinking his position. His 2016 book Listen, Liberal comes off as something of an apology for What’s the Matter with Kansas? The same publisher marketed both, summing up the follow-up volume as a “book that asks: What’s the matter with Democrats?”

Much of what my family and I found in Kansas doesn’t match the stereotypes. We brought with us an expectation the scenery’s flat, barren and boring. The picturesque Flint Hills and Smoky Hills beg to differ.

Everywhere we went, from biggish cities to the smallest of towns, there was a pronounced Latino presence. The local cuisine at every stop was dominated by Mexican restaurants and food trucks. Pretty much every town had a small mercado (market), most also had a separate carnicería (butcher shop), and many a panaderia (bakery). The face of Kansas is evolving.

We certainly saw plenty of beef cattle and quite a few oil rigs, but the far more common sight was miles and miles of wind turbine forests stretching to the horizon. One massive tower after another, topped with those sleek single blades, set about a hundred yards apart, for as far as the eye could see. Looks like Kansas is big into renewable energy.

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Kansas hospitality wowed us. Everyone we encountered was super nice. Some parts of the state are quite affluent; others we visited are dirt poor. The people there are clearly proud of their heritage and way of life, but don’t show even a hint of arrogance. We were warmly greeted in a spirit of neighborliness by people who have to be aware they are the subject of widespread condescension by at least some of the outsiders they welcome with open arms.

They sure do know how to cook and sure do like to eat. I had maybe the finest fish tacos I’ve ever eaten, made in a trailer parked along a dusty roadside. And we were treated to legendary Kansas City barbecue served up at an old-fashioned gas station.

What’s the matter with Kansas? Far as I can tell, not nearly as much as some would have you believe. Our visit was brief but memorable, gave me the impression change is afoot in this place with a rich history of unpredictability, a reputation for shedding its skin as readily as any prairie snake, a presumed “red state” once known for a different shade of red.

Glad we made it here, Kansas isn’t what I was expecting. Got back home late Tuesday night, we’re not in Kansas anymore, feeling kind of sad about that.

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Sarah and I were among the panelists in a webinar sponsored by the League of Women Voters about the rural-urban divide. My job was to describe what problems city and country folk have in common and what challenges are unique to either rural or urban communities. After identifying a lengthy list of shared difficulties, I zeroed in on one that’s unique to city life—traffic congestion—and one that’s especially pronounced in rural settings—lack of access to services. Made a few other observations, then it was Sarah’s turn.

No one is better qualified to speak to that evening’s topic than Sarah Lloyd. She farms with her husband Nels in the Wisconsin Dells area. She’s also a supply chain expert who works with the Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative as well as the University of Wisconsin’s Grassland 2.0 project and the University of Minnesota’s Forever Green Initiative.

Sarah joined the League’s online forum from her home on the farm in rural Columbia County. Less than a minute into her presentation, her video feed froze. Moments later, her audio glitched out. The connection was briefly restored before cutting out for good. She hastily phoned in and profusely apologized before soldiering on with her remarks over a staticky telephone line.

Her sketchy country Internet and phone service—concrete evidence of the digital divide—made my point better than I ever could have. Living proof of what Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, the medium is the message. That was McLuhan’s most famous idea, introduced to audiences in 1964. The Canadian communication theorist died in 1980, didn’t live to see artificial intelligence at work or the Internet for that matter. But he thought and wrote as if he had. In his prophetic book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan wasn’t writing about ChatGPT, digital addiction or doomscrolling, but he just as well could have been. He could clearly see what was coming.

Regardless of where we’re from or where we now live, we share a great many problems. None bigger than our relationship with technology, the question of whether machines will be our servants or masters, whether tools like AI will end up assisting humanity or commandeering it.

Urban or rural, doesn’t matter, people are pushing back—hard—against secretive maneuvers to ram AI down our throats. Here in Wisconsin, the uprising started in communities like DeForest in populous Dane County, where citizens overruled village officials to block a massive data center needed to power AI. In conservative suburban Port Washington, residents revolted against a 1.3-gigawatt data center campus for OpenAI and Oracle supported by President Donald Trump, forcing a referendum on the project. Last month, two-thirds of voters there approved the measure giving residents more say over the project.

