Elisabeth Lina Stewart

There was a time when “buyer beware” meant reading the fine print. Today, it means bracing yourself every time you click, browse, download, or even look at a product online. Somewhere along the way, the United States quietly slid into a new era — one where deception isn’t an exception but a business model. We didn’t vote on this shift. We didn’t approve it. We simply woke up one day and realized the wild west had moved into our inboxes, our phones, our bank accounts, and even our property records. This is the new normal. And it’s costing Americans everything. The Rise of the Unasked‑For Package It starts small. You research a product, read a review, or click on something out of curiosity — and suddenly a package shows up at your door. You didn’t order it. You didn’t authorize it. But the company is banking on one thing: that you’ll keep it rather than deal with the hassle of returning it. This isn’t customer service. It’s psychological pressure disguised as convenience. And the worst p...

 Across the United States, millions of domestic pets enter shelters every year, but nowhere is the crisis more severe than in the Southern states. While the early months of the COVID‑19 pandemic briefly emptied shelters, the years that followed brought a steady rise in intake, overwhelmed facilities, and an increase in euthanasia that rescuers on the ground have felt every single day. This is not simply a cultural issue. It is a structural and legislative failure, and it is solvable. A System Without Consistency or Accountability Government‑run shelters across the South operate with little uniformity. Intake procedures, holding periods, and lifesaving efforts vary dramatically from one county to the next. Some shelters work tirelessly to build networks of fosters, rescue partners, and transport groups. Others function more like temporary holding facilities, where animals have only 5 to 7 days if strays, and if surrendered, less before being euthanized due to a lack of space. Outdat...

                                These are dark days in America — not because of one event, one administration, or one ideology, but because we have allowed ourselves to become spectators in a game of red versus blue instead of guardians of truth. When loyalty to a team outweighs loyalty to justice, a nation begins to lose its way. Another human life has been lost to a senseless act fueled by fear, force, and unchecked emotion. What happened was not an abstraction. It was the result of a state being overwhelmed, invaded by forces operating without transparency, and denied the ability to gather the evidence needed to understand what truly transpired. When a state cannot stand for truth, fairness becomes impossible.                                   For years, there has been a relentless effort to divide this nation, to t...

There was a time in American business when leadership meant presence, accountability, and human connection. I lived through that era — not as an observer, but from inside companies whose leaders shaped the early architecture of the information age. I saw it at Universal Data Systems , founded by Mark C. Smith , with George Grumbles , John Jerenko, and Lonnie McMillion on the leadership team. I saw it again when UDS was acquired by Motorola , and George Grumbles continued in his role as CEO under the Motorola umbrella. And I saw it in the global vision of Patrick McGovern , founder of IDG, who recognized people with a kind of intuitive clarity that is almost extinct in today’s corporate world. These leaders shared a philosophy that feels almost foreign now: Leadership is a relationship, not a reward.  Leadership in the 1970s and 1980s: Human, Present, Accountable The leaders I worked with didn’t hide behind layers of management or corporate messaging. They showed up. Patrick McGov...

Across the United States, especially in rural towns far from the headlines, a quiet transformation took place over the past two decades. Places once written off as “ghost towns” — hollowed out by factory closures, aging populations, and the flight of young people — found new life because of immigrants. Not by accident. Not by policy design. But because families seeking opportunity were willing to move where others had already given up. According to national economic analyses, rural America saw its most meaningful revival in years because immigrants — both documented and undocumented — filled essential jobs, opened small businesses, and kept schools, farms, and local economies alive. In towns like Beardstown, Illinois, researchers found that immigration didn’t just add workers; it rebuilt community life, strengthened local institutions, and restored hope in places that had been fading for decades. These families didn’t just contribute economically. They became neighbors, church members,...

There are moments in a nation’s story when the truth becomes impossible to ignore. The recent shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis is one of those moments. This moment forces us to ask whether America is still governed by due process, or whether we’ve drifted back into something far more lawless. Good, a 37‑year‑old American citizen, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal immigration operation. She was not the target of any investigation. She was not armed. She was not wanted for a crime. She was simply present — and then she was gone. Her death has become a national flashpoint not because tragedy is new, but because the facts emerging from video evidence contradict the official narrative , and because the tactics used by federal agents resemble something closer to the wild, wild west than a constitutional democracy. When the Story Doesn’t Match the Footage Federal officials claimed Good “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to run over agents. Bu...

 I barely remember the town in which I was born. It is a little village by the name of Adami, found in the province of Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy. At the early age of three my family and I left Italy on a journey to America, hoping for a better way of living. It was May of 1967. Twelve long years passed by before we could scrape enough money to return to our native region. Until I saw Calabria, I was not sure of what to expect, my childhood memories being so vague. My mother told me how beautiful it was. I imagined her words and how it would be, for twenty-three hours of tedious and uncomfortable travel…. ten by plane, ten by train (cramped between suitcases) and the last hour by cab from Catanzaro’s train station. Tired and dreamlike, but still anxious to look around. I can recall arriving late at night to my grandmother’s house. She was so happy to see us. My mother was exultant with joy at seeing her mother after twelve years. Tears of the most joyous moments flowed down their f...