Last Word

I’m crashing your (balloon release) party

March 15th, 2017

A sea of bright balloons floats against the backdrop of the infinite prairie sky, blotting out the clouds and sun. This is a poetically picturesque scene soon gracing Fargo’s skies.

Gigi’s Playhouse, a Fargo nonprofit that provides services for people with Down Syndrome, is planning their second annual balloon release fundraiser for World Down Syndrome Day, held on March 21st because Down Syndrome is caused by triplication of the 21st chromosome.

Releasing balloons into the air…

Coffee with Congressman Kevin Cramer: dispatches from the town hall meeting

March 1st, 2017

People showed up hours early to get a good seat to meet North Dakota's sole representative for a town hall session on February 23rd, but many constituents were forced to the back of the room when Cramer's publicist, who had arrived even earlier, reserved prime seating for Cramer lackeys and sycophants like the hate-group Concerned Women of America, or to perennial ratings-loser Chris Berg and the skeletal remains of Scott Hennen.

Berg seemed particularly pleased with the turnout. I…

Putin and Trump: two sides of the same coin

February 22nd, 2017

“The most complete and happy victory is this; to compel one’s enemy to give up his purpose, while suffering no harm oneself.” -Belisarius

“I view the United States of these last years of the twentieth century as essentially a tragic country, endowed with magnificent natural resources which it is rapidly wasting and exhausting, and with an intellectual and artistic intelligentsia of great talent and originality. For this intelligentsia the dominant political forces of the country…

Bullion Butte wins another one

February 15th, 2017

There was a big dust-up about 5 years ago over the North Dakota State Land Board’s decision to offer, for lease, the right to drill for oil on the west side of one of southwest North Dakota’s major landmarks, Bullion Butte. The butte and some of the acreage around it are mostly owned by the U.S. Forest Service, and the area has been off limits to development since about 1977, and closed to even access by vehicles since 2001, when the Forest Service set it aside as one of five…

Dispatches from the United Against HB1427 rally

February 8th, 2017

The simplest description of HB1427 is this metaphor: imagine a dog p*ssing on the Constitution in front of your war-hero grandfather. Hundreds of people showed up to a rally in Fargo on Groundhog Day to rightfully oppose that concept.

People of many creeds and colors, tongues and towns showed up for this rally against this bad bill. Everyone had their reasons: family, business, solidarity. A map of pins showing attendees' ancestry filled every inhabited continent quickly.

Ostensibly…

Before I was a feminist

February 1st, 2017

What was I before I was a feminist, before I even knew what that word meant?

I was a proud daddy’s girl

In my mind, it meant that I was strong, independent and wild. I could be clever enough to figure out problems with my own two hands and ask the question ‘why.’ It allowed me to minimalize my mother's contributions, because what a mother gives is the right of her child, but what a father gives is a gift. These were never things my parents said, but what I learned from society.

I was…

A Christmas Campout

January 25th, 2017

I’ve spent a lot of nights sleeping within spitting distance of the Little Missouri River. God willing, I’ll spend a lot more. I’m pretty sure I’ve slept there in every month on the calendar. Some nights (and some months) were better than others. I’ve slept there alone, I’ve slept there with canoeing buddies, I’ve slept there with wives, with kids, with dogs, with a herd of bison trampling through my campsite, with coyotes howling, with a full moon and a new moon.

I’ve…

Honor, dishonor, and making America white again

January 18th, 2017

“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“It is engraved in my memory that Stalin used the term Russia, and not Soviet Union, which meant that he was not only inspiring Russian nationalism but was himself inspired by it and identified himself with it. There were also anecdotes. Stalin liked one in particular which I told. A Turk and a Montenegrin were talking during a rare moment of truce. The Turk wondered why the…

Whose lives matter?

December 21st, 2016

In 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old boy.

A heartbroken Alicia Garza took to Facebook to write a love letter to her dismayed friends reading “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black lives matter.”

Her words resonated with other activists, who contacted her and organized a social media platform to spread #blacklivesmatter to a disenfranchised community. Alice Garza is a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.…

The roots of Republican Party dishonor

December 21st, 2016

“This my prayer: Civil war fattening on men’s ruin shall not thunder in our city. Let not the dry dust that drinks the black blood of citizens through passion for revenge and bloodshed for bloodshed be given our state to prey upon.” - Aeschylus

“…the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith…in machinery…our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable,…All this, I say, tends to…

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