This week’s Editorial page includes a column about how we can create a better world, political thoughts by Mitch Kokai and a New Year’s column from Pat Throckmorton.

A New Year’s invitation to parents, caregivers, and caring community contributors—our fellow citizens

Parents in Edenton and Chowan County face pressures no previous generation has ever known, and no family is equipped to navigate them alone. This letter is both an invitation and a challenge to all of us—schools, churches, businesses, governing bodies, civic organizations, and neighbors—to stand beside parents and caregivers and take shared responsibility for the environment in which our children are growing up. This is not a call to reject technology. It is a call to put it back in its proper place—under deliberate human guidance, in service of our children’s flourishing, rather than autonomously or algorithmically directing their attention, relationships, and development.

Two recent, extensively researched books—The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and The Digital Delusion by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath—deliver warnings that caring communities like ours should not ignore. Haidt documents what he calls “The Great Rewiring of Childhood,” in which a play-based childhood has been replaced by a phone-based one, coinciding with sharp and sustained increases in anxiety, depression, loneliness, and even suicide among young people. Horvath shows how continuous, poorly bounded screen use—especially in classrooms—undermines attention, memory, and deep learning, leaving students less capable of genuine critical thinking and more vulnerable to manipulation. Neither author is anti-technology; both show that the danger arises when devices and platforms quietly set the terms of childhood and schooling instead of families and communities doing so.

The consequences are serious. When children no longer roam, play, argue, cooperate, and solve problems together in the real world, they miss critical developmental experiences and lose essential opportunities to become self-governing. They struggle to manage risk, regulate emotions, negotiate disagreement, and develop sound judgment—skills no app or algorithm can supply. Meanwhile, the digital environment surrounding them is saturated with divisive politics, targeted marketing, destructive behaviors, deliberate manipulation, and psychological pressures that even many adults find difficult to resist. If this trajectory continues unchecked, we should expect not only poorer mental health and weaker learning outcomes, but a generation less prepared to distinguish truth from propaganda, authentic community from manufactured outrage, and freedom from manipulation.

This is not simply a parenting problem or a school problem; it is a community problem. The digital ecosystem shaping our children is larger than any household. If we want young people in Chowan County to grow into confident, self-governing citizens capable of critical thought, moral reasoning, and meaningful civic participation, we must build and model a culture that protects their attention, strengthens their judgment, and roots them in real relationships—using technology as a carefully controlled tool, not a substitute for real life.

We propose that Chowan County launch a “Connected in the Real World” initiative. This would not be anti-tech; it would be pro-child, pro-family, and pro-community. Its mission would be to support parents in restoring balance and real connection, reclaim a play-based childhood from the worst effects of the Great Rewiring, and raise a generation able to use modern tools wisely while recognizing—and resisting—their manipulative side.

Schools can and should lead through example. Drawing on Horvath’s research, our public schools should make a decisive shift away from digital dependency and toward hands-on, deeply cognitive learning that builds real understanding and lifelong learning skills. This means a school day where personal devices are stored away bell-to-bell and where instruction—especially from kindergarten through eighth grade—relies primarily on handwriting, printed books, face-to-face teaching, discussion, and play-based activities that strengthen attention, memory, and social skills. In high school, digital tools should be used intentionally and sparingly—for specialized research or final editing, not for note-taking, using AI, or passive screen consumption. 

This approach builds the intellectual backbone students need to turn away from divisive politics, sensational “news,” manipulative marketing, and destructive cultural messages, whether they encounter them online or in real life. It helps them become self-directed, self-governing young people capable of weighing evidence, listening to others, and thinking for themselves. By reclaiming the classroom from technology’s grip, schools can restore curiosity, concentration, and the joy of learning—and graduate young adults who are not easily swayed by the loudest voices on a screen. 

Churches and faith communities can offer something families deeply need: screen-light spaces where children and teens experience friendship, service, worship, and moral reflection in person. Youth programs can emphasize character, intergenerational relationships, and service rather than digital entertainment or outrage. “Digital Sabbath” evenings, shared meals, outdoor activities, and simple games can show that device-free time is not deprivation, but a path to joy, belonging, community and inner strength.

