A Letter from Tampa

 

Cedar Valley News
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
A Letter from Tampa
By George Khan

A letter arrived at the Cedar Valley News this week from a woman named Jayne. She lives in Tampa. Not a small town. A metropolis of more than three million people.

She wrote to tell us about her neighbor across the street. She noticed his charger had not moved in eight days. A package sat on his porch for two. She thought about it. She worried about seeming nosy. Then she crossed the street and knocked.

She said: “I’m not being nosy, but — are you okay?”

He had been sick for two weeks. He thanked her. And then she told him something worth remembering: “I will never forget that when the hurricane hit, and we were out of town, you took photos of our house to let us know it was still standing.”

He went first once. She went first this time.

I read Jayne’s letter standing at the Deli Kitchen counter before we opened. I read it twice.

When I came to Cedar Valley, I did not know anyone. I had my faith and my family’s name and not much else. I did not know if this town would notice me, or notice me only in the way a town sometimes notices a stranger — with distance, with caution, with the particular silence that says: you are here, but you are not one of us.

The first time a neighbor knocked on my door just to ask how I was doing, I did not know what to say. Not because the question was hard. Because nobody had asked it before. Not here. Not like that.

 

That was a long time ago. Cedar Valley became home the way a place becomes home — slowly, through a hundred small moments, most of them unremarkable. A wave across the street. A conversation at the hardware store. Someone who remembered what you told them two weeks ago and asked about it.

But I think about the people who do not get those moments. The ones whose charger sits in the same spot for eight days and nobody notices. The ones whose package stays on the porch. In a city of three million, it is possible to disappear inside your own neighborhood. It is possible to be sick for two weeks and have nobody knock.

Jayne crossed the street. That is the whole story. Not a program. Not a committee. Not a community initiative. One woman who noticed and got brave.

I have a counter at the Deli Kitchen. People come in every day. Most of them order the same thing they always order, and we talk about the weather or the news or whatever is sitting on the counter between us. But some of them come in, and something is different. They are slower. They sit longer. They do not quite finish.

I have learned to notice. Not to pry. Not to make a thing of it. Just to ask, before they leave: “You doing all right?”

Sometimes the answer is fine. Sometimes it is not. Either way, somebody asked.

Dan wrote on Friday about showing up. About Ruth Edmonds, who baked cookies the night before the phone calls came because she already knew somebody would come. About the certainty you earn by being the one who went first, over and over, for sixty years.

Jayne in Tampa has some of that certainty, too. She earned it one hurricane ago, when her neighbor photographed her house so she would know it was still standing. She did not forget. When the time came, she crossed the street.

Cedar Valley News has a front porch, even if it is only a Facebook group and a mailing list. If you have a Jayne story — a time you crossed the street, or someone crossed for you — we want to hear it. Use first names. Keep it short. Send it to the paper.

Because what Jayne proved from Tampa is what Cedar Valley already knows. The knock still works. It works in a small town. It works in a metropolis. It works anywhere someone is willing to get a little brave.

— George Khan

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Cedar Valley News has a new Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

Where Does the Money Go?

 

Cedar Valley News
Monday, March 30, 2026
Where Does the Money Go?
From the Editor’s Desk: By Teresa Nikas

Where does the money go?

I spent more than twenty years in a classroom asking that question quietly. Caleb Mercer spent last April asking it out loud. Cedar Valley gave him the mayor’s office for it.

I know what a classroom looks like when it gains four students overnight. I know what it means when the nurse serves six buildings instead of one. I know what a gifted program means to the child who has been waiting all year to finally be challenged. I also know what the budget reports look like from the inside. They are not written for parents. They are not written for property owners. They are written in a language designed to be understood by the people who wrote them.

Mayor Mercer understood that. He came into office and pushed for what New Hampshire had just passed at the state level — a requirement that the school district publish, before every budget vote, four things: average teacher salary over the past ten years. Average administrator salary over the past ten years. Cost per pupil over the past ten years. And the salaries of the four highest-paid administrators in the district.

Not because he assumed the district was dishonest. Because he believed voters deserved to see the same charts the board sees before they are asked to vote.

The charts are coming. Before the next budget vote, Cedar Valley residents will see those numbers side by side for the first time.

Something happened before the charts even arrived. The district made adjustments. Some positions were reviewed. Some line items shifted. The budget changed before the public ever saw the data.

Mayor Mercer did not hold a press conference about it. He just noted it and kept going.

I spent years watching good teachers leave Cedar Valley schools because the salary schedule had not moved in a decade. I watched new administrators arrive with titles I did not recognize. I watched the central office add staff while the classroom counts stayed flat. I am not saying every administrator is unnecessary. I am saying the question is fair, and for too long it was not being asked.

Cedar Valley is not the only town facing this. A city in Alaska is about to ask its voters to take on seventy-nine million dollars in school building debt — while the same district cuts more than three hundred teachers and closes three elementary schools. The buildings need repair. That is true. But the voters deciding the bond have never seen a ten-year chart showing where the money has gone. They are being asked to trust a system they cannot read.

Cedar Valley will be different this spring. Our voters will have the charts.

In the next two months, Cedar Valley will face its own budget season. Property owners will be asked to make decisions. The school board will present numbers. And for the first time, those numbers will be accompanied by a ten-year picture of where the money has gone.

Mayor Mercer will write for this page on Friday. He will tell you what he found and what he believes it means. I am writing today because I want you to be ready to read it.

I became the editor of this paper ten months ago. Before that I was a part-time contributor for years, watching Cedar Valley from a classroom and a folding chair at school board meetings. The question Caleb asked when he ran for mayor is the same question I have been carrying since my first year in front of a class.

Where does the money go?

In Cedar Valley, we are about to find out. And if other towns want to know the answer too, the question is free. All it takes is someone willing to ask it out loud.

— Teresa Nikas, Editor

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Cedar Valley News has a new Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

It's Good to Be Ninety

 

Steven Schrader published his memoir in December. He had just turned ninety.

The book is called The Other Steve Schrader: New and Selected Writing. It tells the story of a man who has lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side for over seventy-five years—longer than most people live anywhere. His father was a Polish immigrant who arrived illegally in 1921. The next day, that immigrant was pushing a rack of dresses up Seventh Avenue. Eventually he became a prominent figure in New York's garment district.

Schrader didn't plan to write a memoir at ninety. An editor at Hanging Loose Press, which had published three of his previous books, encouraged him. He agreed. He sat down and wrote.

In the book, he describes walking to the grocery store seven blocks away, carrying two heavy shopping bags home. He has to stop every block to rest the bags on the low metal fences around the trees on Broadway. He knows where every tree is. He knows which blocks have no trees. On 103rd Street, there are none, so he has to make it all the way to 104th without stopping.

That is the kind of detail only a writer notices. Only a writer records.

Schrader has been many things: public school teacher, garment salesman, director of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. But as a teenager, lonely after his family moved to a new neighborhood, he read. "I think that's what got me into writing," he told the West Side Rag.

When asked how it feels to publish a book at ninety, he said: "I feel lucky I've lived this long. It's good to be alive. It's good to be ninety."

