LWV

Let me begin with a nod to a network television show worth a watch. Abbott Elementary. In this season’s first episode, a young teacher sits in his classroom staring forlornly at his notepad. His seasoned mentor pops her head in to the room. “Everything alright?” She asks though she knows it’s not. “Everything is chaos,…

If you follow regional news, you may have read that nearly 1,1000 Indianapolis households faced eviction when their property owners failed to pay $1.9 million in water bills. In a settlement that came in three weeks before the residents would have to move, JPC Affordable Housing Foundation agreed to sell the rental units and leave…

Two weeks ago, two young men walked down a side street here in Crawfordsville, eyes cast to the ground, sweeping gazes and picking up bits of trash. They wore lanyards and gloves and cleaned up bits of plastic wrappers, cans and Styrofoam that littered the berm. For a few days the block looked cleaner, but…

“Who deserves the right to go down into the Grand Canyon?” “Isn’t everyone entitled?” “We are providing a solution to a need.” These were the pitches of developers to the council of the Navajo Nation captured in the documentary Into the Canyon. They wanted to build a massive shopping-restaurant-transport complex at the confluence of the…

EDITOR’S NOTE: This will be an unusual column. LWV member Maria Reynolds-Weir is writing in the first person to reflect upon what traveling this year has taught this writer about our democracy. Until this past 12 months, I hadn’t traveled much outside of the USA, but in October, I had the opportunity to go to…

What do wine, cheese, and women’s equality have in common? A) Aug. 26, B) Democracy, C) The League of Women Voters, or D) All the above. If you answered D, way to win. Montgomery County’s League of Women Voters plans to celebrate Women’s Equality Day on Aug. 26 with a wine-and-cheese, meet-and-greet at the Crawfordsville…

The news this summer has been filled with signs of climate change: fires out west, flooding in St. Louis and Kentucky, heat waves across the US and Europe. One contribution to climate change is the production of the stuff that we purchase. Recycling can help with this – materials already taken from the earth can…

Last week members of the community gathered to watch Nausicaa, Staging the Oceans’ Biodiversity, sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County and Wabash College. The film presents the creation of Europe’s largest aquarium tank, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. The tank is 197 feet long, 115 feet wide, 26 feet deep, and holds 2.6…

Every person in the world needs and wants clean water. Most of us think of this as a universal human right: without water every living creature dies. Here in Indiana, safe urban and rural drinking water have been the norm—with some notable exceptions. Yet especially after WWII, when using chemicals in manufacturing, in industry, on…

An interested group of Montgomery County residents gathered at Wabash College last week to view and discuss the Green Issues film “Built to Burn.” The Green Issues 2022 film series is co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County and the Wabash College Library. Everyone is invited to attend these free and intellectually…