Kevin Mireles

The New York Times Article “For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions” represents both the promise and the failure of modern journalism.

The promise because the article was a classic piece of investigative journalism that shined the light on the way the ultrarich maneuver the political and legal system to evade taxes.

The failure, because the NY Times only enraged readers. Instead of empowering their readers by providing tools to help them take action and drive political change, they only offered an article, like offering a match without a lantern to people looking for light. The match ignites the fire, but the lantern keeps it burning much brighter and longer than the match alone.

Articles are an 18^th century technology that are still incredibly powerful here in the 21^st century but they:

• Lack Personalization so that you can understand how the issue impacts you specifically – or where your specific representatives stand on an issue or their role in the problem, i.e. who are my representatives, do they have their hand in the cookie jar, what’s their official position and what’s their track record on the issue.
• Are passive instead of being Interactive. While they get you enraged, they don’t help you get engaged and take action. Instead you have to search elsewhere for tools and resources to help you reach out to your representatives or mobilize others to make change.

While Infographics, data visualizations, videos and even virtual reality are great new story telling tools, they still don’t fundamentally transform news organizations from being content generators into solution providers – which is what we as a society need to increase our civic engagement and news organizations need to do in order to grow their value.

So if the Times and other news organizations truly want to make a difference, then they need to provide users the ability to:

• Find their specific representatives
• Identify how much they’ve received from lobbyists and individuals
• Their votes on specific items
• Their positions on the issue. The Times could have easily sent a survey to the representatives and Senators to get their feedback.
• Give feedback to their elected officials via Democracy.io or similar tool
• Create, sign or share petitions demanding change
• Engage with organizations that are fighting for equity
• Attend virtual or physical town halls with key players to learn more about the issue and potential ways to get more involved

I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface on what the NY Times could do. And yes, they all contain risks, but unlike real estate and employment classifieds, civic engagement is why we became journalists and the space news organizations need to own if they are to fulfill their 21^st century potential.

I’ll never forget the flat staccato of the semi-automatics or the boom of the shotgun blasts that would regularly pierce the night sky. As a resident and reporter in Santa Ana I’d pray that the noise wasn’t the prelude to yet another homicide story, where I’d have to interview distraught parents wondering why, wives shorn of their husband’s love, friends mourning their buddies and traumatized neighbors forced to clean the blood off their sidewalks.

I remember:

• Finishing an interview at Pio Pico Elementary School, driving 100-yards and seeing a teenager laying in the street, blood flowing toward the gutter as cops flooded the area looking for the perpetrator. He lived but others didn’t.
• The parents who kept celebrating their son’s birthday, year after year. Of reading the search warrant, describing how the killer had shot him at point blank in the brain while he hid behind a car fender. And then the shooter went onto kill another kid – and all because they yelled a drunken insult at the Southside House.
• Interviewing a young dad with a bullet lodged in his head about, how he knew who shot him, but that he couldn’t tell the police for fear of being killed by other gang members. You can read the story here
• Covering my first shootings; two separate shootings leaving two teenagers dead and a 13-year old in critical condition. When I went to visit the 13-year’s old family, one of my questions got turned into me supposedly saying that the kid had died. The wailing and tears of that apartment living room are burned in my mind.
• Teenagers in wheelchairs, alive but partially paralyzed by the bullets that shredded their spines.
• Calling the police four or five times in one night to report the non-stop gunfire from a block or two away; until I gave up when I learned that in the ‘hood, just because you call the police, doesn’t mean the gunfire stops.

I could go on, but for me guns and gunfire meant only one thing – fear and loss.

Then I went to Washington DC and was talking to someone who grew up in rural Klamath county, where shotgun blasts meant duck hunting and the crack of the rifle meant deer season.

“I’d get up before dawn, go duck hunting and bring my birds to school for cleaning before starting class. The shotgun stayed in the truck and no one cared or called the police – it was just part of life.”

Similar sounds, almost entirely different meanings. When urban America talks about guns, they see death and destruction. When rural America talks about guns they see ducks, deer and dinner.

So when urban America hears about gun control, they see it as a common sense way to save lives, but when rural America hears about gun control, they see their way of life being threatened. Layer on additional racial, ethnic and economic enmities and is it any wonder why we’re so divided on this and almost every other issue in America?