May Sarton kept journals until her death at eighty-three. She published At Seventy and At Eighty-Two. She understood what it meant to write late in life.

"A face without lines that shows no mark of what has been lived through in a long life," she wrote, "suggests something unlived, empty, behind."

The lines on the face are earned. So are the words on the page. Both are records of a life that refused to pass without leaving a mark.

Sarton also said this: "One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are."

---

Steven Schrader knows where the trees are on Broadway. He knows which blocks have no shade, no place to rest. He has walked those blocks for seventy-five years. He wrote it down.

That is what writers do. They notice. They remember. They record the things no one else will record, the details that would otherwise vanish when the person who noticed them is gone.

Somewhere right now, someone in their seventies or eighties is wondering if it's too late to write. They have a story. They have seventy or eighty years of noticing things. They know where the trees are. They know which blocks have no shade.

Steven Schrader says it's good to be ninety. He says it's good to be alive. He published a book to prove it.

What are you waiting for?

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why a book built on conviction has no expiration date.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

Follow the Money

 

Cedar Valley News
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Follow the Money
By Aisha Khalid, M.D.

Kim Witczak went to Washington on Tuesday.

She sat in a room with healthcare leaders, pharmacovigilance experts, and policy officials and said what she has been saying for twenty-three years: adverse drug events are among the leading causes of death in the United States. An estimated two hundred fifty thousand Americans die from them every year. Nearly half of those deaths were preventable.

The meeting ended. Kim flew home. I searched every major news network for coverage.

Nothing.

I adjusted my hijab and sat with that for a while.

On Tuesday evening, ABC World News Tonight aired. I looked up who paid for it. One out of every four minutes of advertising on the network’s evening news last year was purchased by a pharmaceutical company. ABC World News Tonight carried more prescription drug ad impressions than any other broadcast in America. The evening news, on every major network, is built in part on drug advertising revenue.

The United States is one of two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers. In 2024 the industry spent more than six billion dollars on television advertising alone. A quarter of what you see in commercial breaks during the evening news is a drug ad, usually ending with a list of side effects read quickly while someone walks through a sunlit field.

The same industry whose products are killing an estimated two hundred fifty thousand Americans a year.

I thought about Congress. There are bills. The Right Drug Dose Now Act was introduced last year, bipartisan, to address adverse drug events through genetic testing. The Responsibility in Drug Advertising Act would restrict how long after approval a drug could be advertised directly to consumers. Neither has passed. Neither is close.

I looked up why. Since 1999, the pharmaceutical industry has spent more than six billion dollars lobbying the federal government. More than any other industry in America. Every year for twenty-six consecutive years. In 2024 alone the industry spent more than three hundred eighty-four million dollars on federal lobbying. Of the two hundred one lobbyists working for the industry’s main trade association last year, one hundred twenty-three had previously held government jobs.

The door between the industry and the people writing the rules revolves so fast you can feel the wind.

I am a physician. I spend my days inside the consequences of all of this. The woman with eleven prescriptions and three of them treating the side effects of the other eight. The man whose doctor kept writing refills nobody reviewed. The family sitting across my desk who trusted the system and paid for it.

I do not watch much television. But my patients do. They come in asking about the drug they saw during the news. Fifty-three percent of patients who ask their doctor about a drug they saw advertised receive a prescription for it. The ad worked. The revenue flowed. The quarterly report looked fine.

Kim Witczak has been in this fight since 2003. She knows the room. She knows nobody from the networks was in it. She said something at the meeting I have not stopped thinking about: “You can’t improve drug safety if you refuse to acknowledge drug harm.”

She was talking about the industry. She was talking about Washington. She was talking about the evening news.

She was also, I think, talking about all of us.

On Monday morning I will open my door and the first patient will sit down across from me. I will ask what medications they are taking. I will read every line. I will pick up the pen and ask: Does this still belong here?

It is a small question. It is the only question I have the power to ask.

If this editorial reaches one person who brings their medication list to their next appointment — one person, one list, one conversation that might not have happened otherwise — then it has done what I wrote it to do.

But I keep wondering who is asking it in the rooms where the real decisions get made.

— Aisha Khalid, M.D.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Kim Witczak and Timothy “Woody” Witczak are real people, and the national events described in this editorial are real.

Cedar Valley News has a new Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

We Still Show Up

 

Cedar Valley News
Friday, March 27, 2026
We Still Show Up
By Dan Larson

Ruth Edmonds called me last Saturday morning. She is eighty-one. A branch had been blown down by the wind and was leaning against her garage.

I made four phone calls. By ten o’clock, three men were in her driveway with a chainsaw and a truck. The branch was cut, loaded, and hauled away before lunch.

Ruth brought out a plate of cookies when they finished. She had baked them the night before. She did not know who was coming. She just knew somebody would.

She knew because she has spent sixty years being the one who came. I have watched her bring meals to families after a funeral. Organize the clothing drive two Novembers in a row. Sit with a neighbor through a long night in the hospital waiting room. Ruth has been on the other end of those phone calls her whole life.

Now she is eighty-one, and the branch is too heavy. So, she bakes.

When Tommy Huang broke his ankle last fall, three families rotated meals to his house for two weeks. There was no schedule. Nobody assigned a night. People checked with each other and showed up.

When the Marsh family’s furnace failed in January, Dale Rusk organized a collection the same day he heard. Lars donated the parts at cost. The furnace was running before the weekend.

In our congregation we have a program called Helping Hands. When there is a need—a move, a cleanup, a roof repair—the bishop puts out the call. People come because they know the person. Not because they were assigned. Assignments get done. Knowing someone gets done early, and well, and without being asked twice.

I do not think the people who stopped showing up in other places stopped caring. Life has gotten harder in ways Cedar Valley is not immune to. We have our own families stretched thin, our own calendars crowded.

But I keep thinking about those cookies. Ruth did not bake them, hoping someone might come. She baked them certain. That certainty is not given. It is built, year by year, out of a thousand moments no one keeps count of. Out of being the one who showed up when the branch was someone else’s.

If the branch is still leaning against the garage in your neighborhood, maybe the place to start is not a program or a sign-up sheet. Maybe it is the knock. One person crossing the street and saying: I noticed. Can I help?

Let’s find a way.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Cedar Valley News has a new Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

The Book You Owe Someone

 

Not every book begins with ambition. Some begin with a debt.

A father who survived something no one recorded. A community that was erased from the history books. A teacher who changed the direction of your life and never heard you say so. A grandmother whose stories died with her because no one thought to write them down.

You carry this. You have carried it for years. The weight is not guilt, exactly. It is an obligation — the quiet, persistent understanding that someone’s story deserves to exist on paper, and you may be the only person left who can put it there.

I’ve published more than five hundred books. A surprising number of them were written not because the author wanted to write, but because they felt they had to. The distinction matters. Want is optional. Obligation is not. The authors who write from obligation bring something to the page that ambition alone cannot produce. They bring urgency. They bring faithfulness to someone else’s truth. They bring the understanding that if they don’t do this, no one will.

