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The wind out of Paradise
Jan. 19th, 2009 20:55It's been a long eight years, and it's hard to believe it's finally over. I couldn't vote in 2000 and now I've voted twice and registered with a political party. I wonder if, in 2016, I'll feel whether time has passed at the same pace. There were some odds & ends from the paper that I wanted to mention before we turn the page on the old era and start a new one.
One was the copy from, of all things, a State Farm ad, or at least the first part of it:
One man had a dream.
That dream carried us all a long way.
It moved us forward.
It was a little light that nobody could keep from shining.
That dream lasted forty years and then some.
Then, as a country, we woke to find
it wasn't a dream at all.
The second was a quotation of what some of the kids read at the concert yesterday: "Martin Luther King, Jr. walked so that Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama ran so that all children could fly." TRUFAX.
What else, before I forget or stop caring? First, if it weren't for ABS brakes I would have been in an accident last Thursday (damn the snow and my own over-confidence). It was really rather freaky to see that I wasn't going to have enough time to stop and know that there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop my car from colliding with the other one (which was fishtailed across the center lane on its way to the left) except do what I was doing, which was push the brake pedal all the way down and hope, which was the next best thing to helplessness. I had to take deep breaths when the car did stop with about eight feet to go. Bleh.
We saw wild turkeys crossing the hills behind Christopher's house on Saturday morning, and when Wendy and I were driving over the shoulder of the mountain to Albany I realized that the landscape looked a lot like the mountains up north beyond Kyoto, which was sort of comforting. Williams seems like an excellent little college--they had their first editions of the founding documents on display in the musuem. I was most entranced by the Declaration, of course, but I was especially chuffed to see the Articles of Confederation there (the rub lies in Article II, which reserves all "sovereignty" among many other things to the individual states), one of only nine copies that survive. The Articles get a bad rep, but I wonder if they weren't just ahead of their time--is there any continuity between them and the ideas at the base of the E.U. or the U.N., for instance?
Which reminds me, I totally teared up when I went with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
olewyvern and her friend Barb to Independence Hall. Thank you, Mr. President-elect.
One was the copy from, of all things, a State Farm ad, or at least the first part of it:
One man had a dream.
That dream carried us all a long way.
It moved us forward.
It was a little light that nobody could keep from shining.
That dream lasted forty years and then some.
Then, as a country, we woke to find
it wasn't a dream at all.
The second was a quotation of what some of the kids read at the concert yesterday: "Martin Luther King, Jr. walked so that Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama ran so that all children could fly." TRUFAX.
What else, before I forget or stop caring? First, if it weren't for ABS brakes I would have been in an accident last Thursday (damn the snow and my own over-confidence). It was really rather freaky to see that I wasn't going to have enough time to stop and know that there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop my car from colliding with the other one (which was fishtailed across the center lane on its way to the left) except do what I was doing, which was push the brake pedal all the way down and hope, which was the next best thing to helplessness. I had to take deep breaths when the car did stop with about eight feet to go. Bleh.
We saw wild turkeys crossing the hills behind Christopher's house on Saturday morning, and when Wendy and I were driving over the shoulder of the mountain to Albany I realized that the landscape looked a lot like the mountains up north beyond Kyoto, which was sort of comforting. Williams seems like an excellent little college--they had their first editions of the founding documents on display in the musuem. I was most entranced by the Declaration, of course, but I was especially chuffed to see the Articles of Confederation there (the rub lies in Article II, which reserves all "sovereignty" among many other things to the individual states), one of only nine copies that survive. The Articles get a bad rep, but I wonder if they weren't just ahead of their time--is there any continuity between them and the ideas at the base of the E.U. or the U.N., for instance?
Which reminds me, I totally teared up when I went with
olewyvern and her friend Barb to Independence Hall. Thank you, Mr. President-elect.