Forty-five Years
Conscience would not allow me to vote for him, but I feel a swell of gratitude with the outcome of this election, even so. It’s a great day to be an American. We need to pray that the Obama presidency, too, is a great presidency.
Election weirdness 2
Briefly observed on the roadside this morning in Silver Spring: a lone figure, sandy-haired, bearded, in t-shirt & jeans, holding out toward passing traffic a small poster-board sign, red & blue lettering, reading,
If you love your MAMA
vote OBAMA
Election weirdness
I’m pretty sure McCain can’t hope to generate any expression of support quite as warm & communal as this, no matter what he does. Who knows, though? National politics brings out all sorts of weird in people.
(Via Endlessly Rocking, via Boar’s Head Tavern.)
In times like these
We have confused, as a society, wants and needs, and a lot of people have raised up their wants way above their needs and way above their abilities to support all those wants. . . . What we have got to do is get back to the basics in difficult economic times like this and explain to people that you will not wither up and die if you don’t have that wide-screen TV.
— Millard Fuller, formerly of Habitat for Humanity, speaking in Arkansas yesterday. From The Examiner.
Better perhaps if we leave out the ‘in difficult times’ part — and give some attention to just what basics should mean.
Studies show, furthermore
I think Amy described, partly, what’s happened. We have an aging population — but we also have divorce rates being higher, we have work demands being greater, we have, um, both, uh, parents working — so children don’t have the same time, parents don’t have the same time, that promised leisure, hours that we were going to gain over the last several decades never was realized. If we just look at the number of people living alone, it’s increased thirty percent in the last several decades.
Climate theory, social theory
Look, fossil fuel, the abundance of cheap fossil fuel, did several things. One was to make us wealthy, one was to wreck our climate. The last was to make us, in this country, the first human beings in history who have essentially no need of our neighbors at all. Who live lives largely isolated from those around us. . . . What makes Americans depressed and sad is a growing sense of remarkable isolation and lack of connection to the communities around them. And that is no accident: how did we define the American Dream for the last fifty years? It was building bigger houses, farther apart from each other!