These are often the hardest books to write. The author is not telling their own story. They are telling someone else’s, and the responsibility of getting it right presses down on every sentence. They worry about accuracy. They worry about doing justice to a life they loved or a struggle they witnessed. They second-guess their right to speak on behalf of someone who can no longer speak for themselves.

Every one of those worries is a sign the author is the right person for the work.

Carelessness doesn’t produce worry. Love does. The writer who agonizes over getting someone else’s story right is the writer most likely to get it right. The worry is not a warning to stop. It is evidence of the seriousness the work demands.

I’ve watched authors sit across from me, unsure whether they had the skill or the standing to write the book they carried. They didn’t see themselves as writers. They saw themselves as witnesses. They came because the story was too important to leave unwritten, and they couldn’t find anyone else to do it.

Witnesses are exactly what the world needs.

History is not built by historians alone. It is built by the people who were present and refused to let what they saw disappear. The daughter who records her mother’s immigration story. The veteran who writes down what his unit endured so their families will understand. The neighbor who documents a community’s fight to save a school, a river, a way of life. These books rarely make bestseller lists. They do something more important. They preserve truth that would otherwise vanish.

Every year, stories are lost because the person who carried them ran out of time. Every year, someone sits at a funeral and realizes the stories they heard at kitchen tables and on front porches are gone now — gone because no one wrote them down. The loss is permanent. Memory is not a reliable archive. It fades, distorts, and eventually dies with the person who held it.

A book stops that.

A book takes what lives in one person’s memory and gives it a body that outlasts the person. It hands the story to the next generation and the one after. It says: " This happened. This person lived. This mattered.”

If you are carrying someone else’s story, you already know who they are. You see their face when you think about the book you haven’t started. You hear their voice in the details you’re afraid you’ll forget.

You don’t need to be a professional writer to honor that debt. You need to be honest. You need to be faithful to what you witnessed. You need to sit down and begin.

The person whose story you carry gave you something irreplaceable. The book is how you give it back — not to them, but to everyone who comes after.

Some books are not choices. They are obligations. And honoring that obligation is one of the bravest things a writer can do.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why a book built on conviction has no expiration date.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

Room in the House

 

Cedar Valley News
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Room in the House
By Chloe Papadakis

New national polling shows finances are now the number one reason American families say they are limiting how many children they have. Forty-three percent cite insufficient money. One in five rural parents say they are putting off having more children because childcare alone is more than they can carry.

I have heard every version of this conversation. I am twenty-eight with one daughter. She is three. My friends talk about it at the kitchen table, at the park, in the parking lot. We can’t afford another one. We’re not ready. Maybe next year. Maybe never.

I grew up an only child. My mother came to this country with my father from Greece and built a life from nothing. I know what it is like to grow up in a quiet house—the closeness with my parents and the loneliness. My best friend growing up was Debbie Larson. She had five brothers and sisters. Her house was loud and crowded, with shoes by the door. I loved being there.

I understand the question from both sides. And I want to say something most people will not say out loud.

The money is real. Childcare in this country averages more than $15,000 a year. I work from home partly because the arithmetic told me an office job would barely cover daycare. I am not dismissing the cost. I live inside it.

But I also know women my age who spend more on their vacations than they do on a year of daycare. I know couples who say they cannot afford a second child but just financed a new truck. I know families earning half of what my friends earn who are raising four children and getting by. Not comfortably. Not easily. But getting by. And their children are not suffering. Their children are loved. Their house is small, full, and alive.

Think this through. The question my generation is asking is not really about money. A second child costs sleep, space, freedom, time, and the version of yourself you have gotten comfortable being. The real calculation is not on a spreadsheet. It is in the mirror. Am I willing to become a different person to make room for this life?

I am not writing this to judge anyone. Every family is different. Some people cannot have more children for reasons nobody else can see. But I want to challenge the one reason everybody hides behind—the one about money. I believe my generation has been told we should not have to sacrifice. And when the math says we cannot have everything, we cut the child.

My daughter is three. She plays by herself in the living room while I work at the kitchen table. She talks to her stuffed animals. She lines them up and gives them names. Some mornings I watch her, and I think: she is doing what I did. She is making a family out of what she has.

I have not decided yet. I want you to know this. I am not writing from the other side of the question. I am writing from the middle of it. Some nights, after she is asleep, I sit at the table and do not open my laptop. I just sit. I think about the quiet. I think about Debbie’s house. I think about my mother on a ship, leaving everything she knew. And I wonder whether the thing I am afraid to give up is the thing I would be most grateful I gave.

I asked my mother once whether she wished she had more children. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said yes. Every day. I asked her what stopped her. She said life stopped her. Circumstances she could not control. Then she looked at me and said something I have never forgotten. She said, "Do not let money be the reason. Money comes and goes. A child stays. If there is room in your heart, there is room in the house.”

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Cedar Valley News has a new Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

What Your Pipes Are Doing to Your Children

 

Cedar Valley News
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
What Your Pipes Are Doing to Your Children
By Lars Olson

A young couple came into my store last month. The father was carrying a baby against his chest. The mother had a piece of pipe in her hand—a short section she had cut from under their basement sink. She set it on my counter and asked what kind of fitting she needed. I asked how old their house was. Nineteen forty-two, she said. I asked if they knew what their water service line was made of—the pipe running underground from the street to their house. They did not. I told them to test their water before they fixed the leak. The mother picked up the baby’s bottle from the counter and looked at it.

I have sold plumbing supplies for thirty years. I have a master’s degree in chemistry. I know what lead does to the human body. There is no safe level of exposure. None. In children, lead damages the brain. It slows learning. It harms physical development. The damage is irreversible—there is no treatment, no antidote, no way to undo it. In adults, lead increases blood pressure, damages kidneys, and causes heart disease and cancer. The Centers for Disease Control has been saying this for decades. And for decades, millions of Americans have been drinking water delivered through lead pipes installed before anyone understood the cost.

Up to nine million American homes are still connected to their water supply by lead pipes. A federal rule finalized in 2024 requires every one of them to be replaced within ten years. The clock starts in November 2027. But here is what most homeowners do not know: the rule covers the pipes on the public side of the line. The pipes on your side—from the property line to your kitchen faucet—are your responsibility. The cost ranges from 400 to 2,000 dollars.

If you bought an older home, the inspection probably did not include a pipe material test. Most do not. The previous owner may not have known. The realtor may not have asked. The pipe sits in the ground between the street and your foundation, and unless somebody digs it up or tests the water, nobody knows what it is made of.

You can find out. A basic water test for lead costs fifteen to fifty dollars. Your local utility may offer one free. Some hardware stores carry test kits. If the test comes back above ten parts per billion—the new federal action level—your water system is required to notify you and provide a filter. But a filter is a bandage. The pipe is the problem.

I think about the couple with the baby. I think about lead doing its work in silence, one glass of water at a time, in a house where the parents are doing everything right except the one thing nobody told them to check.

If your home was built before 1986, test your water. If you have young children, test it this week. Federal and state funding is available for some homeowners, especially in lower-income communities. Ask your utility. Ask your state drinking water agency. The money exists. But you have to ask.

