I was driving around with NPR on my radio the other day when I heard this poem by Ginger Andrews, from An Honest Answer

Yesterday was the 41st Anniversary of the assassinationi of President John F. Kennedy. Yet, if you Google the subject, there is little recognition of the horror of the actual event. Instead, headlines focus on the awful
….. new video game ….. called “JFK Reloaded.” The goal of the game: To assassinate John F. Kennedy just as it really happened. Shooting the ex-president in the right spots (according to the Warren Commission) earns you points, while shooting wrong “targets” such as Jacqueline Kennedy costs point deductions.
It all becomes a game, doesn’t it? Living, dying, voting. Everything becomes unimportant because when the game’s over, you’re still the same. You turn around and plug into another game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and nothing changes. You disconnect from life’s bloody messes and connect into the clean, flick-switch, walk-away game.
But I remember that day in 1963 when, half way up the hill, taking my toddler daughter for a walk, my neighbor stuck her head out her door and yelled “The President’s been shot!”
“The president of what?” I called back, never even beginning to think that it might be THE President.”
JFK was our hero. Our hope. We believed in his ability to lead us. He knew how to inspire us, stir our sense of pride in being Americans.
My daughter and I scuttled back home and turned on the television. And that’s pretty much where I sat for the next few days, watching real “reality” television.
It seems to me the good die young.
Or maybe too many of our young are forgetting what’s good in life in favor of playing the goodless game.

Frank Paynter is asking bloggers why they blog. From some of the early responses, I have to admit that their reasons are a lot more engaging than mine. Their answers to that question are a lot more clever, creative, and funny than mine (which I will include at the end of this post).
The main difference between a simple website and a weblog is that (most) weblogs invite comments. Therefore, most weblogs are invitations to conversations. And so lots of webloggers are as interested in generating comments as they are in posting interesting stuff. I started out that way, and I still appreciate getting a good comment conversation going. But that’s not why I blog.
Here’s why I blog:
I

He was here — beard and funky hat and laptop, and wearing one of his Agitshop t-shirts. The surprising thing was the little splotch of silvery gray hair right where his widow’s peak is and the flecks of other such strands throughout as well. Some things have changed a lot in the six or so years since I last saw him outside his old Millennium Cafe. But most things haven’t changed. He’s still the b!X we know and love.
It was Thanksgiving and Christmas and their birthdays all rolled into one — food and family-filled, noisy, and much too short.
And so, still half-asleep, we waited together for the morning train that took him to New York City, where he’s staying at the Algonquin Hotel — a combined birthday/Christmas gift to our much-loved writer/son — so that he can catch up with some old-time blogger buddies before he catches his plane for the other end of the country.

I don’t want him to go, hug him tightly, kiss his bearded cheek, this man who’s my only son and who’s leaving. Again. I think back to the Kahil Gibran piece On Children I sent my mother my freshman year in college.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams………
He’ll be back at his home, 3,000 miles away, before Thanksgiving. Who knows when we’ll have a chance to see him again. We might all be very very silvery gray by then.
I stand by the train station window and watch him disappear, remembering the first time:
Leaving Home
Young Dionysus, a faded blue bandana
circling his head like a halo,
layers himself with choices
forgotton by the gods.
He smells of earth, of dreams,
of rain that flows with ease
along acres of hilly woodland,
filling some final need
in the deep hollows of stones.
He releases himself to the magic of motley,
to the wind, alive in his unbound hair,
to sweet pickings, scattered
like ripening berries
along miles of roadside vines.
As he leaves, the hearthfire
crackles softly.
Blackbirds loose feathers
from the heights of sky-borne oaks,
and honey bees sing to the sun.
(copyright Elaine Frankonis 1987)

There’s the Spam we all hated as kids — that salty, odd-tasting, hammy block of mystery meat that everyone ate during WWII because there was rationing of the good stuff and Spam was cheap. We put up with it because he had to.
Now we have another kind of spam that I’m getting more fed up with than I was with the original edible version. This weblog had over a hundred spam comments hawking drugs and whatnot from the same IP address. I do have a blacklist package that’s supposed to alert me when I get a comment; then I can decide if I want to delete it and blacklist the poster. Somehow this clever spammer has figured out how to leave a comment without being noticed by the blacklisting mechanism. I finally figured out how to get rid of the spam comments in a very roundabout way. b!X says that when he gets back to Oregon he’ll upgrade the software that makes this blog happen and the problem should be fixed.
Meanwhile, this spam is making me about as nauseous as the Spam of old. I wish I could puke all over the “Socrates/Antonio” who keeps leaving spam comments from IP 64.19.80.100. He’s indefatigable. Well, guess what, so am I.

