Dwain Northey (Gen X)

One of the latest election proposals is the call for paper ballots, hand-counted votes, and final election results before midnight on Election Day. On the surface, that may sound like a return to simplicity. In reality, it’s a proposal better suited for America in the 1800s than America in the 21st century.

When the United States was a nation of small farming communities and townships with a few hundred or a few thousand voters, hand-counting every ballot might have been practical. Today, millions of people vote in metropolitan areas where a single county may process more ballots than entire states did a century ago. Population growth has fundamentally changed the scale of elections.

The contradiction is obvious. If every ballot must be counted by hand, accuracy takes time. If every result must be certified before midnight on Election Day, speed becomes the priority. You simply cannot maximize both in jurisdictions processing hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of ballots.

Imagine it as a scene from an action movie.

Liam Neeson’s daughter has been kidnapped. The kidnappers demand five million dollars in cash. He races to the bank with only three hours before the deadline. The bank agrees to provide the money, but the cashier has one condition: every single dollar bill must be counted by hand. No counting machines. No electronic verification. One bill at a time.

One…two…three…

Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking.

At some point, anyone watching the movie would yell at the screen, “Use the machine!”

Not because machines are perfect, but because they were invented to handle large volumes quickly while still allowing for verification. If there is a discrepancy, you investigate it. You don’t eliminate technology altogether because perfection is impossible.

That is why the proposal to hand-count every ballot while simultaneously demanding complete results by midnight feels detached from reality. Election workers aren’t counting a few hundred votes in a church basement anymore. They’re processing millions of ballots across thousands of precincts, often including military ballots, overseas ballots, provisional ballots, and legally accepted mail ballots that require signature verification.

Accuracy isn’t the enemy of democracy. Neither is taking the necessary time to get the count right.

In fact, rushing the process creates more opportunities for mistakes than allowing election officials to follow established procedures carefully.

Paper ballots themselves are not controversial. Many election experts support paper records because they provide a physical audit trail. The challenge isn’t the paper—it’s insisting that every one of those ballots be counted manually while expecting immediate final results from some of the largest population centers in the world.

Technology has transformed nearly every aspect of modern life because it allows people to perform enormous tasks efficiently while preserving the ability to audit and verify the results. We trust machines to count millions of dollars moving through banks every second. We trust computers to process taxes, airline reservations, payrolls, and medical records. Yet some would have us believe that elections should abandon modern counting methods entirely while somehow becoming faster.

Democracy deserves confidence. It deserves transparency. It also deserves practicality.

The goal shouldn’t be to count ballots the slowest way possible. The goal should be to count every lawful ballot accurately, securely, and with safeguards that allow the results to be verified if questions arise.

Sometimes taking an extra day—or even several days—to ensure every vote is counted correctly isn’t a weakness of democracy.

It’s evidence that democracy is taking its job seriously.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

One of the more baffling characteristics of this administration is its apparent belief that if you eliminate the people studying a problem, the problem itself somehow disappears. It’s as if they’ve mistaken government for a child’s bedroom: shove everything under the bed, close the door, and declare it clean.

That’s not how reality works.

You can fire climate scientists. You can slash research budgets. You can censor reports. You can scrub the words “climate change” from government websites. You can pretend that hurricanes are just having a bad year, that droughts are normal, that wildfire seasons stretching nearly year-round are just Mother Nature being moody.

The atmosphere doesn’t care.

Physics doesn’t vote.

Carbon dioxide doesn’t belong to a political party.

What’s fascinating—and encouraging—is that scientists keep doing science anyway. Universities continue publishing research. International climate agencies continue collecting data. Private researchers continue monitoring oceans, glaciers, forests, and atmospheric temperatures. Satellite observations don’t suddenly stop because someone in Washington doesn’t like the graphs.

The evidence continues piling up.

Every year brings new records: warmer oceans, shrinking glaciers, more extreme rainfall events, longer heat waves, stronger storms, prolonged droughts. At some point, calling it “just a theory” becomes like standing ankle-deep in floodwater insisting your basement is perfectly dry.

Science has never depended on political approval.

History is full of governments trying to suppress inconvenient facts. They ignored the dangers of smoking. They denied the existence of acid rain. Industries insisted leaded gasoline was harmless. Ozone depletion was dismissed until the evidence became overwhelming. Reality always won—not because it was politically popular, but because reality has an undefeated record.

Climate change is following the same path.

The irony is that this administration often champions innovation and American leadership, yet simultaneously undermines the very research that has made America a scientific powerhouse. Our universities remain among the best in the world. Our researchers continue making breakthroughs. Many of the people being pushed out of federal agencies simply continue their work elsewhere—private laboratories, nonprofits, international collaborations, or universities.

Knowledge has a funny habit of surviving.

Perhaps that’s what bothers some politicians. Scientific facts aren’t negotiable. They don’t care about campaign slogans, cable news talking points, or election cycles. Data simply accumulates until the picture becomes impossible to ignore.