Local businesses and community leaders can help families step away from screens and step back into shared life. By sponsoring “Screen-Free Saturdays” or similar events—offering activities that reward in-person engagement such as arts, sports, reading circles, outdoor recreation, and neighborhood gatherings—they can help children associate our town not with constant consumption, but with meaningful relationships and civic connection.

Community organizations and governing bodies can reinforce this cultural course correction by advocating for better-bounded technology use, championing literacy and play-centered child development, and directing resources toward books, tutoring, debate, outdoor recreation, and social activities that build attention, empathy, and independent judgment, while exercising caution about new digital or screen-heavy initiatives for children.

At the center of all this stand parents and caregivers. They need and deserve strong backing. Neighborhoods can form mutual-support groups and pledges to delay smartphones and social media, keep bedrooms screen-free, and prioritize outdoor play, hobbies, and family time over digital entertainment and 24-hour commentary. Parents, partnered with educators, can push for printed homework, paper-based note-taking, and digital phone-free schools that align home and school expectations while sending children a unified message: your mind, your character, and your relationships matter more than any app or device.

This is our New Year’s challenge: for parents to lead, and for the rest of us to actively have their backs. It will take courage, consistency, and collective effort—but the rewards are enormous. We can give our children a childhood marked by confidence, friendship, critical thinking, character, community, and joy, rather than constant comparison, fear, and manipulation. The change will not come from distant policymakers or tech companies. It can begin—right now—in our own homes, schools, churches, businesses, and streets here in Edenton and Chowan County.  For this to be effective, it will take a village—a village that supports, assists, steps-up and steps-in.

Sincerely,

The Village

Editor’s Note: Although I’m hesitant to publish letters to the editor without the name of the author, I received this letter from a notable person, not some random redneck in the woods, so it is bona fide and vetted.

Looking back while looking toward new year’s political battles

By Mitch Kokai

As we welcome a new year, political pundits will soon focus much of our attention on polls, campaign speeches, and television ads.

In 2026 North Carolina will elect a new US senator, help determine which party controls the US House, and decide whether state legislative leaders will have enough votes to overcome the governor’s vetoes.

Each is important to the state’s future.

Yet it’s also worthwhile to step back from current controversies. Refocusing on basic principles reminds us that ballot choices involve more than supporting or opposing the red and blue teams.

In recent weeks, this observer enjoyed revisiting the yellowed pages of a now 70-year-old paperback copy of Peter Viereck’s “Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill.” Writing when Winston Churchill was still an active player in British politics, Viereck had no knowledge in 1956 of the Reagan Revolution, the Tea Party movement, or other significant recent developments in conservative history. 

Yet Viereck’s observations are far from outdated. One could devote multiple columns to useful insights within his 186-page volume.

The rest of today’s discussion focuses on one of Viereck’s subjects: the 19th-century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville. “Some excellent authorities call him liberal; some, conservative,” Viereck reminds us. “Liberal was his open-minded approach and his criticism of Bourbon monarchy and the days before 1789,” the year of the French Revolution.

“Conservative was his warning that democratic conformity may stifle liberty and that equality and liberty are opposites, not synonyms,” Viereck argued. “His mind was totally independent. Its lonely truths upset liberal and conservative cliches equally. Today many readers find his insights more original and exciting than ever.”

“Today” meant 1956 to Viereck. Spend much time around fans of political liberty these days, and you’ll discover that Tocqueville remains a favorite subject.

After touring our still relatively new country roughly 200 years ago, Tocqueville  “found more to praise than to blame in our democratic experiment,” Viereck wrote. “But by predicting with uncanny accuracy the nature of our future demagogues and thought-controllers, he warned America against the intolerance, the stifling conformity of mob pressure.”

“So doing, he took the characteristically conservative stand that equality threatens liberty: ‘Americans are so enamored of equality they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom,’” Viereck added. “But our severest critic was also our warmest friend: ‘The principal instrument of America is freedom; of Russia, slavery.’”

Long after his American trip, Tocqueville viewed revolution directly during the tumultuous year of 1848. His published recollections of that year “contained three assumptions fundamental to conservatism: protection of a traditional framework, rejection of majority dictatorship, and rejection of a priori blueprints of social utopia,” Viereck explained.

By “a priori blueprints,” Viereck means theoretical designs with no basis in actual human experience.

While supporting tradition, “Tocqueville recognized the inevitability of constant change,” Viereck wrote. “In contrast with liberal relativists, he urged a permanent framework of what he called ‘forms’: to canalize the inevitable change.”