The government set the deadline. The government set the standard. But the government is not going to knock on your door and hand you a pipe. You are the one who turns on the faucet. You are the one who fills the glass. And you are the one who gives it to your child.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

You Paid for It. You Just Don’t Know It.

 

Cedar Valley News
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
You Paid for It. You Just Don’t Know It.
By George Khan

Every time you pay with a credit card—for a sandwich, a tank of gas, a pair of shoes, a bag of groceries—a percentage of your money goes to a bank before the business you are standing in receives a dime. You do not see it on your receipt. Nobody tells you about it. But you pay it. Every single time.

Let me show you how it works. You come into my deli and order a turkey club. The sandwich costs twelve dollars. You add a two-dollar tip, and the state collects seventy-two cents in sales tax. Your total is fourteen dollars and seventy-two cents. You tap your card. The credit card company takes four percent of the entire amount. Not four percent of the sandwich. Four percent of the sandwich, the tax, and the tip. Fifty-nine cents disappears. The bank earns money on the sales tax you paid to the government. The bank earns money on the tip you left for the person who made your lunch.

You paid for all of it. The person behind the counter did not get all of it.

Now multiply your sandwich by every credit card transaction in America. Every coffee. Every prescription. Every oil change. Every grocery run. The credit card industry collected more than 170 billion dollars in swipe fees last year. Billions. Not from businesses. From you. Because every business in the country builds the fee into the price of what it sells. The twelve-dollar sandwich would cost less if the fee did not exist. You are paying it whether you know it or not.

And here is the part most people have never considered. If you pay cash, you pay the same price as the person who tapped a card. The fee is built into the price for everyone. Your cash is subsidizing someone else’s airline miles. The rewards programs the credit card companies advertise—the cashback, the points, the free flights—are funded by higher prices paid by every customer, including the ones who never use a credit card.

Visa and Mastercard control more than eighty percent of the credit card market. They set the fees. The business cannot negotiate. The business cannot choose a cheaper network. The business cannot say no without turning away the customer. And the customer—you—never sees the fee at all.

A bipartisan bill in Congress, the Credit Card Competition Act, would give businesses the right to choose among processing networks. It would not cap the fees. It would not eliminate them. It would introduce competition where none exists. The President has called swipe fees “out of control.” States are not waiting. Illinois passed a law removing swipe fees from the tax and tip portions of transactions, and a federal judge upheld it last month.

But Congress moves slowly, and every day it waits, the fee collects. On your lunch. On your groceries. On the tip you left because you wanted to be generous, and you received good service. On the tax you owe the state. Four percent of everything, every time, every tap.

I stand behind this counter six days a week. I see every transaction. I watch the number on the register and the smaller number I actually receive. But I am not writing this editorial for myself. I am writing it for you. Because you are the one paying. You just did not know it until now.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

The Other Half of the Book

 

This week in Texas, nine young writers received prizes for doing something remarkable. They wrote letters to authors.

The Letters About Literature contest asks students to select a book, poem, essay, or speech and write to the author—living or dead—explaining how the work changed their view of themselves or the world. More than a thousand Texas students entered this year. The winners were announced on March 17.

Dalia Goldman, ten years old, wrote to Lois Lowry about Number the Stars. Emily Rigoulot, thirteen, wrote to Lowry about The Giver. Sophia Haagenson, seventeen, wrote to Jewell Parker Rhodes about Ninth Ward. Zak Hu, also seventeen, wrote to Atul Gawande about Being Mortal.

These are not book reports. They are testimonies. A ten-year-old in Bellaire tells Lois Lowry how a story about a Danish girl hiding her Jewish friend during the Holocaust made her understand courage differently. A seventeen-year-old in Carrollton tells a surgeon how a book about mortality changed the way he thinks about what matters at the end of life.

First-place winners receive $300. Their school libraries receive $300 grants. They receive travel stipends to attend the Texas Library Association conference to accept their awards. But the real prize is something else. The real prize is the letter itself—the act of telling an author, "You changed how I see the world."

Lois Lowry has been receiving letters like these for decades. She has thought carefully about what they mean.

"Early on I came to realize something," she said in an interview. "Kids at that pivotal age, 12, 13 or 14, they're still deeply affected by what they read, some are changed by what they read, books can change the way they feel about the world in general."

In her Newbery Award acceptance speech for The Giver, Lowry described what happens when a child opens a book: "Each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things."

But Lowry understands something else too. She knows writing is not a solitary act. "The writer after all is only half the book," she has said. "The other half is the reader."

The other half is the reader.

The Power of Authors begins here. A writer puts words on a page. A reader receives them. And sometimes—not always, but sometimes—the reader writes back.

That is the covenant. Writers write so readers can respond. The book is incomplete until someone reads it and is changed by it. The letter proves the change happened.

Somewhere this week, an author will open an envelope and find a letter from a stranger. The letter will say: "I read your book. It changed something in me." The author will understand that the work is finished now. The other half of the book has arrived.

If you have ever been changed by a book, tell the author. If the author is dead, tell someone else. If no one will listen, write it down anyway. The testimony matters. It completes the work.

The writer is only half the book. You are the other half.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why a book built on conviction has no expiration date.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

What Happens When You Say No

 

Cedar Valley News- Monday, March 23, 2026
What Happens When You Say No
By: Teresa Nikas
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

Tomorrow afternoon in a San Francisco courtroom, a federal judge will hear arguments in a case every American business owner should be watching—whether or not they have ever heard of artificial intelligence.

Here is what happened. Anthropic, the company behind the artificial intelligence system called Claude, had a two-hundred-million-dollar contract with the Pentagon. Claude was the first A.I. system approved for use on classified military networks. Then the Pentagon asked Anthropic to remove two restrictions: the company did not want its technology used for mass surveillance of American citizens or for weapons systems operating without human oversight. Anthropic said no.

The Pentagon had every right to ask. Anthropic had every right to refuse. In a normal business relationship, the buyer and the seller would part ways and wish each other well. But the Pentagon did not part ways. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” In the history of this designation, it has been used against foreign companies suspected of sabotage or espionage. It has never been applied to an American company. Until now.

The government’s argument is straightforward. Federal lawyers say Anthropic’s refusal to allow all lawful uses of its technology is a business decision, not protected speech. They argue Anthropic could alter or disable its own system during military operations if the company decided its values were being violated. A vendor with a kill switch, they say, is an unacceptable risk in a war zone.

Anthropic’s argument is equally direct. The company says it is not trying to force the government to buy its product. It is asking the court to prevent the government from destroying its business on the way out the door. Nearly one hundred fifty retired federal and state judges—appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents—filed a brief agreeing with Anthropic on this point. Microsoft filed a brief. Scientists from OpenAI and Google filed in support. Former senior national security officials filed in support.

And then there is the part nobody in Washington wants to explain. Hours after Anthropic was blacklisted, the Pentagon signed a deal with OpenAI—a competing company—on terms including the same restrictions Anthropic was punished for holding. No mass surveillance. No autonomous weapons. No high-stakes decisions without a human in the loop. Same red lines. Different company. No blacklist.