You can’t issue an executive order against thermodynamics.

You can’t tariff atmospheric chemistry.

You can’t deport rising sea levels.

Ignoring a problem has never solved it. If your check engine light comes on, putting tape over the dashboard doesn’t repair the engine. It simply guarantees a more expensive repair later. Climate change is humanity’s biggest check engine light, flashing brighter every year while too many leaders argue over whether the bulb is working correctly.

As a Gen Xer, I’ve watched this pattern repeat throughout my life. Whether it’s the AIDS epidemic, pollution, smoking, financial bubbles, or now climate change, there are always people who insist that acknowledging a problem is somehow worse than the problem itself.

It never is.

The encouraging part is that reality has allies. Scientists continue measuring. Engineers continue innovating. Farmers adapt because they have no choice. Insurance companies rewrite risk models because mathematics demands it. Military planners prepare for climate-related instability because national security doesn’t have the luxury of denial.

Reality keeps showing up for work, even when politicians don’t.

Eventually every administration ends. Every political slogan fades. Every campaign promise becomes another chapter in a history book.

But the atmosphere remembers every ton of carbon we emit.

Nature doesn’t negotiate.

And unlike politicians, it never accepts excuses.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Constitution Isn’t a Suggestion

It has been another remarkable week at the Supreme Court, as the justices wrapped up their term by issuing a flood of decisions that will shape American life for years to come. Whether you celebrate or condemn any individual ruling, there is an undeniable pattern emerging: the foundation of the rule of law feels increasingly fractured.

The Supreme Court occupies a unique place in our government. Unlike Congress or the White House, it is supposed to be the non-political branch. The justices aren’t elected. They don’t campaign. They don’t answer to voters every two or four years. Their legitimacy rests on one thing alone: the public’s belief that they are interpreting the law—not advancing a political agenda.

During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts famously compared the job of a judge to an umpire whose responsibility is simply to “call balls and strikes.” It was a reassuring analogy. Umpires don’t decide who they want to win. They don’t change the strike zone depending on who’s at bat. They apply the rules consistently.

Unfortunately, that’s becoming harder and harder to see.

Even before issuing opinions, the Court makes ideological choices simply by deciding which cases deserve its attention. This term provides several examples.

One recent decision involved limiting legal avenues against companies whose Roundup-style herbicides have been linked by some plaintiffs to cancer. Whether those claims ultimately succeed should be determined through evidence, expert testimony, and the judicial process. Yet the perception left behind is troubling: a powerful corporation appears to receive greater protection than ordinary citizens seeking their day in court.

The message many Americans hear is simple: corporations seem to have more rights than people.

Then there was the case involving transgender girls participating in girls’ school sports.

However someone feels about that issue, let’s keep it in perspective. We are talking about an extraordinarily small number of student athletes nationwide—likely dozens or perhaps hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. Yet the Supreme Court devoted its attention to resolving one of the nation’s most politically charged cultural debates.

That naturally raises another question: Why this case?

The Court has limited time. It chooses which disputes to hear. When it repeatedly selects cases that align with the country’s biggest ideological battles while many broader issues affecting millions wait in the background, it’s understandable that people begin questioning whether the docket itself reflects philosophical priorities.

Then came the birthright citizenship decision.

The Court ultimately left birthright citizenship intact—for now. That is significant. But what caught my attention wasn’t simply the outcome. It was the fact that the decision wasn’t unanimous.

That raises a question I genuinely struggle to understand.

The Fourteenth Amendment states:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…”

Those words are not hidden in a footnote. They are not implied. They are not vague. They are written plainly into the Constitution itself.

Reasonable people can debate taxes, immigration policy, healthcare, education, or foreign affairs. Those involve policy judgments.

But how does one debate whether words explicitly written into the Constitution are constitutional?

I’m not asking sarcastically. I’d truly like to understand the legal reasoning behind the dissent. If the disagreement centers on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” then explain the historical evidence. Explain why more than 150 years of constitutional understanding should be reinterpreted.

That’s how constitutional law is supposed to work.

Instead, it increasingly feels as though desired outcomes arrive first and constitutional reasoning is constructed afterward.

That perception extends beyond any single case. It invites broader questions about constitutional consistency. If some long-settled precedents can be reconsidered because they were, in the Court’s view, wrongly decided, where does that principle stop? Americans naturally wonder which other landmark decisions could someday be revisited, and whether the same interpretive philosophy would apply equally in every circumstance.

The Supreme Court’s authority does not come from elections, campaign rallies, or political popularity. It comes from public confidence that the justices are applying the Constitution faithfully and consistently, regardless of who benefits politically.

That trust is incredibly difficult to earn and remarkably easy to lose.

Our Constitution has survived civil war, world wars, economic collapse, social upheaval, and enormous political disagreements because Americans generally accepted that the words themselves mattered. Amendments could be added. Laws could be changed. But until they were, the Constitution remained the highest law of the land.

