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It was 1968. I was 13 years old and living in Arlington Heights, Illinois. A town about 35 miles northwest of Chicago. 

Before turning 70 on Nov. 27 of last year, 1968 was probably the most difficult year for me to process and try to understand. It was the first time I can remember emotionally struggling with a number of events taking place in our country and, at the same time, asking myself some very challenging questions. 

Would I agree to register for the mandatory draft if my number came up? Would I pick up a gun and learn how to shoot another person? Would I dodge the draft? Would I move to Canada? 

It was a confusing time. It was the first time where I felt a deep sense of confusion and anxiety about the country that I had pledged allegiance to. And it was the one time when there was uncertainty about whether or not I wanted to stay in the U.S.

On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated. On June 5, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. On August 22, I turned on the television to watch the student protests and police violence at the Democratic National Convention taking place about a 40-minute drive from my house. 

On March 16, the news reported the My Lai Massacre where U.S. troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese citizens. Around the country there was a growing number of student protests on college campuses against the Vietnam War. There were race riots in Chicago and Washington, D.C. And some of the black athletes at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City raised their fists.

In my first year as a teenager, I found myself taking a critical look at myself, the possibility that I may be drafted to fight in a war I didn’t understand or support, and wondering if I would choose to move to Canada to avoid the draft and not have to pick up a rifle and kill someone. 

That fall, as I’m getting ready to turn 14, was definitely an extraordinary moment for taking a critical look at life in this country, and exploring my decisions and choices for the future. 

It is now late March, 2025. And I find myself again taking a critical look and questioning what’s happening in and to our country. In less than 70 days since the presidential inauguration, we are watching and reacting to a new president who is attempting to dismantle and destroy our hopes for a democratic society that honors the dignity of each human being and our environment. And wondering how Duluth will respond.

In the chapter titled “How Critical Thinking Sustains a Healthy Democracy” from his book Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting, Stephen D. Brookfield talks about how important critical thought is to what he calls the “democratic health of a society.” 

Brookfield wrote, “A readiness to ask why things are the way they are, a capacity to speculate imaginatively on alternative possibilities, an inbuilt skepticism of the pronouncements and actions of those who are judged to be in positions of political and economic power - these are the fundamental ways in which the processes of critical thinking, analysis, and reflection in adults can be recognized.” 

We need an inbuilt skepticism of the Trump administration and those billionaires who have bought a seat in the presidential cabinet, to ask why things are the way they are, and to imagine new possibilities for a brighter future for all human beings and the planet. 

On March 18, The Guardian reported that the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization stated that 2024 was the hottest year on record and that more than 150 “unprecedented climate disasters” struck the world last year. Hundreds of thousands of people went to local hospitals for heatstroke from extreme heatwaves in Japan, six typhoons hit the Philippines in under a month, and record rains in Italy led to more severe floods, landslides and electricity blackouts.

When asked about the Trump administration pulling information about climate change from the federal government websites, Dr. Brenda Ekwursel, with the Union of Concerned Scientists stated, “Attempts to hide climate science from the public will not stop us from feeling the dire impacts of climate change.”

With the 10 hottest years on the planet happening in the last decade, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere and oceans continuing to rise, and we’re experiencing more extreme weather events due to climate change, we have to not only question the federal government’s dismissal of the climate reality we’re all facing but to also question how we choose to live in this climate-change world. 

With the Trump administration pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, allowing fossil fuel developments on public lands, deleting information about climate change from federal websites, and making attempts to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), we have to critically think about climate change’s growing impacts on our city and seriously consider the individual and collective decisions we need to make to hopefully insure that Duluth becomes more resilient, sustainable and equitable. 

It is time for critical reflections and radical choices.