“His writings were one long war against unhistorical and rootless thinking,” Viereck concluded.

As with most thinkers profiled in the book. Tocqueville tells part of the story himself.

“Men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms,” Viereck quotes Tocqueville as writing in “Democracy in America.” Those “forms” are traditional institutions or practices.

Tocqueville critiques small-d democrats. “Forms excite their contempt and often their hatred; as they commonly aspire to none but easy and present gratifications, they rush onwards to the object of their desires, and the slightest delay exasperates them.”

“This same temper, carried with them into political life, renders them hostile to forms, which perpetually retard or arrest them in some of their projects,” Tocqueville continued. “Yet this objection which the men of democracies make to forms is the very thing which renders forms so useful to freedom; for their chief merit is to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, the ruler and the people, to retard the one and give the other time to look about him.”

“Forms become more necessary in proportion as the government becomes more active and more powerful, while private persons are becoming more indolent and more feeble,” Tocqueville warned. “Thus democratic nations naturally stand more in need of forms than other nations, and they naturally respect them less.”

We see no shortage today of attacks on basic American institutions and forms. Restoring respect for those forms ought to occupy at least some of our attention as we look ahead to key political discussions and decisions in 2026.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.

Happy New Year

By Pat Throckmorton

The coming of the New Year is a time of reflection.  Once again, astonishingly and without mishap (leaving aside the odd war, depression, or plague), we have revolved around the sun and returned to where we started to begin anew. 

How can you possibly not believe in God!? 

New Year’s Day is the morning of the year when winter turns to spring, spring into summer, and summer into fall, then the cycle repeats itself.  As the New Year approaches, we turn our thoughts toward self-improvement.  We desire to leave bad habits and vices behind. 

Christopher Flannery (host of The American Story podcast) said, “We begin to wonder at ourselves and take on small but innocent airs.  When we further reflect that without batting an eye or breaking a sweat, we have rocketed over a million and a half miles in our orbit around the sun since this time a day ago and that we are now going to start over and perform these same mysteries and miracles again in a mere 24 hours, we become almost tempted to the sin of pride; we feel that the Frenchman might have stumbled onto something when he counseled that audacity is always the right approach unless it is more audacity that is required.”

“Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.  But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  Philippians 3:13-14 NIV.

Saul, the zealous young man, was known as the persecutor of Christians.  The Apostle Paul had reason to forget what was behind – he had held the coats of those who stoned Stephen, the first recorded Christian martyr.  Read Acts 7:57-58 for this account wherein Paul was called Saul before his conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus.

Like Paul, we too have acts and behaviors in our past that we would like to forget; things we have done or said to others that were less than honorable or moral.  As we contemplate the incoming New Year, we reflect on the “old” and anticipate the “new.”  We may resolve to clean up our vocabulary, change our eating habits, exercise more, show more compassion, share what we have with others, and be more Christlike.  Those would be my resolutions for 2023!  What happens, though, is this: by Valentine’s day or maybe even by Epiphany, our resolutions start to fade.

“Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”  2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV.
Christians are brand new people on the inside.  We are not rehabilitated, reformed, or reeducated.  We are not the same anymore – the Holy Spirit re-creates us.  We are not turning over a new leaf; instead, we are beginning a new life under a new Master!  Resolve to be a Christian if you are not. 

“Remember ye, not the former things, neither consider the things of old.”  Isaiah 43:18 KJV.  The Israelites had been enslaved people in Egypt before their flight.  Past miracles were nothing compared to what God would do for His people in the future.  And that applies to us, His people, today!

We each have a personal responsibility to serve God.  “Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship.  Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.”  Romans 12:1-2 NIV.  In the Old Testament, we read about priests killing animals, cutting them up, and placing them on the altar as a sacrifice.  But God made it clear that obedience was much more critical – He wants us to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice.  His plan for us is good, pleasing, and perfect.

Happy New Year, and walk with God!  As we begin the New Year with hope and expectations, there is much to celebrate about the past year; we must rejoice in what is about to come. 

Someone said, “Write in your heart that every day is the best day of the year.”  And every day is the perfect opportunity to give our hearts and souls to our Savior.

A retired nurse, Pat Throckmorton, is a newspaper columnist and published author who lives in Perquimans County.