It’s Your Turn
It’s Your Turn November 2, 2026 The Idaho Falls Equal Suffrage Club’s hand-painted silk banner still exists. On its back is a sample ballot. Across it, someone wrote: “As voted by Augusta B. Smith April 6th 1897 after woman’s suffrage was granted to us.” Men did the granting. Women could not vote for their own suffrage, so on November 3, 1896, men decided it: 12,126 in favor and 6,282 against. Idaho women had worked hard for that vote. They rented halls, raised money, and wrote letters to ministers. On Election Day, they stood at nearly every polling place in the state and urged men to vote on the amendment. Thousands didn’t. About 29,700 Idahoans voted for president that day, and more than 11,000 of them left the suffrage question blank. Those blanks nearly cost women the right to vote. The state board of canvassers refused to certify the amendment, arguing that it needed a majority of everyone who voted in the election, not just those who answered the question. By that count, the amendment had failed. Suffrage advocates took the board to the Idaho Supreme Court. On December 11, 1896, the justices ruled unanimously that a blank was not a no. Idaho became the fourth state to grant women the vote on equal terms with men — twenty-four years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Equal terms had limits. Article VI, Section 3 of Idaho’s constitution barred “Chinese or persons of Mongolian descent not born in the United States” from voting, serving on juries, or holding office. It excluded “Indians not taxed” who had not severed their tribal relations and “adopted the habits of civilization.” It disqualified members of any group that accepted plural marriage, a clause aimed at members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Those exclusions applied to women too. The Idaho State Archives holds the original handwritten constitution. Conservators have mended its pages twice. They can preserve the document, but they cannot change its words. That power belongs to voters. Over time, voters used their power. In 1950, twenty-six years after Congress granted citizenship to Indigenous people born in the United States, Idaho voters struck the constitutional bar against them. The bar against Chinese and other people of East Asian descent born outside the United States was removed in 1962. Idaho voters also eliminated language targeting Latter-day Saints in 1982. Each change took another generation of voters to make the promise of equal citizenship more complete. This is what voting makes possible. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to take part in their country’s government through elections held by “universal and equal suffrage.” Article 29 adds that everyone has “duties to the community.” These rights and responsibilities belong together. Voting is both a right and one way to take responsibility for the communities we share. Idaho’s history shows both. Each change depended on people who already had the vote choosing to extend it, and on people denied it pressing for change. The right has never expanded on its own. People have had to organize and persuade others to use their voices and votes. Tuesday, November 3, 2026, marks exactly 130 years since Idaho men voted to recognize women’s right to vote. Idaho voters will again decide whether to amend their constitution. Two proposed amendments are on the statewide ballot. Voters in many other states will answer constitutional questions of their own. The questions are different. The responsibility is the same. In 1896, women stood outside polling places urging men not to skip the suffrage question. Today, the questions on the ballot belong to you. Your vote will help decide what our constitution says, what our communities value, and what kind of future we will build together. Find your state’s voting information at vote.gov.
