Opinion

Recently my 5-year-old was invited to celebrate a child’s half birthday. The invitation boasted, “Jerimiah is turning 5 and a half!” (Names and ages have been changed to protect the privacy of those extremely guilty of this kind of thing.) The invitation included a comment section with the RSVP so I did: With regrets, we will not attend Jeremiah’s half-birthday jamboree because where does it end, man? Do we attend Tiny Tim’s throwdown where he turns 4 and ¾? What about small Sarah’s shindig where she turns 6 and 6/7? Shall we frequent fun-sized Fernando’s fiesta celebrating his fourth and 263/365?!

Back in mid-May, the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University released the latest of their studies looking at bipartisanship in the U.S. House and Senate. They summed up the bottom line in their first sentence: “The results show a slight improvement in bipartisanship in 2023 but remained near record lows.”

I’ve either been involved in or keeping an eye on American politics for over 60 years now. We’ve faced plenty of tough questions during that time, and though many of them have been resolved and we’ve moved on, some are tenacious — income inequality, racial equity, the ever-ballooning national deficit, climate change. But in all those years, the question I’ve found myself returning to again and again — and that I suppose we’ll never really resolve — is the one Lincoln posed at Gettysburg: Can a nation like ours, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” endure?

It would appear that my highly energetic roommate, Kiki, the 9-month-old former stray cat, has decided to do battle with various objects in my home. These opponents include the threshold from my kitchen to my living room.

Do you ever do this? Say, your goal for the day is to bring “stuff” down to the basement to store. You see, you don’t have room upstairs anymore.

Editor’s note: State Rep. Dean Urdahl announced earlier this year he planned to retire at the end of his current term. On May 20, as the 2024 session neared its conclusion, Urdahl delivered his retirement speech on the floor of the Minnesota House, the text of which follows:

The weather is overcast, windy and wet from an early morning shower. We have had a string of days with sunshine after a week of rain.

We had a Keurig in our office and one day one of our staff declared, “Come on! What are you waiting for!” I timed it. It took our coffee maker two minutes to brew a cup... . That’s like SOOOO LONG!