I was inspired to write this after reading Joseph Lichterman’s article BuzzFeed grew its Latino audience the old-fashioned way: with content and thinking, “While it’s refreshing to see BuzzFeed making the investment and reaping the rewards, why is hiring Hispanics, covering their concerns and actually integrating them into the larger enterprise considered newsworthy or novel?”

The fact that it is newsworthy, is also whyBuzzFeed and Univision are growing and why traditional news audiences and outlets are shrinking.

While distribution and story-telling technologies have changed, the keys to successfully covering your hyphenated audience haven’t changed since the days I wrote for a community newspaper.

Just apply the principles of community journalism to us

As a cub reporter at the Santa Ana Progress, one of the Orange County Register’s attempt to go local back in the early 90s, I learned the local news mantra, “People want to read about themselves, their family, their friends, their neighborhood and their organizations, so put lots of names in the stories and bold them as people scan to find the familiar.”

Twenty-years later, people haven’t changed. We all want to see and hear our stories reflected in the media, whether it’s in paper, on TV or online. And so if you want to grow your Latino, African-American and other hyphenated American audience you need to apply that same  local lens as we’re looking for stories that reflect our names, our families, our friends, our organizations, our ancestries, our countries.

We’re looking for validation; that our stories matter; that we matter; that regardless of what’s to the left of the hyphen – we’re Americans;  we belong and we’re welcome – no different than anyone else.

And unfortunately, more often than not, what we see, hear and read tells us otherwise.

So how to rectify the situation and grow your audience – instead of see it dwindle is to define your audience and then design for your audience.

A good place to start is with some basic market research and analyze your market demographics:

1. How old are they?
2. Where are they or their families from?
3. What ethnicities/races do they belong to?
4. How do they identify themselves?
5. etc..

And then compare your staff and your coverage with your market demographics to see how well it matches.

Even if you may have never paid attention to these items, your audience does and we notice the fact we are underrepresented and under reported.

For example, as a news junky I listen to NPR but find myself constantly frustrated by how news coverage is skewed to Europe and the Middle East despite the fact that there are way more Latinos with roots and families in Latin America than in Europe. And the conflicts and successes in the Americas, have a much greater impact on us here – than conflicts far from our borders.

As a “Paucho”; (my Mom is a “Gaucho” from Argentina and my dad is a “Pocho,”a derogatory Mexican term for a Mexican-American, from New Mexico), I can tell you it’s the little things that matter:

Pronouncing names correctly

I confess I often butcher other non-Latin names, so this isn’t a deal killer but it’s always great when you hear the “r” rolled correctly.

Not interviewing American Tourists when disasters strike in foreign lands

Guess what, when a hurricane strikes Baja California or Manila, chances are that some of those brown Mexicans or Filipinos may actually be Americans  – and I can almost guarantee you that they have family and friends in the US.

A fair share of the coverage that reflects our importance

Does your foreign coverage look at all like this?

Global news is now local for a good part of your audience, so remember what’s foreign to you may be “local” involving family and friends to a significant part of your audience.

Going the extra mile to integrate us into your non-minority stories

Us hyphenated people are everywhere, but we may not be as easy to find if you don’t make a conscious effort to find us. We don’t want to just be affiliated with special interest news, tragedies or controversies.

Not relying on the faux-mouthpieces that supposedly speak for the community

I always remember their were two guys, we called them Frick & Frack from LULAC, that the not-so-in-the know reporters, i.e. everyone but the couple Latino reporters covering the city, would call any time there was a story with a police/civil-rights angle – and these clowns would say stupid things like, “We need less police in our streeets!” which would wind up as story quotes and the official Hispanic position.

As a Hispanic, who lived and hung out in the ‘hood, I never heard anyone ever say there should be less police, not even many ofthe “gangsters.” The conversations I was having with my neighbors, teenagers and adults alike was the need for more and better policing as we were tired of being afraid, hearing gunfire and seeing kids killed.

Hiring us hyphenated-folks; Lots of us

A chocolate chip does not a chocolate-chip cookie make. Tokenism isn’t going to grow your audience -and just because you have one of us, doesn’t mean that person can speak for the larger community. The reality is we are much more than the color of our skin or our names – so just because our last name is Garcia, doesn’t mean we have any clue what life as a Chicana in East LA is like or what it’s like to live in Cuba under Castro. And I certainly don’t mean that you need a Latino to cover Latinos, but it always helps to have people who understand the basics.

