Provo • Latino students make up the largest ethnic minority group in Utah, but teachers and administrators of the same group are rare, making up just 2.5 percent of educators compared to 17 percent of the state’s student body.

Only two of the 130 schools in Utah County have a Latino principal, according to Latinos in Action and the Utah chapter of the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents.

“I do get a lot of students, when I tell them I’m the principal, they’re surprised because they don’t picture the principal of a large, comprehensive high school as someone who looks like them,” said Fidel Montero, principal of Timpview High School in Provo.

Latino educators make up the third-largest group of educators in Utah. In second place at 4 percent are those who declined to say what they identify as, the Daily Herald reported .

Provo City School District has the highest percentage of Latino students in Utah County, 24 percent, according to 2017 enrollment information. The Alpine and Nebo school districts have about 12 percent.

Latino interest groups worry that as the number of Latinos in the area grows, the gap between Latino students and educators will widen.

Latinos in Action has a leadership program that has spread to more than 100 schools.

It’s already produced two school counselors, said Jose Enriquez, founder and CEO of Latinos in Action and a former administrator.

Part of the challenge is convincing Latino students to continue on to college and pursue an education career, said Axel Ramirez, a professor of secondary education and the facilitator of the Latino Educators of Tomorrow program at Utah Valley University.

Immigrant families like Ramirez’s often encourage Latino students to become doctors or lawyers, not teachers.

His mother told him: “’I didn’t come to this country for you to just be a teacher.’”

Many of those who decide to pursue a career in education do it to be an important role model for Latino students, he said.

“They want to give back to the teachers that helped them and mentored them and also help the next generation so they don’t have the same experiences,” Ramirez said.

The Latino Educators of Tomorrow program hopes to help Latino education majors by providing them with emotional support and mentoring.

The Utah chapter of the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents guides its members through the hiring process, connects them to role models and provides scholarships.

The group wants to double the number of Latino administrators in the next five years. Its goal is to eventually match student demographics.

Mason Falslev, Sky View High School’s outstanding two-sport athlete, has committed to play basketball for the University of Utah, he announced Saturday.

The 6-foot-3 point guard is a rising junior in Cache Valley. He averaged 20.8 points and shot 54 percent from the field, according to The Herald Journal of Logan and is playing AAU basketball this summer for the Exum Elite Utah Prospects team. Falslev scored 43 points against Highland of Idaho and posted 38 points and 13 rebounds against Cache Valley rival Green Canyon.

Falslev also starred as a receiver for the Bobcat football team that reached the Class 4A semifinals in 2017. If he goes on a church mission, he would join the Utes in 2022.

2020 G Mason Falslev commits to Larry Krystkowiak and the University of Utah. Congrats Mason! pic.twitter.com/k7o3Uwycf9

— Exum Elite (@UtahProspects) July 28, 2018

The Utes have a commitment from a point guard in the class of 2019, Olympus' Rylan Jones. Utah is still in the picture with Nico Mannion, one of the country's top recruits. The son of Ute alumnus Pace Mannion soon is expected to reduce his list to five or six schools.

Utah made the cut to six schools for American Fork forward Issac Johnson, along with BYU, Gonzaga, Ohio State, Stanford and USC. Johnson intends to enroll in 2021, after a church mission.

Competitive energy is palpable at this year’s CubingUSA Nationals in Salt Lake City, but it’s also clear how many Rubik’s fans are drawn as much to the cubing community itself as to the chance of winning a title or prize.

“Everybody is friendly and accepting,” said Elijah Brown, a 16-year-old cuber from Los Angeles. “A lot of us aren’t accepted in other places — but here, we are.”

With dozens of brightly colored Rubik’s Cubes and pyramids of all shapes and sizes in their pockets, backpacks and, sometimes, in large, hard-shelled cases, more than 700 people from across the country have converged at the Salt Palace Convention Center. Competitors range in age, but most are teenagers. Many were accompanied by their parents, who sat on the sidelines of the basement convention room wearing “Cubing Dad” and “Cubing Mom” T-shirts and watching as their children’s hands scramble over neon squares.

Many competitors find solace among friends at these gatherings, while learning patience and perseverance.

“Some people use it as a coping mechanism,” said Ryan McCrary, a sophomore at Brigham Young University from California, who has been cubing since he was 12. “People that fidget a lot or are maybe autistic, it’s literally a part of their lives.”

On Saturday, the second day of nationals, cubers sat together at tables in the center of the room, warming up their hands before competition and playing with unusually shaped puzzles. Backstage, “scramblers” got the cubes ready for the competitors, who sit onstage next to a timer that clocks their fastest solves.

This year’s contest drew the highest attendance in the event’s 14-year history, said Shelley Chang, a member of the board of directors for Cubing USA. The first nationals in 2004, as she recalled, amounted to about 30 enthusiasts from around the world, with a core group of college students who’d staged the event in their math lecture hall.

“It was a very small gathering,” Chang said Saturday. "And I’ve basically watched it grow since then to a 700-person competition.”

‘You can be anybody'

Isaac Myers, an 18-year-old from West Valley City, said he started cubing for a “bad reason” — jealousy.

“In like eighth grade, my friend brought back a cube from winter break and he’s like, ‘I can solve it,’” Myers said. “And I was like, ‘You’re going to teach me.’”

After that, Myers started practicing an “almost unhealthy amount,” working each day to quickly finish his homework and house chores before getting his hands on a cube.

“When you first start out solving a cube, it’s like magic that you can solve it,” he said. “I remember getting my first six-second solve and being dumbfounded, like, ‘How did that happen? What did I do right in that?’”

The event in Salt Lake City, which Myers helped run as a volunteer, was his first national competition. But the recent high school graduate already holds several statewide records in Utah and knows hundreds of algorithms, often complex sequences of moves that help cubers solve parts of the puzzle.

“I love everything about [cubing] except for the exponential decay of how fast you can get in a short amount of time,” he said. “Because like you’re a beginner and doing five solves increases your time by just a huge margin. But then getting up to my level where it’s just like, I need to learn hundreds and hundreds of algs and practice these things to shave off seconds is so hard but it kind of is worth it.”

Many cubers learn how to solve puzzles by watching videos on YouTube. And since it’s easy to find a cube for less than $20, there’s a relatively low economic barrier to entry in the community — and cubing is a skill Myers said anyone can learn.

“You don’t need to be good at math,” he said. “You don’t need to be old. You don’t need to be young. You can be anything. You can be anybody and just solve a Rubik’s Cube really fast if you just put in effort.”

‘A male-dominated sport’

At the same time, competition-level cubing continues to be heavily male-dominated — around 90 percent, Chang estimated. Equity has improved slightly, and conversations about how to improve gender diversity continue, she said.

“In the early days, I was commonly the only woman at a competition,” she said. “Now there are more, and some of them are really fast.”

In 2005, Chang said she became the first woman to solve a 3-by-3 cube blindfolded and held that title for about 10 years in part because, she said, “there were so few women.”

Channae Anderson, a 28-year-old nursing student at Texas Women’s University, has been cubing for eight years, and the competition in Salt Lake City was her third nationals. Though she said “it’s a male-dominated sport for sure,” she also said she hasn’t felt that make a difference.

“Sometimes I forget, you know, that I’m a woman,” she said. “Sometimes I have to say, ‘Wow, I’m the only one around. Wow.’ But they treat me the same as everybody else. It’s good.”

Some male participants said they had noticed they’re usually in the majority, but they’re not sure why. Whatever the answer, many said they’d like to see more diversity.

“I don’t think there’s anyone more disappointed than me that there aren’t more girls at these competitions,” joked McCrary, the BYU sophomore.

Myers encouraged anyone who’s interested in cubing to have patience, keep practicing and “never think you’re too slow.”