I am not a lawyer. I am a newspaper editor in a small town. I do not know whether the supply chain risk statute was designed for this situation. I do not know whether the First Amendment applies to a contract negotiation. Tomorrow a judge will begin sorting through those questions, and I will wait for her answers before I pretend to have mine.

But I know something about saying no to a powerful customer. Every small business owner in Cedar Valley knows it. You have the right to say no. You have the right to set your terms. And you had better be prepared for what comes next. Principle is not free. It never has been. The question is not whether Anthropic was brave or foolish. The question is whether the response was proportional—or whether the most powerful buyer on earth reached for a weapon designed for foreign enemies and aimed it at an American company for the sin of negotiating.

We are watching. So should you.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

They Took Their Medicine and Died

 

Cedar Valley News — March 21, 2026
They Took Their Medicine and Died
By: Dr. Aisha Khalid
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

She sat in my exam room with her daughter beside her. She was seventy-four. She had fallen twice in a month. She could not sleep. Her daughter was afraid it was dementia. The woman was afraid her daughter was right.

I opened her medication list. Eleven prescriptions. Four doctors. I went through every one. Three of the eleven were treating side effects of the other eight. We removed those three. Within two weeks she was sleeping through the night. Within a month the falls stopped. She did not have dementia. She had too many pills.

She is alive. She is someone you might know.

But not everyone gets what she got. Not everyone has a daughter who brings her in. I want to tell you about people who were not so fortunate. These are not fictional characters. These are real people, documented by the World Health Organization and by public record. Read their names.

Naila was an older woman on a long list of medications. Her daughter sat down with the doctor and went through every pill. Does my mother still have this condition? No. This one? No. Drug after drug came off the list until one was left. When her daughter asked why she kept taking all of them, Naila said she kept taking them because the doctor kept prescribing them. Nobody asked.

Martha was twenty-two. A psychiatrist wrote a warning in her chart about low potassium. A junior doctor ignored it and prescribed lithium. A cardiologist confirmed a heart defect, but never read the results. Martha died of a cardiac arrhythmia caused by the drug. Her family gave permission for her story to be published so others might be spared. She was on one medication. One.

Timothy “Woody” Witczak was thirty-seven. He lived in Minneapolis. He was not depressed. He had no history of depression. He went to his doctor because he could not sleep. The doctor gave him a sample pack of Zoloft. Five weeks later Woody was dead. His wife Kim has spent twenty-three years fighting for drug safety. On Tuesday she will be in Washington for National Adverse Drug Event Awareness Day. She is still fighting.

I sit with these stories the way I sit with my patients. Quietly. I have been a physician long enough to know the difference between a disease walking through my door and a prescription walking through my door. Some days, the hardest part of my job is not writing a prescription. It is looking at the ones already written and finding the courage to cross one off.

I know a man in his nineties who never took a pill in his life. Last year he got shingles. The pain was unbearable. He accepted one medication. It caused his body to hold water. So, his doctor prescribed a second pill to fix what the first one caused. As soon as he could, he stopped both. He lives with pain in his head every day. He would rather have the pain than start the chain again. Not everyone has the stubbornness to do what he did. Most people trust the next prescription the way Naila trusted hers.

Tuesday is National Adverse Drug Event Awareness Day. You have probably never heard of it. An estimated 250,000 Americans die every year from adverse drug events. Nearly half were preventable.

I am asking you to do something before the week is over. If you are taking even one prescription, bring it to your next doctor visit and ask: " Do I still need this? Is this the right dose for my body today?” And if something does not feel right—if you are dizzy, if you are falling, if you cannot sleep—do not accept a new prescription until someone has looked at the old ones. Bring someone who loves you enough to ask the hard question. And if the answer does not satisfy you, ask another doctor.

My name is Aisha. It means alive. I write it in my notebook some nights when the day has been long, to remind myself why I do this work. Not to prescribe. To heal. And sometimes healing means picking up the list, reading every line, and putting down the pen.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

The House Decided for You

 

Cedar Valley News — March 20, 2026
Faith and the Front Porch: The House Decided for You
By: Dan Larson
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

Only a quarter of Americans say they know most of their neighbors. Between 2003 and 2022, face-to-face socializing declined by 30 percent among American men and by more than 45 percent among teenagers. The country has moved from a “townshipped” society, where neighbors communicated regularly, to a “networked” one, where local neighborhoods, churches, and civic organizations have weakened over time. I have spent 25 years building houses. I can tell you part of the reason. The house decided for you.

I am a contractor. I have framed walls, hung doors, and poured foundations in Cedar Valley since I was young enough to think the work would never tire me out. I have watched the houses change. The homes I built early in my career had front porches wide enough for two chairs and a conversation. The garage was on the side or in the back. The front door faced the street. When you walked up to the house, you walked toward the people who lived there.

The houses I am asked to build now face the street with a garage door. The front entrance is a decorative afterthought between the garage and the landscaping. The living space is in the back, behind a privacy fence, facing a yard nobody outside the family will ever see. The message the house sends to the street is clear: we are not available.

I do not blame the homeowners. They are buying what the market offers. I do not blame the architects. They are designing what the market rewards. But somebody should say out loud what the blueprints are doing to the neighborhood. When the garage faces the street, the car goes in, the door comes down, and the family disappears. No wave. No pause where a conversation might begin.

Before air conditioning, families sat on the porch because it was the coolest place in the house. The porch was not a design feature. It was survival. But it did something no architect intended — it put people where other people could see them. The widow next door came over with a question about her gutters. The teenager down the block stopped to ask if your son could come out. None of this was planned. It happened because the house was built facing outward.

Now the house faces inward. The backyard has a deck. The deck has a grill. The family eats dinner 30 feet from their neighbor’s family eating dinner, separated by a six-foot fence, and neither family knows the other is there.

Aisha wrote last month about loneliness. Chloe wrote yesterday about inheritance — what we pass to our children through our hands and our choices. Both are stories about connection being interrupted. The front porch is another one. It is the oldest one. And unlike the others, this one is drawn into the blueprint before the first nail is driven.

I keep a notebook. I write down verses and thoughts when the day gets long. I wrote this last week: the first act of hospitality is the architecture. Before you invite someone in, the house has already told them whether they are welcome.

Rebecca and I sit on our front porch most evenings when the weather is fair. It is not a large porch. Two chairs, a small table, and a view of the street. People walk by and wave. Some stop. Last Tuesday a man I had not spoken to in a year stopped because he saw me sitting there and remembered something he had been meaning to ask. The conversation lasted four minutes. It would not have happened if I had been on the deck in the back.

Let’s find a way. If you are building, ask your builder for a real front porch — not a decorative overhang, a porch with room for chairs. If you already have one, sit on it. If you do not, put two chairs in your front yard and see what happens. The architecture does not have to decide for you. You can decide for the architecture.

The front porch is open. It has always been open. The question is whether anybody is sitting on it.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

Your Book’s Second Life

 

The launch is over.

The social media posts have run their course. The emails went out. Friends and family bought their copies. The first wave of reviews appeared, and then the silence settled in. The Amazon algorithm moved on. The bookstore table made room for the next title. The podcast hosts found new guests.