If judges begin treating constitutional text as endlessly malleable depending on the political climate—or if the public comes to believe that ideology determines which cases are heard and how they’re decided—then the Constitution risks becoming less a governing document and more a collection of suggestions.

That should concern conservatives, liberals, independents, and everyone in between.

Because once we decide that clear constitutional language can mean almost anything, it eventually means almost nothing.

The rule of law isn’t about winning today’s case. It’s about preserving tomorrow’s confidence that the same rules will still apply, regardless of who occupies the White House, who controls Congress, or who sits on the Supreme Court.

Without that shared confidence, the strongest democracy in the world develops cracks in its foundation.

History teaches us that foundations rarely collapse all at once.

They fail one crack at a time.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I’ve written before about election reform. Shorter campaign seasons. Less money sloshing around. Public financing. Independent redistricting. Ranked-choice voting. The mechanics of making our democracy function better.

But maybe we’ve been overlooking something much simpler.

Can we just start talking about policy again?

Remember that concept?

It really wasn’t that long ago.

In 2008, during a presidential town hall, someone in Senator John McCain’s audience claimed Barack Obama was a Muslim and implied that somehow made him unfit for office. McCain immediately took the microphone back.

“No, ma’am,” he replied. “He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

Think about that for a moment.

That wasn’t weakness.

That wasn’t conceding the election.

That was leadership.

McCain understood something we’ve seemingly forgotten: your political opponent isn’t automatically your enemy. You can believe someone is completely wrong about healthcare, taxes, immigration, energy, education, or foreign policy without believing they’re a villain.

Somewhere along the way, campaigns stopped becoming contests of ideas and became middle-school food fights.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yeah-huh.”

“You’re a socialist.”

“You’re a fascist.”

“You’re weird.”

“No, you’re weird.”

Congratulations. We’ve somehow reduced the world’s oldest constitutional republic to the level of an online comment section.

How exactly is that helping anyone?

For most of modern American history, conservatives and liberals generally wanted the same destination.

A stronger country.

A healthier economy.

Better schools.

Safer communities.

Greater opportunity.

The disagreement wasn’t whether America should improve.

It was about how.

Conservatives traditionally favored slower, incremental change. If the machine is running, don’t start replacing parts until you know exactly what every gear does.

Liberals often looked at the same machine and said, “Have you noticed it’s on fire?”

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t look at the Great Depression and suggest everyone give the free market another decade to figure things out. His view was essentially, “This is broken. People are suffering. Let’s fix it.”

Those are legitimate philosophical differences.

That’s the debate we should be having.

Not who can invent the cleverest nickname.

Not who can generate the most outrage on social media.

Not who can produce the nastiest thirty-second attack ad.

If we’ve also shortened campaigns—as I’ve argued we should—to roughly a hundred days, the incentives change overnight.

You don’t have two years to spend attacking your opponent.

You’d better explain your own ideas.

Healthcare?

Go.

Taxes?

Go.

Housing?

Go.

Infrastructure?

Education?

Energy?

Veterans?

Climate?

The deficit?

Tell me what you’re going to do.

Because if your entire platform boils down to, “The other candidate is awful,” you’ve just spent precious campaign time telling me absolutely nothing about why I should vote for you.

Now imagine what debates could become.

Picture a gubernatorial race where the sitting governor is seeking reelection. Under their administration, the budget is balanced. Schools are functioning well. Teachers finally received meaningful raises. Highway projects are actually finishing on time. Businesses are investing, and the state’s economy is healthy.

No administration is perfect, but objectively speaking, things are running pretty well.

Now imagine a moderator who actually moderates.

“Governor, you’ve outlined your accomplishments. Challenger, you’ve criticized several of those policies. Fair enough. But answer this for the voters.”

“If the budget is balanced, how would you improve it?”

“If teachers are finally earning better salaries, what’s your plan to make education even stronger?”

“If infrastructure projects are being completed, what would you build next?”

“If these programs are working, are you proposing to improve them—or simply tear them apart because someone else created them?”

Now that’s a debate.

The challenger shouldn’t earn points merely for declaring that everything is terrible if the evidence suggests otherwise. They should have to explain why their ideas would produce even better results.

At the same time, the incumbent shouldn’t get a free pass because things are going well. They should have to explain what’s next. How do you improve on success? How do you prepare for tomorrow’s challenges instead of celebrating yesterday’s victories?

That’s what leadership looks like.

Politics shouldn’t reward demolition for demolition’s sake.

If something works, preserve it.

Improve it.

Expand it if it makes sense.

If something doesn’t work, explain—specifically—how your proposal fixes the problem.

That’s how engineers improve a bridge.

That’s how scientists build knowledge.

That’s how businesses innovate.

Nobody tears down an entire bridge because one beam needs replacing.

So why do we expect politicians to campaign as though every successful policy must be destroyed simply because the other party implemented it?

Robert’s Rules of Order were written to encourage orderly debate—not orderly shouting. Present your argument. Challenge the opposing idea. Offer a better solution. Let the public judge the merits.