At a town hall meeting in tiny Cassville in rural southwestern Wisconsin, residents unanimously instructed their town board to put a stop to a proposed billion-dollar data center, signaling a “hostile backlash to unwelcome big tech incursions into rural spaces.” Menomonie in rural Dunn County also successfully fought off a planned data center, and organizers there developed a toolkit for other communities looking to do the same. Other small towns like Greenleaf in Brown County along with Caledonia and Yorkville in Racine County recently have rejected or caused tech companies to pull out of plans to build data centers in their communities.

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It’s not just happening in Wisconsin. Just last month, disgruntled voters in Festus, Missouri gave their city council a makeover after it approved a $6 billion data center, ousting all four incumbent council members running for reelection, half of the council’s membership. This city of 12,000 people along the Mississippi River a half-hour south of St. Louis joined the growing list of communities across the country rebelling against local officials agreeing to host hyperscale data centers over the objections of residents.

You’d think the segment of our population that grew up in the Internet age and have never not known computers would be most comfortable with AI and such. Think again. Judging from this year’s college graduation ceremonies around the country, many young people are not fans. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was loudly booed by students when he made mention of AI in his commencement address at the University of Arizona.

This was not an isolated incident. At the University of Central Florida, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told graduates the “rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” The crowd booed. Clearly taken aback by the reaction, Caulfield gamely tried to rally: “May I finish? Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives.” Her audience erupted in cheers.

At Middle Tennessee State University, music industry mogul Scott Borchetta also was met with jeers when he brought up AI. His response to graduates: “Deal with it, like I said, it’s a tool.” So is he. Hyping AI’s potential he’s good at, reading a room, not so much. Tech industry titans don’t do themselves any favors when they casually predict, as Anthropic’s CEO did, that AI will likely wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and create a new normal for unemployment, a jobless rate of between 10% and 20% in the next one to five years. A software company exec piled on, estimating new college graduate unemployment could reach 30% thanks to AI automation. Guys, young people are right over there, listening. They can hear you. And you’re still surprised they’re not jumping for joy?

Intelligence really does seem quite artificial in the highest echelons of this industry. Tech bro Peter Thiel froze for between 20 and 30 seconds before expressing ambivalence and uncertainty when asked during a discussion of AI if he thinks the human race should survive. Elon Musk cheerily predicted “work will become optional” in the next 10 to 20 years, “like playing sports, or a video game.” Not thinking for an instant that normal people find meaning, purpose and dignity in work, not to mention sustenance. Not realizing that what people hear him saying is soon they’ll no longer be needed, no longer be relevant.

Something’s brewing out there, something Musk and Thiel and their ilk cannot see coming. Marshall McLuhan surely did.

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What I missed out on were things I didn’t even know existed. Was never taught about Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and the race massacre there in 1921. Knew nothing of the history of sundown towns, even though it was clearly pertinent to my upbringing since nearly every community I grew up around once fit the description, with either written decrees or unwritten rules keeping blacks and other non-white ethnic groups out. If you weren’t white, you couldn’t be there after dark.

Was left unaware of another essential part of American history that was left out of social studies lessons, namely the circumstances surrounding white supremacy’s invention. Was oblivious even to the part of the story having to do with my own ancestry, how people with my ethnicity and skin color went from being despised outcasts to a recognized part of the white majority by aligning with oppressors rather than fellow oppressed classes to gain social and political standing.

Some living in places like where I grew up say teaching this kind of stuff will hurt kids’ self esteem, make them feel bad about their cultural heritage. Nonsense. Learning later in life about the Tulsa massacre or racial covenants in property deeds did not bring on self-loathing, it helps me properly understand the world I share with so many others. I needn’t have been spared this truth; I could have handled it in my youth. Discovering how indentured Irish immigrants sold out Africans they’d fought side by side with in Bacon’s Rebellion did not load me down with shame, it further opened my heart to sympathy and tolerance.

At no point in school was I taught the African proverb about how history is used to perpetuate the power of dominant groups.

Until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

The wisdom in this saying comes into sharper focus as we now witness the whitewashing of history, the defunding of reality, the erasure of the glories of lions.

