Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I have spent a fair amount of time wondering why so many of the stories we tell ourselves seem to need a dark side.

Why can’t something just be good?

Why can’t we have a little light without immediately being reminded that somewhere behind the curtain, there are demons, sinners, eternal consequences, and apparently a celestial accounting department keeping track of everything we’ve done wrong since breakfast?

I’ve written before about our apparent inability to tell a story without putting some darkness in it. Maybe that’s just human nature. We seem to need a villain, a tragedy, a cautionary tale, or at least somebody wandering around in the background ominously reminding us that things could be much worse.

And then I started thinking about religion.

Specifically, organized religion.

I’ll willingly admit that I haven’t been to church in a very long time. I’m not making some grand declaration of atheism or claiming that I have figured out the mysteries of the universe. I simply haven’t been sitting in a pew on Sunday mornings for quite a while.

But I remember what it felt like when I did.

And what I remember most isn’t necessarily feeling bad when I walked in.

It was feeling bad when I walked out.

There always seemed to be something lurking around the edges of the service. Sin. Temptation. Judgment. Hell. The devil. Guilt. Shame. The possibility that I wasn’t quite measuring up to whatever invisible standard I was supposed to be measuring myself against.

Even when the sermon was supposed to be about love, there was often a warning attached.

Love your neighbor—but remember who the sinners are.

Forgive—but remember what happens to people who don’t.

Be kind—but don’t forget that there are people living the wrong way.

Believe—but be very concerned about what happens if you don’t.

It can make religion feel less like an invitation to walk into the light and more like a fire drill for avoiding the dark.

And I’ve always found that strange.

Because if the central message is supposed to be about love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, kindness and hope, why does fear seem to get such a prominent speaking role?

Maybe that’s one of the reasons Christmas always felt different.

For a little while, the emphasis seemed to shift.

There were lights everywhere. Candles. Music. Decorations. People wishing strangers peace and happiness. Churches seemed to become less interested in reminding everyone what was wrong with humanity and more interested in celebrating the possibility that something good had entered the world.

And then, eventually, Christmas ends.

The lights come down.

And apparently we’re back to worrying about the demons.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying it. I know there are churches that genuinely emphasize love, service, acceptance and community. There are religious people who spend their lives helping other people without asking what they believe, who they love, how they vote, or whether they have checked all the appropriate theological boxes.

Those people exist.

And honestly, they’re probably closer to the version of religion I could understand.

Because here’s the thing I’ve never quite understood: Why spend so much energy convincing people that everyone else is different when difference is one of the most obvious things about being human?

We’re different.

Of course we are.

Different backgrounds. Different cultures. Different beliefs. Different ideas about God. Different ideas about whether there is a God. Different ways of loving. Different ways of living. Different questions. Different answers.

That’s not a bug in humanity.

That’s humanity.

Maybe if I ever walked into a church again, that’s the kind of sermon I’d actually like to hear.

Not one telling me who the demons are.

Not one explaining who is going to hell.

Not one spending forty-five minutes identifying which people aren’t living correctly.

I’d like somebody to stand at the front of the room and say:

Look at all these different people.

Isn’t that amazing?

Now go be kind to them.

What a radical theological concept.

Maybe the purpose of religion doesn’t have to be convincing us that we’re surrounded by people who are wrong. Maybe it could be teaching us how to live with people who aren’t like us without needing to fix them.

Maybe faith could be less about fearing the reaper and more about embracing the light.

Less “Here is what happens if you get it wrong.”

More “Here is what you can do while you’re here.”

Because eventually, every one of us gets the same ending. That’s the one theological proposition that doesn’t seem to require much debate.

We’re here.

We get some amount of time.

Then we’re not.

So perhaps the interesting question isn’t how terrified we can become of what happens afterward.

Perhaps it’s what we do with the time before then.

Do we make somebody’s day better?

Do we forgive somebody?

Do we help somebody who needs help?

Do we make room at the table?

Do we learn something from someone who doesn’t look, think, pray or live like we do?

Do we leave the world with a little more light than we found?