Beyond Closed Doors
Beyond Closed Doors October 26, 2026 In 1980, an Ohio woman named Annie Warmke finally escaped her abusive husband after more than 20 attempts to leave. For the first time, she reached a shelter where he could not find her. There she found the groundbreaking book Battered Wives by Del Martin. In its stories of other women, she recognized herself and learned that she was not alone. She would become an ardent advocate for women who have experienced domestic violence. The abuse that Annie left behind is an age-old story and a violation of human rights. Intimate partner violence can be emotional, financial, sexual, psychological, or physical, and it grows from the belief that one partner has the right to control the other. It harms people of every gender, though women are more likely to experience its most severe forms and report lasting effects. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. For Annie, as for millions of others, that right was most at risk inside her own home. For centuries, domestic violence was considered a private, family matter. In many places, it still is. In 1993, the United Nations General Assembly rejected that idea. It declared that violence against women violates their human rights, whether it happens in public or behind closed doors. In the United States, change has been slow. When Annie fled, many of the protections survivors rely on today did not exist or were brand new. The first state laws protecting survivors appeared in the mid-1970s, and federal funding for shelters and services followed in the 1980s and 1990s. When the National Domestic Violence Hotline answered its first call in 1996, Annie had been free for 16 years. Laws alone have not ended this violence. Worldwide, one in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence at least once in their lives, and the person who harms them is most often a current or former partner. This violence spans income and education levels, geography, religion, and race. When an injustice is this universal and entrenched, we must ask ourselves why. The Spiral of Injustice reminds us that injustice begins with language. When language marginalizes, objectifies, and dehumanizes women, sexism and, eventually, violence become easier to justify. Research links harmful attitudes toward women to violence against them in intimate relationships. Language can be the hardest part of the Spiral to interrupt because it is so common and happens close to us. We hear “Can’t you take a joke?” at home, at work, in the media, in group chats. Because these attitudes are handed down from one generation to the next, it takes all of us to make homes safe. We can notice the words, jokes, and insults that we use or repeat. We can reach out to a friend who might be in an abusive relationship. We can seek help if we are in one ourselves. We can talk with young people about the harmful messages they absorb in person and online. We can hold perpetrators accountable. We can create spaces where people can learn, talk honestly, and recognize harm. We can hear and believe survivors. The woman who once needed a place her abuser could not find has spent the decades since making that place for others. Her life has been rooted in advocacy and community building. Change is possible. The road to just and joyful communities follows the one Annie traveled: away from injustice, into the hope of community, and toward the day when the right to security of person is a lived reality in every home. If you are experiencing domestic violence or someone you know is, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233.
Under the Same Sky
Under the Same Sky October 19, 2026 If you watch long enough on a clear night, the stars wheel slowly overhead. One of them seems to stay still. The North Star isn’t especially bright, but since it sits almost directly above Earth’s North Pole, it holds its place while the rest of the sky turns. For centuries, travelers have steered by it. The star shows the way. People who lived generations apart looked up under the same sky and found it right where it should be. A community needs a fixed point like that, especially in unsettled times. Thirty years ago, a group of Idahoans set out to help their community find one. In 1995, a traveling exhibit about Anne Frank opened in Boise and drew tens of thousands of visitors. Idaho was tense that year. The Aryan Nations still operated a compound near Hayden Lake. The previous November, a ballot initiative that would have barred state and local governments from protecting gay and lesbian Idahoans from discrimination had barely failed. In that climate, a team of community members worked to bring the exhibit here and make it succeed. Many of them had been working for human rights in Idaho for years. Inside the exhibit, people stood together before photographs of a girl who went into hiding at thirteen and never came home. Her diary let them hear her voice and see her courage. The organizers learned something from watching them: Anne’s story was an entry point to challenging conversations about human rights in Idaho. They wanted to keep that conversation going. A year later, they founded the human rights education organization that would become the Wassmuth Center, so the momentum they had built would not leave town with the exhibit. Raising the money for a permanent memorial and ongoing education programs took years of steady effort, and the gifts came from across the community. When the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial opened in 2002, it paired one girl’s story with the promise the world made after the war that took her life. Anne Frank died in a concentration camp in 1945. Less than four years later, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, naming the rights that belong to every person, everywhere. At the Memorial, all thirty articles are etched in stone, making it one of the few places in the world where the full Declaration is on permanent public display. The sky turns. The words stay put. Anyone who looks can see them. Those thirty articles describe what the founders hoped Idaho could become: a place where human rights are a lived reality for all. Like the North Star, a right carved in stone can only point the way. It becomes real when people do the work of making it so, and everyone can count on it in their own neighborhoods. For thirty years, the Center has worked toward that reality by holding two commitments together: justice and joy. Justice asks whether every person can actually claim the rights the Declaration names. Joy is how it feels when they can, when people are welcomed and valued and free to be fully themselves. On October 10, justice and joy filled the room at our annual Change Your World Gala. That night, 344 people gathered to celebrate thirty years of human rights education. The theme was Under the Same Sky, and the evening held serious purpose and real delight side by side. At the Memorial, the Declaration’s first