Ultimately, you need to hire a broad cross-section of employees of not just various ethnicities, but experiences and geographies, if you’re going to be able to capture the hyphenated-stew, or rather chile or pho, that is America today. And not just as cub reporters, but as leaders who can hire and fire and influence the organizational structure so that we’re not just hyphens grafted onto a tree not committed to change.

It’s really that simple.

How often have you read an issue article with a political angle at the local, state or federal level and wondered:

• Who is my representative?
• What’s their stand on the issue?
• How can I give them feedback easily?
• What do other groups that I respect have to say about the issue?
• Why didn’t I learn about this meeting or issue before the vote took place?
• Where do my fellow constituents stand on the issue?

While traditional news articles may enrage, they rarely help people engage as they lack the personalized content and tools for people to easily take intelligent action.

So here’s my recommendations:

1.  Leverage the power of GIS/mapping to identify which elected officials or candidates are aligned to each reader. Instead of your audience wondering which one of the city council members or county commissioners represent them, in exchange for users entering their addresses, news organizations can display the specific elected officials aligned to their location.
2. Survey the elected officials about their stances and publish their positions prior to major votes.
3. Send alerts via email, SMS, etc.. notifying your audience when something of concern to them is coming up – with the information about where their elected officials stand on the issue.
4. Enable your audience to vote in favor or against the specific issues – and give them the ability to send their feedback either privately directly to their specific elected officials or post their comments online.
5. Segment the audience vote and feedback by political district so that representatives and residents in that district are able to see what their fellow constituents are saying – and not have it lost in the larger noise from people outside their district.
6. Capture the elected officials votes on issues and save them so your audience can easily scan through them come voting time or if they have questions in the future.

Just imagine if news organizations implemented these six basic concepts; what it would  mean for both civic and site engagement.

Today, all the pieces exist to execute this vision for interactive personalized political “journalism,” but no one has merged them together into a seamless experience for both journalist and reader.

Sunlight Labs and others have built powerful services that provide elected official information and even make it easy to give feedback at the state and congressional level. Combined with the many different interactive survey tools it should be “easy” to hack this personalized political vision together.

The bottom line is all the individual components exist today, someone just needs to have the courage and resources to pull them all together into one seamless whole.

And that organization will win the election for the best political coverage platform and our undying gratitude for your service to our nation!

• Do you know who your government representatives are?
• Do you know who to vote for?
• Do you participate in the political and governmental process outside of voting?

If you’re like me, the answer to all of the above is, “Not really”. And the media is partly to blame.

Instead of providing people the information and tools they need to easily and intelligently engage in local politics, news organizations are stuck in old paradigms, Political Journalism 1.0 – covering local politics following a paper and TV-based model – which is a debacle for both their finances and society as a whole.

Despite the dysfunction and the billions spent on political advertising, there has been very little discussion about how to comprehensively leverage technology to bring simplicity, transparency and engagement to local politics, which is especially pathetic when there are so many existing models to borrow from.

The first step into the new world is to take off your “story” glasses and try on your “etail,” “social networking,” “fantasy-sports” and other glasses as you think about moving from just covering politics to becoming a platform for civic engagement. This means providing an editorial and technology platform designed to enable participation.

Today, the technology exists to do this – and various organizations and companies have developed individual components  – but as of yet no one has built out the entire infrastructure. And whomever does will create an entirely new space and largely obsolete the existing models of political coverage – just as Craig’s List killed newspaper classifieds and YouTube transformed online video.

Transforming Retail Politics into Etail Politics

You need to find a new toaster. Where do you turn? Amazon.com. It’s easy, you type “toaster” in the search box, up comes a list that you can sort by price, brand and features. Need information about the specific toaster, click on the links to read product spec, customer reviews, etc.. Want to compare selected toasters, select the models and see how they stack up side by side.

By contrast you need to figure out who to vote for in your local city council. Where do you turn to?  Do a search for your City Council. What pulls up? An individual candidate website.  Maybe you can find a list of city council members – but good luck finding your specific representatives and candidates. And if you can find a list, is it easy to compare them based on their specific stands?

No, No and no! In order to solve this, news organizations need to think of voting as a purchase process and apply basic etail and mapping concepts to politics.

Step 1: Find

You need to help people find their representatives and candidates. Most of us don’t know who our local representatives are – and the current story structure doesn’t help us easily figure that out.

Residents should be able to simply enter their address and pull up a list of all their representatives and candidates from their city council to congressional district.

