What a Week
At first, as the election results began to trickle in from the East coast, I wondered if this was not just going to be another mid-term election with a monumental ho-hum attached. I got distracted. Logged on and checked my email. Browsed a couple of the forums. Checked my PayPal stats. Checked my AdSense stats. Pleasantly distracted, I moseyed back to the living room and clicked the mute button and behold, Wolf Blitzer was stammering something about the Democrats and an unpredictable, though heatedly desired upset in the making.
I grinned. What were the odds…? I said a little prayer. As has been observed by some unknown sage ‘All prayers are answered…’ and it goes on to conclude that ‘sometimes the answer is “No”. Not on November 7th, 2006, though.
I could begin to sense the effects of millions of right-thinking voters, all shaking off the despair that we’d ever get our country back from the Bush Power Elite, expressing their disdain and utter disgust with the deceptions, dissemblings and obfuscations attendant on any question asked of the Bush Whitehouse or any of it’s designees.
I went to sleep with childlike trust in the American People, and awoke to salvation in the form of a wholesale drubbing of the current congress and its Coxswain, George W. Bush.
Heh heh. I massaged my palms with glee. I checked the results and pinched myself for the third time to be sure I was not dreaming.
Man, are prayers ever answered.
By late afternoon, Virginia had gone to Webb and Mr. Mecaca was out the door.
Thursday morning revealed the capture of Montana, and best of all, the ‘resignation’ of Donald “Those things are unknowable…” Rumsfeld; perhaps the most inept Secretary of Defense in recent memory.
I am just wishing Cheney and Bush would up and turn over their player cards, too. On the radio this morning, I overheard someone saying, “Dick Cheney would be wise to remain in his secret, undisclosed location”.
I could not agree more.
Long live the United States, our democratic republic as a coherent and cohesive entity, and let us put our foreign policy on a track that ENDEARS rather than ESTRANGES our neighbors, friend and foe alike, to the USA.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
The Never Ending Question
Genealogy or the Never Ending Questions
I suppose everyone goes through it. You reach an age at which you suddenly come to the realization that there is more life behind you than ahead of you. Then, it becomes terribly important to connect with those ancestors with whom you share an increasingly palpable commonality.
This is the point at which you decide that it is time to examine all of that history. Researched, compiled, edited, explored, reconstructed, revealed, and codified for future generations. You begin tentatively. The old Family Bible with its cryptic birth and death entries is generally the initial resource. Somehow though, it generates more questions than answers.
What ever became of this person or that one? Isn’t HE the son that went to California before the First World War? Didn’t he study architecture or engineering or something like that? Went to John’s Hopkins, is what I heard grandmother say once…I think.
Resources include old photographs, yellowed and brittle, more cryptic notations, dates, names (but no particular positional references; just the names, sort of in a MATRIX of names), places (isn’t that the old home place down in the country? I seem to recall that tree from the summers I spent at that house), things, faces to which your own countenance bears a faint similarity in appearance. Other resources are letters, certificates of birth and death, service records from different branches of the military, medical records, newspaper articles, books written by or about someone either in the ancestral tree or associated with a member of the ancestral tree in some way.
All of these provide leaf and fruit for the family tree you’ve begun to nurture to maturity. If your family contemporaries are even remotely similar to mine, you’ll find interesting and amazing connections to people whom yesterday you didn’t even know existed.
It’s an adventure into self-awareness and realization that can’t be perceived, it must be experienced. Thinking about who you are in the absence of a knowledge of who you came from and how you fit into the overall panoply of history is an exercise in delusion. You must get immersed in the study of your origins, eventually. Don’t wait too long. You’ll want to have time to revel in the discoveries you are destined to make once you embark on this journey.
Most of all, enjoy the trip. Each step is enlightening, some may prove to be disturbing, but in the vast overall view of families in the family of man, yours may be the most delightful among many.
I suppose everyone goes through it. You reach an age at which you suddenly come to the realization that there is more life behind you than ahead of you. Then, it becomes terribly important to connect with those ancestors with whom you share an increasingly palpable commonality.
This is the point at which you decide that it is time to examine all of that history. Researched, compiled, edited, explored, reconstructed, revealed, and codified for future generations. You begin tentatively. The old Family Bible with its cryptic birth and death entries is generally the initial resource. Somehow though, it generates more questions than answers.
What ever became of this person or that one? Isn’t HE the son that went to California before the First World War? Didn’t he study architecture or engineering or something like that? Went to John’s Hopkins, is what I heard grandmother say once…I think.
Resources include old photographs, yellowed and brittle, more cryptic notations, dates, names (but no particular positional references; just the names, sort of in a MATRIX of names), places (isn’t that the old home place down in the country? I seem to recall that tree from the summers I spent at that house), things, faces to which your own countenance bears a faint similarity in appearance. Other resources are letters, certificates of birth and death, service records from different branches of the military, medical records, newspaper articles, books written by or about someone either in the ancestral tree or associated with a member of the ancestral tree in some way.
All of these provide leaf and fruit for the family tree you’ve begun to nurture to maturity. If your family contemporaries are even remotely similar to mine, you’ll find interesting and amazing connections to people whom yesterday you didn’t even know existed.
It’s an adventure into self-awareness and realization that can’t be perceived, it must be experienced. Thinking about who you are in the absence of a knowledge of who you came from and how you fit into the overall panoply of history is an exercise in delusion. You must get immersed in the study of your origins, eventually. Don’t wait too long. You’ll want to have time to revel in the discoveries you are destined to make once you embark on this journey.
Most of all, enjoy the trip. Each step is enlightening, some may prove to be disturbing, but in the vast overall view of families in the family of man, yours may be the most delightful among many.
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