It’s not just what wasn’t taught in school that left me woefully uneducated. It also was the many things taught that just weren’t so. I was taught about Adam Smith, superficially, beginning and ending with his invisible hand theory. The indoctrination I received had me believing that Smith was extolling the virtues of market capitalism free of government interference.

Turns out he was doing nothing of the sort. Turns out the understanding I was given is wrong. Turns out this lion of moral philosophy needed his own historians. The ones who told his story twisted it to their advantage, made him into a mascot for a mythology that served their purposes.

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I discovered this more than 40 years after my formal schooling was complete, too late to spare me the indignity of knowing an article I wrote for this journal in August 2025 did Smith’s work a considerable injustice. I now can only acknowledge my ignorance and seek to correct the record.

The Adam Smith taught in school is the father of economics. Truth is, he was not trained as an economist and didn’t consider himself one. The story we all were told says Smith viewed unregulated commerce as the purest form of human progress, tying him to laissez-faire, the idea that markets should be left alone. Truth is, laissez-faire was not his idea. He didn’t believe greed rules the world, he believed morality does.

Adam Smith wrote volumes. He mentioned the phrase “invisible hand” only three times in everything he ever wrote. And not one of those three references described a universal law of markets, none said deregulation is the path to prosperity. In fact, in his most famous text, The Wealth of Nations, he spent page after page warning about corporations becoming too powerful. He warned that merchants, when left unchecked, would distort markets to enrich themselves. He argued that markets are human creations that require careful oversight and moral boundaries.

The three invisible hands Smith did identify were superstition, fear and the physical limits of gluttony. Not exactly the holy trinity of free-wheeling greed-is-good capitalism. The whole purpose of The Wealth of Nations was to shine light on why markets fail, how monopolies form, how cartels manipulate prices and corrupt governments, how economic power concentrates. He argued for markets strong enough to innovate, governments strong enough to restrain, societies wise enough to demand fairness. In death, he was made into something he never was while alive, by people who wanted nothing to do with the kind of balance he favored.

This most recent shoring up of my incomplete and insufficient education does not bring on self-loathing or load me down with shame, it drives home how important it is to keep an open mind, be wary of certainty, stay on the lookout for new revelations. And it reinforces for me how genuine truths are lions that need their own historians.

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I’ve written before about how we’re living in a state of emergency, starting with the very first entry in this journal of mine nearly four years ago, then half a dozen more times since. In that first article, I wrote that it was not one single emergency but six all at once. A little over two years later, I upped it to seven. Now I’d say it’s at least eight, and we’re not having anything remotely resembling a national conversation about any of them.

We’ve got unaddressed national emergencies coming out of our ears and we’re not meaningfully discussing them much less taking corrective action. This is not only an indictment of elected representatives. The cowardly and politically paralyzed Congress we currently have is a reflection of an impoverished national conversation, not its cause.

Much is made of how divided and polarized our society has become, yet a strong case can be made that it’s something we largely agree on that’s most to blame for derailing national discourse and preventing problem solving. Yes, we have our differences, plenty of them. All generations of Americans have had differences, often very sharp ones, but previous generations managed to work through them. They didn’t get stuck, not the way we are today.

If there’s a national consensus on anything nowadays, it’s that America is in deep trouble, heading in the wrong direction, going downhill. One thing we all seem to agree on is that “the system is broken.” When we say that, we really mean to say systems, plural. The political system, economic system, health care system, all broken. And those are only the three brought up the most.

As for those eight largely ignored national emergencies, here goes:

1. There is grotesque economic inequality in America, and it worsens by the day, with the wealthiest 10% of Americans making half of all consumer purchases. Our society seems resigned to this arrangement. The federal tax rate on the highest income bracket is half what it was 50 years ago, the top rate the wealthiest paid at the end of World War II was nearly triple what it is now. There is not so much as a whisper—either in Congress, at the White House, in the media or much of anywhere else—about restoring such policies that even out the distribution of income and wealth.

2. Millions of Americans lack health insurance, millions more are a pink slip away from losing theirs, growing numbers who manage to stay covered have crappy insurance, nearly everyone who gets care has a horror story about how the medical industry did them wrong. Seven in 10 Americans believe the health care system has major problems or is in a state of crisis. No concentrated attention is being paid to overhauling it.

