Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Sean Dietrich 
I remember my first cellphone. I felt like one bad hombre.
I was in my mid-20s. The cellphone retail salesperson outfitted me with a state-of-the-age phone about the size of a residential General Electric refrigerator.
The young woman sits in my truck passenger seat. She is 19. Her hair is red. Scottish red. Luminously red. People always comment on her hair first.
Her classroom was out of control. Had been for a while. The kids in her “at-risk” fourth-grade class were about as organized as a prison riot. That’s what we call them in today’s world. “At-risk youth.”
I have been doing a lot of walking. More walking than I’ve ever done in my life. More walking than I thought possible.
I awoke early and went for a walk with my dog. The sun wasn’t up, I let my eyes adjust to the darkness of Birmingham.
I have here a letter from 19-year-old Erin, who lives in Bristol, Virginia.
“Dear Sean,” she begins, “I want to be happy, but I’m not…
“My family is stressing me out, big-time. Especially my mom.
People from small towns almost never tell you the name of their town first. They always start with the nearest big city and work their way inward.
My sister and I sit cross-legged on the front porch, playing cards. I am losing. Not that this matters.
We are really into the game right now, slapping cards on the porch floor.
Once upon a time there were three little ants. The ants had an unusual home. They lived atop an elephant. Long ago the ants’ mother had reasoned that an elephant would be a wise place to lay eggs to keep them from danger.
You’re 16. One day, you’re hanging out, shooting the bull with friends, when a horde of thugs comes through your village, setting fire to houses, pillaging, and doing unspeakable things to townswomen. Now what?
It was a big storm. The television showed weather updates. The radar looked like red-and-yellow vomit.
“Find shelter!” the weather guy kept saying. “There’s a tornado on the ground in Calera!”
Idiots complain. And I’m not a complete idiot. Idiocy is all about percentages. I’m only 40 percent idiot, the other 75 percent of me is bad at math.
This is my fourth week with a flip phone. My “unintelligent” cellular phone is manufactured by Nokia, and the phone’s primary selling feature is that it sucks.
Anna and her four young daughters were on a trip to England on the SS Ville du Havre. It was a French steamship. All iron. Built like a tank. Except, of course, tanks weren’t around yet. This was 1873.
The kid was filling a shopping buggy. He was reaching for a bag of tortilla chips on the top shelf. I saw one of the older ladies in our aisle reach upward and remove a bag of Tostitos for him.
“Dear Sean,” the letter began, “there’s a dog in my neighborhood who was lost and followed me home.
In a few weeks my wife and I will be walking 500 miles unless we die before we finish. We will be walking the Camino de Santiago, a medieval religious pathway across Spain. We will be on foot. With backpacks. And we shall not be called “hikers,” but in the ancient Spanish tongue: “Locos Americanos con mochilas.”
Husbands and sons. Carpenters and clergymen. Some rich, some poor. Some carrying the nicest firelocks money could buy. Some wielding nothing more than a pitchfork. I was playing my fife for them.
Paul William Bryant was born in the late summer of 1913 in a Cleveland County, Arkansas, backwater. His hometown of Moro Bottom wasn’t even a town, technically. Only seven families lived there.
Columbus, Georgia. I was eating at a barbecue joint not far from the state line. My cousin, John, insisted that this joint serves the best barbecue in the state of Georgia. He made me promise to try it.