August 2022

The President of the Fargo, North Dakota School Board made a speech and the school board members went along with his thinking. His position; that in the Pledge of Allegiance it was not inclusive because God was capitalized, meaning it was the God of Judeo-Christian people. This excluded anyone who worships another god. They want the Fargo schools to be ‘inclusive’. Uh-huh.

It was about this time several years ago, when our part of the country was bone-dry like today, that I took what was probably my last outdoor hike with our dad. I swooped him up at his retirement home apartment and we headed to the McPherson Valley Wetlands just outside Inman for a hike. The trails had recently been mowed making the walking easy, but I had to measure my steps so my long legs didn’t out-distance him. We stopped on the first rise and I pointed out all the marshes that were now dry and the ones that still held water. Next, we meandered down into one dry pool along the trail where I had trapped muskrats the prior winter. We looked over a now flattened muskrat hut that had once seemed as big as a Volkswagen. We could still make out a muskrat trail in the mud that led from one big bunch of cattails to another. A little further, and we topped the dike along the drainage ditch that runs nearly a mile to the next road and drains all the marshes along the way, but was now so dry the ducks have to hitchhike down it. Just behind us, the drainage split as it made its way around a large grove of trees. The previous winter at that place there had been a long beaver dam that had since been demolished with heavy equipment. We stepped over the left-over rubble from that beaver dam and down into the dry drainage ditch. It was fascinating to think that the previous winter the water was deep enough where we stood that I hesitated to wade into it with chest waders. We found a beaver den or two dug into the bank deep in the bottom of the dry drainage. Bottles, tree limbs and strangely enough a bright yellow golf ball all lay in the mud waiting to be covered once again when the rain came. The grove of trees harbored mammoth cottonwoods probably as old as dad and I together. We clamored up out of the dry ditch, meandered through the trees and onto the road that led us back to the truck.

Special to the News Last Tuesday evening, I was at the company’s truck stop in Wellsville, Kansas. I set everything down on the counter when she asked me, “Is this all for you?” I turned around to the young man standing behind me and asked if he wanted anything on the counter.

By Lyn Fenwick Macksville author Special to the Tribune How many of us remember some variation in the voice of your mother saying, “Now, you be nice and apologize to Susie...or Johnny... or the family dog? Which would be, hopefully, followed by your friend accepting the apology, or the dog wagging its tail, and all the hurt feelings mended.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote critically of those who “look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” While he firmly opposed “frequent and untried changes in laws,” he argued that, in the end “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” In other words, as people learn and grow and change, their constitutions necessarily should too.

On Labor Day we honor the achievements of America’s workers, and in 2022 we have a historic victory to celebrate. Our nation’s working people have come all the way back from the depths of a global pandemic, regaining every job lost and more.