Everyone else will be gathering with their families next week for Thanksgiving dinner.
My thanks and feasting will come this weekend, when, for the first time in more than six years, my offspring will both be here with me — along, of course, with my son-in-law and my grandson. And — unless something happens between now and then — my 88 year old mother.
I’ve been cleaning and cooking — pierogi — three different kinds; chocolate cream pies; potato salad; cooked Chex cereal; beef, bean, and macaroni soup — all the comfort foods from their childhoods. Well, not the soup. That’s a more recent addition to my menu.
b!X will meet his toddler nephew for the first time. He zig-zagged across the country in a 12-hour trip today (that’s what happens when you get a cheap flight) and should be arriving at his dad’s soon. His sister and her family will actually drive from Massachusetts to New York for the first time since they got their first drivers’ licences and their first car over the summer. This family reunion is a big deal for all of us.
I am thankful for the graces of this odd-ball family of mine. Thankful that we are all getting together while my mother can still enjoy their presence. Of course, I have lots of presents for them. And food. Lots of food. Love, you know.

She wants to smell lilacs — the kind that grew all over her family’s farm in Poland when she was a girl. But we had snow showers here last week. The lilacs have been long gone.
She can’t remember to take her pills or if she ate lunch or that she’s supposed to set the table for dinner. She drinks instant coffee because she can’t remember how to work the coffee maker. She only listens to the radio or watches tv because she knows how to turn them on and off. She can’t remember how to use the audiotape or CD players.
But she remembers the scent of lilacs. She wants to smell lilacs.
So, we stop and the Health Hut and I buy some Lilac essential oil, fill up a spray bottle with water and pour in some of the oil. I spray the air, her clothes, her bed.
And so, I sit here smelling lilacs.
Actually, I prefer lavender.

Most women will spend 17 years caring for children and 18 years helping an elderly parent.
It

F is for fraud. Voting fraud. My in box has been indundated with calls to sign petitions to urge Congress to do an in-depth investigation into the inaccuracy of the vote counts in Ohio and Florida.
F is also for fear. Lots of us are afraid of the way this nation is being led away from the fundament tenets of a constitutional democracy.
F is also for farblondzhet — an expressive Yiddish word meaning all mixed up. Because that’s what the Democratic Party is these days.
In response to a couple of feature pieces in the Portland Mercury, b!X pretty much lays it out there for us “Blues,” saying that the second piece, by Sean Nelson…
…argues for a loud and vocal reclamation of what it means to be liberal, which, he says, literally means “free from bigotry… favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.” He rattles of a string of (yes) values which are common amongst residents of our urban archipelago, including education and true literacy, science, reason, history, and the social contract (and the taxes it requires).
[snip]
…….. To move forward, the Democratic Party above and before all else, must reassert its claim upon the values represented by this urban archipelago — which first requires that it stop pretending that these values are somehow things to be ashamed of, or only spoken of in private amongst other Democrats.
They are also both entirely correct that the America described by these urban values indeed simply is a better America than the one desired by the base of the Republican Party out there in its vast Red Sea. It is, in fact, simply a more American America.
Yes, there is a not insignificant portion of the country that for some reasons insists upon and persists in pretending to be stuck somewhere in the middle, between these two value systems, and they repeatedly demand attention, routinely compel the parties and their candidates to cater and pander to them.
But just as the Democratic Party needs to stop trying to reach out to the hardest of the hardcore Reds who will never share the small-d democratic values of the urban archipelago, it should also resist the temptation to reward those who, at this point, seem willfully and selfishly to pretend to be in conflict when it comes to these two competing value systems. It’s time for the Democratic Party to stand firm as the party of tolerance, reason, and the social contract, and tell the whining middle to make up their minds which version of society they want America to resemble.
In our heart of hearts, we of the urban archipelago, those strongholds of the true Democratic Party, know what we believe, and know those values for which we stand. And we know they are quintessentially American values.
We also know the the rightest of the right-wing Reds will never agree, simply are beyond the reach of reason, and perhaps will only ever come around — if they do at all — when they see by our example that our way of life is a better one.
And we know that the whining middle needs to grow up and decide for themselves. No more pandering to their insistence that we reach out to them. They are supposed to be adults and citizens of a democratic republic. They’ve been given more than ample opportunity to see each version of America, and it’s time for them to pick a side.
So, maybe F is also for the “future.” Maybe we need to let the present administration stumble along for the next four years, fertilizing the political ground with its constant crap. And we liberals and Democrats need to take those four years to prove that we are better Americans — more truthful, more tolerant, more reasonable, and more invested in honoring our American social contract.
Just as I believe that, if we want other countries to desire democracy for their own people, we Americans must convince them to pursue that goal by example and not by force, so must I believe that the Democratic Party needs to set the example for how an ethical, moral, truthful American political system functions. We liberals need to show that our way of life is better than the constrained and strained movements of the Reds.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to continue my dissenting tendencies when appropriate and necessary. After all, that’s also the true Blue American way.