article sits beneath that sky every day: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. From the start, that promise has been the Center’s North Star. The gala’s high points came when we honored two Idahoans who help others find their way by it. Kerry Thomas, our 2026 Idaho Human Rights Educator of the Year, teaches in Rigby, three hundred miles east of Boise. For 25 years, he has taught high school students the history of the Holocaust — how a government stripped its own citizens of their rights and how ordinary people looked away, joined in, or, sometimes, risked everything to protect their neighbors. Students who study this history eventually wonder what they would have done. Kerry asks them what they will do now. To help them answer, he brings them to the Memorial, where the words carved in stone can point them in a direction. Melanie Flitton Folwell, our 2026 Idaho Community Changemaker of the Year, is a lifelong Idahoan and the executive director of Idahoans United for Women and Families. Her work starts at kitchen tables, where Idahoans make decisions about their health and their families. She has spent countless hours protecting their freedom to make those decisions themselves. Melanie is known as much for how she treats people as for what she achieves. She listens, makes space for other people’s fear without hiding her own, and thanks volunteers one by one. That respect has drawn more than a thousand volunteers from across Idaho, people of different politics, faiths, and zip codes. She has shown our community what it looks like to honor people’s dignity. Kerry and Melanie weren’t yet part of the Wassmuth Center’s story in 1995, and neither were most of the people at the gala. Now they carry forward the work the founders and so many others began, alongside community leaders, teachers, volunteers, neighbors, and donors whose gifts keep the Memorial open and most of our programs free. We are all guided by the same North Star. At the end of the gala, every guest switched on a small star wand. Each gave off only a soft glow. Raised together, hundreds of them filled the dark. In 1995, a community of determined people worked together to bring Anne Frank’s story to Boise, then refused to let the conversation they started end. This October, hundreds of their neighbors gathered to carry it forward. Then they took their lights out into the night, home to classrooms and kitchen tables
Four Plaques, One Morning
Four Plaques, One Morning October 12, 2026 A stone monument stands beside Highway 91, a few miles northwest of Preston, near the Utah line. It has four sides and a small stone tipi on top. Since 1932, four plaques have been mounted on it, each telling a version of what happened nearby on a winter morning in 1863. At first light on January 29, 1863, U.S. Army volunteers from California, led by Colonel Patrick Edward Connor, attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter camp on the Bear River. By the time the shooting stopped, hundreds of Shoshone people lay dead, many of them women and children. Yeager Timbimboo was a boy in the Shoshone camp. When the soldiers attacked, he hid with his grandmother among the bodies of the dead, pretending to be one of them. Years later, Yeager told that story to his granddaughter, Mae Timbimboo Parry. She made telling it part of her life’s work, and she insisted on calling what happened that morning a massacre. For most of Mae’s life, a different story stood beside the highway. The first plaque, dedicated in 1932, told the soldiers’ version. Titled “The Battle of Bear River,” it said Connor’s men fought Indians “guilty of hostile attacks on emigrants and settlers.” It reported 250 to 300 Indians killed or incapacitated, among them about 90 “combatant women and children.” Yeager attended the unveiling. A photograph from that day shows him with his son. He had lived through the morning the plaque described. In 1953, the Franklin County Daughters of Utah Pioneers, one of the groups behind the first plaque, added a second. It honors the pioneer women who nursed wounded soldiers. The plaque also blames the violence on Indian attacks against “peaceful inhabitants.” Mae would not let this story stand. According to her grandson, Darren Parry, she carried soldiers’ own journals to Washington, D.C., and testified about what they described. In 1990, the National Park Service added a third plaque declaring the Bear River Massacre Site a National Historic Landmark. It is the first plaque on the monument to use the word massacre, yet it does not say who died. The fourth plaque came from the organization that had helped place the first two. After Alexis Beckstead became president of the Franklin County Daughters of Utah Pioneers, she began attending the tribe’s annual memorial for its dead. She saw that the Shoshone were unhappy with the 1932 plaque. The Daughters prepared new language, and Parry, a former tribal chairman, approved it. On January 29, 2021, the 158th anniversary of the massacre, Parry unveiled the new plaque, which replaced the 1932 plaque. It honors “the estimated 400 men, women, and children of the Northwestern Shoshone Nation.” Eighty-nine years after Yeager stood at the first unveiling, his great-great-grandson led this one. Read the four plaques in order, and you can watch the Shoshone people’s place in the story change. In 1932, they were enemy combatants. In 1953, they were attackers. In 1990, they went unmentioned. In 2021, they came first. The Northwestern Band has also reclaimed land. In 2018, the tribe bought several hundred acres of the massacre site, which it calls Wuda Ogwa. Tribal members and volunteers are restoring wetlands and replanting native trees and shrubs along the creek, and the tribe is raising money for its own interpretive center. Language has been shifting beyond the monument, too. For decades, Indigenous people called for a day honoring the nations who lived here long before Columbus arrived, and cities and states adopted it one by one. In October 2021, the year the new plaque went up, President Biden issued the first presidential proclamation recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Here in Idaho, it is a day to honor the Coeur d’Alene, Kootenai, Nez Perce, Shoshone-Bannock, and Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, along with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, whose ancestors were killed at Bear River. Honoring people starts with listening, and the fullest accounts come from Native people telling their own histories. We can find them at the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum at Fort Hall, in Darren Parry’s book The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History, and someday at the interpretive center at Wuda Ogwa. The stone beside Highway 91 has been changed three times, and it may be revised again. Down the slope, on land the Shoshone own again, new trees are taking root along the creek where the winter camp once stood.