Today there are multiple sites that enable you to enter your zip code and they will provide a list of your congressional and in some case state representatives – but I’ve yet to find a site that lists all your representatives down to the local level. And amazingly, no local media organizations provide this basic functionality, despite the fact that local politics is a core news offering.

If properly integrated, it would even enhance the reading experience and help make stories more relevant, after all, how many times have you wondered which one of the politicians mentioned in a story are your representatives? Wouldn’t it be great if your specific representative’s names were highlighted with a link to that candidate’s engagement page. Or at the very least enable readers to easily find out which is their representative.
Step 2: Choose and Engage
It’s election season and as I drive to work, I’m surrounded by a sea of signs, but when I go online and try to figure out who to vote for, there’s a paucity of trustworthy easy to find information. And I certainly can’t easily compare candidates side by side the way I can when selecting a toaster online.  The result is frequently clueless, frustrated voters – often either guessing who to vote for, skipping the majority of the races and/or not participating in the elections at all – angry at the media for its haphazard, mostly unhelpful approach to campaign coverage.

If the traditional media is going to stay relevant and regain its standing, it needs to begin providing the same tools people use when shopping online, deciding on where to eat and engaging with each other. That means providing readers the ability to easily:

1. Compare candidates qualification and positions on key issues. This requires offering both a technology platform and an editorial oversight role to select the key issues for candidates to respond to. A “journalist” should be both identifying issues, e.g. new court ruling will require the school district to redraw school boundaries, and polling residents about what they view as key issues.
2. Reduce the shouting by limiting the conversation to residents in their specific districts. One of the problems of the Internet era is it’s easy to become the target of a national audience and be overwhelmed by angry voices from outside the district. By requiring address level information to participate, it’s may be possible to reduce the noise from outraged minorities (not necessarily people of color) on the left or the right that often seem to hijack the political conversations.
3. Encourage participation by enforcing clear rules of engagement designed to maintain civility – as all it takes is a couple of verbal hand grenades to transform the conversation into shouting matches. And I, like many people, find the flames just completely turn me off – and often make me wish for the pre-comment era.
4. Ask questions and receive answers from politicians. The YouTube debates enabled ordinary people to ask questions and Obama took it the next logical step with his Open for Questions http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions
5. Vote early and often for candidates. The site www.HotOrNot.com pioneered the ability to vote online – and as simple and as silly it is, it’s addicting. Visible Vote (Now http://www.bythepeople.us/  ) enables you to “vote” on candidates and bills. And this should be a standard for any political site. People should be able to rate and vote on the politician, their stands and their votes – as a way to give people both a voice and engage in the site. There should be weekly polls on the candidates and representatives – and give people the ability to vote on candidates’ positions, ads and everything else.
6. Campaign online in favor or against candidates. Make it easy for people to share their opinions, create petitions and take action. People post signs in their front yards, why not make it easy to show your support online by providing people easy-to-use tools to show their support on their Facebook pages, blogs and emails.
7. Personalize political stories.  When I read an article, I’m often not sure if it applies to me, or which council person I should care about. In the future there needs to be prompts and linkages that make it easy to determine who in the article is my elected representative and their position on an issue. Traditional story telling isn’t dead – it just needs to be updated to take advantage of new technologies and meet key readers’ needs.
8. Read reviews from groups and people they trust. Customer reviews are standard on retail shopping sites, but are a little more problematic for reviewing politicians. If I’m a conservative gay Republican I don’t care what straight liberal Democrats think about a politician. I care what other conservative gay Republicans think. Today, sites like REI.com or diapers.com enable you to not only read reviews but select reviews based on what group the reviewer belonged to. After all, I may not trust a journalist to provide me with “unbiased” commentary, but if I belong to the NRA, I’ll trust their candidate ratings.

Until news organizations move from just thinking of themselves as storytellers writing articles to focusing on helping voters more easily and more intelligently participate in the political process, voters will continue to feel confused and disenfranchised, news organizations will become less and less relevant and our democracy will be driven by the few, instead of the many.

I originally wrote this in 2010 and sadly news organizations are still stuck in the same old broken paradigm.

I hate to say it but the Old Gray Lady needs a major face lift if it’s going to be welcome in my home again.