Most authors experience this moment as a kind of grief. The book they spent years writing seems to disappear in weeks. They wonder if it mattered. They wonder if anyone is still reading. They look at sales numbers and feel the weight of silence where excitement used to be.

Here is what I’ve learned across five decades and more than five hundred published titles: the launch is not the life of a book. It is the birth. The life comes after.

Books do not follow the rules of product cycles. A kitchen appliance peaks at launch and declines from there. A book can sit quietly on a shelf for years and then find the reader it was always meant for. A grandmother discovers it at a library sale. A college student pulls it from a used bookstore bin because the title catches her eye. A grieving widower finds it on his late wife’s nightstand, reads the first page, and cannot stop.

These are not accidents. They are the natural work of a book built on purpose.

A book written to chase a trend has a shelf life measured in months. The trend passes, and the book passes with it. But a book written from conviction — one anchored in truth the author earned through living — does not expire. The questions it asks stay relevant. The honesty it carries stays fresh. The purpose that drove the writing continues to meet readers wherever they are, whenever they arrive.

I have titles in my catalog published decades ago still reaching new readers. Not because of marketing campaigns or algorithmic boosts. Because a reader finished the book, set it down, and handed it to someone else. That single gesture — one reader passing a book to another with the words “you need to read this” — is the most powerful distribution system ever created. No platform can replicate it. No advertising budget can buy it. It happens only when a book earns it.

Authors who understand this stop measuring success by launch week numbers. They start measuring it by reach — not how many people bought the book in the first month, but how many lives it touched in the first decade.

This requires patience. It also requires faith. Faith in the work itself. Faith in readers’ ability to find what they need. Faith in the quiet, unglamorous truth that a good book does its best work long after the author stops promoting it. The publishing industry measures everything in speed — speed to market, speed to bestseller lists, speed to the next title. Books built on purpose operate on a different clock. They measure themselves in staying power.

There are practical steps an author can take to extend a book’s reach. Libraries matter. A book donated to a local library enters a circulation system that can put it in front of readers for years. Independent bookstores matter. A relationship with a bookseller who believes in the title keeps it visible long after the chains have moved on. Speaking engagements matter — not for the sales at the back table, but for the conversations that follow. Every conversation is a seed.

But the most important step is the one the author already took. Writing a book with purpose. A book built on something real carries its own momentum. It doesn’t need the author to push it forever. It needs the author to trust it.

Your book is not finished working just because the launch is over. It is just getting started. Somewhere right now, a copy sits on a shelf waiting for the right pair of hands to pick it up. When they do, it will do exactly what you wrote it to do. Not because it was marketed well. Because it was written true.

The launch gave your book a birthday. Purpose gives it a life.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why a book built on conviction has no expiration date.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

What the Phones Were Hiding

 

Cedar Valley News — March 19, 2026
Culture and Craft: What the Phones Were Hiding
By: Chloe Papadakis
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters
from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

New York City banned phones in schools this year. The ban worked. Students are more focused. They are socializing at lunch. They are getting to class on time. But the ban uncovered something nobody expected. When the phones were put away, the students looked up at the walls — and could not read the clocks.

Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, told Gothamist the phone ban revealed many teenagers cannot tell time on an analog clock. They do not know where the minute hand is. They do not know how much time is left in the exam. The school has clocks on every wall. The students have been looking past them for years.

This is not a story about clocks. It is a story about what the phones were hiding.

Schools in the United Kingdom began removing analog clocks from exam rooms because students could not read them. Cursive handwriting was dropped from most American school curricula during the 2010s. At Florida Gulf Coast University, archivists discovered student workers could not read letters and diaries in the collection — not because the documents were damaged, but because they were written in cursive.

I wrote two weeks ago about screen time — five hours a day for children between eight and 12. I wrote about my daughter standing in the backyard not knowing what to do, then finding a stick and inventing a game. The yard was still there. We just had to walk her to it. The clocks are still there too. So is cursive. So is the ability to read a paper map, to do arithmetic without a calculator, to tie a knot, to address an envelope. None of these skills are obsolete. They were just standing behind the screen, waiting for someone to notice they were gone.

My daughter is three. Yesterday she picked up a crayon for the first time on purpose. Not to eat it. To use it. She pressed it against the paper and dragged it sideways and looked at the mark she made and then looked at me as if to say: I did something.

She did. Her hand closed around the crayon with intention, and her eyes followed the mark, and something connected between her fingers and her brain. I do not know what to call it except the beginning of handwriting.

I keep a box of letters my mother wrote to her family in Greece when she first came to America. They are in Greek, in cursive, in blue ink on thin paper. I cannot read Greek, but I can read the shape of her hand — the way the words slope when she was tired, the way the pen pressed harder when she was certain. If my daughter never learns cursive, she will never see what I see when I hold those pages. She will see marks. I see my mother’s voice.

Think this through.

Lars would understand this. He sells tools. A person who cannot read a tape measure cannot build a shelf, no matter how many videos they watch. Teresa understands it better than any of us. She was a teacher before she was an editor, and she saw this coming before the rest of us looked up.

My daughter has 15 years before she leaves this house. In those years I will teach her to read a clock, write her name in cursive, find north without a phone, and hold a pencil the way my mother held a pen — with intention. Not because these skills are practical every day. Because they are hers. They belong to her the way her grandmother’s handwriting belongs to the letters in the box. They are inheritance. And inheritance does not arrive through a screen.

The crayon is still on the table. The red line is still on the paper. She does not know it yet, but she started something yesterday. I intend to make sure she finishes it.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

The Middleman You Never Met

 

Cedar Valley News — March 18, 2026
The Middleman You Never Met
By: Lars Olson
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

I am 72 years old, and I do not take a single pill. My doctor says I am either lucky or stubborn, and Mildred says she knows which one. I walk to work. I eat what she cooks. I am not against medicine. I am simply watching the system from the outside, and what I see does not make sense.

Nearly 7,000 pharmacy locations have closed in the United States since 2019. An Ohio State University study reported this month nearly half the nation's counties are now pharmacy deserts — no drugstore within 10 miles. In Howard, Kansas, pharmacist Julie Perkins says 80 percent of her prescriptions are reimbursed at less than cost. She fills them anyway because the town has no other pharmacy.

The question nobody on the nightly news is asking: Who sets the price she gets paid?

The answer is a pharmacy benefit manager. A PBM. Most Americans have never heard the term. I had not until last week. But three companies — CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx — control roughly 80 percent of the prescription drug benefits market for 270 million Americans. They are the middlemen between your insurance company and your pharmacist. They decide which drugs your plan covers. They decide which pharmacy you can use. They negotiate rebates from drug manufacturers. And they set what the pharmacist gets paid for handing you the bottle.

Here is where the math turns. Drug manufacturers pay PBMs a rebate — a percentage of the drug's list price — in exchange for favorable placement on the approved list. The higher the list price, the larger the rebate, the more the PBM earns. The system does not reward lower prices. It rewards higher ones. The CEO of Novo Nordisk — the company behind Ozempic — told Congress PBMs are the reason he cannot lower his list price, because if he does, PBMs will drop the drug from their formularies.