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3. Fear of a technological takeover of our lives and livelihoods has 70% of us here in Wisconsin believing artificial intelligence is overall a bad thing for society and similar majorities opposing the energy- and water-devouring data centers needed to power AI. In what passes for a technology debate, it’s all or nothing. One side demands outright bans on AI and data centers. The other side insists on a cyber version of the Wild West, with no rules or regulation whatsoever. So far there’s been no attempt to find a middle ground that accepts there’s no shoving this genie back in the bottle but also sees the need for economic safeguards for workers along with protection of personal privacy and intellectual property.

4. Heavy reliance on fossil fuels to produce electricity and provide transportation has caused undeniable environmental harms that are showing themselves in the form of more volatile weather and violent storms as well as adverse health consequences. As demand for electricity surges globally, the rest of the world is racing to transition to alternative sources of energy. Meanwhile, the current regime in the U.S. is doubling down on fossil fuels while withdrawing support for the development of renewables. The climate crisis is getting scant attention these days, having been driven off the agenda here. Few are complaining.

5. Plainly visible and loudly vocal expressions of racism and other forms of bigotry have been made fashionable again. After decades of progress, backsliding on women’s rights and even open displays of misogyny are gaining alarming degrees of acceptance. Scapegoating of immigrants and other vulnerable populations has grown commonplace. Such social injustices are in the back of our minds for the time being.

6. America condones and even celebrates violence while talking little and doing less about glaring symptoms of what 90% of Americans consider a mental health crisis. The U.S. leads the world in gun deaths, has the highest suicide rate among wealthy countries, fueled by an epidemic of loneliness and depression. That sums up a nation with more than unattended public health and safety concerns, one with uncorrected moral failings that are swept under the rug. Out of sight, out of mind.

7. Our country passed a grim milestone just the other day when the national debt surpassed America’s total annual economic output. Government debt has mushroomed to $31.27 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury, while the Department of Commerce estimated the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) for the past 12 months at $31.22 trillion. How best to raise revenue and reduce spending is not exactly a hot topic. The line for volunteers willing to stave off the nation’s insolvency by paying more, getting less or some of each is not long.

8. Belief that corruption is killing democracy has the blood of most Americans boiling, but equally strong feelings of political impotence quickly turn that anger into despair, as far too many among us wrongly assume it’s always been this way and always will be. Those who lack confidence in the possibility of any reform are convinced there’s no use talking about things like ending the legal bribery of elected officials or banning congressional stock trading. Needed conversations about these kinds of cures for what ails us are stopped dead in their tracks.

Eight mammoth problems, one murky future. We let everything from bombs to seashells get in the way of us dealing with them.

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The place I call home now has been petless the last couple of years, for the first time in close to 30 years. Even though there’ve been pets of one kind of another in our house for decades, still seems sort of unnatural. Growing up, we always had a dog to guard the grounds and help herd the cattle, was never allowed in the house, had a doghouse for shelter in case of storms, covered the floor with straw in the winter for warmth.

We also had barn cats to keep down the vermin, as many as 13 at one point if I recall accurately. I call them barn cats for a reason, that’s where they stayed when they weren’t wandering around outside. They lived off prey, though we also gave them table scraps. Those were mostly for the dog. Never once did we buy a bag of dog food or canned cat food. No Kibbles ‘n Bits for the pooch or Friskies for the mousers.

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This all seemed perfectly normal. Still does, even though I fully realize it’s well outside the cultural norms of city dwellers. Come to think of it, what was normal to me growing up where I did is not necessarily the way people in small towns live today. There is not a single rural culture, there are many, just as there is not a uniform urban culture. Both small towns and big cities are complicated and stratified and ever changing.

Perhaps because I’ve lived my life straddling what is now a troublingly pronounced rural-urban schism, have had a foot in both worlds, I was recently asked by a local League of Women Voters chapter to be a panelist in a discussion of ways to bridge the divide.