I don’t know whether I’d ever become a regular churchgoer again.

But I know what might get me through the door.

A church that didn’t spend so much time telling me what to fear.

A church that didn’t need an enemy.

A church that didn’t confuse difference with danger.

A church that understood that maybe the greatest expression of faith isn’t pointing toward the people standing in the darkness and explaining why they’re there.

Maybe it’s simply turning on another light.

And then another.

And another.

Until eventually, there isn’t quite so much darkness left to worry about.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is a deeply strange contradiction in the way modern society talks about women. We like to congratulate ourselves for being civilized, enlightened, technologically advanced, and supposedly more evolved than the barbarians who came before us. We have smartphones that can translate languages in real time, artificial intelligence that can write poetry, rockets that can land themselves, and medical technology that can keep a human heart beating outside the body.

And yet, apparently, we are still struggling with the revolutionary concept that women are human beings rather than merchandise.

Every so often, another story comes along and reminds us just how badly we have failed that particular class.

We hear about allegations of sexual assault involving college students. We hear about young women whose accounts are questioned, minimized, dissected, or somehow turned into debates about what they were wearing, how much they had been drinking, why they went somewhere, or why they trusted the people around them. And now, in Arizona, we have allegations involving a political candidate who says she was sexually assaulted while putting up campaign signs.

Because apparently even democracy can’t put up a yard sign without somebody deciding a woman’s body is an invitation.

The details of individual allegations have to be handled carefully. Allegations are not convictions, and accusations deserve due process. But there is a much larger issue underneath these individual cases, and that issue doesn’t require a courtroom verdict to recognize.

We have a cultural problem.

And it isn’t new.

Human beings have been objectifying women for as long as we’ve had enough civilization to document our bad behavior. Prostitution is ancient. Paintings and sculptures have depicted women as objects of sexual beauty for thousands of years. Then came the modern industrialization of it: pin-up girls, Hollywood, men’s magazines, Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, strip clubs, advertising campaigns that discovered somewhere along the way that selling everything from automobiles to beer became easier if you put a nearly naked woman next to it.

We somehow managed to turn half the human population into a marketing strategy.

And before somebody jumps in with, “But women can choose to pose nude or work in a strip club,” yes. Of course they can.

That’s not the point.

There is nothing inherently wrong with consensual sexuality between adults. There is nothing inherently wrong with someone deciding to be a dancer, model, actor, sex worker, or anything else involving their own body. Agency matters. Consent matters. Choice matters.

The problem is what happens when a culture becomes so accustomed to seeing women as sexual objects that some people begin confusing being sexually attracted to someone with having some kind of entitlement to them.

Those are radically different things.

And this is where rape enters the conversation.

Rape isn’t fundamentally about sex.

It’s about power, control, domination, humiliation and the destruction of another person’s autonomy.

The sexual component is the weapon.

That’s an important distinction because we’ve spent centuries pretending that rape happens because men simply “can’t control themselves.” That’s nonsense. Men manage to control themselves when the consequences are serious enough. They can walk past attractive women every day without attacking them. They can experience sexual attraction without committing a violent crime.

Rape isn’t some biological inevitability.

It’s a choice.

And that brings us back to the culture.

I once knew a young woman who worked as a dancer while she was in college. She had a wonderfully blunt explanation for the existence of strip clubs.

Her assessment was essentially:

“The only reason strip clubs exist is because men are stupid.”

I wasn’t a parishioner at the Church of Strip Clubs then, and I haven’t exactly become a regular member of the congregation since. But I understood her point.

There is something objectively bizarre about paying another human being to stand on a stage and pretend to be sexually interested in you.

And apparently we’re willing to spend an astonishing amount of money proving that we’re willing to do it.

But again, the dancer isn’t necessarily the problem. She’s doing a job. The customer is making a voluntary transaction. Everyone knows the rules.

The more disturbing question is why our culture has spent thousands of years teaching men to view women through the lens of sexual availability in the first place.

We inherited patriarchy before we inherited electricity.