We’d been getting the Wall Street Journal for the last few years, until we received a gift subscription to the New York Times so we let our subscription to the Journal lapse. My wife and  teenage daughters really enjoyed the Journal’s inviting layout, easy-to-read articles and especially the Market Place, Personal Journal and all the Weekend Extra sections, but I loved the NY Times articles on the Web and was looking forward to receiving the entire paper.

So after three months of the New York Times, our family unanimously agrees, the Times is out and the Wall Street Journal is coming back to our driveway.

While the WSJ still has a focus on business and Wall Street in particular, it didn’t feel like it was written just for Wall Street Insiders. There were articles on politics, international affairs, science, family, education, relationships, etc… that were easy to read and of interest to the family.

On any given day there were always more than a few articles that interested adults and teenagers alike. While the Journal  may not have as much written content as the NY Times, the layout was a lot more user friendly for a busy family always on the go. So at the end of the week, you actually learned more even if there was less actual text/content.

The NY Times on the other hand seemed like a big gray mass of text with an overwhelming number of articles and even worse, an intense focus on the New York arts and culture scene, about as a relevant to a Memphian as Memphis city politics are to New Yorkers.

While it featured some great articles, the total amount of text was too much to read and the stories too hard to find. Everything was so buried in a sea of words that even though our family is very internationally focused (One spouse is from Europe. I’m half Argentine. One daughter wants to be a diplomat, etc…) the length of the articles made it difficult to find the time to read.

Instead of being able to quickly ingest an article or two over breakfast before dashing out the door, you needed to plan on setting aside time for a three-course meal to digest articles in the Times. Rather than being an enjoyable Sunday read, going through it was viewed as kind of a chore, and mostly abandoned by everyone except for myself – a former reporter and intense news junkie.

When I was a reporter at the Orange County Register we used to grouse about the travesty of having to write more condensed articles and having our articles chopped to fit the papers easy-to-read design guidelines. After I left and started editing/designing publications,  I discovered the importance of design. And now as a busy dad and marketer, I’ve come to appreciate good design even more, which is why one reason why I appreciated the Journal, and why I’m even more surprised that the Times hasn’t focused more on making their content more accessible.

Another part of the problem is the “New York” in the New York Times. While many, daresay most of us, outside of New York embrace the brand for its ongoing history of great journalism – especially its coverage of national and international events – most of us don’t really care about New York, and find the intense parochialism, off putting.

On the Web, it’s less of an issue, as it’s very easy to skip the New York components and dive into the areas of interest, but in the paper form, it’s very distracting. And while we’re all Webheads, nothing beats bringing a good-old fashioned paper to the bathroom or for sharing articles and commentary with family around the breakfast table.

Now that our gift subscription to the Times has run out, we’ve re-upped our subscription to the WSJ and are looking forward to relaxing with the paper instead of working through the paper.

To the Commercial Appeal & other Memphis-area news organizations,

Now is your chance to rise above and help us Shelby County residents better understand some of the momentous choices we are about to make, but it will require moving beyond the traditional reporting and writing of the past to actual analysis & presentation of information.

Us residents of Bartlett, Germantown and Collierville are about to vote on creating new school districts but without having any of the tools required to really understand the impacts of our decisions. And your text-based reporting doesn’t really illustrate or explain what the impacts of the different scenarios really are.

If you and the rest of the news organizations really want to thrive in an interactive world, then it’s time to move beyond just writing and adopt new tools  – like GIS/ computerized mapping, which can give us readers the ability to visually see how different options will impact us.

Depending upon how the new municipal school boundaries are drawn, e.g. if they only include students within the municipality, you will have dramatic fluctuations school populations – either increasing or decreasing – and therefore the potential revenue and staff available at the school.

For example, we love Riverdale Elementary, our neighborhood school, but as far as I can tell the majority of the school kids actually come from the Cordova area outside of Germantown city limits. If a new municipal school district was too be launched then my assumption is all the kids from Cordova would be excluded and attendance   would plummet. Instead of overcrowding, we’d be faced with empty classrooms and firing teachers.

However, these are all guesstimates as I don’t have the tools to easily calculate the different scenarios. Instead, I get to read articles from different stakeholders sharing general opinions but without really getting insight into the cold hard numbers or what new boundary changes will mean to me.

It’s as if I turned on the TV news to find out the details of a dangerous storm heading our way so I could decide whether my family should take shelter in the closet or not – and instead of a meteorologist giving me detailed visual information about the storm track and intensity, reporters with no meteorological training were interviewing various “experts” about the storm.