The job I’ve been assigned is to identify problems that rural and urban communities share in common and problems that are unique to urban or rural settings. I don’t plan to talk about dogs and cats. I’m expected to dig a little deeper. I’m looking forward to the challenge. This is a much-needed discussion that could do some good. If you’re interested in joining in, consider yourself invited.

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The threat or actual use of violence is, of course, a primary means of maintaining that power, but not the sole means, not even the most effective. The powerful cannot remain so unless those who are ruled accept their supremacy. Once that acceptance begins to crumble, not even the most ruthless violence is sure to prevent a ruler’s fall.

The Roman Republic was established more than 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, one of the world’s earliest experiments with a republican form of government. It lasted for close to half a millennium, coming to an end less than three decades before Christ’s birth.

Patricians were the aristocratic, land-owning elite in ancient Rome who held exclusive control over political, religious and legal offices. The rest of the populace—the lower and middle classes, the commoners—were known as plebeians.

In ancient Rome, patricians were in charge because they regarded themselves as aristocrats and actively sought to adorn themselves with authority they considered their birthright, but also because plebeians cooperated with the adornment, saw them as elite, as worthy to rule. So it is in modern-day America. Today’s patricians are seen, even celebrated, as special.

Our current president is loved by some, hated by many, watched by everyone. He has proven to be an erratic if not completely inept commander in chief, but the one and perhaps only thing he can indisputably command is a stage. He has genius-level ability to attract attention, keep himself forever in the spotlight. All eyes are on him, doesn’t matter if he’s being worshipped or savaged, he’s the subject of daily conversation. He is a living testament to the old saying all news is good news. He dominates every news cycle.

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This is how he wound up in the White House in the first place. This is why despite historically low public approval during his first term, he managed to win a second one. People can’t stop thinking about him, can’t resist talking about him. By obsessing over him for so long, we made him strong. By continuing to obsess over him, we prop him up. We’ve fallen into the same trap ancient Rome’s plebeians fell into, shining light and thereby bestowing ruling privileges on a patrician’s patrician.

In politics, sadly, the single most influential factor determining election outcomes is name recognition. The current president has made it his life’s mission to make his one of the most recognizable names on Earth. He’s aided immeasurably by America’s plebeians, who utter the name countless times every day.

Knowing this, I try my level best to resist, consciously avoid bringing him up. Don’t bother speculating on his motivations, there’s no looking into his heart. Don’t speculate on his physical or mental fitness, there’s no diagnosing from a distance. Been sharing thoughts here on a wide variety of topics for going on four years now. This is my 203rd post. Out of the first 202 articles, only 14 mentioned him by name. Even those 14 were not about him, they were about us, our problems, our blessings, our past, our future. But fleeting references were made to him because his words or actions were pertinent to the subjects being addressed.

Try as I might to sidestep the plebeian pitfall, I bear witness to the power of patricians, seeing how devoting only 7% of my attention to him and his regime works to my own detriment. Of the more than 200 articles shared prior to this one, the most-read one by a longshot—with nearly three times as many readers as my average posts get—was essentially about him, well, an especially odious lieutenant of his. If I wrote about him more, I’d surely have a larger readership.

I take solace from the fact that my most-read article also is about what happened when plebeians of yesteryear got tired of patricians throwing their weight around and the spell they were under finally broke. Happened before, will happen again, once our focus shifts from him to us, our problems, our blessings, our past, our future.

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As soon as the Wicked Witch of the West appeared out of nowhere from a swirling plume of smoke, I could bear to watch no more and fled. I cowered as far from the living room as I could get, in a linoleum-floored utility room in our old farmhouse where the twin tub wringer washer was kept. Stayed there until my siblings assured me the show was over.

The movie played on TV only once a year back then, so I was a full 12 months older by the time the chance to redeem myself came around. Knew the witch was coming, was braced for her entrance. Settled in after that, confident—too confident—I’d make it through the whole thing. The story took a darker turn, then another, tension rose, I started to crack. When the flying monkeys swooped down into the Haunted Forest to haul Dorothy and Toto off to the witch’s castle, I made a run for it.

The following year I did manage to watch the entire film. Went on to see it dozens more times. Years later, watched with my son when he was around the same age I was when I first saw it, was amazed he didn’t once seem unnerved from beginning to end. Either I was an especially lily-livered child, or kids grow desensitized to fright at an earlier age than used to be the case.