The Fourth Page
The Fourth Page October 5, 2026 On September 25, 1690, Boston printer Benjamin Harris published the first issue of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. It ran three pages of local and international news. The fourth page was blank. Most accounts say Harris left it for readers to write in their own news before passing the paper along. Boston was an anxious town that fall. New England was at war with the French, smallpox had reached the colony, and, Harris wrote, false reports were being spread maliciously among his neighbors. He wanted people to understand public affairs at home and abroad. He hoped the paper would do something toward “the Curing, or at least the Charming, of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us.” He promised to print only what he had reason to believe was true and to correct any material mistake “in the next.” There was no next. Within four days the governor and council shut the paper down. Harris had printed without a license, and the authorities objected to what they called “doubtful and uncertain Reports.” No other newspaper appeared in the colonies until 1704. Histories of the free press usually follow the printers. Harris’s blank page argues that a free press also depends on its readers. Two and a half centuries later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed that freedom of expression belongs to every person, not only those who own the presses. Article 19 protects the freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” These three verbs describe more than the movement of information. We seek information to understand what is happening around us. We receive it to form our own judgments. The third asks more. When we forward a post or repeat a headline over dinner, we become someone else’s source. What we pass along carries our name, like a reader’s handwriting on Harris’s blank fourth page. Now we have more blank pages than we could ever fill, and we fill them all day. Every comment thread and group chat is a fourth page. What we are losing is the first three: the information a reporter gathered at the city council meeting, checked, and published. A fourth page with nothing in front of it puts us back in the Boston that Harris was writing to, where neighbors passed along whatever they had heard and the “Spirit of Lying” had the run of the town. Boise still has local news, though one of its largest newsrooms will soon have far less capacity to provide it. Last month, the Idaho Statesman‘s parent company, McClatchy, laid off ten journalists and three editors, cutting more than half of the Statesman’s newsroom as part of nationwide reductions. Michael Lycklama, who chairs the reporters’ union, recalled a newsroom of about 100 people twenty years ago. Soon there will be nine. Nine people cannot sit through every school board meeting, legislative hearing, and zoning session the rest of us miss. Researchers have measured what places like Boise stand to lose. With less local reporting, communities experience lower voter participation, fewer candidates for office, and higher local government costs. Residents have less information about the decisions that affect their lives and fewer ways to hold public officials accountable. Article 21 of the Declaration promises everyone a voice in government. But a meaningful voice depends on knowing what the government is doing. That knowledge matters even more when leaders try to limit or control the press. Local reporters can follow a decision made in Washington or at the Statehouse to the classroom, the clinic, or the farm where it actually lands. Their reporting gives residents what they need to hold those decisions, and the people who make them, to account. We cannot write the first three pages ourselves, but we can help make sure someone is still there to write them. We can seek out local reporting by subscribing to a newspaper, supporting public radio or nonprofit newsrooms, and showing up when decisions are on the agenda. We can receive information with care: read past the headlines and talk with neighbors who see things differently. And before we impart anything, we can ask where it came from. When we get something wrong, we can do what Harris promised and correct it in the next. Harris trusted his neighbors with the fourth page. Three hundred and thirty-six years later, it is still ours to fill with care, and the first three are ours to protect.
