The year 2024 marked forty years of marriage for my husband and myself. We took our vows with a religious belief, at the time, framed by a verse (message) in the Bible: The two shall become one flesh. For us, that meant we opened a joint checking account.  Even though we both worked, our money […]

After three flights totaling eighteen hours in the air, I arrived with incredibly swollen feet—in Hong Kong—three days before a ten-day tour of mainland China. The group on the tour organizes around the central theme that peace with China is in everyone’s best interest. They study the results of policies enacted by China. A couple […]

Try to remember a time when you believed strongly in something. Maybe it was Santa Claus, maybe it was the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, maybe it was Y2K and you thought it would shut down the grid. Whatever comes to mind, I’m telling you this: you made decisions, took actions and maybe even did some […]

I once held an out-of-the-ordinary job many of you probably don’t know about.  Once upon a time, I completed a midlife crisis master’s degree in peace and justice studies. My focus was conflict resolution.  And the conflict that captured my heart was the political divide in the United States. In my coursework, I had learned […]

Reawakening American Democracy An American journalist on his way to finalize his divorce in Germany becomes the unwitting archivist of a movement that gave us new language to describe the socio-economics of our world. Michael Levitin was not a newcomer to protest. Even so, he wasn’t looking for anything other than a flight out of […]

Come on get happy!

The answer to this question rises quickly to the surface like a powerful whale. The tail splashes down on the water in a force majeure that sends chills down my arms and feels like a giant spanking on the salty surface of my career.

Dear Democrats, Gather round the table my dear, sweet, liberal friends. Let mama Julie guide you into the cranial folds of the Republican mind. Lest we forget, I was in their tribe and I’m bilingual in Red and Blue speak—a vast resource here to help you understand the conservative cosmos.  When the votes are cast, […]

It’s going to take more than a vaccine to inoculate us against the fear and worry we’ve created in our society. Each of us must do our part to unwind the tyranny of radicalization and retell the story of our democracy—a story in which we all see ourselves.