Columns 2015

Last week was one heck of a week, wasn’t it? The Affordable Care Act got upheld, marriage equality was extended to all people in this country, Obama sang Amazing Grace a capella and actually pulled it off and Bristol Plain proved the efficacy of the abstinence program she advocated for so long as they were paying her a lot of money. Yep, what a way to begin the summer.  Alaska’s fires stopped making national headlines. Our earthquake was lost in the fog of funerals. Even Donald Trump’s insane rantings couldn’t get him front page coverage in the face of such

Here’s what I don’t understand. I don’t understand why we always seem so surprised at the health care needs of veterans returning from wars. It’s not as though this is something new. Every war supplies us with heartbreaking pictures of veterans living in cardboard boxes on streets; of veterans pushing their legless bodies on wooden boards with wheels begging money; veterans reliving the nightmare of what they saw and what they endured to keep their homeland safe.

These vets are the by-products of war that we seemingly don’t know how to handle. We always find money for war, even if

I am an ardent supporter of public broadcasting. Until last year, I had been on a board or commission for public broadcasting since my first stint at KBRW in Barrow in the late seventies. I was there as public radio brought the Inupiat language into the public sphere by broadcasting in Inupiat as well as English. I listened as people from far-flung villages wished distant friends and relative’s happy birthday on the birthday show.  I anchored a show on Saturday mornings called Discount Radio. Its motto was, “You get what you pay for and I’m a volunteer.” This tamped down

It’s funny how progress gets made sometimes. We often don’t even recognize it as such until we stop and ponder the implications. On first hearing the news last week that same sex couples receiving health benefits through the state employee system would now have to be married, my gut reaction was that this was just another effort to deny same sex couples their rights. Then I remembered that same sex couples have the same rights as anyone else to marry here, and I realized this requirement was progress.

Treating all people equally in civil society is the mark of a

Anchorage in the summer likes to think of itself as a city of flowers. And it is. But it is also a city of sounds, sounds that we don’t hear in the winter because we close our doors and windows to the cold. But in the summer, we open those windows and the sounds of everyday life come rushing in.

Last night I lay in bed reading while outside I heard a train whistle, kids playing and yelling to each other, dogs barking, lawnmowers roaring, birds singing – compared to winter in my house, it was a cacophony of sounds.

Between trying to destroy our public schools by underfunding them, refusing an expansion of Medicaid that would help children throughout the state, and now trying to twist Erin’s Law so that it becomes nothing more than a bastardization of its original intent, I have to wonder just how much our current legislators really hate children. Or maybe they owe so much to their money overlords that they are not allowed to provide for children if it comes out of the pockets of the people who pay to get them into office.

I’m not sure how we elected a group of

It must have been the dental surgery I had last week. That can be the only reason I missed my legislators coming to my door to find out what I really think about the work they did this session. They did come around, didn’t they? Isn’t that the reason they gave for their little two-week working vacation? So did anyone have a Republican legislator come knocking on their door to see how they felt about budget cuts? And remember, if you were one of those foolish people who thought the legislature existed in the 21st Century and so used e-mail,

I awoke today to no pain in the surgical site and no need to take pain meds so I am back to being functional… ok, maybe functional is too high to grasp but at least I’m not sitting in a chair drooling while watching BB reruns. That has to count for something.

Etok, Charlie Edwardsen, Jr., was definitely one of the most colorful people it has been my privilege to know. He was amazing in many ways, and in just as many ways could make friendship a challenge. He was who he was and made no apologies for that.

Etok managed to keep his passion for his people alive through more decades than any of us thought we’d survive. When I first met him in Barrow in the early seventies, I knew nothing really about the struggle for land claims or the indigenous rights of Alaska Natives. I had been seduced there