For most of human history, women were denied property rights, political power, education, economic independence, reproductive autonomy and control over their own lives. Their value was frequently measured through their usefulness as wives, mothers, caretakers or sexual partners.

We have made enormous progress since then.

But cultural programming doesn’t disappear just because somebody passes a law.

We can put a woman in Congress and still have people commenting on her body.

We can elect women to the highest offices in the country and still debate whether they’re attractive enough.

We can put women in boardrooms, laboratories, military cockpits and courtrooms and still have some idiot believe that “no” is merely the beginning of negotiations.

That’s the absurdity.

We are supposedly the dominant species on this planet.

We have altered rivers, split atoms, sequenced genomes, walked on the Moon and built a machine capable of generating an essay about how ridiculous human beings are.

And somewhere along the way, humanity apparently decided:

“Yes, but let’s still argue about whether women deserve bodily autonomy.”

Seriously?

This is our evolutionary achievement?

We have gone from caves to quantum computing and somehow dragged the same primitive impulse with us the entire way.

Maybe it’s time to grow up.

Women aren’t objects.

They aren’t trophies.

They aren’t advertisements.

They aren’t prizes for being nice to a man.

They aren’t responsible for preventing somebody else from assaulting them.

And they certainly don’t surrender ownership of their bodies because they wore something revealing, drank too much, went to a party, danced for money, flirted with somebody, changed their mind, or simply happened to exist in the same physical space as another human being.

Consent isn’t complicated.

Yes means yes. No means no. And everything else requires stopping.

That’s not radical feminism.

That’s not political correctness.

That’s not some terrifying attack on masculinity.

That’s kindergarten-level human decency.

Perhaps the real measure of whether we’ve become a civilized species isn’t whether we can build a computer smarter than ourselves.

Maybe it’s whether we can finally look at another human being and understand the simplest concept imaginable:

You belong to you.

What a revolutionary idea.

After thousands of years, perhaps we’re finally ready to catch up with it.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

We are just weeks away from the midterm elections, and for once, it feels like people are actually paying attention.

Historically, midterm elections have been treated like the political equivalent of the opening act nobody came to see. Turnout is lower. Attention is lower. People seem to forget that the House and Senate aren’t decorative branches of government that exist merely to provide cable news with talking heads. They are co-equal branches of the federal government, and they have enormous power to determine what this country can—and cannot—do.

But this year feels different.

Maybe it’s because of how badly this administration has performed. Maybe it’s the unnecessary wars, the chaos, the attacks on institutions, the constant assault on the idea that government should actually work for the people rather than serve the person sitting in the Oval Office. Maybe people have finally reached the point where they are tired of watching the country being driven into a ditch while being told we’re actually winning the Indy 500.

Whatever the reason, there is momentum.

And that’s good.

But momentum is a funny thing.

You can have it, and then you can lose it.

That is the part I think we need to remember.

Hopefully, in November, Democrats take back the House. Hopefully, we take back the Senate. Hopefully, voters look at the last couple of years and decide that enough is enough.

But if that happens, we cannot take a giant collective sigh of relief and go home.

We’ve done that before.

We elected Barack Obama and, for a moment, there was a sense that maybe we’d crossed some enormous historical finish line. America had elected a Black president. Surely that meant we had finally moved beyond racism.

Except we hadn’t.

Not even close.

Then came 2020. Donald Trump was defeated, Joe Biden was elected, and once again there was a collective exhale. We had survived the moment. Democracy had held. And Biden’s administration accomplished plenty.

But apparently, we didn’t keep our foot on the gas.

And here we are again.

That’s the lesson.

An election is not the movement. An election is part of the movement.

Taking back Congress in 2026 would be important. It would be necessary. It could put the brakes on some of the damage being done and begin restoring some balance to our government.

But 2028 is already standing in the doorway.

And after 2028 comes 2030.

Then 2032.

There is always another election. There is always another fight over what kind of country we want to be. There is always another generation of voters who needs to understand that democracy isn’t something you inherit like Grandma’s china and put in a cabinet until Thanksgiving.