Imagine if every debate followed that philosophy.

Every personal attack is interrupted.

“Answer the question.”

“Explain your policy.”

“Show us the numbers.”

“How do you pay for it?”

“What evidence supports your claim?”

The clock keeps ticking.

No extra time for insults.

Eventually politicians would discover something astonishing.

Ideas win elections.

Insults merely dominate headlines.

And maybe, just maybe, we’d stop voting for whoever delivers the sharpest one-liner and start voting for whoever presents the clearest vision.

Disagreement has never been democracy’s greatest weakness.

Refusing to debate ideas is.

Let’s get back to arguing over solutions instead of slogans.

America deserves candidates who are trying to build something better—not just tear down the person standing at the next podium.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

One-Sixth Gravity, Infinite Possibilities

One of the things I love most about science isn’t necessarily discovering the answers. It’s asking the questions no one has had to answer yet.

As we continue to inch toward becoming a spacefaring civilization, the Moon is no longer just that bright object hanging in our night sky. It’s beginning to look less like a destination and more like humanity’s first permanent outpost beyond Earth. When that happens, we’ll face challenges that no civilization in history has ever encountered.

Most conversations about a lunar colony focus on rockets, habitats, mining, or politics. Those are certainly important, but I think the more fascinating questions are the ones we haven’t fully wrapped our minds around yet.

What happens when people don’t just visit the Moon?

What happens when they’re born there?

The Moon presents opportunities that Earth simply can’t offer. For roughly two weeks at a time, portions of the lunar surface receive uninterrupted sunlight. Vast fields of solar panels could generate enormous amounts of electricity without clouds, weather, or atmospheric interference. Data centers, one of the fastest-growing consumers of electricity on Earth, could someday be powered almost entirely by solar energy.

Even better, lunar nights are brutally cold. Cooling massive computer systems is one of the biggest operational costs for modern data centers. On the Moon, nature provides refrigeration that engineers on Earth spend billions trying to create. What is an engineering problem here could become an engineering advantage there.

Imagine gigantic AI processing centers operating beneath the lunar surface, naturally shielded from radiation while powered by nearly continuous solar energy and cooled by the vacuum of space itself. Information could be relayed through constellations of communication satellites between the Moon and Earth with only about a one-and-a-quarter-second delay each way. That delay is noticeable for conversation but almost irrelevant for many scientific, industrial, and computational workloads.

Suddenly, the Moon isn’t just a colony.

It’s an industrial partner.

It becomes a research laboratory unlike anything we’ve ever had, a manufacturing hub for products that benefit from low gravity, an astronomical observatory free from Earth’s atmosphere, and perhaps the largest renewable-powered computing center humanity has ever built.

That’s the optimistic side of the equation.

The human side is considerably more complicated.

We’ve already learned from astronauts that the human body begins changing almost immediately in reduced gravity. Even after spending hours exercising every day, astronauts lose muscle mass, bone density, and experience cardiovascular changes. Most recover after returning home, but rehabilitation can take months, and some changes linger.

Now stretch that timeline from months to generations.

A child born on the Moon would never know Earth’s gravity.

Their bones would grow differently because they would never bear Earth’s weight. Their muscles would only need to support a body weighing one-sixth as much. Their heart wouldn’t have to fight gravity every second of every day. Their balance, coordination, and even the way they walk would develop under conditions no human civilization has ever experienced.

To someone born on Earth, visiting the Moon would feel almost magical. Every jump becomes superhuman.

To someone born on the Moon, visiting Earth might feel like wearing an invisible suit of armor weighing hundreds of pounds.

Even robotic exoskeletons and advanced rehabilitation may not fully solve the problem. A lifetime spent in one-sixth gravity could make Earth’s environment physically overwhelming. Standing, walking, climbing stairs, even breathing under greater atmospheric pressure might become exhausting.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

For thousands of years we’ve imagined space as the dangerous frontier.

Yet for future generations born there, Earth may become the hostile world.

That possibility changes how I think about colonization.

The first generation of lunar settlers will always be Earthlings.

The second generation might become something entirely different.

Not a different species—not for a very long time—but certainly a different branch of humanity. They would develop their own culture, slang, traditions, architecture, sports, holidays, and perspectives. Gravity would influence everything.

A basketball court designed for one-sixth gravity would be unrecognizable to us. Buildings would rise taller with less structural support. Heavy machinery would become easier to move. Manufacturing techniques impossible on Earth might become routine.

And eventually identity changes.

Instead of asking where someone lives, we’d ask where they were born.

Earth.

Luna.

Mars.

Those answers wouldn’t simply describe geography.

They would describe biology.

Perhaps the greatest challenge won’t be engineering habitats or building rockets. It’ll be maintaining the emotional connection between worlds whose inhabitants are becoming physically different.

Imagine grandparents living on Earth while grandchildren can never safely visit because Earth’s gravity is simply too much for their bodies.

Imagine families separated not by distance, but by physics.