Could be a bit of both, but that’s not the point of telling this story. As we age, we outgrow certain things and let those go, clothes, shoes, coats, boots, childhood friends, playground hijinks. Some no longer fit, others just seem childish, we find it embarrassing to hold on to them in our haste to be grown-ups. Once-cherished stuffed animals get thrown out or stored away. They did us no harm, on the contrary proved quite comforting, yet they get discarded.

We give up childhood innocence, never do replace it with any adult surrogate. We come to see innocence as naïve and weak, opting instead to allow ourselves to grow jaded and cynical, seeing those as proper responses to the rough and tumble of adult life.

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When we outgrow childhood fears, these too take on a new form later in life. All kids are afraid of monsters of one kind or another. Those flying monkeys set me off. For my son, it was Bruce the shark in Finding Nemo. When Bruce nearly leapt off the screen with jaws wide open, a terrified boy left my wife and me with no choice but to leave the theater. When the monsters of our youth no longer scare us, we curiously do not put fears behind us, we go so far as to monsterize people who are the least bit different than us, turn them into targets of our wrath and blame.

We leave behind childhood horseplay, but move on to gamify cruelty and killing, choose the most childish of leaders to handle our nation’s affairs, men and women highly skilled in scaring and demeaning and maiming.

Once we say goodbye to the freedom from care we knew as children, we waste no time bidding welcome to worries that enslave us as adults. With aging comes greater responsibility, making it impossible to be as care-free as we once were. But taking responsibility doesn’t make it necessary to load ourselves down with so many matters beyond our control, to the point of crushing our zeal for living.

As we age, the boundless energy of our youth wanes, but this loss is at least theoretically offset by gains in insight and wisdom. I say theoretically because it’s so glaringly apparent that many of the choices we’re making as a nation right now are neither insightful nor wise. Can’t help but sense a loss of innocence as America hardens, becomes less generous, less idealistic. Can’t help but feel how tightly fear now grips us, how cynical we’ve allowed ourselves to become.

Pondering what lies ahead for our country and our world, I’m thinking it’s never too late to grow up, but it’s also never been more important to remember the simple blessings and virtues of youth, what’s necessary to let go, what’s worth holding on to.

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He’ll keep going and going, battling by the screen’s light under cover of blanket, long after bedtime. He’ll talk a parent into paying for add-ons, more features, more functions, more levels, more foes. Maybe he’ll tire of it. Maybe he won’t. He’ll find adult content, you know he will. He’ll feel so grown up, peeping through a crack in some shuttered window, peering around some dark corner, then another, then one darker still. Chances are he moves on, gives authentic human relationships a try.

Or maybe he stays cooped up in that cell. Might never seek his release from this quarantine, might age without growing up, may go on to hunger more fea…

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To these men, owning people with different skin pigmentation was normal, even among those who thought it wrong. Possessing people with different reproductive organs was normal, too. They could scarcely imagine women voting. They didn’t see a civil war coming.

Many other things we take for granted were entirely unknown to them. Electricity. Flush toilets. Motor vehicles. Factories and assembly lines. Furnaces. Air conditioning. Telephones. Radio. Television. Computers. The Internet. Scroll was their word for a piece of parchment, not a mind-numbing way of passing time and ushering doom.

They did not have vaccines, knew noth…

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The Dow jumped 631 points on the day, taken as a sign of rebounding investor confidence. Stock traders rallied when news reached them that the U.S. and Iran were in serious and “productive” talks that could soon bring an end to the war that’s tanked the market and much of the rest of the economy. Except the two countries involved in these supposed negotiations were not seriously and productively talking, not if you accept a dialogue takes at least two.

Whether on Wall Street or Main Street, we all had every reason to wait and see. After all, we’d been told the war would be over in a matter of days, then were told it could last months. Last June, we were told Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.” A few weeks ago, we…

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Eyes rolled and heads shook at what they took for folly, but a ton of approval is not worth an ounce of self-respect. Choices you made then make me grateful today, remind me to resist acting in a retiring manner just because I am now retirement age.