“Some of my friends hate going to competitions because it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m too slow.’ But it’s like, ‘No, you’re not too slow,’” he said. “You go to a competition and now forever on the internet people have the availability to see that you can solve a Rubik’s Cube. And that is awesome. Solving Rubik’s Cubes is awesome and if you can do it, go to a competition. If you can’t do it, then learn. Then go to a competition.”

A 48-year-old woman was killed earlier this month when someone in a car outside her Taylorsville home fired at least seven shots into the building, reportedly meaning to hit the woman’s nephew but striking her instead.

Jawnie Wey died July 10. On Thursday, police got a big break in the case when they interviewed someone who was in the car during the drive-by. Thirty hours of “exhaustive” detective work later, a 16-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were booked into jail on suspicion of murder, Unified police spokeswoman Sgt. Melody Gray said.

The shooting, she said, apparently stems from a dispute over a stolen French bulldog. Gray didn’t elaborate on the alleged theft.

According to a probable cause statement, the man, the teen and two others drove by a home near 4900 South and 1950 West.

A witness in the car told police that the man was “upset and heated about something” — apparently the theft of the dog — and wanted to go to the house. As the four drove by, the teen fired several times, according to the probable cause statement.

The 16-year-old told police that the 20-year-old shot at the house, but the man and the witness said that the boy fired and that the man was driving. Gray said police believe the teen was the shooter.

After the shooting, the group apparently went to a groomer to pick up the man’s dog, according to the probable cause statement. Gray said she doesn’t believe the dog at the groomer was the stolen bulldog, because that dog was still at the Taylorsville home when officers investigated.

While the man reportedly didn’t fire the gun, Gray said police arrested him on suspicion of murder “because … they’re all together in the commission of the crime, [and] the decision to make the crime, and because someone died during the commission of the crime.”

Gray said officers are reviewing their case against the two others in the car, and the district attorney will decide whether the pair will be charged.

Court records show that the man hasn’t been formally charged in the case. Case information for the teen isn’t available because he is a minor.

A 13-year-old boy who ran away from a wayward-youths facility in a remote area of Beaver County on Thursday was found Saturday morning.

After reports of sightings in Washington County that caused Beaver County Sheriff’s Office to call off its search, staffers with the Redcliff Ascent wilderness therapy program found Roberto Madrigal about 10 a.m., sitting on the side of the road in Beaver County, program spokesman Steve Schultz said.

Schultz said the California boy had kept hydrated after running away into the desert and was hungry but otherwise OK.

Madrigal will be transported to a facility that has more security.

Espelette, France • No longer merely a support rider for Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas is going to Paris in the yellow jersey.

The Welshman with Team Sky effectively sealed his first Tour de France title by protecting his lead in the time trial on the penultimate stage on Saturday.

Thomas takes an advantage of 1 minute, 51 seconds over Tom Dumoulin into the mostly ceremonial finish on the Champs-Elysees on Sunday.

“It’s just overwhelming,” Thomas said. “I didn’t think about it all race, and now suddenly I won the Tour.”

Dumoulin won the 20th stage by one second ahead of four-time champion Froome, who leapfrogged Primoz Roglic into third place overall.

Thomas finished third in the stage, 14 seconds behind. But that was more than enough with an advantage of more than two minutes at the start of the day.

“The strongest guy has won this Tour de France,” Froome said. “Tomorrow, to stand up on the podium with G, it’s going to be a really proud moment for me.”

Thomas, known as “G,” was a support rider during Froome’s title rides but he became Sky’s undisputed leader when Froome cracked in the grueling 17th stage through the Pyrenees.

Thomas and Froome have been together since their days on the small Barloworld team a decade ago.

“Because we’ve been teammates and friends for so long, it made it easier to communicate honestly,” Froome said. “It was clear as soon as we hit the Alps that Geraint was in better physical condition than me. It was pretty simple, really.”

Wearing an all-yellow skin suit on a bike in the red, white and blue colors of the British flag, Thomas was the last rider to start.

In a few drops of rain, Thomas was quick to regain control when his wheel appeared to lock up coming around a tricky, tight corner early on. Still, he was first at the two checkpoints before slowing in the final kilometers.

“I felt strong. I felt really good, actually. I heard I was up and maybe I was pushing it a bit hard on some of those corners,” Thomas said. “Nico (Portal, Sky sports director) told me to relax, take it easy and just make sure I won the Tour. And that’s what I did.”

At the finish, Thomas let out a loud scream and held his arms out wide in celebration. He embraced his wife, Sara Elen, as soon as he got off his bike.

“The last time I cried was when I got married,” Thomas said as he teared up.

Thomas is poised to become the third British rider — and first Welshman — to win the Tour after Bradley Wiggins and Froome. He will make it Sky’s sixth victory in the last seven years.

“It’s insane really — just all the interest in Cardiff,” Thomas said. “Great to put it on the map. We’re a small nation and we really get behind anyone that’s successful. By the sounds of it, it’s gone pretty crazy back home, so looking forward to going back to celebrate.”

An all-around rider who began his career on the track, Thomas helped Britain to gold medals in team pursuit at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics before turning his full attention to road racing.

Thomas claimed the yellow jersey by winning Stage 11 in the Alps, followed that up with another victory atop Alpe d’Huez a day later, and defended his advantage through the Pyrenees.

“He was in the shape of his life,” Dumoulin said. “He didn’t make any mistakes. He was never put into trouble by anyone, in the mountains or anywhere — including by myself.”

The time trial world champion, Dumoulin clocked under 41 minutes over the hilly and technical 31-kilometer (19-mile) route.

It marked the first time in 12 years the Tour passed through the Basque Country, and fans waving the region’s red, green and white flags lined the entire route in front of the area’s traditional half-timbered houses.

It was Dumoulin’s second career stage win in the Tour, having also won a time trial in 2016. The Dutchman has won six TTs overall at the three Grand Tours — the Tour, the Giro d’Italia and the Spanish Vuelta.

New York • How does it feel to be an esports champion?

“I didn’t think it would be this easy,” London Spitfire support player Seung-Tae “Bdosin” Choi said through a translator. “Next year, I hope we play against a stronger team.”

The Spitfire rolled to the inaugural Overwatch League championship Saturday night, dominating the Philadelphia Fusion over the two-day final at Barclays Center to claim the $1 million top prize. London swept the best-of-three showdown, becoming the first club in the 12-team, international esports league to hoist the trophy.

They celebrated with a little smack-talk.

“I also want to face a stronger team in the finals” next year, London’s Ji-Hyeok “Birdring” Kim said through a translator.

The Overwatch League is the first global, city-based esports league, and it capped its barrier-breaking inaugural season by selling out the Barclays Center and airing the opening match of its Grand Finals on ESPN, the first prime-time appearance for esports on the traditional sports network. The league is planning to add six franchises this offseason and eventually wants to boast 28 teams spanning the globe.

Overwatch’s lone European club lost the first of five scheduled maps Friday night, then swept the rest of the competition. It cemented the trophy by taking King’s Row — fittingly, a London-based map — in overtime.

The crowning moment was pulled straight from the traditional sports world — a confetti shower, a surprisingly heavy trophy, and championship hats and bomber jackets for the players. Even players who had previously won championships in esports-mad South Korea were struck by the scene.

“This was a much larger stage,” Spitfire tank Jae-Hui “Gesture” Hong said through a translator. “And therefore, the happiness, the joy of winning everything is a lot greater here.”

It was a celebratory end to a seven-month grind for London’s entirely Korean roster, which like all the league’s franchises, was based in Los Angeles for the first season until team owners can find home arenas in their host cities. The league hopes to begin playing home-and-away matches in its third season.