That may become one of the greatest sacrifices of becoming a multi-planet civilization.

Like every major leap in human history, settling the Moon won’t be entirely good or entirely bad.

It will create opportunities beyond our current imagination while introducing ethical dilemmas we’ve never had to confront. Entire industries could emerge. Scientific breakthroughs could accelerate. Renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, medicine, astronomy, and artificial intelligence could all benefit from a permanent lunar presence.

At the same time, humanity itself may begin changing in ways that no longer allow us to assume that every human being can comfortably live on every human world.

That’s both exciting and unsettling.

History has always been shaped by geography. Oceans separated civilizations. Mountains isolated cultures. Deserts created barriers.

The next frontier isn’t separated by oceans.

It’s separated by gravity.

Fifty to one hundred years from now, our descendants may look back at this era the same way we look back at the first wooden ships crossing unknown seas. They’ll wonder why we argued about whether humanity should leave Earth at all.

Because once the first child is born beneath a lunar sky, there is no turning back.

Humanity won’t simply have explored another world.

For the first time in our existence, we will truly belong to more than one.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Why Did People Live So Long in the Old Testament?

One of the stranger things about reading the Bible as a historical document instead of simply a theological one is that you start noticing details that don’t quite line up. One of the biggest is age.

In the Old Testament, people seemed to have birthdays the way billionaires have yachts—absurdly large numbers that everyone simply accepts. Methuselah supposedly lived 969 years. Noah was around 600 when the flood came. Abraham was a century old when Isaac was born. Moses lived to 120.

Then you turn the page into the New Testament, and suddenly everyone has what we’d recognize as normal human lifespans. Jesus is crucified somewhere around age 33. His disciples are adults, but not centuries old. The Apostle Paul lives a life measured in decades, not millennia. By first-century standards Jesus was already a mature adult, but certainly not a man approaching his thousandth birthday.

So what happened? Did humanity suddenly lose 90 percent of its lifespan?

Some have suggested the ancients measured time differently. Perhaps a “year” really meant a season, a lunar month, or some other unit. It’s an interesting theory, but it quickly falls apart. If you divide Methuselah’s age by four seasons, he dies at about 242—not much help. Divide by twelve lunar months, and people become fathers at impossibly young ages. Noah would have had children while barely old enough to walk. The math simply doesn’t work consistently.

Modern biblical scholars generally don’t think those enormous ages were intended as literal birth certificates. Instead, they likely served symbolic purposes.

Ancient cultures often attributed extraordinary lifespans to their legendary ancestors. The Mesopotamian kings listed in the Sumerian King List supposedly ruled for tens of thousands of years before a great flood. Compared with that, Methuselah’s 969 years almost seems modest. Longevity symbolized wisdom, divine favor, authority, and closeness to the dawn of creation.

Notice something else. As Genesis progresses, human lifespans steadily shrink. It’s almost as if the authors are saying humanity is moving farther away from perfection and closer to the ordinary world we know today. The numbers become part of the theological message rather than a demographic census.

By the time we reach the New Testament, the focus has shifted entirely. The writers aren’t interested in proving holiness through impossible ages. They’re writing biographies, letters, and eyewitness accounts centered on the life and teachings of Jesus. Their concern isn’t how many centuries someone lived but what they did with the years they had.

Ironically, some of the very people who insist every number in the Bible must be interpreted literally have no trouble recognizing symbolism elsewhere. They’ll accept that Jesus saying to forgive “seventy times seven” isn’t a command to keep a spreadsheet, but somehow Methuselah absolutely had to blow out 969 birthday candles.

History is rarely that simple.

The Bible is a library, not a single book. It was written over roughly a thousand years by dozens of authors with different audiences, different literary styles, and different purposes. Reading Genesis the same way you read the Gospel of Luke is a bit like reading Homer’s Odyssey the same way you read a modern newspaper.

None of this diminishes the Bible’s importance. If anything, it makes it more fascinating. Understanding the historical context allows us to appreciate what the authors were trying to communicate instead of forcing every ancient literary device into a twenty-first-century definition of historical reporting.

So were people in the Old Testament really living for nearly a thousand years?

There’s no archaeological or biological evidence that humans ever routinely lived that long. The far more likely explanation is that these remarkable ages were literary and theological devices, reflecting the worldview of the ancient Near East rather than a literal actuarial table.

Sometimes asking questions isn’t an attack on faith. It’s an attempt to understand history honestly. And history, unlike mythology, rarely comes packaged in neat, impossible numbers.

Dwain Northey

I always find it fascinating what people choose to be outraged by.

As Pride Month winds down, social media once again fills with declarations that rainbows have somehow become a threat to civilization. Think about that for just a second. A rainbow.

For generations, one of the very first things every preschooler learns is how to draw one. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Rainbows decorated classrooms, birthday parties, lunch boxes, stickers, and coloring books long before anyone’s political outrage machine decided visible light was controversial.

So what exactly are we supposed to tell three-year-olds now?

