Annika Neklason

Instead of telling my sister to follow a plan into her future, I want her to know that there’s no honor in sticking with the wrong decision just because it’s the one you made first. You can always change your mind. You can always say no. You can always admit you were wrong, turn back and throw out every map you drew for yourself. And sometimes, you should.

The Fourth of July, and what it commemorates, serves as a reminder that laws without morals are useless, that unjust rules should be fought. In the midst of the ongoing arguments over the country’s founding principles, the long-held definition of marriage, the heritage represented by the Confederate flag and the best way to move forward as a nation, that idea is something we must hold onto.

This week, the families of nine innocent men and women prepare to lay their bodies to rest in Charleston, South Carolina.

Fifty years ago, after a long and sometimes bloody struggle waged by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights activists around the country, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Put simply, this act prohibited racial discrimination in voting on both a state and federal level.

Environmental issues feel abstract and distant in Philadelphia, experienced in their extremes only through news items and stories, through conversations in science and political science classes that end at the close of a lecture and through brief bouts of social activism like the campus referendum for fossil fuel divestment. But in California they have become unavoidable as the drought has progressively worsened, coloring the landscape and creeping into residents’ daily routines.

For whatever reason, what I haven’t heard about nearly as much is the positive: simply put, the fact that Obamacare is working.

Unfortunately, Americans are abandoning the script and exercising their right to opt out of inoculation — and preventable diseases are now making a comeback as a result.

In a country of hundreds of millions of people, one vote does not give you assurance or control. But it does give you a voice.

As a teenager living at a boarding school where many of those choices were made for me by higher authorities, my vegetarianism felt like something I could control. Something I could do, myself, to fight for a cause I cared about.

I think the real punch line is our failure to grasp the simple truth that doing the same thing over and over will never produce a different result. Until we make a real move toward restricting firearm access, we’ll keep reading about these shootings in the morning news.