PBMs also practice spread pricing. They negotiate a low price from the manufacturer, charge the insurance company a higher price, and keep the difference. The pharmacist never sees the spread. The patient never sees it. Until recently, the insurance company often did not know it existed.

Now here is the part I keep thinking about. CVS Caremark is owned by CVS Health, which also owns Aetna — the insurance company — and CVS Pharmacy — the drugstore. The same company decides what drugs are covered, sets the reimbursement rate for the independent pharmacist, and owns the competing pharmacy on the corner. Julie Perkins in Howard, Kansas, is negotiating her survival against her own competitor.

I sell hardware. I understand supply chains. If a distributor set the price I could charge, decided which products I was allowed to stock, took a cut from both my supplier and my customer, and opened a competing store across the street — I would call it something other than a benefit manager.

Senator Bernie Sanders called PBMs "as clear a middleman rip-off as you are going to find." The Federal Trade Commission accused PBMs of raising prices through conflicts of interest. In February 2026 Congress passed reforms delinking PBM compensation in Medicare from drug prices. Six states have filed lawsuits. This is not partisan. The left and the right agree, the system is broken.

But here is what concerns me most from my side of the counter — the side where I do not take pills. This system makes more money when people take more drugs. Every prescription filled generates revenue. Every refill. Every new medication added to the list. The system does not profit when a doctor says walk more and eat less salt. It profits when the prescription is written, filled, and repeated.

Aisha Khalid would remind me this is not an argument against medicine. People need insulin. People need blood pressure medication. The pills are not the problem. The problem is the company standing between the pill and the person, taking a cut from both sides, and answering to neither.

Cedar Valley still has its pharmacy. The pharmacist knows your name. She knows what you take. She catches the interactions your doctor's office misses. She is the last person in the system who looks you in the eye. And the middleman you never met is deciding whether she can afford to keep the lights on.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

The Car Knows My Name

 

Cedar Valley News — March 17, 2026
The Car Knows My Name
By: George Khan
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

A woman brought her car in last week. The check engine light had been on for three days. She was worried. She thought it might be the transmission.

It was a loose gas cap.

I could have told her in ten minutes. The problem is what happened before she got to me. She went to the dealer first. They charged her $189 for the diagnostic. They told her the vehicle needed a software update before they could clear the code. She waited two hours. She paid. She drove away. The light came back on the next morning.

She came to my shop. I plugged in my scanner. I tightened the cap. I cleared the code. I charged her nothing. But here is the part Lars would understand. On a newer model, I might not have been able to do even this much. Because the manufacturers are locking me out.

The Right to Equitable and Professional Auto Industry Repair Act — the REPAIR Act — cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee in late February. It is heading to the full House with bipartisan support. Representatives Neal Dunn of Florida, Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington introduced it with a dozen co-sponsors from both parties.

The bill would require automakers to give vehicle owners and independent shops access to the same diagnostic data, tools, and software they provide to their dealer networks. It would prohibit manufacturers from using technological or legal barriers to block independent repair. And it would let car owners control their own vehicle data.

This is not a small problem. Seventy percent of all post-warranty repair work on 292 million registered vehicles is handled by independent shops. According to the Auto Care Alliance, more than 60 percent of independent facilities now report difficulty completing routine repairs because manufacturers restrict access to diagnostic systems. More than half send up to five vehicles a month back to the dealer — not because they cannot do the work, but because the software will not let them.

I have lived this. A customer brings in a 2024 pickup. The blind spot monitor needs reprogramming after a mirror replacement. I have the tools. I have the training. But the system requires a dealer-only authorization code. So, I tell the customer to drive to Millfield. He pays the dealer $280 for a 15-minute software handshake, I could have done for a third of the price.

Lars wrote about this last week from the farmer's side. The EPA told equipment manufacturers in February they cannot use the Clean Air Act to lock farmers out of their own tractors. A farmer who owns a $400,000 combine should not need a dealer appointment to replace a $12 fitting. The same principle applies to every car owner in America.

Representative Gluesenkamp Perez — a former auto shop owner herself — said Americans want to be stewards of the things they own. They should not depend on a system designed to keep them coming back to the dealer.

The auto repair industry supports 303,000 businesses across the country. Most of them look like mine. Two or three bays. A waiting room with bad coffee. A mechanic who knows your car by the sound it makes as it pulls into the lot.

There is a competing proposal — the SAFE Repair Act — backed by automakers. It emphasizes cybersecurity. Those concerns are real. Nobody wants a hacker accessing your car through an open data port. But the answer is encrypted, authorized access — the same way hospitals protect patient records without banning family doctors.

I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking for what every mechanic in this country used to have. The ability to open the hood, read the codes, and fix what is broken. The car no longer belongs to the manufacturer after the sale. It belongs to the person who is still making payments on it.

Lars collects signatures at his hardware store counter. My hands are usually covered in brake dust, so I collect something else — stories. A woman with a loose gas cap who paid $189 because the system sent her to the dealer first. Multiply her by 292 million vehicles. This is not a repair problem. It is a trust problem.

And trust, in this town, is the only currency worth anything.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

From the Editor's Desk: What Survived the Test

 

Cedar Valley News — March 16, 2026
From the Editor's Desk: What Survived the Test
By: Teresa Nikas, Editor
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

Last year the federal government proposed eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services — the only federal agency dedicated to funding the nation's 125,000 libraries. The proposal was part of a broader effort to cut agencies the administration considered unnecessary at the federal level. The reasoning was straightforward: if a program is essential, the states and the people will defend it. If it is not, it should not survive on inertia alone.

So, the test began.

Twenty-one state attorneys general sued. The American Library Association filed its own lawsuit. A federal court blocked the executive order. Congress — on a bipartisan basis — rejected the proposed cuts and preserved funding. In December, all terminated grants were reinstated. The libraries survived.

And here is what I find myself thinking about. Not the fight. The result. The system did what the system is designed to do. The executive branch proposed. The legislative branch disposed. The courts weighed in. The people who depend on libraries made their case, and the case held. IMLS survived not because nobody challenged it, but because when challenged, enough people stood up and said — we need this.

There is something honest about the process, even when it is frightening to watch. Every institution in this country exists because someone once decided it was necessary. But necessary in 1996 is not automatically necessary in 2026. The only way to know what still matters is to ask. And sometimes asking looks like proposing the cut and seeing who shows up to say no.

Americans showed up. Libraries receive more than 1.3 billion visits a year. The return is roughly five dollars in services for every tax dollar spent. In rural communities, the library is often the last public building offering free internet access, job-search help, early-literacy programs, and materials for people with disabilities. The pressure made the case in a way years of quiet funding never could.

Cedar Valley showed up, too. Our librarian, Helen Marsh, wrote to our congressional delegation the week the proposal was announced. Lars Olson put a sign-up sheet on the counter at the hardware store and collected forty-seven signatures in four days. The elementary school PTA passed a resolution asking the school board what happens to the summer reading program if federal funding disappears. Dan Larson mentioned it from the pulpit — not as politics, but as stewardship. George Khan printed the library's hours on the back of every repair invoice for a month. Nobody organized a campaign. People just did what Cedar Valley people do — they showed up before anyone told them to.