“Sorry, Timmy. Rainbows are dangerous. Crayons are political now.”

Should unicorns be canceled too? Leprechauns? Pots of gold? Are we going to ban The Wizard of Oz because Dorothy follows a colorful road?

The absurdity would be hilarious if it weren’t so exhausting.

One of the more ironic moments this year came when the San Francisco Giants announced players would wear a Bible verse on their caps instead of the Pride-themed logo they had worn previously. The verse chosen referenced God’s covenant with Noah after the flood—that the rainbow would be the sign that He would never again destroy the Earth by water.

Now here’s where the irony practically writes itself.

The rainbow wasn’t invented by the LGBTQ community. They adopted it because it symbolizes diversity, hope, and inclusion. Symbols evolve throughout history. The cross existed long before Christianity. The eagle has represented countless nations and empires. The olive branch has symbolized peace for thousands of years.

A symbol can carry more than one meaning.

Yet some people seem determined to “take back” the rainbow, as though visible wavelengths of sunlight have somehow been hijacked.

The entire argument becomes an exercise in hypocrisy.

If you believe the biblical story, then the rainbow belongs to everyone. It appears after storms whether you’re gay or straight, religious or atheist, conservative or liberal. Nature doesn’t stop to ask your politics before refracting sunlight through water droplets.

It simply exists.

And maybe that’s the lesson we’ve forgotten.

A rainbow isn’t an endorsement of anyone’s lifestyle. It isn’t a recruitment tool. It isn’t a conspiracy. It’s light behaving exactly as physics says it should.

If someone sees seven colors in the sky and immediately becomes angry because another group of people also uses those colors as a symbol of acceptance, perhaps the problem isn’t the rainbow.

Perhaps the problem is that we’ve become so conditioned to search for culture-war battles that we’ve declared war on sunlight.

That seems like an extraordinary amount of emotional energy to devote to a weather phenomenon.

This is, of course, just my opinion. But if your faith teaches that God created the rainbow as a promise of mercy, and someone else sees that same rainbow as a reminder that they deserve dignity and acceptance, I’m struggling to see the conflict.

One interpretation speaks of God’s grace. The other speaks of treating fellow human beings with compassion.

Those ideas don’t seem nearly as incompatible as some people insist they are.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The irony is almost too rich to make up.

For once—just once—Washington managed to do something that looked vaguely like governing. Democrats and Republicans sat in the same room, argued, negotiated, compromised, and eventually produced a housing bill aimed at addressing one of the biggest economic problems facing ordinary Americans: the fact that home ownership has become increasingly out of reach. The legislation passed the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32, margins so overwhelming that they qualify as the political equivalent of a standing ovation. It included measures designed to increase housing supply and limit the ability of large institutional investors to gobble up single-family homes like they were collecting Monopoly properties.  

Think about that for a moment.

Republicans voted for it.

Democrats voted for it.

Housing advocates supported it.

Builders supported it.

Even many people in the real estate industry supported it.

In an era when Congress can barely agree that the sky is blue and water is wet, lawmakers actually found common ground on an issue that affects millions of Americans.  

And then along came Donald Trump.

Instead of signing the bill, he decided to hold it hostage until Congress passes his voting legislation, the SAVE America Act. He canceled the signing ceremony and declared that housing was of only “minor importance” compared to his election-related priorities.  

Of course housing is of minor importance to Donald Trump.

This is a man who has never worried about making rent.

He has never had to wonder whether the landlord was going to raise the rent another $300 a month.

He has never had to choose between a mortgage payment and groceries.

He has never had to watch a private equity firm buy up houses in a neighborhood and turn what used to be starter homes into investment vehicles.

Housing insecurity is an abstract concept when you’ve spent your entire life surrounded by wealth, privilege, and gold-plated excess. To millions of Americans, however, it is not abstract. It is the difference between stability and chaos.

What makes this situation even more absurd is that the housing bill and the voting bill have absolutely nothing to do with one another. One addresses affordability and home ownership. The other addresses election laws. Yet Trump is treating legislation like a spoiled child treats toys on a playground: “Nobody gets to play with this one until I get what I want.”

That’s not leadership. That’s a tantrum.

The truly remarkable part of this story is that Congress actually did its job. For a brief moment, elected officials looked at a real problem affecting real people and attempted to solve it. They recognized that corporations purchasing thousands of single-family homes has distorted housing markets and made it harder for families to buy homes of their own. They recognized that increasing supply and reducing barriers to construction could help ease the affordability crisis. They recognized that ordinary Americans are tired of being priced out of the American Dream.  

And now the entire accomplishment is being overshadowed because one man wants to use it as leverage for an unrelated political objective.

The lesson here is simple. When government actually works, when compromise actually happens, when Republicans and Democrats actually come together to address a problem hurting millions of people, it should be celebrated. Instead, we are once again watching everything grind to a halt because Donald Trump cannot resist making every issue about himself and his personal political agenda.

Housing affordability is not a partisan issue.