“It does feel like we’ve been rewarded with being the grand champions of the league for staying abroad so long,” Grand Finals MVP Joon-Yeong “Profit” Park said through a translator.

London and Philadelphia were the lowest-seeded teams entering the Overwatch League playoffs. The Spitfire were a force early in the season but slumped midway through the year amid internal strife, leading to the release of four players.

The Fusion reached the final by upsetting the top-seeded New York Excelsior. Philadelphia peaked late in the season as its roster featuring players from nine countries gelled and hit its stride in the teamwork-intensive 6-on-6 first-person shooter.

Minneapolis • Lynx star Maya Moore said she’s routinely asked if she has room for all of the awards she’s won in her basketball career. She’ll have to make space for another trophy after her performance on Saturday.

Moore won her third straight All-Star MVP award to lead Team Parker past Team Delle Donne 119-112 in the WNBA All-Star Game.

“Thank you for your concern for my storage space,” Moore deadpanned after she was asked the question again after she scored 18 points, grabbed eight rebounds, and dished out six assists to win the MVP award on her home court.

“It’s crazy, it really is, to just be fortunate enough to continue to be in positions to win, to be playing well, to be healthy,” said Moore, who joined Lisa Leslie as the only three-time MVP of the game and became the all-time scoring leader in All-Star history, passing Tamika Catchings’ mark of 108 points.

Allie Quigley of the Chicago Sky also scored 18 points and Skylar Diggins-Smith of the Dallas Wings added 17 points, eight rebounds, and eight assists for Team Parker.

Team Delle Donne’s Kristi Toliver of the Washington Mystics led all scorers with 23 points, including 7-for-11 shooting on 3-pointers. Rookie A’ja Wilson of the Los Vegas Aces added 18 points.

Toliver made five 3s in the final 5 minutes of the game as Team Delle Donne came back from a 14-point deficit. But Moore drilled a 3-pointer of her own with 1:26 to play, pushing Team Parker’s lead to six and all but sewing up the MVP award.

NEW FORMAT

Eschewing the traditional East-vs.-West format for the first time, the league let captains Elena Delle Donne of the Mystics and Candace Parker of the Los Angeles Sparks chose up sides from a pool of the top players in All-Star voting. That allowed for the rosters to be heavily dominated (16 of the 22 players) by the Western Conference, home of six of the top seven teams in the league standings.

“You’re not going to make a bad pick,” Parker said of the process. “Everybody who’s out here is here is here for a reason, so it was just about having fun and playing with players you haven’t ever played with.”

Defending the crown

Quigley beat a field of six participants to win her second straight WNBA Three-Point Contest at halftime. After she and McBride tied with 18 in the head-to-head finals, Quigley caught fire in redo, scoring 29 of a possible 34 points and sending the crowd -- and the sidelines -- into a frenzy.

“How did we follow the 3-point contest?” asked Parker, who called it her personal highlight of the day. “We had some of the best shooters in the world competing. To have to make 21 to even get into the top two, to then have a shoot off, to then have Allie hit 29? ... That was awesome.”

Throwing it down

Wings star Liz Cambage capped off the contest with a dunk, becoming the sixth different player to do it in the game.

“I was going to pull up and take a 3, but Candace said I should dunk it so I did,” said Cambage, a 6-foot-8 post who set a WNBA single-game scoring record earlier this year with 53 points.

With talk of adding a skills contest to next year’s festivities, Quigley playfully suggested Cambage push for a dunk contest, a suggestion that the gregarious Australian shut down instantly.

“Girl, I’m getting old now. I’m not in my early 20s (anymore),” said Cambage, who turns 27 next month.

Local legends

Four players from the hometown Minnesota Lynx were selected for the game, two on each roster, creating a festive atmosphere with the crowd cheering loudly for both sides throughout the game. Moore and Brunson (four points, five rebounds) played for the winning side, while Seimone Augustus (14 points) and Sylvia Fowles (two points, six rebounds) played for Team Delle Donne.

Passing the torch

The second quarter began with the league’s career leaders in scoring (Diana Taurasi), rebounding (Rebekkah Brunson) and assists (Sue Bird) on the floor. But youth was served with Wilson scoring eight straight points for Team Della Donne. Wilson, the No. 1 overall pick out of South Carolina, was the only rookie selected for the game and scored 12 points in the second quarter to lead all scorers at halftime.

“It was kind of bittersweet to see them win,” Fowles said. “But for us to have four all-stars on this team, on our home floor, in front of these amazing fans, it meant everything.”

Viva Las Vegas

WNBA President Lisa Borders announced that the 2019 All-Star Game will be held in Las Vegas, home of the Aces, who relocated from San Antonio after last season. The Aces, who were represented by Wilson and guard Kayla McBride, reached the All-Star break only 1 1/2 games out of the final playoff spot.

In 2017, the inaugural LoveLoud Festival — a concert event conceived by Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds to raise awareness, support and money for at-risk lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths — drew 17,000 people to Orem’s Brent Brown Ballpark.

For this year’s follow-up, more than 30,000 people flooded Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City on Saturday.

Asked what that indicated to him about the progress of a state where the predominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a faith he is a part of — teaches that to act on same-sex attraction is a sin, Reynolds clapped his hands enthusiastically and let out a whoop.

“The people and the community want to love our LGBTQ youth. Period. And that’s the goal of LoveLoud,” he said in a red carpet event hours before the concert began. "We’re not trying to change doctrine. We know we can’t change orthodox religion. I don’t claim to be able to do something like that. My mom said to me, ‘What do you think, you’re gonna change the Mormon church?’ No. But I know enough Mormons, and I believe enough in the hearts of people enough that, that if we all talk, I think they’ll realize we need to do better and we need to change.

“I was taught as a Mormon that the heart comes first. I was not taught ‘prophet, then heart.’ Right?” he added. “I can tell you about false prophets. If a prophet tells you not to do it, well, what does your heart say? My heart says this is wrong. So I’m following my Mormon teachings!”

The steps made so far and the steps that must come next were familiar refrains during a pre-concert news conference.

Lance Lowry, a Draper native who last year served as the LoveLoud Festival’s executive director and now holds that same role with the LoveLoud Foundation, marveled at how far the organization has come.

“One year ago at this time, we didn’t have a venue, we didn’t have any sponsors,” Lowry said. “Now, we’re about to play in a football stadium in Utah in front of 30,000 people who put their money where their mouth is.”

Reynolds, among others, wanted to push the narrative forward, though.

“The ultimate goal is that we don’t have to have a LoveLoud Festival at all,” he said. “LGBTQ people should not have to continually explain why they love who they love. … So the ultimate goal is to not have this need to be a thing.”

In the meantime, though, Lowry broached the possibility of taking LoveLoud “to wherever it’s needed.”

Tegan Quin, a member of the Canadian pop duo Tegan and Sara who is a Lesbian and who became one of the festival bookers this year, pointed out: “This is a problem all over the country, all over the world — not just in Utah.”

Stephenie Larsen, CEO and founder of Encircle — an LGBTQ family and youth resource center, which is based in Provo and will soon expand to Salt Lake City and St. George — noted that she gets emails every day from young people in Alabama, in California, reaching out for support and advice.

A study by the Family Acceptance Project concluded that “lesbian, gay and bisexual youth who come from highly rejecting families are 8.4 times as likely to have attempted suicide as peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection.” And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that suicide is the second-leading cause of death in the United States for teenagers.

“This is a public health crisis — not just in Utah but across the country,” said Amit Paley, CEO and executive director of The Trevor Project, a national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ youths. “LoveLoud is sending the message — you are not alone, and you are beautiful the way you are.”

Several speakers touched on the frequently stated idea that for people struggling to reconcile their sexual identity with an oft-contradictory religious upbringing, achieving better mental health can be as simple as disavowing a religion.