Someone to Talk To
Someone to Talk To September 28, 2026 The first funeral Chad Varah ever led was for a fourteen-year-old girl. It was 1935, and Varah was a newly ordained clergyman in England. The girl had died by suicide after mistaking the start of her period for a shameful disease. No one had told her what her body was doing, and she had no one to ask. Varah later said the girl had changed the course of his life. He began giving frank talks at youth clubs, telling young people what adults were too embarrassed to say. And in 1953, as rector of a London church, he set up a telephone line for anyone in despair. That single line grew into the organization Samaritans, which answered more than 134 million calls in its first 70 years. Crisis lines spread across the United States in the decades that followed. Idaho’s own hotline began taking calls in 2012. Within a decade, more than 95,000 calls, texts, and chats came in from every Idaho county. Since 2022, dialing 988 has connected Idahoans to that line. A crisis line meets someone in their hardest moments. Varah’s talks in those youth clubs reached for something earlier: the months and years before the phone rings. Public health workers call this upstream prevention, which means changing the conditions young people live in before a crisis arrives. The CDC lists social isolation, bullying, and discrimination among the factors that increase suicide risk. Among the factors that protect against it, the agency lists feeling connected to school and community. A teenager can sit in a full cafeteria and feel invisible, especially if they suspect that who they really are wouldn’t be welcome. We want every young person to walk into a school, onto a sports team, or into a youth group as they are and be met with gladness. That is the work of Communities for Youth, a Boise State University initiative now working in more than 30 Idaho communities. In the small town of Marsing, teens are invited to take a well-being survey, and each year the community gathers to review the results. Last fall, students ate pizza and watched a movie in the school cafeteria. Down the hall, their parents, caregivers, and neighbors walked among posters showing what those teens had reported about loneliness, stress, and whether they had an adult they trusted enough to talk to. The adults discussed the data and voted on what to work on as a community. The early results give reason for hope. In recent years, the numbers on those hallway posters have moved in the right direction: youth depression in Marsing has fallen. The town has taken that as a reason to keep going. This year, its local coalition wants every student to sit down one-on-one with a school counselor at least once. It is also asking students which clubs they want and planning events like bingo nights. Each of these efforts tells a young person that someone knows them and wants them around. The girl Varah buried was born free and equal in dignity and rights. Nothing that happened to her changed that. Part of what failed her was a silence no one around her thought to break. At the Wassmuth Center, we teach people of all ages to recognize, interrupt, and prevent injustice. The last of those is often the quietest. It looks like neighbors gathered on an autumn evening in a small Idaho town, reading what their young people have told them and deciding, together, how to help each one feel known. If you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. Help is free and available 24 hours a day.
Showing Up for Each Other
Showing Up for Each Other September 21, 2026 An Idaho State Police trooper closes the door to the governor’s office. It is five o’clock on an April afternoon, and nine people are sitting on the floor of the entryway. They have come to ask Governor Little to veto a bill that would make life harder for transgender Idahoans. The governor will not see them. The trooper takes out the handcuffs. Each of the nine people had a way out of that entryway. They all sat on the floor anyway, staying until they were arrested. We call that allyship, though the word feels smaller than the act. Five months later, two miles from the governor’s office, Boise Pride celebrated its thirty-seventh year. The theme was “Louder Than Fear.” Think about what it means to put the word fear in the title of a celebration. Then notice the other word: louder. Fear may be present, but it does not get the only voice. It gets answered by people who show up. For three days, Boise answered with a parade through town, a park full of performers and community organizations, and thousands of neighbors who came to celebrate and raise their voices together. A door closed against nine people. A park filled with thousands. Transgender Idahoans are living with fear right now. So are many other neighbors, because of who they are, where they come from, how they look, or the way they move through the world. For anyone paying attention, outrage comes easily in a time like this. So does paralysis. Showing up for one another is a way through both. Being loud, it turns out, has almost nothing to do with volume. It means being unmistakable. It means that when someone looks around a room to see who is with them, they do not have to wonder about you. That requires staying curious about people whose experiences don’t look like yours. It requires paying attention to who is comfortable in the spaces you have some say over — whether that is an office, a classroom, or a kitchen table. And it requires joy. Boise Pride was a party for a reason. Outrage burns out fast, and this work of showing up for each other has to last. We can’t sit on the floor outside the governor’s office or march in a Pride parade every day. But we can always show up for each other. Sometimes showing up means staying when it would be easier to leave. Sometimes it means asking a question, making room, speaking up, or simply making sure someone knows they are not alone. These acts may look small. Together, this is how a community grows louder than fear.