People need places to live regardless of whether they vote Republican, Democrat, Independent, or don’t vote at all.

But apparently helping Americans find affordable housing can wait while Donald Trump stomps his feet demanding that Congress give him something else first.

And somehow we’re supposed to believe he’s the one putting America first.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Forever Is a Long Time

Every few months, another headline appears announcing a breakthrough in genetics, genome sequencing, telomere research, cellular reprogramming, or some other field that promises to slow, halt, or perhaps even reverse aging. Scientists are increasingly discovering that aging is not simply “wear and tear” but a collection of biological processes. Cells lose their ability to repair themselves. DNA accumulates damage. Certain genes switch on and off differently over time. Some tissues stop replacing themselves efficiently. In theory, if those mechanisms can be repaired or reset, human lifespan could be dramatically extended.

From a purely scientific standpoint, that’s fascinating.

From a philosophical standpoint, it is terrifying.

Most people hear “end aging” and immediately imagine more healthy years. More time with family. More opportunities to travel, learn, and experience life. Who wouldn’t want to be thirty-five physically while retaining decades of wisdom?

The problem is that science rarely exists in isolation from economics, politics, and human nature.

Let’s assume researchers actually succeed. Imagine a treatment that stops biological aging. Not immortality in the Highlander sense. You could still be hit by a bus, contract a disease, or fall off a cliff. But barring accidents, you might live for centuries.

Now what?

Our current economic systems struggle to support people living eighty years. Retirement systems are already strained across much of the world. Healthcare systems are overwhelmed. Housing shortages exist on nearly every continent. Young adults struggle to afford homes, start families, or build wealth.

What happens when nobody dies?

The obvious answer is population growth, but that’s only the beginning.

Imagine a CEO who remains healthy and productive for three hundred years. A billionaire who never relinquishes control of assets. Political leaders who remain active indefinitely. Supreme Court justices serving not for decades but centuries.

Human societies have always depended on generational turnover. New ideas eventually replace old ones not because arguments win, but because generations change. Scientific revolutions, cultural shifts, and social progress often occur because younger people inherit the institutions of society.

If the same people remain in charge forever, society risks becoming frozen in place.

Then there is wealth.

The fantasy version of longevity looks a lot like Connor MacLeod from Highlander. Live for centuries, invest wisely, accumulate assets, and eventually become incredibly wealthy.

The reality is that most people are not starting with centuries of compound interest. They’re starting with credit card debt, medical bills, rent payments, and stagnant wages.

If anti-aging treatments become available, who gets them first?

History suggests the answer is obvious.

The wealthy.

The first generation of longevity therapies would almost certainly be expensive. They would begin as luxury medicine before becoming more accessible. That creates a disturbing possibility: a society where the rich don’t merely live better than everyone else—they live vastly longer.

For most of human history, inequality meant differences in comfort and opportunity.

Now imagine inequality measured in centuries.

The rich live to 250. The poor die at 80.

That is not merely economic inequality. It is a fundamentally different class of humanity.

There is also the question of meaning.

Part of what gives life urgency is that it ends.

People fall in love because time is limited. Parents treasure childhood because it passes. We pursue dreams because we know there are only so many years available.

Would a life of three hundred years make us wiser? Or would it make us procrastinate forever?

“I’ll learn that language next century.”

“I’ll write that book in 2150.”

“I’ll travel eventually.”

Death is unpleasant to contemplate, but it provides a framework that gives value to time.

Without limits, would time become less precious?

None of this means research into aging is wrong. If we can eliminate Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and other diseases associated with aging, we absolutely should. Extending healthy life by ten, twenty, or thirty years while reducing suffering is a noble goal.

But there is a profound difference between helping people live healthier lives and creating a world where aging effectively stops.

Science often asks, “Can we do this?”

The harder question is, “Should we do this?”

Because before humanity celebrates the conquest of aging, we need answers to housing, employment, resource consumption, wealth concentration, political power, and the simple question of what it means to be human when the clock no longer ticks.

Living forever sounds wonderful until you start doing the math.

Then it starts looking less like a medical breakthrough and more like a civilization-wide stress test.

And unlike Connor MacLeod, most of us don’t have a Scottish castle, centuries of accumulated wealth, and a screenplay making sure things work out in the end.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

One of the questions I’ve been asked most often throughout my life is, “What’s your favorite place you’ve ever lived?”

It sounds like a simple question, but I’ve never been able to answer it.

I’ve lived in multiple states, on military bases, in small towns, large cities, and even in other countries. Every place had something wonderful about it, and every place had something that drove me crazy. Washington was beautiful, green, and alive, but the gloomy weather could wear on you. Maryland had its own charm and the benefit of being close to the nation’s capital. Florida had beaches, sunshine, and theme parks. Milwaukee had incredible festivals and a culture all its own. Phoenix, despite its reputation, has a beauty that only makes sense once you’ve spent time in the desert. Germany was fascinating because history seemed to exist around every corner. England felt much the same way, where entire centuries of human history are simply part of the landscape.

