The Choice

We're back from central & Northern Virginia this morning. I have many things to do today before I head back down East. And I still have to tell the story of the killer lady bugs.

We actually spent a large portion of Saturday at Harper's Ferry . . . where a domestic terrorist figures prominently in the history of the place. I suppose you could argue all day about the end justifying the means.

Mom and I spent a lot of time talking about politics and the state of the world on the drive home. She expressed dismay that so many young people/voters were so easily swayed by flashy Hollywood marketing, meaningless/insubstantial slogans and the lure of easy, instant gratification. Many young people these days talk of rights but don't want to have any responsibility. They are entitled to everything . . . the government is supposed to provide for even the most basic of their needs . . . and ensure their happiness.

How did we get here?

My Mother/her siblings and their parents/siblings lived/fought through a couple of wars . . . they scraped and clawed and sacrificed and did for themselves and lived off the land - and by the considerable talents of their hands. It was a hard living. But as a family they survived and even prospered.

They got educations, were fruitful and multiplied - and in the next generation, produced a doctor and a pilot/soldier and a savy businessman and an artist and an electrical genius/history buff/soldier and an FBI agent and a preacher's wife/Mother and a biomedical whizkid. It's the American dream. And that dream lives on in their grandchildren.

I sit with my Mother's people now and listen to their stories (you don't need a TV when they're in a room together), and I'm in total awe. I am privileged to be in the company of these men and women - much less be related to them by blood.

In an earlier conversation over the weekend, my Uncle noted that we lost more people in one day or one campaign in those long-ago wars . . . than we've lost in several years in Iraq. And if history has anything to teach us, it's that isolationism in the face of terrorism and genocide does not work.

Flash forward seventy years. While our military may be fighting a war right now - the rest of the country is at the mall. And as a nation, we don't have a clue as to what real hardship is.

When it comes to the state of our society, I myself (as a modern girl who has never picked cotton or harvested tobacco or butchered her own food or cooked on a woodstove or sewed her own clothes or lugged water from an outside well) am at the point of despair. I simply do not understand how a young person in this country . . . how anyone . . . can look at at proven statesman like John McCain - a man who spent years in a jungle prison in Vietnam - a man who was brutally tortured - a man who turned down the chance to go home early because it violated a code of honor - a man who has repeatedly bucked his own party and moderated and reached across the aisle . . . and compare him negatively to a wet-behind-the-ears community organizer-turned junior Senator with his roots mired in the dirtiest of Chicago politics - a man with links to smug, unrepentant domestic terrorists - a man who attended a church for YEARS where the so-called pastor spewed hatred & racial epithets - a man who would not pass the screening to be his own (Secret Service) bodyguard - a man whose socialist/Marxist notions could very well bankrupt the country morally and economically - a man (plucked from political obscurity by Oprah) who, if he wins, will have essentially bought the White House.

I just don't fricking get it.

When you look at these men, there is NO choice.

A "righteous wind"? Are you kidding me?