Tyler Glenn, singer of the formerly Utah County-based alt-rock group Neon Trees and a former LDS Church missionary, said that cutting ties with the church was ultimately his best option.

“It has been a hard journey; I don’t think it’s hard anymore. I just discovered it’s not true," he said. “It doesn’t serve anything that I am now. For years, they told me that I’m flawed, for years, they told me that who I am is wrong.”

Others pointed out, however, that not everyone can get to that point, nor should they have to.

“Often, religious communities tell LGBTQ youth, ‘You have two choices: You can stay in the closet, hide yourself and be a part of our church; or you can be cast out forever.’ A choice like that is no choice at all,” said Jeffrey Marsh, an author who writes about gender queerness and gender fluidity. “It’s almost like a choice between life and death. An LGBTQ young person who has to choose between their family, their friends, their school or their own happiness — what an awful, evil, false choice. We should live in a world where LGBTQ youth are loved and accepted and have the support system they need to live a full and happy life.”

“It’s an extremely important message that you can be a person of faith and also LGBTQ,” Paley added. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

The LDS Church endorsed last year’s event, but it did not renew its support for this year’s festival.

Reynolds grew fiery when talking about people telling him on social media that all the effort he was putting into LGBTQ support was unnecessary — that gay people have gotten enough attention and seen enough social change, and the issue is passé and played out.

“That is one of the saddest things to me,” he said, his jaw clenched. “That is not a truth.”

Many of LoveLoud’s invited speakers could personally attest to that.

Quin, of Tegan and Sara, recalled an ex-girlfriend from a conservative community whose parents hacked into her email to confirm their relationship, then banished her from their home unless she agreed to change.

Grammy-winning songwriter Justin Tranter, who took up a music career behind the scenes after his band Semi Precious Weapons was dropped from one too many labels, recalled being copied on an email to a video editor that said, “Hey, can you please edit out this shot and this shot and this shot because Justin’s hands are moving in too effeminate of a way?” He alternately called the experience “heartbreaking,” “soul-crushing” and “a bit of a mind-[expletive].”

Paley, meanwhile, noted that conversion therapy is legal in 37 states: “Young people are being sent to torture to erase their sexual identities.”

However, while there was an air of grim determination at all the work still left to do, there was also a prevailing hopefulness. After all, there were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people pouring into Rice-Eccles Stadium on Saturday for LoveLoud.

Yes, its leaders acknowledged, some were there just to catch a musical bill featuring the likes of Imagine Dragons, Zedd, Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda and teen singer-songwriter Grace Vanderwaal. But many others of varying backgrounds, religions, and sexual and gender identities bought tickets simply because the proceeds would go toward raising $1 million to benefit local and national LGBTQ charities such as Encircle, The Trevor Project, and the Tegan and Sara Foundation.

“I wanna see the headline, ‘Most Mormon state in the U.S. now has the lowest suicide rate for LGBTQ youth,’” Reynolds said. “I wanna show the world that this can happen in the last place you would ever think.”

Long Pond, Pa. • Daniel Suarez made NASCAR history when he became the first Mexican driver to win a pole in the elite Cup series.

The milestone comes with a bit of an asterisk: Suarez earned the top spot for Sunday’s race at Pocono Raceway because the times of front-row starters Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch were tossed out because their cars failed inspection.

Suarez had qualified third but officially starts his bid for his first career Cup win from the pole.

“It feels good because we haven’t been running well lately,” Suarez said. “I feel like this is just the beginning of the weekend. The real business is (Sunday) and we have to keep this rolling.”

He was the “El campeon!” of NASCAR’s developmental series.

But the 2016 Xfinity Series champ failed to produce similar results when he was abruptly bumped to Cup on the heels of the stunning departure of Joe Gibbs Racing fixture Carl Edwards.

The 26-year-old Suarez has yet to win a Cup race in 56 career starts and has only two top-five finishes. He’s 20th in the standings in the No. 18 Toyota and will likely need a win to earn an automatic berth into NASCAR’s playoffs.

“The results of my race team has been pretty bad the last few months,” Suarez said. “When things are going bad, you have to work even harder.”

Suarez began racing karts in Mexico and moved to North Carolina as a teenager to pursue a career at NASCAR’s national level. He had to teach himself English by watching cartoons on American television and moved through NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program to land a job with JGR.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted in Spanish to Suarez after the Xfinity title, and called him “a pride for Mexico and Latin America.”

Gibbs signed him to his Xfinity Series program in 2014. He won three poles in 2015, had three wins and became NASCAR’s first Mexican champ a year later.

Suarez’s mother was at Pocono for one of the few times each season she visits her son at the track.

“It was pretty cool to have mom,” he said. “My entire family is in Mexico. It’s cool to have my mom with me and starting on the pole. It’s always more fun to have family on the weekend.”

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Crawling on her belly, Susie Motola inched her way through a cramped limestone tunnel that wound through the earth like the path of a worm. The search-and-rescue team volunteer sweated in 70-degree heat and stifling humidity, her clothes covered in soft brown clay. This unmapped passage of Utah County’s Nutty Putty Cave was no wider than the opening of a washing machine, and Susie had ropes tied around her ankles so other rescuers could pull her out if she got stuck.

Twenty minutes passed before the beam of her headlamp fell upon a pair of navy-and-black running shoes sticking out of a narrow crevice at the tunnel’s end.

“Hi, John, my name is Susie. How’s it going?”

The reply seemed to come from the other end of a long hallway.

“Hi, Susie, thanks for coming, but I really, really want to get out,” said 26-year-old John Jones.

He was trapped nearly upside down, his 6-foot, 200-pound body seemingly swallowed by the rock.

Above John, Susie ‘s slight, 5-foot-3-inch frame was also encased. She couldn’t fully extend her arms and legs, but she was confident.

Among the smallest of the dedicated band of search-and-rescue volunteers in rugged Utah County, Susie couldn’t carry the biggest packs and she got cold faster. But she was a caver. A good one. She knew Nutty Putty, and she could go where others couldn’t.

Susie had been moving into a new house, but dropped everything when her rescue pager went off just after 9 p.m. She drove her Toyota 4Runner, purchased with an eye toward rescues, around the southern end of Utah Lake and down the long, dark dirt road leading to the cave.

Susie met two other rescuers and descended into the cave through a rocky hole on top of a large hill in the west desert. They traversed its chambers for about 30 minutes before reaching the 135-foot tunnel where John was stuck.

Susie went in first and reached John at 12:30 a.m. He had been stuck for more than three hours, one arm bent underneath his chest, the other forced backward. His calves were free but useless.

“Oh, no worries, John,” she told him. “You’re going to be out of here lickety split.”

But as she tied a webbed rope into a Lover’s Knot around his ankles, she realized bringing John out of the cave was going to be like swimming backward against a very strong current.

The cave tightens its grip

Caver Dale Green discovered Nutty Putty in 1960 and named it after the clay he found in much of its 1,400 feet of chutes and tunnels. Hot rising water formed the ancient fissure, and the still-humid air is slowly but constantly degrading the rock.

Thousands of people have explored the cave, which was once so popular that line formed at its entrance.

John went into the cave on Nov. 24 with 10 other friends and family members on an excursion organized by his brother, Josh. It was their first time in Nutty Putty and a throwback to childhood family caving outings. John hadn’t gone into a cave in years when the two brothers met for Thanksgiving at their parents’ Stansbury Park home.

John was by then attending medical school in Virginia, where he lived with his wife, Emily, and 1-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Their second child was due in June.

The group entered the cave around 8 p.m. and explored a large chamber called the Big Slide before John and Josh broke off with two friends to find a challenge: a tight but navigable passage called the Birth Canal. They split up, wriggling into alcoves and passages to look for it.

