Do you use the internet? Like, at all? On your phone, on your laptop, on a big glowing gaming rig or a desktop held together with chewing gum and good thoughts? Then you should know we’re on the cusp of something that could destroy the internet as we know it: the end of government-enforced net neutrality.

Back in our June 2017 issue, I wrote about what net neutrality is and why it matters. But so much has been happening that it feels like years since then, so I’ll give you a refresher: “Net neutrality” is the policy that all internet traffic should be treated the same regardless of its source. Service providers aren’t allowed to throttle, for example, Netflix, which they might want to do to make their own streaming service look more appealing or so they can charge an extra fee to get it at full speed. Or they might just do it because they think it’s too much of a burden on their networks – they’ve done it before.

While the Netflix example is the most likely to spur your average citizen into action, it’s also vital to anyone whose politics fall left of center to keep the internet free from corporate control and censorship.

When I was teaching myself how to write, when I was about 20 to 25, I churned out (and threw out) all kinds of autobiographies. I wrote glorified diaries. I fictionalized my friends and acquaintances. I still write columns all the time in the first person. I did write a children’s book in recent years that was fiction but included my oldest son and my niece and nephew as characters. But I haven’t touched autobiography in more years than I’d been alive when I used to engage in it.

I’ve been asked a number of times to write chapters for books on “how I became a peace activist.” In some cases, I’ve just apologized and said I couldn’t. For one book called Why Peace, edited by Marc Guttman, I wrote a very short chapter called “Why Am I a Peace Activist? Why Aren’t You?” My point was basically to express my outrage that one would have to explain working to end the worst thing in the world, while millions of people not working to end it need offer no explanation for their reprehensible behavior.

Achievement is a thing done successfully, typically by effort, courage or skill. Attainment, realization, accomplishment, fulfilment, implementation, execution, performance. As I look back over the year 2017 I find myself thinking about what, if any, achievements have been accomplished and what makes these achievements successful and relevant to the American people and who has benefited from these achievements.  

In November, Vice President Pence said President Trump was responsible for our economy being improved by 1.5 million new jobs. Pence and Trump himself have said and see the success of the stock market as an achievement for Americans. They both feel that Trump is responsible for the manufacturers “confidence” in producing goods here in America. Pence says, “we’re just getting started” in regards to the “accomplishments” of Trump.  Pence and Trump both fail to acknowledge that another one of Trump’s achievements this year is to be deemed “historically unpopular” by the American people.  

Theater troupes and filmmakers persist in telling and retelling A Christmas Carol year after year. And why not? Charles Dickens’s ghostly morality tale makes a moving case for redemption and generosity, the respective hallmarks of the religious and secular sides of the holiday.

The story is such a perfect complement to the season that anyone who performs it competently is likely to meet with success. That is, unless they give in to the temptation to put their own spin on it. Then, all bets are off.

This year, a local theater production and a nationwide movie decided to get creative with the classic tale. In each case, they would have been better off letting Dickens be Dickens.

The troupe is Shadowbox Live, which in the past has given us Scrooge, a movie-to-stage adaptation that musicalized the tale but left its inspiring message intact. This year, Shadowbox remade the wheel with Cratchit, an original production that sets the action in modern America and focuses on Scrooge’s underpaid employee rather than the skinflint himself.