New Nation
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Today America chose its next leader. With him already comes a new world that’s something to behold.
This nation and others are celebrating the dawning of a United States far different than the land where I awoke this morning. Regardless of party affiliation, the change is already apparent and quickly arrived.
America’s president-elect embodies a vicissitude in the nation’s politics with his physical make-up, differing so greatly from the string of leaders to come before him. Those characteristics and his promise of a new approach to policy are causing people to buy into a world of possibility and hope – a feeling we might soon learn to call prosperity, though it’s hard to name because we’ve never experienced it before. It’s never seemed so real or authentic. (more…)
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Tags: America
Home building has stalled according to national news reports and confirmation to the fact can be found with a look out our kitchen window.
Construction on the second phase of the Genesis Creek housing development began in 2006 in the pasture behind our house. The land was leveled, the trees were cleared and the quiet backcountry prairie was replaced with an immense brown field with fresh asphalt in the shape of two cul-de-sacs and one long neighborhood street poured down its middle. (more…)
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Tags: America, Suburbia
However far removed I might be from the national news media, I have to say the coverage of this year’s presidential election has made me question its practice of and commitment to certain fundamental aspects of journalism.
I’m not sure how a serious journalist or any major news organization can claim impartiality this election season, and I’m not alluding to the recent studies that show a media bias toward Obama. I’m referring to the exclusion of independent candidates from debates, interviews and other forums in which they could make their positions be known. (more…)
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Tags: America, Journalism
Grocery store bookshelves are the latest battleground for the presidential election here in middle America. Among the trashy romance novels, Louis L’Amour westerns and military combat serials are politically tinged biographies bearing the images of Barack Obama and John McCain.
Side by side, they’ve been placed at eye level on the highest shelf, the Price Chopper management conscious not to show any favoritism for either candidate that might cause lost business. Fittingly, on the left Obama sits with his fingers intertwined and, on the right, McCain is standing proudly before a background draped with an American flag. (more…)
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Tags: America, Books
My Generation
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
By early October, the morning light has changed and the air in those earliest hours is so mountain-cabin thin that breakfast smells weigh it down. Fresh coffee and eggs are boiling in the kitchen, seaping out the windows and door frames to fill the house as subtly as the morning chill left on the furniture by cracked windows.
In the backyard, the dogs give off their first barks, chasing squirrels that balance along the fencetops and powerlines, or in suspicion of random hedge apples that fall invisibly behind the fence and land in the underbrush with rustling sound. They are animals in a long line of creatures that came before them, as we are, and yet they are in some cases 4-5 generations removed from the farm dogs that ran these fields when I was much younger and the pastures were yet to be made over into suburban housing.
My generation is all grown up now, and making the table for children of their own. The first real generation defined by media (or maybe defied), raised with Henry and Ribsy – with Pony Boy and Dally – with wet recesses sitting “Indian style” watching Reading Rainbow and Electric Company, then all that giving way to Nirvana, phony apathy and downtrodden plaid. (more…)
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Tags: America, Morning