John picked a waist-high hole to explore. He wore a rainbow-colored, 1970s-style caving headlamp his father had bought for the family trips of his childhood. John went in headfirst, pushing himself along with his hips, his stomach, his fingers. Other cavers exploring this hole had found that only the nimblest of contortionists could navigate its tight corkscrew of rock.

John found no place big enough to turn his body around and leave the tunnel.

So he kept going , likely thinking he was in the Canal. When he saw a fissure that dropped nearly straight down in front of him, it may have appeared to widen out at the bottom, giving him a spot to turn around.

Rescuers believe John sucked in his chest to investigate the fissure, sliding his torso over a lip of rock and down into the 10-inch-wide side of the crevice. But when his chest expanded again, he was stuck. Struggling to free himself only made John slide deeper into the narrower, 8 1/2-inch-wide side of the fissure.

One arm was pinned underneath him , the other forced backward by an outcropping of rock. The rainbow headlamp bounced off.

Instead of widening so John could get out, the crack narrowed and all but closed.

‘Guide us as we work through this’

When 23-year-old Josh learned his brother was stuck, he thought it was the beginning of another family adventure story. Their father had once gotten briefly stuck between two rocks when they were children. Leon Jones worked his way out, but the story entered the pantheon of family lore.

But as Josh wound through the tunnel, crab-crawling feet first between the cramped, muddy walls, he felt a creeping apprehension. When he reached the corkscrew, he got stuck himself. By then he could see his brother, and dread settled in.

“Seeing his feet and seeing how swallowed he was by the rock, that’s when I knew it was serious.” Josh said. “It was really serious.”

The two devoutly Mormon brothers prayed together.

” Guide us as we work through this,” Josh prayed, and worked his way free.

He wrapped his feet around John’s calves and pulled.

John’s body inched up, but he had nothing to hold onto and slipped back into the crevice as soon as Josh released him.

It was all backward for Josh.

Caving made him feel like an explorer finding something truly new in alien depths. Now he felt powerless and overwhelmed. His older brother was helpless in a dark hole.

“I had to get out,” said Josh.

He knew they needed search and rescue teams. Now.

Josh crawled back up to the surface and called 911 while a friend went into the tunnel to stay with John.

Knowing help was on the way steeled Josh for another trip down the tunnel to take the friend’s place. The brothers made small talk to take their minds out of the cave.

They talked about Josh’s girlfriend, whether he should follow John into medical school.

They sang the hymn “How Firm a Foundation.”

Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed, For I am thy God and will still give thee aid; I’ll strengthen and help thee, and cause thee to stand Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.

Again, they prayed.

“I’m so sorry. Father, just get me out of here. Save me for my wife and kids,” John said.

After nearly an hour, Josh heard rescuers were at the cave’s entrance and went to find them.

“I didn’t want to leave him,” he said. “His life was in that cave, in that little crack.”

John told his brother it was OK to leave.

“Go get ’em, brother,” John said.

‘The entire system starts to fail’

The human body is designed to walk upright, and the heart works with the force of gravity — not against it. When rescuers told trauma physician Doug Murdock that John was nearly upside down, he knew the trapped man didn’t have much time.

“Being upside down, your body has to pump the blood out of the brain all the time,” he said. “Your body isn’t set up to do that ... The entire system starts to fail.”

Murdock headed for the scene, knowing blood and fluids would be pooling in John’s brain and lungs. His circulation would be slowing, capillaries leaking , toxins building up in his blood. If the rescuers were to free John, those toxins could rush to his heart and kill him.

There are very few studies about the long-term effects of being upside down, but Murdock thought John might have eight to 10 hours to live.

Susie knew what it was like to be alone in the darkness at Nutty Putty Cave. She’d been stuck once, when she curled into a ball to turn around and found herself unable to move her legs. She couldn’t hear her group. She started to panic, then told herself to breathe.

Millimeter by millimeter, she pushed her legs out behind her until she was free.

But those moments were why she became a caver.

“I used to be so afraid of tight, enclosed spaces and the dark,” she said. “What do I do?

I make it one of my passions and my loves.”

Inside the tunnel, Susie tried every thing she could think of to free John.

She helped string a rope from John back to the rest of the team in an open pit at the tunnel’s entrance. The team pulled, but didn’t have enough power to move John: the friction of the rope rubbing stone was too strong. Susie helped him shift positions, but she couldn’t lift him.

She stretched a water bottle down to his right arm, the one forced backward, so he could tip the bottle forward. The water f lowed down his arm, and Susie hoped some of it might reach his mouth.

She cut off his jeans to try to free up a few inches. She joked that she would have a story to tell his wife and asked if he’d like to get some pancakes when they got him out.

When she ran out of things to say, she started humming an LDS hymn, “High on the Mountain Top.”

John asked if that meant she was Mormon.

She said yes, but she had fallen away from church teachings somewhat in recent years. John asked if her faith was strong -- whether she planned to be married in a temple.

“He was 100 percent right on there with his religion. I wasn’t,” she said. “It was kind of like a big brother, saying ‘Come on now, shipshape.’ ”

John’s faith would connect him with many of the rescuers who crawled through the dark to reach him.

But as he talked, his voice grew more nasal, his breathing labored. She could hear that his lungs were filling with fuid.

Time slips by strangely underground, and Susie had only a vague notion of its passing.

Only her headlamp lighted the cave’s absolute darkness; the only sounds were those the rescuers made.

After about two hours, Susie had tried everything she knew and crawled out for rest while another rescuer took her place.

In the meantime, the team worked to solve the friction problem by rigging a pulley system anchored to the tunnel’s walls with a series of climbing cams -- anchors designed to fit quickly and tightly into rock.

They had to push the cams through a thick layer of powdery calcite that coated the cave walls, then string the rope through the attached pulley. After each new cam, they’d try the system again. If the friction was still too great, they’d add another pulley.

It was all painfully slow.

Each trip into the tunnel to pass a piece of gear took nearly an hour.

As the hours passed, rescuers arrived from all over Utah. The Utah County Sheriff’s Office set up a command center and rescue leaders ran through idea after idea.

Was there a back entrance to the tunnel? No, it ended shortly after the crack where John was stuck.

What about the rescuers who’d worked on the Crandall Canyon explosion that trapped six miners in 2006?

They didn’t have much advice.

Rescuers ordered six gallons of vegetable oil to help slide John out. They even considered explosives. But they quickly determined neither would work.

Drills and chisels continued to arrive throughout the day, but the larger equipment was too big to position near

John. The smaller equipment was too slow: when they tried to widen the rocky corkscrew to prepare for John’s exit, it took an hour and a half to drill through just 6 inches of rock.

‘We’ll get him out for you’

John’s wife spent the night of Nov. 24 waiting by the phone expecting news that John was free.

Emily had always known her husband of 3 1/2 years to be persistent and patient.

She knew she loved John as a 20-year-old Brigham Young University student, but marriage seemed “like a lot of work, and not that much fun,” she said with a smile. Emily wanted to serve a church mission and had been called to Madagascar.

John decided to propose anyway. He filled an area at the top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in downtown Salt Lake City with rose petals and shooed out all the other visitors, then played guitar and sang her a song he’d written.

Emily took the ring, then gave it back. He waited two months until she was sure.

They married, and when she became pregnant, it was John’s idea to attend medical school at the University of Virginia so she could be close to her family.

When morning came on Nov. 25, Emily couldn’t wait any more. She took Lizzie and drove to the cave with John’s parents. There she found a hive of more than 100 people talking, planning, and waiting amid ambulances, firetrucks and police SUVs.

“I knew I couldn’t do anything to help, but I really wanted to give him a hug when he got out,” Emily said.