“Yes, it’s going to be a dangerous storm,” exclaims expert one.

“Well it shouldn’t really be that bad unless you’re in the impacted areas,” explains expert two.

“There you have it, it will be a stormy night,” explains the reporter.

Meanwhile, what people like me, have come to expect is a trained expert using advanced analysis/visualization tools showing us the intensity and storm track so we can make potentially life or death decisions. (For those of you outside of tornado country, check out this clip of the play-by-play analysis of a severe storm to see what I mean.)

Because I have a GIS background, I could potentially conduct the analysis but that’s what I’m looking to you for as I have a full time job and kids. That’s why I subscribe, or don’t, to the Commercial Appeal or turn to other local news sources.

The reality is that if I want to buy a car, house or furniture, I’m going to look on Craig’s List, but when it comes to understanding what’s going on with my city, county and schools I look to news organizations, but you need to provide me the information I want and need in order for me to shell out my hard-earned money for a subscription.

The good news is that the technology has become much cheaper and easier to learn and use – so someone with some curiosity and basic spreadsheet skills can quickly move from just reporting to analysis.

And if you don’t have the skill sets internally, partner with the university or people like me who do. Whatever you do, don’t continue doing what you’ve been doing and expect different results – your business and your community need you  to do better.

Sincerely,

Kevin Mireles

It’s hard to believe it’s been sixteen years since that fateful St. Patrick’s Day party at my place in Santa Ana when I hooked up with my wife.

Since my roommate was Vietnamese and I’m an undercover Hispanic we celebrated this Irish holiday in a 100% American way with green fried rice, a Shamrock piñata, Guinness, Irish whiskey and a multicultural and multicolored group of friends.

Not everyone was as enthused about this cultural miscegenation. My roommate’s Irish-American boyfriend just kept muttering between swigs of Irish whisky, “My grandfather must be turning over in his grave,” as we ate our fried rice and took turns whacking the pinata.

But that’s what I love about America. Where else can you celebrate an Irish Catholic holiday with an Asian and Mexican twist? Nowhere! And that’s why where others are dismayed at the sights and sounds of other countries in their own front yards, I see the strength and vitality that will be critical to our success in this global economy.

After all, I’m a cultural mutt. My kids are mutts. My dog’s a mutt. And that’s what makes America great – the mashups of people and cultures that create new versions of old traditions – especially food!

Lets face it the “traditional” American diet is pretty boring. I remember the days when even in LA my mom would have to drive cross town to get fresh raviolis and empanadas. And the concept of eating raw fish with rice and seaweed was virtually unheard of –  at least in my household. Instead, being a good Mexican-Argentine-American family we’d have much more traditional food, like bacon, eggs, waffles and beans or steak and beans or beans and empanadas…. you get the picture.

Back then, your choice of bread was white Wonder bread or if you wanted something with a little fiber  there was Roman Meal bread in the yellow and orange bag  – and that’s it. Now walk into a  supermarket in any major city and there’s tofu, tortillas, sushi and Sriracha  Sauce next to the Greek yogurt and Gruyere cheese.

Even beyond that, the dirty little secret of our information age is that it’s primarily powered by South Asian immigrants and others from around the globe with the talent, education and drive required to thrive in a code-driven economy.

And where would I be without this global society? Nowhere  as I’m a Paucho; the mix of an Argentinian Gaucho and a Mexican-American Pocho.

Worse yet, I’d never have met my French wife and learned about the joys of home-made whipped cream. Growing up I thought it just came out of a can and had no idea just how good it could be! Or how easy it is to make! I’d know nothing of tarts, the joys of cheese or the proper way to eat mussels – that’s with another mussel shell of course!

My kids wouldn’t be bilingual – now working toward trilinguality – and most of all I wouldn’t have my partner, the woman I love, the femme I fight with, the mother of my kids, who watches my back, tells me the things I don’t want to hear, holds me tight when I need a hug – my petite hummingbird who flits from task to task and declares on a daily basis, “I can’t understand why I’m so tired” despite waking at 5:30 a.m., rarely stopping, never sitting, helping cranky kids with homework, planting gardens, cleaning, installing kitchen tiles, cooking home-made meals, dashing to and fro for good deals and kids activities.

And I might not have her in my life if it weren’t for celebrating an Irish saint’s birthday nearly 1,700 years later here in America – home of the free, the brave and the mutts.