Opinion
The Unfriendly Skies
Spectator
By Stephen Tuttle | Sept. 18, 2021
A woman on a Southwest Airlines flight refuses to fasten her seat belt or put on her mask. The video, taken by another passenger, shows her standing and repeatedly striking a flight attendant until another passenger intervenes. The flight attendant has a tooth knocked out, three others cracked and suffers a broken nose and facial lacerations. An American Airlines passenger, screaming that the plane is going to crash, assaults a flight attendant ... Read More >>
Alcohol 101
Guest Opinion
By Mary Keyes Rogers | Sept. 18, 2021
Sometimes, in the interest of good parenting, I have broken the law. Ask any drivers ed instructor how many times they're accompanying a kid who's getting behind the wheel of a car for the first time ever. Next to none would be the answer. Moms and dads find a quiet parking lot or backroad and give the kid their first lurching attempt at driving the family car before starting formal lessons on ... Read More >>
Northern Death
Spectator
By Stephen Tuttle | Sept. 11, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic marches inexorably toward ignominious Milestones of Death here in the United States. We've now eased past 650,000 COVID deaths here. Soon enough we will surge past the estimated 675,000 Americans who died in the 1918–19 flu pandemic, and this coronavirus will become our deadliest disease outbreak ever. (October 1918 remains the deadliest month in U.S. history from any cause, with at least 200,000 flu/pneumonia deaths.) Even sooner we will ... Read More >>
Pro-Life, You Say?
Guest Opinion
By Amy Kerr Hardin | Sept. 11, 2021
Imagine a Venn diagram consisting of these positions: pro-life, all lives matter, anti-mask/anti-vax, supporting repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and anti-immigration. Any person who finds themselves at the intersection of these incongruous viewpoints is, in the very least, a hypocrite who clearly doesn’t value any life but perhaps their own. They are the product of the toxic alchemy of misguided politics and faux morality. It’s double the hypocrisy because many of ... Read More >>
Rethink Your Reverence of “Science”
Guest Opinion
By Derek Meyer | Sept. 4, 2021
Our institutions are only as good as the minds and temperaments that orchestrate them, and as such, science is subject to all the fallibility of its practitioners. Public discourse in the era of COVID-19 makes manifestly evident our contemporary predisposition to logical fallacies. I attribute this in equal parts to a) an erosion of critical thinking that is reflected in and perpetuated by a dumbing down of culture and media, and b) ... Read More >>
Heroes
Spectator
By Stephen Tuttle | Sept. 4, 2021
It has been two full decades since we were attacked by crazed murderers hijacking planes and using them as weapons. Calling them “terrorists” affords them more credit than they deserve, a kind of cachet that somehow elevates them beyond what they actually were. We will once again mark the day by showing all the videos of airplanes impacting buildings and the hole smoldering in the ground in Pennsylvania. It was a grim ... Read More >>
Needles, Blood, and the Wanton Destruction of Infrastructure
Guest Opinion
By Gary Howe | Aug. 28, 2021
When I watch movies, I squirm when needles go into skin and when blood oozes all over the place. These seem like pretty common reactions among moviegoers, but I wonder how many other people also have to avert their eyes when bridges, streets, and buildings are destroyed? When Godzilla and King Kong took their dispute to Hong Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong, I tensed up in my seat and could barely watch. ... Read More >>
County Knowledge and City Plans
Spectator
By Stephen Tuttle | Aug. 28, 2021
Those of us living in Grand Traverse County are incredibly lucky; the Republicans on our county board of commissioners are just about the smartest people alive, and their wisdom extends to subjects far and wide. A previous board's expertise on energy distribution — specifically pipelines — led them to pass a resolution in support of the proposed Enbridge tunnel/pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac that would replace the pipelines now lying on ... Read More >>
Traverse City’s Urban Design Lacks Both Vision and Common Sense
Guest Opinion
By Kathleen Stocking | Aug. 21, 2021
Traverse City’s planners are so focused on creating wealth and tax revenue with “high density” that they aren’t thinking about what will happen in the future. In 2017, Joe Minicozzi, a proponent of New Urbanism, came to Traverse City and, in the Warehouse District’s Inside-Out gallery, I think, told people how his hometown of Rome, New York, had been killed by malls. (You can watch his talk on YouTube.) Traverse City was ... Read More >>
A Basket Full of Troubles
Spectator
By Stephen Tuttle | Aug. 21, 2021
President Joe Biden has a basket full of troubles. Some inherited, some the responsibility of multiple people and some of his own doing. They all promise to be rich fodder for attack politics during the 2022 midterm elections. AfghanistanOur military adventure in Afghanistan started as an effort to rout the controlling Taliban because, among other things, they had given aid, comfort, and shelter to Osama bin Laden and his gang of 9/11 ... Read More >>
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