Family & Community
Funding Public Libraries Crucial to Diverse, Free Society
I am writing this letter in support of, not only maintaining, but increasing, the 2024 budget for the Marathon County Public Library. It seems strange that the budget of such a valued community resource should be threatened. We live in a complicated age where diversity of people and ideas should be celebrated, not condemned.
The public library system makes all kinds of books and ideas available to everyone. Public libraries are one of the safe places where people of all backgrounds, economic class, race, gender and ideology can gather and quietly go about their ...
Memories and Condolences for Theresa Miles
It is with sad hearts we bid farewell to Theresa ("Myrt") R. Miles, who passed away on Monday, August 1, 2023, after a courageous nine-year battle with cancer. At a time when public education has been under siege, Theresa stood out historically as a champion of public education from the start of her career. She began her career in Wausau in 1973, teaching at GD Jones before moving to Rib Mountain Elementary. At Rib, she taught first grade for 30 years. She also became the "literacy coordinator" in the WSD, coaching other teachers in the district. Numerous students ...
Commonwealth Spirituality
Here in northern Wisconsin, on Tuesday night, August 15, 2023, the Lincoln County Board of Supervisors defeated, by a vote of 13-9, a resolution calling for a county-wide referendum on the funding of the county-owned nursing home, Pine Crest. Over one hundred people—many of them elderly, some in wheelchairs—were in attendance in the big room where supervisors meet. Over half-a-dozen citizens spoke, all in favor of the resolution, including one man who pointed out that a ten-year $8 per month price tag (the property tax increase) offered an astonishingly inexpensive ...
Quality Schools for Wisconsin
“It takes a village to raise a child,” an African proverb.
The problems facing Wisconsin's public schools are complex. There are no quick or easy fixes. But neither are the problems insurmountable. Like with many issues the problems in education are solvable. We have the knowledge and resources to make needed improvements. We lack the will to make it happen.
Many of these problems are structural. They are the result of the outdated educational system and funding mechanisms. I am not a expert on education but I have a lifetime of being a student, adult learner, ...
Writer challenges legislator Robin Vos on stand against DEI programs at UW System
Here are two questions for the readers:
Do you contact Wisconsin legislators?
Do the legislators respond?
Recently, I sent an email to Assembly Speaker (Robin) Vos regarding statements Vos has made during and after the 2023-2025 budget session. Here are some of the statements I addressed in the email.
Speaker Vos said he is embarrassed to be an alumni of UW-Whitewater. He stated he and his fellow Republicans will withhold the $32 million allocated to the UW-System in the 2023-2025 budget.
What is his reason? He disagrees with the DEI (Diversity, Equity and ...
Brook Trout in the Coal Mine
To say that I come from a long line of fisherfolk requires something to measure that line by, so let's see what a brief glance at Google suggests. Though not as helpful as I'd supposed the lineage of fishers clearly goes back a long, long way. Somewhere between two hundred thousand and forty thousand years ago is the scientific range, forty thousand being the first time clear evidence of a heavy fish diet shows up in skeletal analysis. He's known as Tianyuan man, and chemistry of his bones tell us he fished in eastern Asia and ate his catch regularly.
So ...
The Jefferson Project: Thomas Jefferson’s Death Day and a Fourth of July Remembrance
Back in the mid-1980s, an outfit called Anvil Press published a book of mine. Its title was—still is—Nature’s Unruly Mob: Farming and the Crisis in Rural Culture. The topic (or its urgency) hasn’t gone away.
Anvil Press printed the book as a special issue of its occasional quarterly magazine, North Country Anvil. The magazine was full of larger-issue farm news and analysis, and it made the Anvil shop a hub and gathering spot for farm activists—all this in southeastern Minnesota, in a village called Millville, nestled below limestone bluffs, through which the ...
A Star in the Night Sky
James Albert Lewis, 94, of Merrill passed away on June 5. He was surrounded by loved ones at home near Merrill. Among those loved ones were Joel and Melissa Lewis.
Jim was born on Feb. 28th, 1929. This was the year you recall the stock market crashed. There was the great depression, the St. Valentine’s massacre, and Al Capone. There was World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam. Later countess other wars. He lived in a time when television was first invented. He saw man landing on the moon. Imagine all this man has seen and done!
James graduated from the University of ...