Step on your Porch: Progress never sits still long enough for me

Sitting at the shiny new Beacon office last week, I got to looking out the window while I was thinking about the results of Tuesday night's elections around the country, and I ended up thinking about Texas and baking powder and Kennedy half dollars.

Bear with me – I promise, I'll land the plane.

Plenty of you probably remember: You used to get $2 bills and Kennedy fifty-cent pieces for change at Nickís.

I can only assume it was genius guerilla marketing before we had a word for that. 

Because what was a guy gonna do when he leafed through his wallet and saw a couple $2 bills? At that point, you basically have to go grab a couple cheeseburgers, right?

But see, at my father's house, we never spent Kennedy half dollars. We were exactly Irish Catholic enough that anything with JFK's picture on it transubstantiated, like the water into wine, into a totem of solemn pride. And I am reasonably sure a pile of those coins in my room – leftover from Nick's trips – is what inspired my Dad to cut a hole in the top of an empty five-pound tin of Calumet baking soda for my bank. Other kids had ceramic pigs, but we were a food service household.

Of course, both John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the man who replaced him as president after he was murdered in Dallas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, were long gone by the time I came around.

But my Dad made sure I read plenty about John, and Bobby, and how after JFK was killed, LBJ decided to pass the pending Civil Rights Act anyway, despite wild opposition.

While Kennedy was the sainted, fallen hero, it was actually the Texan Johnson who bullied and cajoled and argued his way to passing the landmark legislation in 1968.

Supposedly, after Johnson signed the bill, he turned to his top aide and said, "I fear we just lost the South for the Democrats for my lifetime – and probably yours."

Johnson died not long after, in 1973. That aide, a man by the name of Bill Moyers, would go on to have perhaps the most distinguished American journalism career of his generation. 

Moyers died from pancreatic cancer in 2025 at the age of 91.

And so it came to pass that late Tuesday night, a man named James Talarico took the stage in Austin after becoming the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Texas since 1988. Democrats swept the Texas statewide races and dominated races in North Carolina, Georgia and even look to have won a Senate seat in Mississippi.

But it was Talarico's 12-point victory that was seemingly most impressive – and the most poetic.

Because, of course, he won Lyndon Baines Johnson's old Senate seat.

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58 years later – and it certainly feels longer than that, doesn't it? And then I thought of those Kennedy half dollars, again.

There was an echo in this election of Kennedy's 1960 run to the presidency, at least from my perspective.

In Michigan, a telegenic young candidate and gifted orator named Abdul El Sayed won a Senate seat with a campaign relentlessly dialed in on kitchen table issues like the cost of fuel and groceries, the spiraling costs of health care.

Like JFK in 1960, El Sayed was accused of having dual loyalties. No Muslim had ever been elected to the U.S. Senate before last week – just like Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic to win a presidential election. Like JFK, Sayed largely tried to steer his campaign above those accusations of guilt by association.

But that wasn't what had me thinking of fifty cent pieces. It was holding a grudge.

This summer and into the fall, back in Ireland, an older, if not less ugly part of the political past was once again thrust into the spotlight.

On Garvaghy Road in Portadown, County Armagh, in the North of Ireland, the past seemed destined to repeat itself. For more than 800 years, the North of Ireland has existed as – depending on who you ask – kind of Britain, kind of Ireland, but neither one nor the other.

I don't have the column inches nor the expertise to truly and completely explain it all, so you'll have to live with my opinion: A bunch of orange-sash wearing goobers in dumb hats have only one thing unifying them: Old fashioned hate and prejudice.

So when political fortunes for the loyalist party turn poor, they have only one card to play: Racial, religious, sectarian strife. The Orange Order demanded their "right" to march down the Garvaghy road this summer, as they have every summer since The Troubles ended. But in a display of stupidity nearly unrivaled in human history, THIS summer, the parade commission established in the North of Ireland at the end of The Troubles gave them the green light.

The last time the loyalists sincerely tried to march through this overwhelmingly Catholic, unionist neighborhood, it was 1998 and I was fresh out of high school. It was a nightmare.

Scores of Catholic churches were firebombed. Skirmishes broke out at the barricades, with dead on both sides.

Three Catholic brothers – Jason, Mark and Richard Quinn, aged 8,9 and 10 – were murdered that July when their apartment was firebombed by loyalists.

It was the worst of everything the North of Ireland had shown the world for an entire generation through The Troubles. And this summer, the pattern proceeded how it had seemingly thousands of times before. Another eye, and another eye, the ballad goes, until everyone is blind.

But this story didn't end that way. Instead, thousands of Irish people showed up on the Garvaghy Road. But instead of opportunists using the standoff as an excuse to escalate to violence, this time the better angels of the Unionist nature held their ground.

They stood where they stood, in defiance of an order from a government body, yes. But they threw no Molotov cocktails, nor rocks. No hasty ambushes were set up. This time, the green and gold side simply showed up, blocked the road and said "No." 

Eventually, even the local protestant church grew tired of the Orange Order, and sent them back where they came from.

It was maybe not the military victory we sing songs about. After all, I'm Irish – we only sing songs about military defeats. 

But it was an unequivocal blow for civil rights in the North of Ireland, in 2026, without a drop of blood shed. More than sixty years after John Fitzgerald Kennedy overcame anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States to attain its highest office, the residents of a least one town in Armagh were allowed to live their autumn without scores of grown men in orange neckties trying to celebrate killing small boys in their streets.

Progress is a funny thing, but it's a thing, all the same.

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So what, then, are we to make of last week's election results? Nationwide, it's impossible to argue there was a once-in-a-generation swing in the results from just two years ago. Democrats won senate and governor's seats across the nation in places that have long been Republican strongholds – in Kansas and Iowa, in South Carolina and Mississippi, in Colorado and New Mexico. President Trump now enters the lame duck period of his term with strong opposition majorities in both houses of Congress.

But here in South Dakota, the election results didn't look much different than any over the past 25 years. Single party rule isn't leaving us any time soon. 

Progress means laying down grudges, eventually. But it also means holding fast to ideals. Whether in Texas or County Armagh, moving onward also means this: You cannot keep progress in a jar, or even a baking powder tin.

The only thing to do with progress is use it to make more progress. That's why the sign on the Beacon office door says "Onward." It's my daily reminder that the only way out is through, and that even when things don't make immediate sense, if you put your head down and keep doing the work – if you're willing to work harder than you have before, or take risks you never dared, you will eventually get results you had not before.

The next two years will certainly be written about for centuries to come when the histories of this nation are composed. All that anyone can do is put their head down and do their work.

Be just and fear not – the years will pass, either way. 

Might as well see them through.