Arrowhead Indivisible

Spring in the Arrowhead is all water and mud; but this year, intolerable mud from Trump’s first 100 days dirties us all.

Each day brings more mud as institutions, livelihoods, our standing on the world stage and precious protected lands are put at risk. A friend of a friend’s cancer trial is cancelled; the administrators were deemed waste. It’s too much, too fast, too dirty.

For me, I cannot seem to clean this mud from my thirsty boots so on April 5th, I rallied and marched with you and wrote about it creatively.

And love shared a mitten with a friend

on a chilly, sunlit Saturday in April,

and just as snow melts and rivers flow

to feed our beloved Lake Superior,

so we gathered and inspiration rained down –

words that fed our thirsty boots

with the sweet taste of hope

and quickened the shared strides of communal spirit.

Holly Lamond

Last stanza, We are One with Water

Substack, @poetrytracks

My husband and I live in Grand Marais, MN about 45 miles from the US/Canadian Border. We enjoy skiing, dining and staying in Thunder Bay, ON. We were treated kindly by the locals during two recent stays in Thunder Bay in spite of the shameful treatment of Canada by our government. I have been connected to Canada all my life having grown up in International Falls, MN, which happens to be a sister city to Fort Frances, ON—separated only by the width of Rainy River. As a family we fished and camped in Canada. The Fort had the only hockey arena when I was young and high school games were played in Canada. Curling and golfing take place in the Fort today as there are no curling rinks or golf courses in the Falls. Pickleball, line dancing, dining and shopping are shared events on both sides of the border. The locals love and support one another. On March 29th 150 residents from the Falls and the Fort held a Hands Across the Border event forming a human link across the international bridge as sign of solidarity. Residents and businesses are deeply disturbed over the tariff war started by the Trump administration. Border businesses rely on shopping revenue from their immediate neighbors. This is true for Grand Marais as well. Canadians shop and dine in Grand Marais year round and the loss of their business hurts our local merchants. No doubt the tariff policy is having a deleterious effect on the Grand Portage Casino which is one of the largest employers on the Grand Portage reservation. I am personally incensed by the treatment of Canada by our current administration. I love Canada and Canadians, and I honor their tremendous loyalty to the US during times of strife. Most recently they were involved in fighting the California fires last Fall and they have been by our side through numerous wars and catastrophes. I worry about how long it will take to heal the damage that has been done to our dearest ally. I plead with our administration to stop the tariff wars, to treat all nations with dignity and to stop generating cultures of hate with their “we and they” inflammatory rhetoric. I’ve included a photo of Craig and I taken at the Sleeping Giant Loppet, one of many happy days spent in Canada.

The unsurpassed beauty of the Arrowhead region of northern Minnesota is what drew us to live here eight years ago. Our leisure time is spent canoeing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and hiking our State Parks and the Superior National Forest. It’s obvious the current administration cares nothing about climate change, the environment, and polluting our pristine waters. Additionally, it pains me to witness the inhumane treatment of individuals, simply because of the color of their skin, their country of origin, their disabilities, their gender identity, or anything not perceived by this administration as “white.” I used to be proud to be an American and all our country stood for. I now just feel ashamed and embarrassed that we have alienated countries who used to be our allies. I’m afraid for the country in which my 2-year-old grandson will grow up.

The impact of the infantile, retribution budget cuts has affected our family in a number of ways. I work for an international nonprofit that has received around 10% of our annual budget in federal grants. There have been a few staff layoffs and postponed hiring for open positions. Our organization is primarily funded through membership fees, and our members are all nonprofits in the social services. In our sector we will sink or float together.

My husband works for the State of MN in information technology for the Department of Public Health. They were informed of federal funding loss last week and laid off a large number of contractors and staff. He is still employed, but will be taking up some of the duties of those who now are not employed.

Our daughter and her soon-to-be husband are both medical professionals. He works at a federal hospital as a psychiatrist and only has two years to go before his student loans were eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Our daughter graduated with her masters degree two years ago and is now a physician assistant. She too was counting on PSLF to keep her from a lifetime of student loan debt payments. The fate of this program is still to be determined but its chances do not look good.

My husband and I are both 64 this year. We've paid into Social Security since our first part time jobs in high school. We do have some retirement savings, but were certainly counting on Social Security as a major portion. Now with our 401k retirement accounts tanked, and the threat of Social Security being cut, we will have to stay at our current jobs for as long as we can, as long as they are there.

We are fortunate that we own our home and are relatively healthy. We enjoy many of the publicly funded amenities in Cook County and are grateful for those. It is heartbreaking to consider that so much could be taken from all of us and sold to the highest bidder, but it is also an enormous motivation to fight back!

I am writing to express my alarm and outrage at the recent and continuing activities in the Trump administration that are destroying higher education in the USA. These activities include witholding or directly cancelling billions of dollars of federal funding (Harvard, Columbia, U Penn) and unilaterally slashing “indirect costs” for research grants at NIH.

These examples are clearly intended to intimidate all others. I have recently retired from a 40-year career as a professor of physics at Arizona State University. As department chair, I was proud to manage or assist or witness hundreds of graduate degrees for our students. The careers of every one of these students were made possible by federal grant money supporting research programs at the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy or Department of Defense (Army, Navy, AirForce, DARPA). The bi-annual commencement ceremonies at ASU were highlights of the year, when tens of thousands of students would gather, along with their families who had travelled long distances to share in the achievements of their children and siblings and to hear inspiring words from distinguished guest speakers praising the students and sending them forth into the world with the mandate to use their new talents to improve the lives of others throughout the World.

Approximately half of graduate students in the sciences come from outside the US. For them, coming to the US was a “dream come true” for launching their careers. Some of the best will stay in the US as permanent residents and will become high-performing scientists, engineers or teachers. Half of the faculty in my department were permanent-residence immigrants. The US graduate programs are currently the envy of the World, but that reputation is now on the eve of destruction and is already badly damaged. It will not be easily restored. A brain drain has already begun, with other institutions outside the US welcoming de-funded students, recent graduates and even young faculty. The autocratic actions of the Trump administration are incredibly ignorant, arrogant, short-sighted and self-serving. In a cruel irony, the purveyors of the MAGA agenda are killing our reputation as the best in the World. I beseech all leaders to help stop this madness!