Many of us went into election night looking for a repudiation — an unequivocal electoral avalanche, a stinging rebuke that would erase Donald Trump and Trumpism, allowing us to look back on the past four years of division, vitriol and indecency as nothing more than a blip. A brief mistake. An outlier. Not us. Others […]
Editorial
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Awards and an Invitation
We are elated to announce that North Coast Journal arts and features editor Jennifer Fumiko Cahill won the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2020 award for best food writing, while the paper’s Media Literacy Issue took second place for best special section. The nonprofit association includes nearly 100 member papers throughout the country, including many of […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Such a Shame
It’s a such a shame,” is a phrase we hear a lot when a restaurant shuts down. Since the shelter-in-place order came down in March, it’s been on constant loop as dining rooms and storefronts have gone dark around us. Owners and staff who have managed to hang on — careening from complete closure to […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
We Thank You, Doctor
It’s important to remember that Teresa Frankovich never asked for any of this. There’s no indication she ever desired to issue orders that impact people’s lives and livelihoods, nor that she ever wanted to be a fixture on the nightly news. As she has said, people who want those things simply don’t enter public health […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Campus, Community and COVID
It was with no small amount of alarm that we watched a seemingly large rift emerge between those tasked with keeping us all safe during a pandemic — Humboldt County Public Health — and what’s arguably the region’s most important institution — Humboldt State University. Those wanting the specifics can read more on page 6 […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Zombie Apocalypse
Anyone who’s watched traditional zombie movies knows it’s never really the zombies themselves that kill people. Sure, the relentless but slow-moving and brainless corpses are the mechanism of death, but it’s really humans’ selfishness, panic, stupidity and conflict that always causes them to leave positions of relative safety to imperil themselves and their loved ones. […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Community Responsibility
A friend of the Journal recently said that opening one part of the country — or one part of the state — amid the COVID-19 pandemic is akin to having a peeing section in a public swimming pool. The analogy is crude but accurate. We were reminded of this July 13 when, faced with soaring […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Unease, Inaction and Time for Reckoning
The video of police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd joins a heartbreaking library of footage of the abuse and death of Black Americans at the hands of those charged with protecting them under the law. It is an archive vast enough — and growing amid the very protests against such systemic violence — to […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Privileged Protest
By now, just about everyone has seen the photograph. It’s of a brunette white woman standing on the Humboldt County Courthouse lawn with a smattering of American flags in the background. Her head is cocked to the right, sunglasses covering her eyes and a red bandana tied around her neck above a jean jacket. In […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
The Cost of COVID
It feels as though loss has come to surround us lately. Our children have lost the opportunity to go to school, tear through playgrounds, have playdates, finish their sports seasons, dance at prom and walk across a graduation stage. We adults have lost the ability to go out to dinner with a friend, have the […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Wear the Damn Mask
I often tell my kids, perhaps more frequently since we’ve all been on lockdown together, “Be as good as you can be, not as bad as you can get away with.” The scolding feels different looking out into our community during shelter in place. But before I get to what some are getting away with, […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
A Nation of Laws
It was the nation’s second president, John Adams, who said, “We are a nation of laws, not of men.” It is one of the lights that guides this experiment of democracy we’re all engaged in and what holds us together as a society. After all, it’s laws that hold that your inalienable right to swing […]