“I just imagined him being really tired and scared.”

A tall, broad-shouldered man in his 50s with buzzed hair and a bristle-brush mustache introduced himself as one of the on-scene commanders.

“We’ll get John out. We’ll get him out for you,” Utah County sheriff’s Lt. Tom Hodgson said. He was tearing up, Emily remembered, which confused her.

But he knew what the cave could do. Hodgson was there six years ago, when a 16-year old boy got stuck in the same tunnel that trapped John. It took crews 14 hours to free him , and the teen spent three days in a hospital afterward. When a second person got stuck at Nutty Putty less than a week later, state officials closed the cave.

The cave had been open for only six months when John got stuck.

A pulley system freed the 5-foot-7-inch-tall, 140-pound teen in 2004, but John was bigger, farther down the tunnel, and rescuers could only reach about 6 inches of his legs.

Back in the cave, each new pulley helped inch John out of his dark prison.

The team pulled. They pulled again. But John’s feet hit the tunnel’s low ceiling. With his heart struggling to pump blood into his legs, the contact made him scream in pain.

The rescuers came to a horrible realization: The angle of the tunnel meant they couldn’t bend John’s body backward without likely breaking his legs. In his weakened state, the shock could kill him. And the cams anchoring the pulleys were slipping from their uncertain places in the weak calcite.

This is Part 1 of the Nutty Putty rescue. Read Part 2 here.

As the President Trump Show plays out daily on cable news, popular reactions — both the rants of his critics and the railings of his followers — suggest a common human tendency: We are trying to fit new circumstances into familiar vessels so we can pretend that we are not in uncharted seas.

We are all of us trying to deal with the current administration simply as one more manifestation of ideological division: Those who don’t support the Trump agenda are screaming liberals; those who do are conservative nut cases. This debate feels familiar and comfortable for all concerned. It’s water we have sailed with every presidential administration for time out of mind. We pretend that dissension over the Trump administration’s antics, gaffes and oddities has the same basis as dissension in national politics has always had: right versus left. Simple.

But we are simply wrong. The current administration fits no mold; it is unlike any we have had before.

Donald Trump is not a reincarnation of Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt or any other occupant of the Oval Office from years past. Neither is he a liberal or conservative statesman. He is an opportunist who has mastered the art of deflection, denial and off-balance sleight-of-hand dishonesty, and has sold them to a huge cross-section of our citizenry as healthy, make-us-great-again iconoclasm. No president before him has managed to fool this many of the people this much of the time with this tawdry a display of leadership.

It has nothing to do with his ideology, if indeed he has any. It’s about an overarching sense of cynicism in his entire approach to the American presidency, an air of opportunism and wink-and-nod profiteering. Buried beneath (and not very far beneath) the surface of any presidential action seems to be a single consideration: What will most benefit Donald, his cronies and his personal interests? The president has, in short, co-opted the White House as a business asset. If there is anything left in 21st-century America to inspire commonality, it should be universal condemnation of such chutzpah and arrogance by the person holding the office once thought to embody leadership of the free world.

But it’s not happening. The very unprecedented, surreal nature of the situation has America ignoring the real crisis and clutching for the old red-versus-blue model. Supporters of the administration twist and stretch like acrobats to justify Trump in his doings, and opponents chase off after every instance of incompetence or malfeasance, real or imagined. This is how the script plays out, we seem to say. This is politics in Washington, as it has always been. And so the president has both Republican-dominated houses of Congress in enthralled lockstep behind his every agenda item, however harebrained or counterproductive, because GOP control of the federal government is worth any price, including the national welfare.

And the left, rather than picking its battles and rifle-shooting the actual issues, pours time, energy and rhetoric into whatever juicy item on the daily news cycle will generate the most “buzz.” It’s all geared to short-term tactical gain, all about one-upping the other side. And while we batter and quarrel in the familiar arenas of politics past, a snake oil salesman is fleecing the country — unsustainable corporate tax cuts, torching of international bridges, industry-friendly environmental rollbacks and dismantling of social programs — and no one is really minding the store.

Vince Rampton is a practicing attorney at Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough in Salt Lake City.

Washington • For three months in 1917, Leon Trotsky lived in the Bronx, just south of the congressional district where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently defeated a 10-term incumbent in a Democratic primary. Because she calls herself a democratic socialist, the word “socialism” is thrilling progressives who hanker to storm the Bastille, if only America had one. And the word has conservatives darkly anticipating the domestic equivalent of the Bolsheviks storming St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace 101 years ago, if there is an equivalent building in the eastern Bronx and northern Queens. Never mind that only about 16,000 voted for Ocasio-Cortez’s version of “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!”

A more apt connection of current events to actual socialism was made by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican, when Donald Trump decided to validate the conservative axiom that government often is the disease for which it pretends to be the cure. When the president decided to give farmers a $12 billion bandage for the wound he inflicted on them with his splendid little (so far) trade war, and when other injured interests joined the clamor for comparable compensations, Johnson said, “This is becoming more and more like a Soviet type of economy here: Commissars deciding who’s going to be granted waivers, commissars in the administration figuring out how they’re going to sprinkle around benefits.”

Concerning Johnson’s observation, the Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane, who blogs as The Grumpy Economist, says actually, it’s worse than that: “It’s a darker system, which leads to crony capitalism.” Cochrane is just slightly wrong: Protectionism, and the promiscuous and capricious government interventions that inevitably accompany it, is, always and everywhere, crony capitalism. But he is spot on about the incompatibility of America’s new darker system and the rule of law:

“Everyone depends on the whim of the administration. Who gets tariff protection? On whim. But then you can apply for a waiver. Who gets those, on what basis? Now you can get subsidies. Who gets the subsidies? There is no law, no rule, no basis for any of this. If you think you deserve a waiver, on what basis do you sue to get one? Well, it sure can’t hurt not to be an outspoken critic of the administration when the tariffs, waivers and subsidies are being handed out on whim. This is a bipartisan danger. I was critical of the ACA (Obamacare) since so many businesses were asking for and getting waivers. I was critical of the Dodd-Frank Act since so much regulation and enforcement is discretionary. Keep your mouth shut and support the administration is good advice in both cases.”

Now do you see what Friedrich Hayek meant when he said that socialism puts a society on the road to serfdom? Protectionism — government coercion supplanting the voluntary transactions of markets in the allocation of wealth and opportunity — is socialism for the well connected. But, then, all socialism favors those adept at manipulating the state. As government expands its lawless power to reward and punish, the sphere of freedom contracts. People become wary and reticent lest they annoy those who wield the administrative state as a blunt instrument.

Tariffs are taxes, and presidents have the anti-constitutional power to unilaterally raise these taxes because Congress, in its last gasps as a legislature, gave away this power. What do the members retain? Their paychecks. Certainly not their dignity.

Noting that some Trump protectionism is rationalized as essential for “national security,” Cochrane, who clings to the quaint fiction that Congress still legislates, suggests a new law stipulating that such tariffs must be requested — and paid for — by the Defense Department: “Do we need steel mills so we can re-fight WWII? If so, put subsidized steel mills on the defense budget. If defense prefers to use the money for a new aircraft carrier rather than a steel mill, well, that’s their choice.” Actually, the Defense Department, unlike much of the rest of the government, has serious responsibilities and has not trafficked in “national security” nonsense about protectionism.

In 1932, three years into the terrifying Depression, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, received fewer votes (884,885) in the presidential election than the (913,693) Eugene Debs won in 1920 when, thanks to the wartime hysteria Woodrow Wilson fomented, he was in jail. Now, however, there is a Republican president who can teach Ocasio-Cortez a thing or two about the essence of socialism, which is 10-thumbed government picking winners and losers and advancing the politicization of everything.