To be sure, the fight is not over. The FY2027 budget cycle begins now. The administration is expected to propose the same cuts. The American Library Association launched its annual campaign last week. The deadline for congressional signatures supporting library funding is March 20. The process will repeat. And every year it repeats, the libraries will have to answer the same question: are you still necessary? The answer must be earned, not assumed.

The institutions worth keeping are the ones willing to be tested. The ones afraid of the question are usually the ones the answer has already moved past. Libraries made the case. They are still here. And Cedar Valley is part of the reason.

Our library is small. The carpet needs replacing. The hours are not what they used to be. But the lights are on. And as long as the lights are on, somebody in this town has a place to go where the information is free, and nobody asks why you need it.

Keep the lights on. Not because nobody asked. Because somebody did, and this town answered yes.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

The Documents That Left the Vault

 

On Monday, March 2, 2026, a Boeing 737 lifted off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Its cargo was unlike anything that had ever traveled by commercial aircraft.

Nine documents. Founding-era originals. The kind of paper that never leaves the climate-controlled vaults of the National Archives.

An 1823 engraved copy of the Declaration of Independence, commissioned by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the Revolutionary War—signed by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay. The Oaths of Allegiance signed in 1778 by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. A draft of the U.S. Constitution with handwritten notes by the delegates who debated it.

The plane landed in Kansas City. On Friday, March 6, the documents went on display at the National World War I Museum and Memorial—the first stop on an eight-city tour celebrating America's 250th anniversary.

"It's tangible history," said Jim Byron, senior adviser to the Archivist of the United States. "And tangible history inspires."

Local schools booked visits for more than 5,000 children before the exhibit opened. Tickets are free. The documents will travel to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Miami, Dearborn, and Seattle before returning to the vaults in August.

For most Americans, this will be the only chance they ever have to stand before the words that founded a nation.

Thomas Jefferson understood what these documents meant. He wrote one of them. And he spent the rest of his life thinking about what it meant to preserve the written record of a nation's founding.

In 1823—the same year John Quincy Adams commissioned the engraving of the Declaration now flying across America—Jefferson wrote to a man named Hugh P. Taylor:

"I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country."

Jefferson did not believe the founding documents were museum pieces. He believed they were living things—words that needed to be read, argued about, carried forward. He believed preservation was not passive. It was active. It was a duty.

When asked about the purpose of the Declaration itself, Jefferson said he had not set out "to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of... but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent."

Plain and firm. Words anyone could understand. Words that commanded assent not through complexity but through clarity.

This week, somewhere in Kansas City, a child will stand before George Washington's handwritten oath of allegiance. The paper is 248 years old. The ink has faded. The signature is unmistakable.

That child will understand something no textbook could teach: that a nation begins with a pen and a page. The revolution was not only fought with muskets. It was written.

The Power of Authors calls writers to this truth. The documents on that plane matter because someone wrote them. The words endure because someone chose them carefully, arranged them deliberately, committed them to paper in terms plain and firm.

What you write may not fly across the country on a Boeing 737. But it may reach someone who needs it. It may outlast you. It may be the tangible history that inspires the next generation to act.

Jefferson called it a duty. The duty remains.

 

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the deepest convictions often live in the smallest spaces on the page.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

What We Are Made Of

 

Cedar Valley News — March 14, 2026

What We Are Made Of

By: Aisha Khalid, M.D.

From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

Right now, as you read this, nearly two thousand young athletes from eight regions of the circumpolar North are competing in Whitehorse, Yukon. The Arctic Winter Games started March 8 and will close tomorrow. Teams from Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Northern Alberta, Northern Quebec, Greenland, and the Sápmi region of Scandinavia are playing twenty sports in a city of twenty-eight thousand people where the temperature has not climbed above freezing all week.

Most of you have never heard of these Games. The networks do not cover them. No celebrity endorsements. No billion-dollar broadcast deals. The athletes are teenagers from places most Americans could not find on a map — Inuvik, Iqaluit, Whale Cove, Nome. They travel thousands of miles to compete in sports ranging from hockey and volleyball to the one-foot high kick and the knuckle hop. The ulu — a traditional Inuit cutting tool — is their medal.

The Games were founded in 1970 after northern athletes realized they could not compete on equal terms at national events. Their communities were too small, their training pools too shallow, their distances too vast. So, they built something of their own. Alaska was there from the beginning. Governor Walter Hickel helped create the Games alongside leaders from the Yukon and Northwest Territories. The idea was simple: let northern athletes compete on their own terms, on their own ground.

In 2020, the Games were set to return to Whitehorse for the fiftieth anniversary. A copper cauldron was designed for the occasion — four shields shaped like children, eyes opening, facing north. COVID cancelled the Games days before opening. The cauldron sat unlit for six years. Last Sunday, it was finally lit. Fireworks over the Yukon River. Two thousand athletes marching into Shipyards Park. A flame six years in the waiting.

I keep thinking about what did not happen during those six years. The teenagers who were fourteen in 2020 are twenty now. They aged out. Their Games never happened. They trained, they qualified, and the world shut down. No medal. No ceremony. No moment under the lights. Some of them are now coaching the younger athletes who marched last Sunday. They handed the dream forward because the dream was bigger than their turn.

George and I have ten-year-old twins. Maryam runs faster than most of the boys in her class. Trevor can throw a ball with an accuracy I cannot explain genetically, because neither George nor I could hit the side of a barn. In a few years, they will be old enough to try out for something, to represent something, to walk into a gym wearing a jersey with a name on the back and understand what it means to carry more than their own ambitions.

The Arctic Winter Games give young people from the smallest, most remote communities in the world exactly this. A girl from a village of three hundred people in Nunavut stands on the same floor as an athlete from Anchorage. A boy from northern Norway competes alongside a teenager from Greenland who traveled by boat and plane to get there. They do not speak the same language. They trade pins. They trade jackets. By closing ceremonies, athletes arrive wearing each other's gear — Alaska blue mixed with Yukon red, Greenland green next to Sápmi blue. The trading is not a side event. It is the point.

To be sure, these are competitive Games. Alaska leads the medal count with over a hundred seventy ulus. Records have been broken. Matches have been fierce. Nobody flies to the Yukon in March to lose gracefully. But the competition exists inside something larger — a gathering of communities too small to be seen by the wider world, standing together and saying: we are here. We made it. Watch what we can do.

The theme of the 2026 Games is "What We Are Made Of." I cannot think of a better question for any young person — or any community — to carry home.

What are you made of? Not what do you own. Not what do you consume. What are you made of — when the lights go on, the temperature drops, and nobody is watching but the people who came with you?

Cedar Valley is a small town. We understand the question.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

The front porch is open. Readers of the Cedar Valley News are gathering on Facebook to respond to the editorials, share their own stories, and join a conversation built on respect, honesty, and no party lines. Come sit with us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy