Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning which it perhaps never finds.
- Robert Anderson, I Never Sang for My Father
It’s been more than 20 years since I last uttered those lines from Robert Anderson’s play, which also appear in a slightly different form in Tuesdays with Morrie, but they came racing back to me today. I understand their meaning so much better now.
Dennis Taylor delivered remarks to West Virginia University at Parkersburg faculty earlier today at the school’s Faculty Appreciation Luncheon. His address, titled Our Changing World and the Faculty Member’s Frantic Efforts to Keep Up, focused on changes in the characteristics of students entering higher education and the needs of the modern workforce. He urged faculty to strive to better understand their students, to serve their communities, and to change the lives of students.
An amusing faux pas from or misquote of Delegate Dan Poling in the Parkersburg News Sentinel:
“I know House Speaker Earl Ray Tomblin is open-minded to looking at what is cost effective,” he said. ["]We need to look at where the money is needed most, everyday things for people to go to work. I don’t want to look at one thing.”
For eight long years, I watched Republicans exploit terrorism as a political issue. For their efforts, we got into a war with a country that did not present an imminent threat and that had no Al Qaeda terrorists (at least before we got there) or weapons of mass destruction. And for their efforts, we came to be viewed as a rogue nation throughout the rest of the civilized world as we discarded basic constitutional principles for “detainees” in facilities as diverse as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and a notorious set of “secret” prisons scattered throughout the world.
Guess what? They’re back!!
After the attempted terrorism incident on Christmas Day, former Vice President Dick Cheney issued a statement criticizing President Obama for his failure to act dramatically in response to a Nigerian’s man’s effort to blow up an airliner landing in Detroit with explosive materials hidden in his underwear:
As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
Mr. Cheney has been joined by an array of conservative commentators criticizing the President.
Guess what? President Obama acted far more swiftly to the underwear bomber scare than President Bush reacted to the Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, eight years ago.
Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber’s attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11. But it was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate.
It’s refreshing when legitimate news organizations do their homework and expose partisan propaganda for what it is.
Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them than he said to his squire: “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.
- Miquel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
In our search to create a carbon neutral world, we have begun to harness small, but not insignificant, amounts of wind energy. Until recently my knowledge of wind energy was limited to a vague notion that there were a lot of windmills (not true) and wooden shoes in Holland.
Today I know a lot more about wind energy. That knowledge makes me appreciate that making environmentally-correct decisions can be very complicated. Some of the issues:
Unlike Don Quixote’s imaginary enemies, our environmental enemies – global warming, destroyed ecosystems, polluted streams – are quite real. But slaying these real enemies might prove just as difficult for us as slaying imaginary enemies was for Don Quixote.
