Chad Frey

Not too long ago I had the privilege of representing Kansas Farm Bureau at the American Farm Bureau Federation Convention in San Antonio. For any of you who have never attended an annual meeting, it would be my hope that someday you might get that opportunity. If you do you should jump on it as fast as you can.

On February 18, investor/entrepreneur James Fishback posted a suggestion to X: “President Trump and @ElonMusk should announce a ‘DOGE Dividend’ -- a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE.”

We are in a collective grief process. The old normal passed away. We are not getting it back, at least not anytime soon. And so, the destabilization we are feeling right now is two-fold. First, the destabilization that we feel from the flooding of the zone, which is by design, and part of a playbook we knew was coming. They told us. But what we did not expect was another destabilization—that is, the destabilization that comes with grief.

As I write, the Kansas House Committee on Judiciary is about to hear HB 2348, which would eliminate tenure at higher education institutions governed by the State of Kansas. The bill emerged from a legal dispute between certain faculty members and administrators at Emporia State, yet its consequences would reverberate far beyond that.

The first time I heard a Bob Dylan song was at Washington Elementary School in Baxter Springs, where in the auditorium a young music teacher led our class in singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 at the time, but I remember thinking so hard about the words and what they meant that I slipped into a kind of reverie.