Yellow Springs, Ohio, is the kind of place that makes you smile the moment you step onto its main street. The kind of Main Street Generation X—and every generation before us—assumed would always exist. The kind that, to my children’s generation, now feels less like a living place and more like a memory: something America once built everywhere, and now struggles to protect anywhere.
Browsing: Opinions
Knowing The Reason For The Season Keeps Us Prayerful And Thankful.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ adoptive father Joseph and his mother Mary, live in Bethlehem, a town in Judaea near Jerusalem. It is assumed to be their home village. Certain wise men come from “the East” to Herod, the evil King, looking to honor a new ruler they have determined from their study of a bright star that has appeared like a message in the “heavens” is soon to be born.
In countless casual political conversations over the years, I have heard the principle of the “lesser of two evils” invoked, the quiet suggestion that voting is less an act of belief than a calculation of how much damage one is willing to tolerate. Alongside this logic is the familiar refrain that “both parties are the same.” Both frames are reductive and ultimately defeatist. They shrink democracy into a form of harm management rather than collective self-determination and condition citizens to expect disappointment as the price of participation.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper released this month is filled with nasty, nativist language and half-truths straight out of the Project 2025 playbook. But amidst the bluster about historic success in strengthening national security and claims about resolving wars is a stark reminder of the direction US foreign policy is taking, which looks to be a world divided into American, Chinese, and Russian spheres of influence.
Greg and I had been having Red-Blue conversations for a while, with spotty success. This time, we agreed to discuss mask mandates over the phone for 30 minutes on Friday.
In other words, Engels’ concept of social murders is alive and well—not through factory smog, but through stagnant wages, lack of affordable housing, gutted regulatory protections, denial of healthcare, indiscriminate tariffs, and the intentional suppression of voting rights. These avoidable tragedies, including deaths, are the foreseeable outcomes of systemic social, political, and economic oppression. If the government and capitalist policies are not addressed, the consequences are as lethal as any direct act of violence.
How about the No way in the hell prize?
I Told You To Follow The Money
Now that the government shutdown has temporarily ended, Democrats can take stock of the 2025 election returns and assess what the results mean for the 2026 midterms. In a year when national political narratives were dominated by noise, it was the South—not Washington, not the coasts—that delivered the clearest lessons for Democrats. The South was the star of the 2025 elections and Democrats should invest meaningful resources to further position southern states.