One Less Stranger
One Less Stranger September 14, 2026 In 1955, a young Polish reporter named Ryszard Kapuściński passed his editor in the hallway and told her he’d like to go abroad someday. He was dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia. Crossing any border would have done. The following year, she called him into her office and told him he was going to India. Then she reached into a cabinet and handed him a book with a stiff yellow cloth cover, the author’s name stamped in gold: Herodotus. “Here,” she said. “A present for the road.” Kapuściński carried that book with him for decades afterward — across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, reading it against whatever unfamiliar place happened to be in front of him that week. Twenty-five centuries earlier, Herodotus had crossed the ancient Mediterranean to record what he learned about Persians, Egyptians, and Scythians. He wrote down what strangers ate, how they buried their dead, whom they worshipped, and what they believed. He observed and asked questions. Near the end of his life, Kapuściński tried to name what following that example had taught him. In a late series of lectures on what he called “the Other,” he argued that every encounter with a stranger eventually forces a choice among three options: go to war, wall ourselves off, or sit down and talk. He thought the first two had dominated history. He spent his career betting everything on the third. That bet is not sentimental. Rights written on paper matter enormously, but knowing that a right has been violated does not necessarily make us care about the person whose right was denied. What moves us is a name, a face, an afternoon spent in a stranger’s home, hearing whatever they’re willing to share. Herodotus and Kapuściński worked 2,500 years and half a world apart. Neither of them argued anybody into anything. Both refused to let a stranger stay a stranger. Teaching about human rights runs into that wall. The hardest histories usually happened somewhere else, to someone else. Secondhand horror often only leads to secondhand concern. A person can read that more than 1.5 million Cambodians died under Khmer Rouge rule and still not grasp the scale of it. Stand in the courtyard of Tuol Sleng — the former high school turned S-21 torture center — sit with someone who survived it, and the distance closes. The practice is ancient and plain: paying attention long enough for someone else’s story to land. Herodotus did it in Egypt. Kapuściński did it for decades with a yellow-bound gift in his coat pocket. We can do it in a courtyard in Cambodia or in our next-door neighbor’s kitchen. We come away with a story and one less stranger in the world.
The Other 364 Days
The Other 364 Days September 7, 2026 In the spring of 1894, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages again in its shops on Chicago’s South Side. Jennie Curtis had sewn there for almost a decade: carpets, drapes, the tapestry on the seats of the finest railcars in America. A year earlier, the best seamstresses in her department could make $2.25 a day. Now the same work paid only 80 cents. Jennie’s father had also worked for Pullman. When he died, he owed the company $60 in back rent. Like most workers, he had lived in company housing. The company collected his debt from Jennie’s paycheck, deducting it week after week until her earnings barely covered her own rent. On June 21, at the convention of the American Railway Union, she rose and told the delegates what she and many others were experiencing: subsistence wages, a dead father’s debt still coming out of her pay, colleagues in her department going hungry doing the work that kept Pullman’s dining cars dressed in silk and velvet. The delegates had argued for days over whether to boycott Pullman cars. After she spoke, they voted yes. The boycott spread quickly down the rail lines, and within a few days, Washington responded twice. On June 28, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation that established Labor Day as a federal holiday. On July 3, that same administration sent troops into Chicago to break the strike that Curtis’s testimony helped ignite. A holiday honoring labor and an army sent against laborers — five days apart, from the same government. The workers were asking for wages they could live on. They received recognition on paper and rifles in the streets. Jennie Curtis hadn’t asked for much. She wanted a day’s labor to be enough to live on. Fifty-four years later, the world finally put that demand into writing. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone who works has a right to pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity,” and the right to join with others to protect it. Article 24 adds rest, reasonable hours, and paid holidays. Walk through the Idaho Human Rights Memorial, and you’ll find these words carved into stone. It’s worth pausing to read them carefully because the work of making them true is not finished. That work reached a federal courtroom just last month, but it started a year earlier. