Category: Column
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Village Life: Pierce Preschool connected us to our “Pandemic Village”
By Melodee Mabbitt Before the pandemic hit, I was the kind of parent who relied heavily on my village to help raise our child. Pre-pandemic, I was lucky to have a flexible schedule with the ability to work remotely. I even got away without needing a babysitter much of the time by going places where…
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Commentary: Civility workshops for City Council? Good intentions, but keep the Jack Daniel’s handy
By Paul Rozycki Can workshops bring “civility and decorum” to City Council meetings? Imagine an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting which starts out with good, sober, intentions, but concludes several hours later with most members passed out on the floor, littered with empty Jack Daniel’s bottles. Now imagine a Flint City Council workshop aimed at bringing civility…
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Fifteen days in January: The nation faces insurrection, impeachment, and inauguration.
By Paul Rozycki In the early 1960s, at the height of the cold war, there was a best-selling novel, and a movie, that told a story of a potential military coup in the U.S. and possible nuclear conflict with Soviet Union. The book was “Seven Days in May” by Charles Bailey and Fletcher Knebel, and…
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Village Life: “Among Us,” but Not Us — video game brings up painful American truths
By Vivian Kao My older son is eight years old, and like most eight-year-olds, he goes through phases in which he gets obsessed with certain things. About a year ago, it was professional wrestling. He had a group of friends at school who watched WWE, and through them, he learned the names of all the wrestlers,…
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Commentary: Beyond Biden and Trump, who else and what else is there in Election 2020?
By Paul Rozycki Who’s your choice — Trump or Biden? Sometimes it seems like the only thing on the ballot this year is Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden. It’s hard to turn on the TV without seeing an ad for either candidate. We’ve all felt the impact of the most divisive…
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Village Life: A reclaimed piano reclaims grace in a time of plague
By Jan Worth-Nelson Some days, no matter how hard you try to stay sane, it’s just too much. Picture me roaming around my house — a sprawling old place with several routes for pacing and hiding — where we’ve been mostly cloistered, like any reasonable oldsters shrinking away from COVID-19, since March. Picture me agitated,…
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Commentary: COVID-19, mail-in voting challenge the USPS, election clerks
By Paul Rozycki What would it take to make 2020 the most disruptive year in decades? How about a global pandemic, where the U.S. has more cases than every other nation on earth? How about an economic collapse, with unemployment worse than anything seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s? How about racial divisions…
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Commentary: An August primary primer–how it’s different and why its important
By Paul Rozycki In a time of the COVID-19 virus, economic shutdowns, Black Lives Matter protests, and 500-year floods, it’s difficult to focus on something as routine as an August primary election. Even in “normal” times, the primary is often overshadowed by summer vacations, county fairs, and car cruises, and the turnout is usually low.…
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Village Life: Flint’s newest journalists are eight years old and raring to write
By Jan Worth-Nelson Paxon Laube-Clary’s head hurt. Stuck at home in pandemic shutdown, he was spending three to four hours a day of screen time keeping up with his classes at the Perry Innovation Center in Grand Blanc. His friend since preschool, Julian Pauli, home from the Flint Cultural Center Academy, was in the same…
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Commentary: Mixed messages on COVID-19–whom should we believe?
By Paul Rozycki What’s your answer to any of these questions about the COVID-19 crisis? Should we wear a face mask or not? If so when? Will the summer heat kill the virus? Will hydroxychloroquine get rid of it? Will there be a vaccine by the end of the year? When should the nation begin…
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