It requires maintenance.

It requires participation.

It requires attention.

And, occasionally, it requires getting off the couch.

That’s where the old saying comes in:

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

The entire point is movement.

A stone sitting in the same place long enough eventually becomes covered in moss. It becomes part of the landscape. Eventually, you stop noticing it.

I don’t want our political movement to become that stone.

I don’t want us to win an election and then spend two years congratulating ourselves for winning it.

I don’t want us to mistake stopping something bad for actually building something better.

And I definitely don’t want us to assume that because we won once, we’ve permanently solved anything.

Because history has a nasty habit of reminding us that nothing is permanent.

Progress isn’t a parking space.

You don’t pull into it, turn off the engine and announce, Well, we’ve made it.

Progress is movement.

Sometimes it’s fast.

Sometimes it’s painfully slow.

Sometimes you take two steps forward and one step backward.

But you keep moving.

If we don’t want to go backward, we have to keep going forward.

That means paying attention after the election. It means holding elected officials accountable after we’ve helped elect them. It means voting in midterms, presidential elections, primaries and local elections. It means knowing who represents us in Congress and the state legislature. It means paying attention to school boards, city councils, governors and judges.

It means understanding that democracy isn’t a spectator sport.

And it means resisting the temptation to believe that one election can fix everything.

Maybe 2026 gives us some momentum.

Good.

Use it.

Don’t squander it.

Turn 2026 into 2028.

Turn 2028 into 2030.

Turn 2030 into 2032.

Keep rolling.

Because the objective isn’t simply to defeat one politician or one administration. The objective is to build a political culture where democracy, equality, accountability, science, reason and basic human decency aren’t temporary projects that depend upon which party happens to control the White House.

That’s a much bigger job.

And it won’t be finished in November.

So vote.

Then keep voting.

Pay attention.

Then keep paying attention.

Push.

Then keep pushing.

Celebrate the victories, because God knows we need a few reasons to celebrate.

But don’t confuse a victory lap with the finish line.

There isn’t one.

The road keeps going.

And if we want to keep moving forward, we can’t afford to sit still long enough for moss to grow.

Keep rolling.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

We Didn’t Lose

There is a particular kind of ridiculousness that has developed around Donald Trump that I have never quite seen in my 59 years. It is the political equivalent of standing in the middle of a football field after the scoreboard has gone dark, the officials have left, the other team has taken the trophy home, and somebody is still standing there insisting, “We didn’t lose.”

This isn’t even about whether you liked the outcome.

It isn’t about whether you thought the referees made bad calls. It isn’t about whether you believe your team was better. It isn’t about whether you think the other team cheated, the weather was unfair, the field was crooked, or the concession stand gave you a stale hot dog.

The final score was 36–27.

You lost.

And yet, apparently, saying those two words has become a loyalty test in the Republican Party: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

You can say Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president. You can acknowledge that Biden occupied the White House for four years. You can acknowledge that Trump left Washington and Biden entered it. You can even acknowledge every physical reality surrounding the transfer of power.

But apparently there is something radioactive about actually saying the words:

Donald Trump lost the election.

Instead, we get linguistic gymnastics worthy of an Olympic event.

“Well, Joe Biden was declared the winner.”

“Joe Biden became president.”

“The election was certified.”

“Biden served four years.”

“I’m not going to comment on something that hasn’t been determined.”

Haven’t been determined?

At some point, refusing to acknowledge something doesn’t make it unresolved. It simply makes the person refusing to acknowledge it look ridiculous.

Imagine asking the quarterback of the team that just lost 36–27, “Why do you think you lost the game?”

And the quarterback responds:

“We didn’t lose.”

“Um… the scoreboard says 36–27.”

“Yes, but the other team was awarded the victory.”

“So… you lost.”

“No. We didn’t lose. There were circumstances.”

“But the game is over.”

“I won’t comment on whether we lost.”

“But you’re not the winner.”

“That has not been sufficiently determined.”

At that point, you wouldn’t think the quarterback was making a sophisticated legal argument. You would probably wonder if somebody needed to escort him back to the locker room.

Yet this is essentially the intellectual contortion that has been demanded of people who want to remain in Trump’s orbit.

And that is what makes it so troubling.

A political party is supposed to be able to survive losing an election. In fact, losing elections is part of democracy. Republicans have lost elections. Democrats have lost elections. Presidents have lost reelection campaigns. Senators have lost. Governors have lost. Mayors have lost.

They go home.

They lick their wounds.

They figure out what went wrong.

They come back four years later and try again.

That’s how the system is supposed to work.

The extraordinary thing about Trump isn’t simply that he refused to accept the 2020 result. Politicians have complained about elections forever. The extraordinary thing is how refusing to acknowledge the loss has become a kind of initiation ritual.

If you want a position in the administration, apparently you have to understand the choreography.

You don’t necessarily have to say Joe Biden wasn’t president.

You just can’t quite bring yourself to say Donald Trump lost.

There is a linguistic distinction without a meaningful difference.

And it reminds me of something toddlers eventually figure out.

Give a four-year-old a game and let them lose, and you’ll probably hear:

“I didn’t lose!”

Then comes the list of excuses.

“He cheated.”

“You didn’t explain the rules.”

“I wasn’t ready.”

“My shoe was untied.”

“He got more turns.”

But eventually, even the toddler usually reaches the inevitable conclusion:

I lost.

It isn’t psychologically devastating to acknowledge reality. It is actually part of growing up.

You lose games.

You lose elections.

You don’t get the job.

Somebody else gets the promotion.

Your favorite team gets eliminated.

Your candidate doesn’t win.

And you learn that losing doesn’t erase your worth.

You learn that you can lose today and try again tomorrow.

What seems profoundly unhealthy is the insistence that acknowledging a loss is itself an act of betrayal.

Because once you make acknowledgment of reality a loyalty test, you’re no longer asking people to demonstrate political agreement. You’re asking them to demonstrate obedience.

And those are two very different things.

I don’t expect politicians to be unbiased. I don’t expect them to praise their opponents. I don’t expect them to suddenly become enthusiastic supporters of the other party.

But I do expect adults—particularly people entrusted with enormous governmental power—to be capable of recognizing an observable fact.

The election happened.

Votes were counted.

The states certified their results.

The Electoral College voted.

Joe Biden was inaugurated.

He served four years as president.

Donald Trump did not.

You can write a thousand footnotes explaining why you don’t like any of those facts.

The facts remain.

And that’s the part I find so bizarre.

There is nothing humiliating about losing an election.

There is something deeply humiliating about being so terrified of admitting that you lost that you have to invent an entirely new vocabulary in which losing doesn’t exist.

Because eventually you have to wonder what happens when the same people who cannot admit they lost an election are confronted with something else they don’t like.

Do they acknowledge reality then?

Or do they simply redefine reality until it agrees with them?

That’s not strength.

That’s not leadership.

And it certainly isn’t patriotism.

Democracy requires something much simpler and much harder:

Sometimes your team wins.

Sometimes your team loses.

And when the scoreboard says 36–27, a grown adult should be able to look at it and say:

“We lost. We’ll try again next time.”

Apparently, in Trump’s America, even that has become a loyalty test.

Dwain Northey

The President Who Wants to Be at the Rally

With only a few weeks left before the midterm elections, I find myself thinking about something that feels increasingly strange about the current occupant of the White House.

Presidents campaign for their party. That’s nothing new. They raise money, make endorsements, record advertisements, occasionally show up at a rally and tell everybody how important it is to vote for the candidates who will help them accomplish their agenda.

But Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand the word occasionally.

He has launched a full-blown midterm campaign blitz, planning rallies across the country to pump up Republican candidates and, apparently, remind everyone that the election is really about him. Reuters recently reported that his approval rating had fallen to 32 percent, while two-thirds of Republican candidates in competitive House and Senate races were trying to distance themselves from him. (Reuters⁠)

And yet here comes Donald.

Again.

And again.

And again.

It’s almost as if somebody told him there was an election and he interpreted that as, “Great! Another presidential campaign!”

There is an important distinction here. Barack Obama certainly did campaign for Democrats during the 2014 midterms, including holding rallies for candidates such as Maryland gubernatorial candidate Anthony Brown. But Obama initially stayed largely off the public campaign trail because Democrats knew his approval numbers could actually hurt some of the candidates he was trying to help. (CBS News⁠)

That seems like an important concept: sometimes the most helpful thing a president can do for his party is get out of the way.

Donald Trump appears to have missed that memo.

Instead, he’s behaving like the headliner of a traveling rock band that refuses to acknowledge that the audience isn’t quite as enthusiastic as it used to be.

And this is where I start wondering whether Donald actually enjoys being president—or whether he enjoys being Donald Trump, the guy who gets to stand on a stage while thousands of people cheer for him.

Because those are two very different jobs.

Being president means sitting through briefings nobody watches on television. Reading reports nobody chants about. Making decisions that don’t produce applause. Dealing with Congress, foreign governments, courts, agencies, disasters, budgets, wars, economic problems and all the other incredibly glamorous parts of being Commander in Chief.

Being at a Trump rally means walking onto a stage, looking at a crowd full of people who already like you, hearing them cheer, talking about yourself for an hour or two, insulting your political enemies and leaving convinced that everybody loves you.

I can see why one of those would be considerably more enjoyable.

The problem is that the country didn’t elect a professional rally performer.

It elected a president.

And now, with the midterms approaching, Trump seems determined to turn the entire Republican campaign into one enormous traveling Trump rally. He has even told voters to essentially pretend he’s on the ballot. (Reuters⁠)

Which, frankly, may be the most honest description of his political philosophy I’ve heard.

Pretend I’m running.

That’s apparently the plan.

Republican candidates are trying to win their individual races while some are quietly discovering that having Donald Trump’s name attached to them isn’t necessarily the electoral gift from heaven they were hoping for. Reuters found that many candidates in competitive races are deliberately creating some distance between themselves and the president. (Reuters⁠)

That’s understandable.

Imagine you’re running for Senate and your campaign team is sitting around the conference table asking, “What can we do to win over independent voters?”

And somebody says:

“How about we bring in the president with a 32 percent approval rating?”

At which point the campaign manager quietly walks into the parking lot and starts screaming into the nearest trash can.

Trump seems to believe that because the people who attend his rallies love him, everybody loves him.

But a rally isn’t a random sample of America.

If I throw a party and invite only people who already like me, I shouldn’t walk outside afterward and announce that the entire neighborhood has endorsed me.

That’s not polling.

That’s called having a guest list.

And perhaps that’s the fundamental problem with Donald Trump. He appears to have spent so much time surrounded by people whose job is to tell him how wonderful he is that reality has become something he encounters only when it refuses to cooperate.

The economy isn’t behaving the way he says it is.

His approval numbers aren’t behaving the way he says they are.

Republican candidates aren’t universally begging him to appear with them.

And voters aren’t necessarily treating every problem in America as though it can be solved by another Trump speech.

Yet the solution appears to be:

More rallies.

Because surely the thing missing from the current situation is another giant crowd chanting his name.

At some point, you have to wonder whether the presidency has become secondary to the performance.

The Oval Office is the job.

The rally is the dopamine hit.

And Donald Trump seems increasingly interested in the dopamine.

There are only a few weeks left until Americans vote. Republican candidates are going to have to answer for the policies of this administration whether they want to or not. And Trump is going to continue traveling around the country telling everyone how fantastic everything is, how badly everybody needs to vote Republican and, presumably, how fantastic he is.

Because in Donald Trump’s America, the scoreboard apparently doesn’t matter if the crowd is still cheering.

And maybe that’s the strangest part of all.

A president should be looking at the country and asking, “How are we doing?”

Donald Trump seems to be looking at the crowd and asking, “How am I doing?”

Those are two very different questions.

And with the midterms approaching, America is about to provide an answer to both.