Do GO and VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!

I won't tell you who to vote for but, if you vote for Sarah, you are a bit idiotic!

Operation Stephen's Freedom

July is now ending and my tenure here at Mature Care (great name, eh) will soon be ending. Then it is to be relegated to carrying Gerda's bags as she leads her students back to Berlin for the Fall semester, not that I mind as I do like Berlin. We will stay there through the Holidays and then back here to Lewiston and, finally, I will go out on another assignment. What that will be and where is totally unknown now. We will see what crops up in this chaotic and rather merciless world of ours. Unlike Pip, I do not have "great expectations" for progress. I suppose that is job security but, at my age, it would be wonderful to see a bit of progress after the past disastrous eight years.
Stephen

As time goes by

We are now in the primary season and, like so much in the US of A, this does just not seem to stop. I do think that either of the Democrats would be fine as president, though I still do believe that a woman would be preferable for this bigoted country. McCain, while a man of courage and conviction (at times), is an anachronism and should serve out his waning days back in the Senate. He is definitely not the person who should be in command. He still is too much of the hostile warrior. We have had enough of that. At least he has served and suffered greatly though it did not have the appropriate impact. As George Patton observed, "War is Hell". That seems to have escaped Senator McCain. We won't talk about the Bush and Chaney combination that have never been in battle but quite easily send others to die or be maimed. Meanwhile the Democrats, like Yassar Arafat, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Instead of trashing each other, they should emphasize their differences from the Republicans and they are vast. Of course whether anything happens in the next few years to better our lives and world is totally up in the air right now. As the old Crosby, Stills and Nash song goes, "It's always darkest before the dawn." One can only hope so.
That's the way it looks from here.

Stephen

Confusion Has Its Day

I have now been home for a month and perhaps this is a time to think about my experiences over these days, days that have passed so quickly and that have been rather puzzling.
We are now in the extended presidential race and what I do see, read and hear is so very bizarre. Who knows at this point how many millions have been spent but, at least, it is millions rather than the billions spent on Bush's insanity. I have always maintained that we will have venial people among us. Actually I used the word psychopaths, though he is not that far gone. That epithet belongs to truly EVIL folk as Cheney, Wolfowitz and the other "neo-cons" that have brought us here and who have been responsible for so much death and destruction. Bush is just stupid.
I have learned this week that Iraq has now moved down in importance to the economy in the concerns (fears) of our citizenry. As if the two are not intimately interconnected but the "sub-prime" debacle seems to have claimed that exclusive title. Interesting the way our economy gets "all shook up" every decade by so similar events as rapacious, immoral , supposedly educated idiots who only care about themselves run rampant over our "capitalist ad absurdum" society. There seems to be, in our fretful minds, little concern about the way the poor of this country and the world live. Those that try to find enough food for the next meal, to find shelter, education, health care and safety. Few seem to realize that we are all interconnected. Few seem to believe what Christ and other spiritual thinkers have tried over the ages to teach us. We humans are a sad species. Rife with selfishness, controlled by fear mongers posing as saviors, we forget what life really should teach us. We do so admire in a rather puzzled off handed abstract way the saints among us as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa and those others that do redeem us. We would rather admire the brute, the greedy, the superficial, the wealthy but we ignore those quiet heroic folk who daily go about their task of caring for those so less fortunate among us, be it family, neighbor or just fellow being. Obama is right we do need change but I do not believe that his view is radical enough to save and redeem us. We need to return to The Sermon on The Mount and understand and follow what Christ was trying to teach us. These lesions are not the purview of Christianity. They are there in every religion that we on this tiny planet live with. How tragic it is that a bit over 60 years since the end of the Holocaust we still allow this slaughter of our fellow creatures to continue and even supply the material to carry on. I do believe that the slogan of this presidency is "Not On My Watch". I guess that like so much else our government says as it mounts on its "moral high ground" is froth designed to make us all feel good at little cost.
As one on of my favorite weatherman here in Maine always says, "That's the way it looks from here".

Stephen