So which one is my favorite?

I honestly don’t know.

Every place has its ups and downs. Every place leaves an imprint on you. Choosing one feels like asking which chapter of your life mattered most.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always struggled with a different question.

Where is home?

Is that a literal question or a figurative one?

For many people, home is easy to define. They grew up in the same town. They attended the same schools as their parents. They still know people they met in kindergarten. Their favorite sports teams are the local teams because those teams are woven into the fabric of their lives. They’re lifelong Packers fans because they grew up in Wisconsin. They’re lifelong Knicks fans because they grew up in New York. Their identity is tied to a place.

I don’t have that.

My experiences have been scattered across maps and time zones. I’ve lived too many places to claim any one of them completely. Sometimes I view that as a positive. I’ve seen different cultures, different ways of thinking, different landscapes, and different people. My world became much larger because of it.

Other times, it feels like a negative.

When you never stay anywhere long enough, you never develop that deep-rooted allegiance that some people have. You become a visitor everywhere and a native nowhere. You learn how to adapt, but you never quite learn how to belong.

Sometimes I wonder how much of that was set in motion by a single decision.

I was born in Georgia and then moved to Colorado, but if there was ever a place that might have become my hometown, it was probably Loveland, Colorado. That’s where my dad grew up. That’s where my grandparents lived. That’s where my uncle was. That’s where my aunt was. If there was a center of gravity for our family, that was it.

Then somewhere around 1979 or 1980, my dad made the decision to go back into the military.

I’ve often wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t.

Maybe Loveland would have been the only stop on the tour. Maybe I would have grown up with the same group of friends. Maybe I would be one of those people who can point to a spot on the map and say, “That’s home.”

Instead, we moved.

And after that, it seemed like the entire family ecosystem slowly began to change. My grandparents left Loveland. My uncle left Loveland. My aunt left Loveland. The family that had once been centered around one place gradually scattered in different directions.

Now, I don’t know that my dad’s decision caused any of that. Life is rarely that simple. People make their own choices for their own reasons. Maybe everyone would have left eventually anyway.

But looking back, it sometimes feels like that decision was the linchpin. One small choice that started a chain reaction that rippled through the entire family.

Not good. Not bad.

Just different.

Like a rock thrown into a pond, the ripples kept moving long after the splash.

Another thing I’ve noticed throughout my life is how differently people view moving.

Every time I’ve relocated, someone inevitably asks, “How could you move there? Do you know anyone?”

Or they’ll say, “I could never move somewhere if I didn’t have family there.”

To me, that’s always been a strange question.

Not because it’s wrong, but because my experience has been so different.

When you’ve spent your life moving, not knowing anyone is almost the default setting. New schools, new neighborhoods, new states, new countries—you arrive knowing nobody, and then you build a life. You make friends. You find your favorite restaurant. You learn the shortcuts. You discover the places that make that location uniquely yours.

I’ve never viewed a place as valuable because I already knew people there.

I’ve always assumed the people would come later.

Maybe that’s another consequence of a life spent moving. For some people, roots come first and adventure comes second.

For people like me, the adventure came first and the roots were always temporary.

The unknown has never been something to fear. It’s simply been where the next chapter begins.

At fifty-nine years old, though, I find myself asking the question of home more than ever.

My son is grown, married, and building his own life. My parents and brothers live far away from Arizona. I’m divorced. The house that once revolved around raising my son is quiet now. The room that once had purpose sits empty. The routines that defined so much of my life no longer exist.

People like to say, “Home is where you hang your hat.”

Others say, “Home is where the heart is.”

At this point in my life, neither answer feels entirely right.

If home is where I hang my hat, then I’ve had a lot of homes.

If home is where my heart is, then pieces of my heart are scattered across multiple states, multiple countries, and multiple decades.

Part of me envies people who can point to a single place and say, “That’s where I belong.”

But part of me also knows I wouldn’t trade the life I’ve lived.

I’ve seen things many people never get the opportunity to see. I’ve experienced different cultures, different perspectives, and different ways of living. I’ve learned that no place is perfect and no place is terrible. Every location is a mixture of beauty and frustration, opportunity and limitation.

Maybe that’s why I can never answer the question about my favorite place.

They’re all part of me.

Will Arizona remain where I hang my hat? I don’t know.

Will Phoenix be my final destination? I don’t know.

Could I move somewhere else entirely? That’s possible too.

The truth is that for the first time in my life, the answer is completely up in the air.

Maybe home isn’t a place at all.

Maybe home is simply the collection of experiences, people, and memories we carry with us. Maybe it’s the sum of every road we’ve traveled, every lesson we’ve learned, and every chapter we’ve survived.

Or maybe that’s just something people like me tell ourselves when we can no longer point to a single spot on a map and claim it as our own.

What I do know is that after a lifetime of moving from place to place, I’ve become very good at answering questions about geography.

It’s the question of home that still leaves me searching for an answer.