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Washington Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

San Jose, Calif. • Real Salt Lake showed it knows the way to San Jose. But knowing how to win on the road? That’s a different matter entirely, as RSL learned again on Saturday night in a 0-0 draw with the MLS-worst Earthquakes.

RSL has been outscored 25-8 and is 1-8-2 on the road this season.

Andrew Tarbell had three saves for San Jose.

The 24-year-old Tarbell had his first clean sheet of the season and the third of his career. It was San Jose’s first shutout in 25 games, dating to a 1-0 victory over the Houston Dynamo on Sept. 16.

Nick Rimando had three saves in his sixth shutout of the season for Real Salt Lake (9-9-4).

Real Salt Lake’s Albert Rusnák, who came in tied for second on the team with five goals this season, left the game due to neck pain in the seventh minute.

RSL played its second consecutive game without coach Mike Petke, who was completing his two-game suspension. Freddy Juarez was the acting bench coach.

The Earthquakes (2-12-7) are winless in their last 12 games after a 3-1 victory over Minnesota United on May 12.

San Jose, with league worsts of two wins and 13 points, has not won a home game since its season opener on March 3.

“Imagine the earth beneath you opening up and swallowing you whole. Imagine feeling everything good inside you — love, joy, kindness, trust, security, hope — burning and scorching to embers, giving way to fear, desperation, anguish and helplessness. Imagine being trapped in your worst nightmare, knowing that you will never wake from it. Imagine feeling truly abandoned — by God, by the universe, by humanity. Imagine all of that — and imagine it being far worse.”

— “A Better Place,” by Pati Navalta Poblete

Sometimes, numbers don’t really tell the tale.

For instance, the FBI reports that in 2014, there were 8,124 gun murders in this country. And hearing that, you might feel that it gives you some grasp on the impact of gun violence.

Eight thousand, one hundred and twenty-four, you say. That’s a lot of people — 22 a day, one every 65 minutes. And you might think you get it, might think you comprehend the dimensions of the tragedy. But you don’t. After all, what is 8,124? How do you put your mind around that much loss?

The truth is, there is only one number that can help you understand gun violence. It is the number one.

In that sense, Pati Navalta Poblete, a former journalist for The San Francisco Chronicle, has given us a terrible gift with her new memoir, “A Better Place.” She has given us what we need to understand. She has given us one.

His name was Robby and he was her son. As described by his mom, he was a young man determined to drink all of life in one long pull. His list of interests was varied and long — archery, cooking, surfing, cycling, exotic fish, Buddhism and welding, to name a few — and he pursued them with a furious, all-in enthusiasm.

Then, on Sept. 21, 2014, he was shot to death at a busy intersection in Vallejo. Robby Poblete was 23 years old.

His mother’s book is not about “healing” or “closure” or any other pop-psychology buzzword by which we pretend grief can be managed and contained. No, this is a raw, intimate account of how it feels to be hollowed out by pain.

As such, it’s a difficult read. If you have kids, it will make you look around for them, thankful to hear them bicker, laugh, remind you that they are alive. In a video on the website of the Robby Poblete Foundation, Pati puts it like this: “You never understand how much love you’re capable of until you give birth to your child. And you never understand the pain that you’re capable of until you lose a child.”

But if that pain makes Poblete’s book difficult, it also makes it necessary, especially in a country that so often finds itself talking around gun violence. Reading it, it is all too easy to imagine yourself pulled out of a normal day in a normal life by the voicemail message that your child has been shot. It is all too easy to imagine yourself in the car, weaving through traffic, hope flickering inside, then getting a call from your daughter — “Mom,” she wails. “Mom, mom” — and knowing. And it is all too easy to imagine days dragging into weeks into months into years as you struggle with pieces of the broken thing that used to be your life.

Eight thousand, one hundred and twenty-four Americans murdered by guns in 2014 alone. But Pati Poblete reminds us of the only number that ever really matters.

One.

One life cut short.

One mother devastated.

One father wrecked.

One sister crushed.

One circle of friends and family bereft.

You really want to grasp the impact of gun violence? Put the statistics aside for a moment. Start with one. Feel the pain of one. Suffer unbearably with one.

Then realize you have 8,123 yet to go.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. lpitts@miamiherald.com

The country seems divided along a line that cuts through seven issues:

1. Abortion rights for women.

2. Equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and religion.

3. Immigration.

4. Climate change.

5. Gun control.

6. Health care insurance.

7. Taxes and the economic safety net.

While all of these issues are complex, it is interesting that most people fall on one side or the other. If you believe in a woman’s right to choose, you are likely to support equal rights for everyone, that we should be more open to immigration, that climate change is real and human-caused, that we need stronger gun control laws, that everyone should have access to quality, affordable health care, and that taxes should fall more on the rich and support more of the poor among us.

Polls show that most people agree on the above stated positions, so what should this silent majority do and why?

1. Abortion rights for women must be supported. While abortions should be legal and rare, the solution is to make unwanted pregnancy rare. Quality sex education in school and easy access to contraception would help. Let’s put abortion clinics out of business by taking away the need for them!

2. There can be no compromise on equal rights for all. Everyone should have equal rights and protection under the law!

3. With immigration, there are areas for compromise. But like abortion, let’s reduce the need for immigration. Most people who want to immigrate are doing it for economic and security reasons. Instead of them fleeing bad situations, let’s do a better job of helping those people and their governments with these issues. Foreign aid for these kinds of projects has been decreasing.That is shortsighted. Good people are leaving these bad situations. Let’s help them stay and make those countries more successful!

4. Climate change has been studied for more than 40 years, and a consensus that it is human caused has existed for more than 20 years. The last-breath argument against human-caused climate change seems to be that it is some “natural cycle.” There is no “natural cycle” that can explain the degree and speed of the warming we have seen the past 40 years. While there are ways that the Earth can cool quickly — think nuclear winter, large asteroid impact or very large volcanic activity — no such mechanism exists for sudden warming. It is time to move aggressively and quickly into solution mode.

5. The bottom line for gun control is that all sales of guns must have background checks and automatic weapons must be illegal.

6. While the Affordable Care Act had its problems, it was much better than where we are going now. Medicare for all is the simplest and most efficient solution. While there is room for how to get there, it is time for America to catch up with the rest of the advanced world in supporting health care as a right!

7. The last tax package has produced an unsustainable deficit whose impact will likely fall mostly on the young (they will be paying the interest and the principal), the poor and the elderly. There are reasonable compromises in both taxes and a sustainable safety net, but they will only be found if there is a return to more balance of power in our legislative branch. One area where the economic safety net needs to be expanded and strengthened is for those adversely affected by the move away from fossil fuels. Not only could carbon fees reduce CO2 production, but a part of those fees could be directed toward helping those people and their communities.

The next election will have huge impacts on each of those areas. Those of us who support most of these ideas must come out and vote. But we must also be willing to compromise and see it as a solution, not an evil. We must win because we are fighting to redeem the soul of America.

David Hart, a former physics teacher at Skyline High School and former junior high school counselor, has degrees in physics, education and social work. He lives in Torrey, Utah.

Washington • Economic growth surged last quarter. Unsurprisingly, President Donald Trump and his supporters were quick to crow that this means Trumponomics has been validated at last.

But that probably is the exact opposite lesson Trump, and everyone else, should take from the numbers.

On Friday morning, we got an update on how the U.S. economy, as measured by gross domestic product, is faring. And the news was encouraging: In the second quarter, the economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.1 percent.

Which is, obviously, good news! We want the economy to expand more quickly than it has done for the past few years, when it’s puttered along at about 2 percent.

But there are a lot of reasons not to read too much into one quarter of strong growth — or interpret it as evidence that Trump’s tax cut and trade war are good things.