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Labor lowered the wage floor for farm laborers. The government sets that wage floor to protect everyone in the field — citizens and the guest workers who come here each season on H-2A visas — so that no one’s need for work becomes an excuse to pay anyone less. When the government cut pay for guest workers, citizen farmworkers’ wages fell alongside them. Irene Mendoza is one of the workers affected. A Texan who picks and packs green beans and potatoes, she said the $3.22-an-hour cut dropped her rate to $13.78 an hour. Mendoza explained that the loss would make it hard to pay for her children’s education and keep her own health insurance. She and seventeen other farmworkers, backed by the United Farm Workers, sued in federal court. They argued that a wage floor built to protect workers shouldn’t become a tool to pay any of them less. On August 26, U.S. District Judge Kirk Sherriff ruled the cut unlawful and ordered the Department of Labor to set new rates, telling employers they might owe back pay. The case isn’t finished. But Mendoza made the federal government explain itself in court, and the judge agreed with her. A hundred and thirty-two years apart, and it’s still the same argument. Someone at a distance decides what a person’s day is worth. The person answers back that it’s worth more. Whether that answer holds depends on who else is willing to say it out loud. Dignity at work isn’t hard to name, even when it’s hard to win. It looks like a wage that covers rent, real rest, and being treated like a person instead of a line item. Most of us don’t own big companies like Pullman. We aren’t the Department of Labor, and we don’t set Idaho’s wage floor. But most of us do employ someone, manage someone, buy what someone else made, or get served by someone at the end of a long shift. We set the wage. We determine the schedule. We tip, or we don’t. We ask how the food got to our table, or we don’t think about it. Dignity is never granted from afar. It’s claimed by people willing to say their labor is worth more than they’re being paid, and it’s honored — or it isn’t — in a hundred decisions the rest of us make every day. One woman’s testimony changed a vote in a union hall in 1894. Another woman’s testimony changed a judge’s mind in federal court last month. Today, someone is topping onions in Caldwell, and someone is running a register in Meridian while the rest of us take the day off. This holiday exists because working people insisted their lives had worth. A day off honors them. Affirming their worth the other 364 days moves us closer to a community where human rights are a lived reality for all.
Light in the Tunnel
Light in the Tunnel August 31, 2026 On the last Saturday of Hanukkah in December 2021, swastikas appeared in several Greenbelt tunnels, including the one beside the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. Boise responded the way a decent city does. Maintenance crews painted over them. Police opened an investigation. Officials condemned the vandalism publicly. The graffiti said something specific: that Jews in this city are not welcome, and everyone else should take note of where they stand. Removing an image like that is not the same as replying to it. What was left was blank concrete — the same blank concrete that drew vandals in the first place. So the city took up a harder question. What should go here instead? A committee of community partners put out a call and chose muralist Addie Boswell. The following October, she went into the Eighth Street tunnel with high school students, people from faith communities, folks from the unhoused community, and neighbors who showed up. They painted it together in about a week. Boswell and the volunteers filled a dark tunnel with people working to create a better world: a teenager holding a climate justice sign, a teacher with a book, the woman whose lawsuit shut down the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho. They added the symbols of different groups in the community: a crescent moon, a sunflower, a transgender emblem. Around every figure they painted a ring of light, set at eye level, so that whoever walks through meets them face to face. At the center of it all is a chestnut tree like the one Anne Frank could see from her window. The mural is called E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One. One night, a can of spray paint, and a whole city spent a month talking about it. Art cannot compete on speed. It competes on staying. At the dedication for the mural, Boswell said, “Breaking glass is easy. Tearing things down is easy . . . This kind of work will never be broken by the work of moments.” A committee, a hired artist, sixty people with paintbrushes working through a week in October. This was a remarkable amount of effort to respond to a dozen marks made in the dark. But nearly four years after it went up, the mural is what people still walk by every day. Anyone can walk into the Eighth Street Tunnel. There is no ticket and no gallery hours. The mural never mentions the graffiti. It doesn’t scold or argue. It is simply a picture of our community, offered to everyone who passes through. The graffiti made a claim about who belongs. So does the mural. The difference is that one of them is still here.