In a stuffy gymnasium on a warm June evening back in 2001, I was the commencement speaker at the high school graduation ceremony in a small town where I spent the early part of my childhood. Few actually listen to commencement speeches, and mine was well on its way to being typically unmemorable. Until I strayed from my own thoughts to Thomas Jefferson’s.

Recounted how Jefferson believed each generation should start a revolution, rip up the Constitution and start over. How he famously said that expecting each new ge…

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Weeds offend our sensibilities, we see them as intruders, treat them harshly, the way we do with all trespassers. The land considers them partners, holds them tight. Insects creep us out, we regard them as a nuisance, do everything we can to keep them at bay. The land loves bugs, misses them terribly when their numbers thin.

Unequivocal evidence presents itself that our planet is warming at an unprecedented rate. Pains us to hear it. Some among us insist the warming is entirely natural, climate is always changing. It’s true, Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, but the rise in average temperatures we’ve been seeing in recent years is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years. Climate scientists are as unanimous as scientists ever get in concluding that the warming is due to human activity. Those currently in power or…

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Barely two years ago, the side favoring cleansing had substantial public support, with Americans seeing border security and immigration control as the country’s single biggest need.

We were promised aggressive but targeted immigration enforcement, zeroing in on violent criminals—the “worst of the worst”—who lack legal grounds to be in the country. Instead we got indiscriminate raids by rogue agents trampling on constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, wantonly using excessive force. Most of those rounded up have no criminal convictions, many are U.S. citizens, among them children, even Native Americans.

Communities have been terrorized and traumatized, with tragic consequences. Migrant families have been captured and held without cause, in unsafe and…

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Yes, verify, by all means. Document the dotting of every i, the crossing of every t. But when all the scrutiny, the evidence gathering, the fact checking is done and still doesn’t yield trust, that’s a danger zone where skepticism morphs into cynicism. A skeptic questions; a cynic assumes the worst. There is an abundance of cynics nowadays.

When tension between verification and trust reaches a breaking point, one casualty is clarity of vision, another is imagination, a third is faith.

I wrote last week about focusing on a hazard so intently that our field of vision narrows. All we see is the menace we wish to avoid or escape, leaving us unable to see what lies beyond the obstacle.

After hearing “I’ll believe it when I see it” for th…

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The performer known far and wide as Bad Bunny made history as the first artist to perform a Super Bowl halftime show almost entirely in Spanish. America’s superiority-complex-in-chief was disgusted by the spectacle, insisting “nobody understands a word” coming out of the Puerto Rican rapper’s mouth. Nobody. Or half a billion people worldwide, close to 50 million in this country alone.

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I do not count among these masses who speak Spanish, yet Bad Bunny’s performance spoke to me as well, transcending cultural and linguistic barriers through the universal languages of rhythm, harmony and movement. I felt the energy, the unbridled exuberance. I caught the symbolic expressions of pain and frustration, of hope and re…

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In no time Frazee was printing money on Broadway, with a string of his shows—Madame Sherry, Ready Money, A Pair of Sixes, A Full House and Nothing But the Truth—becoming huge hits. The small fortune grew large. He built the ornate Longacre Theatre in Midtown Manhattan, kept it full with his own productions and those of others.

Nearly everything Frazee touched made money, a real estate company, a brokerage business. He managed a professional wrestler, dabbled in boxing promotion. He knew everybody who was anybody, not just in New York, but all over the Northeast, including Boston.

Baseball was the national pastime. Wit…

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One horrifying story after another after another after another after another after another has emerged from the besieged Twin Cities in recent days. Details have been meticulously chronicled. Images are burned into memory. The extensive coverage is more than justified, the public needs to know the full extent of authoritarian overreach involved in the ruling regime’s lawless immigration raids.

When rogue federal agents snatch a 2-year-old girl and ship her from Minnesota to Texas in defiance of a judge’s order, other big stories get overshadowed. When they kidnap a 5-year-old boy to use as bait to draw family members out of their home, other critically important news goes unnoticed. When they force open the front door of a home without a warrant, slap handcuffs on a barely clothed man—a U.S. citizen—and pull him out into the freezing cold as his 4-year-old gran…

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