GDP is noisy, bouncing around a lot from quarter to quarter. In fact, while Republicans love to point out that no calendar year during Barack Obama’s presidency reached 3 percent, GDP growth actually did meet or exceed that threshold in 12 quarters. Four quarters surpassed 4 percent, and one hit 5.1 percent.

So a single three-month period of strong growth is not exactly unprecedented. It’s also not a sign that the economy is going gangbusters or has been fundamentally transformed. What matters is whether that strong growth is sustainable.

Right now, under Trump’s policies, the answer looks like a big fat no.

There are a lot of idiosyncratic factors that juiced growth last quarter. One is that growth was relatively disappointing at the beginning of the year and was due for a rebound. Again, the numbers are noisy.

But another major factor is that businesses freaking out about Trump’s trade war likely pulled forward some of their activity. That is, as Morgan Stanley chief U.S. economist Ellen Zentner puts it, they “doomsday prepped” by stockpiling raw materials, intermediate goods and finished products before tariffs raised costs on all those things.

Soybean exports surged, for example, as companies raced to beat retaliatory tariffs that went into effect this month. The jump in soybean exports alone probably added 0.6 percentage points to GDP growth in the second quarter, estimates Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

We should expect a reversal later this year, as buyers run down their existing stockpile rather than place new orders.

In other words, perhaps a bit counterintuitively, the very thing that may make Trump think his trade war is working — unusually strong growth this past quarter — may be evidence it’s about to backfire. At the very least, uncertainty about trade barriers is not helpful for businesses trying to make longer-term decisions about how much and where to invest, plant, hire and so on.

What about Trump’s fiscal policies?

Right now, we’re getting a sort of sugar high from Trump’s tax cuts and spending increases. That may have contributed to second-quarter GDP growth — particularly given the strong consumer spending numbers — and will likely lift it throughout this year and next.

But the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve, the Penn Wharton Budget Model and lots of other private forecasters expect such effects to be short-lived. They generally project higher growth this year of around 3 percent, with output then falling back to a longer-run pace of 1.8 percent or so within a few years. Whatever positive effects these fiscal policies might have going forward, they’re nonetheless too modest to outweigh the other major structural challenges the United States faces, including our aging population.

The federal debt they generate will also weigh on growth in the long run. And, yes, Trump and tea party confederates are racking up debt big league.

Trump’s own Office of Management and Budget projects that the deficit will reach nearly $900 billion this year and top $1 trillion next year. That’s not even including other new costs on the table, such as a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by Trump’s trade war or $90 billion in additional tax cuts the House passed this week.

One last thing to keep in mind if you see high-fives at the White House on Friday: Where are the raises? Output may have swelled last quarter, but paychecks did not. Adjusted for inflation, average hourly earnings were flat in June compared with a year earlier, according to the Labor Department.

If Trumponomics is indeed working, it’s still not working for workers.

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, politics and culture, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times. Her email address is crampell@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @crampell.

The NFL announced last week that it is currently in discussions with the NFL Players Association regarding rules for the league and its players on the issue of the national anthem and players’ silent protests. These protests, started by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, seek to draw attention to the unequal treatment of people of color by law enforcement.

Highlighting this important issue has had some serious backlash, with everyone from everyday fans to the current president of the United States calling these men out as unpatriotic.

The NFL recently drafted a rule that would impose discipline on teams that have players who decide not to stand for the anthem, leaving them the option of remaining in the locker room during the anthem if they wish. The Players’ Association filed a grievance against the league, resulting in the joint statement issued by the league and the association that they’re suspending new rules until a mutually acceptable solution can be found.

Democrats have been largely silent on this matter, to the detriment of the party and our nation. Far from being a political football, this has the potential to help Democrats reframe a variety of concepts that the Republican Party has co-opted over decades. The widest-ranging issue is really more of a concept — patriotism. The GOP has cast itself as the party of patriots, the party of the flag and American identity, for 40 years. From controversies over flag-burning to the very idea of what makes an American, the GOP has triumphed in convincing a large segment of Americans that its version of patriotism is the only interpretation. This isn’t because Democrats lost the debate, it’s because they didn’t show up.

Democrats have an opportunity, provided by this president, to take the entire idea of what it means to be a patriot away from the GOP. Large swaths of America think being a patriot means hanging a flag off your truck. These people think criticizing (their) president is unpatriotic, and anyone who doesn’t conform to their ideal isn’t a “real American.” These ideas are wrong and stupid. Democrats have an opportunity to recast this debate into what being an American really means.

The question becomes how do we, as a party and individuals, make this argument effectively? One place to start is with the men of the NFL who’ve chosen to use their platform to speak out against minority treatment by law enforcement. Patriotism doesn’t mean blind loyalty to your nation, but rather taking a clear-eyed view of your nation’s strengths and weaknesses and doing your part as a citizen to help correct those weaknesses.

This is exactly what these football players are trying to do. Peaceful protest isn’t about making people comfortable, it’s about making people uncomfortable with a situation that isn’t reflective of who we want to be as a nation.

Ultimately the question surrounding these protests is just that: Who do we want to be as a nation? If we are true to our ideals, to the concept that all men are created equal, then we must acknowledge that reality has failed to match that high bar. In this nation, people of color are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned at rates disproportionate to their representation in the population. Kaepernick and those he’s inspired are speaking out against injustice, and make no mistake, it is an injustice. It’s a betrayal of the highest ideals of our republic. How, then, are Democrats supposed to speak about this and correct this betrayal?

The GOP has co-opted the symbols of what makes America great. We need to take them back. We need to speak about our flag as a symbol of our ideals and put to rest this idea that “disrespecting” the flag somehow dishonors our military and veterans. Our military exists to secure the peace but also to defend our ideals.

As a veteran, I find nothing disrespectful about these professional athletes using a symbol that I cherish to start a conversation. Instead, these men are using that very symbol to stand up for the lofty rhetoric our Founding Fathers put on paper over two centuries ago. As Democrats, we need to stand with these men and put their protest into its proper context. That context is that true patriotism isn’t blind loyalty, it’s loyalty to higher ideals. Republicans will hoot and holler that kneeling during the anthem is un-American, and we need to combat that with the truth.

Mike Bailey is a veteran of the United State Air Force, a former Republican and currently a registered Democrat. He lives in Layton with his wife, five kids and two dogs.

On a day for cherishing the pioneer spirit and for celebrating the resilience of Utahns, President Donald Trump took opportunity to amplify this message to the entire country and curry political favor with members of the LDS Church.

In the article about Pioneer Day published July 24 (“President Trump celebrates Mormon settlers on Pioneer Day”), this newspaper failed to acknowledge the selective nature of the president’s well-wishing or place the congratulations in a context of political maneuvering and image repair for disastrous policies.

This president blatantly disregards the role that immigrants from Central America have had within our country “to transform the arid desert landscape into a blossoming new home where their families could live in peace and prosperity” and robs refugees of their future role to build “cities and towns that continue to thrive in the 21st century.”

Readers of this paper should consider our administration’s inaction in resettling fewer than 22,000 refugees this year, insist upon the necessity of our leadership in support of refugees and asylum seekers, and reject Trump’s self-characterization as “pro-pioneer.”

Jonathan Nellermoe, Salt Lake City

As I sit here listening to these idiotic fireworks, I can't help but wonder where Utah went so wrong.

The state complains of pollution and ozone and tells us not to drive, but for days on end, we smell gunpowder, smell smoke and watch wildfires just above the Capitol. Besides that, our pets run off, get lost and hurt and our veterans cower for cover as the sounds and sights remind them of war. Their PTSD rages out of control.

So we can literally burn money. Somebody get your head out of your butt and make fireworks illegal except for professional shows.

Candace Wetzler, Sandy