Great Bend, Kan.- A recession is a scary time, everyone feels insecure with employment, family members loose jobs, our standard of living is threatened. The Great Depression of the 1920's was no doubt a very dark and dismal time in America. We were not sure where the country was headed, and those who were sure, did not have a very positive outlook. I just finished reading, "The Worst Hard Time", by Timothy Egan, a fantastic tale about the dustbowl.

I have always been interested in that time period, the time period of the great depression. Growing up in a small town, back in the sticks of Michigan, I was required to ask my Grandmother about it during a school project. I expected some piece of history I had not known about my family and their survival through the depression. Instead my Grandma had a simple answer. She stated, "We did not even know a depression had happened, we were always poor. The depression never left up here."

GREAT BEND, Kan. - It all started with Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, who had to resign due to a racial slur. In the early 70's grain and commodity prices were high, and the family farm was still intact. But the city people at the supermarket complained about high food prices, and that's when the New Deal farm programs started to come apart, and with it, the Great Plains.

It happened slowly. But looking back at Western Kansas over the last 30 years, it has been a steady and slow decay of "life as we knew it." I doubt we can reverse things, but we can know who did this to us and hold them accountable. And we can start to turn the ship around back toward pro-family farm policies.

Everybody on the Great Plains knows something horrible has happened over the last 30 years, but they really don't know what happened or why. They just see their downtown buildings boarded up, the abundance of thrift stores, and young people who turn to methamphetamines rather than working at McDonalds.

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GREAT BEND, Kan. - Over the last two years in Kansas, the number of Independent ('Unaffiliated') voters has grown by more than 7.4%. Meanwhile, during the same time period, the number of Democrats jumped 3.2%, while the number of Republicans dropped slightly, by 0.4%.

But the thing is, the growth in Democrats is heavily concentrated in eastern Kansas particularly northeast Kansas. Meanwhile, western Kansas gets redder. This confirms the thesis of Bill Bishop's book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart (2008), which argues that people with similar political views tend to group together geographically.

Statewide, the Republican party still has 738,750 members, compared to 484,995 Independents, and 463,225 Democrats. So the largest group by far is Republicans, then Independents, and then Democrats.

GREAT BEND, Kan. - Richard T. Hughes' book Christian America and the Kingdom of God (2009) argues for a course correction for American Christians. Hughes, a professor of religion at Messiah College, tackles some tough questions and answers them with refreshing clarity.

Here's the gist of the book: God's Kingdom does not depend on coercion, or force, but instead seeks to persuade people into the Kingdom of God through non-violence and love. On the other hand, earthly Kingdoms (e.g., the Roman Empire) depend on coercion to gain compliance. Human empires depend on "the sword" to maintain peace. The Kingdom of God does not depend on the sword for peace, but believes that peace is a byproduct of justice. After reading this book, I finally understand the bumper sticker: "If you want peace, work for justice."

Relax, Hughes says that America is clearly a Christian nation, culturally and ceremonially. Christianity is easily the most popular religion in the USA, and the founders of our country were Christians, although some were Deists. Stated differently, America is a de facto Christian nation.

HAYS, Kan. - Though I should be excited, not to mention proud of myself, that I am reaching the end of the book I've been feverishly reading this past week, I'm not. In protest to my upcoming biology test, I've immersed myself in the book "Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang" and have only one chapter left.

I often have a hard time finding a book that completely catches my interest, but I can't put this one down. Chelsea Handler, who runs a late night comedy show on E!, keeps me turning the pages for more.

For anyone who's seen her show, you know just as well as I do that she's a hoot! From her pulling outlandish tricks on her staff, family and Boyfriend, to her Jewish father Melvin and his shenanigans, I've spent the past week laughing. When you read the book, her voice resonates, making her catchy punch lines ten times better.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - All winter long a male Northern Harrier has been hunting in our crop fields. We see him gliding close to the ground, his slender body rising and falling with the contour of the land. Back in the pasture, a female Harrier is doing the same thing. As in most hawk species, she is larger than the male, but she too appears to float effortlessly just above the grass, sometimes rising above a ridge top only to disappear behind it as she follows a Flint Hills swale. Both the gray male and the brown female sport prominent white patches above the tail.

Northern Harriers used to be called Marsh Hawks, as they often hunt in open wetlands--but "harrier" is a more accurate term, for they are by no means limited to swampy ground. In fact, they are one of the characteristic birds of the tall grass prairie. My mentor, KSU ornithologist John Zimmerman, wrote in The Birds of Konza: The Avian Ecology of the Tallgrass Prairie that the grasslands of all continents have a similar array of birds: a chicken-like bird; a dryland shorebird; small, medium, and large insectivores; and a hawk that hunts on the wing.

WICHITA, Kan. - During the 1960s, while male activists were out in the streets protesting the war, the draft, the CIA, Dow Chemical, or what have you, their female counterparts often complained that they were left behind to brew the coffee and tidy up the meeting rooms. By the beginning of the decade that started Jan. 1, 1970, however, the ferment that had started to percolate in the '60s erupted into a movement that eventually became a feminist tsunami of marches, political appointments, laws, and legal decisions that changed forever the lives of women and the men who lived and worked with them.

The feminist movement, often called The Second Wave, spread across the country and around the world. Women sought equality in the workplace, in education, in their relationships, and even in men-only bars. In New York City, feminists demonstrated to liberate the men's bar in the New York's Biltmore Hotel. McSorley's, a 116-year old New York bar admitted its first woman patron on Aug. 10 after Mayor John Lindsay signed a bill prohibiting sexual discrimination in public places, making New York the first major city to have such a law.

MANHATTAN, Kan. - In 2005, I attended the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis sponsored by Free Press. While I had always been an "activist," this conference change my outlook on US culture and society like nothing else I have even been involved in. In particular, Bill Moyers's speech (you can watch it here) articulated much of the frustration I had and have with the direction our nation has taken since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

For seventeen years following the "Reagan revolution," I lived in Italy and became accustomed to a national press that truly informed along with television and radio that provided a broad diversity of music, content, and opinions with minimum commercial interruptions.

When it came to newspapers, if I wanted to read what the capitalists thought on a topic I read Il Sole 24 Ore; if I wanted to know what the Communist and Socialist Left thought I read L'Unitá or Il Manifesto. If I wanted to read what the center thought, I read La Repubblica. If I wanted the Christian Democrat point of view, I could read Avvenire. And if I wanted to know what the fascists thought, I could read Il Popolo d'Italia. In addition to these national papers, there was a profusion of local and regional newspapers. All of which received some sort of government support to help balance their budgets.

SALINA, Kan. - In a new book, Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook contend workplace equality for women boils down to not only whether women are included in the work force but on how they are included.

Despite big changes over recent decades, workplace gender inequalities endure in the United States and other industrialized nations around the world. These inequalities are created by facets of national social policy that either ease or concentrate the demands of care giving within households and shape expectations in the workplace.