Life goes on, right? I’m not as certain about that as I used to be – or maybe I no longer understand the term “goes on.”

I’ve been pondering past decisions I’ve made in this life of mine – decisions of enormous impact, decisions that created my future, essentially out of the blue. Forty-nine years ago, for instance, I moved from rural, southwest Michigan to . . . ta da . . . Chicago. I’d been a back-to-the-lander for the previous four years, having transformed with many of my fellow boomers from antiwar activist and hippie to planet-saving environmentalist. I was also married, but that marriage – numero uno – fell apart and I found myself, in my late 20s, with my entire future in my hands. I loved gardening. I’d been raising barred-rock chickens. Every spring we made maple syrup. On and on. Love the planet, man.

But I found myself looking beyond the moment and knew I had a future to create – ooh, serious responsibility here. I knew I wasn’t meant to remain a farmer. What I loved was writing. And it was something I was good at. I also could envision only one way to make an actual living as a writer: journalism.

Israel is meticulously following a textbook model of instigating unrest in the occupied West Bank. The latest such provocations consisted of stripping the Palestinian-run Hebron (Al-Khalil) municipality of its administrative powers over the venerable Ibrahimi Mosque. Worse, according to Israel Hayom, it granted these powers to the religious council of the Kiryat Arba Jewish settlement, an extremist settler body.

Between deep Medicaid cuts and a ballooning budget for an increasingly fascistic Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the recently passed federal budget contained grim news for just about everyone in the country. While MAGA-land rejoices at the bill’s passage, recent climate-related disasters show that everyone will suffer under this “Big Beautiful Bill”. The legislation guts Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), eliminating tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles — a move that will cost Ohio billions in investment and thousands of jobs. Even Trump’s most rabid white nationalist supporters will live in the hotter, more disaster-prone, and volatile climate system that this climate rollback will help to usher in — right along with the rest of us.

Senate Bill 63 would ban ranked-choice voting statewide and withhold state funding from cities who want to use it.