Columns 2008

A friend and I recently had an e-mail exchange about silence versus…well, anything that makes noise. He went through a great deal of trouble to find a portable radio that meets his living and exercising needs. Exercising is also his excuse for owning an iPod.  I don’t own an iPod.  Or a Blackberry…in fact, I’m still not even sure what a Blackberry is. I’ll figure that out as soon as I figure out what Blue Tooth means. Anyhow, I realized that I really am different from the majority of people in that I seek and crave silence. When I walk,

Hillary Clinton seems to have a problem with the inspirational aspect of Barak Obama’s campaign. She wants details. That’s funny coming from a woman whose husband once said, “There is nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what is right with America.” Sometimes politicians forget that it’s not just the nuts and bolts of a plan that change the landscape. Sometimes it’s the words used to inspire a people to be better than they are, to achieve goals they thought impossible.

All the great leaders of history have known that this is an integral part of leading. Is

It was one of those moments. I shoved the salmon with pill into the eagle’s mouth as one volunteer held him and another gingerly pried his mouth open. I’d get the salmon down far enough to think he’d surely have to swallow. He’d glare at me and, the minute we let go of his mouth, spit it right back out. Then he’d glare some more.  I’d pick up the now tattered piece of salmon barely holding a melting pill in its center and we’d do the dance again. Eventually the humans won. But it was not lost on me that

Watching congressional hearings this past week, you would have been hard pressed to know there was a war going on in Iraq in which our soldiers and their soldiers and civilians continue to die with no viable definition of winning evident, or that the economy was tanking, or that my house is probably worth about half of what the government wants to assess it at for tax purposes. That’s because our leaders were too busy tackling the obviously much more important problem of steroids in baseball.

I’m still not sure why the government is spending my tax dollars on this

I’ve told this story before but I think it bears repeating. A class on STDs had a discussion centered on the role of alcohol in child sexual assault. The instructor asked everyone in the class who’d ever been drunk to raise their hand.  Most hands went up. Then the instructor asked those who had sexually assaulted a child while drunk to keep their hands up. All went down.

Recent statistics show that fifty-seven percent of rapists were not using alcohol when they assaulted.  Sixty percent of the victims were sober during the incident. Sexual assault is about power. And what

A very dear friend of mine recently got some bad news. She’s ill. Very ill. The kind of ill that involves hospitals in the lower 48, chemotherapy and a lot of fervent prayers.

My friend is an amazing woman who generates deep love and affection in anyone who takes the time to know her. She and her partner raised two beautiful young ladies, the kind of young people who give hope for the future.

Her partner would like to stay with her during the next month while she’s in a hospital so far away.  That’s not too surprising considering that

I wrote a column a few weeks ago about pseudo-families. State and federal rules require social workers to try to reunite these dysfunctional families when children have been removed from them despite the fact that healing something that never existed is darn near impossible. I had a very interesting e-mail response to that column that struck me as even more pertinent after reading about the sex trafficking trial currently happening in Anchorage.

The trial is about whether or not the accused was prostituting the girls who lived in his house, paying them in drugs and periodically beating or abusing them.

America’s economic engine seems to run on marketers selling us stuff we don’t need based on advertising that convinces us we can’t live without it. But if I sometimes despair over the materialistic world that has swallowed America whole, a week spent in the company of volunteers who willingly held smelly slimed eagles that were very unhappy about getting a bath cures me of that despair. Because while marketing may drive our economic engine, its the volunteers in our communities that drive our hearts and souls.

Just about everyone by now knows the story of the eagles that thought there

Here’s the thing about Alaska and the oil industry.  Without the industry, Alaska would still be trying to figure out how to pay to keep the lights on in the winter. For this we should be grateful to them. Industry investment dragged this state into the economic life of America in a way that would never have happened without it.  The size of our Permanent Fund alone makes us players with the big boys in the financial world.

But let us be very real about industry’s dedication to our state. Neither Exxon, nor ARCO, nor BP nor Conoco Phillips, nor

After spending countless years working with abusive families and damaged children, I’ve decided that one of the ways to get a grip on the problem is to redefine the terms. Anyone who’s ever been called fat or ugly knows that words are very powerful. So we need to use the right ones in defining the people involved in the court system because of domestic violence and/or neglect and abuse of children.

Right now, the system is geared towards reuniting families. This goal is predicated on the assumption that the family is the best unit society has for rearing the next