Joshua's Spot

I am SO disappointed...

I spotted this little news clipping taped to a shelf in our local bookstore, and just stood there for about five minutes in a state of sheer disbelief.

Robert Jordan died a couple weeks ago. No, really, this time it's true (the previous oft-repeated rumors of his death always turned out to be greatly exaggerated).

For those of you who don't understand the full, horrifying significance of this, I'll leave it at this. He wrote 11 books in the Wheel of Time series, plus a prequel, and was working on his twelfth. Each is thicker than the Bible. The plots and characters and subplots and sub-subplots are so complex that each time a new book comes out, I've had to go back and re-read most of the series. So I've probably read the earlier books at least four times straight through... which means I've invested something like 20,000 pages of reading in this guy.

All I can is that I really, really hope he has an editor or assistant or child or someone who has his notes and knows where he was going with this whole thing - otherwise none of us WoTheads will ever know how it was supposed to end. Which would be soooo disappointing.

It's also, on a less selfish note, very sad that such a talented writer passed away so young (he was only 58).

Get thee hither, Ophelia

This guy is my new hero.

Finally, some clarity amid all the finger-pointing...

Required reading for anyone who wants to get past all the "blame games" and really start to understand what happened after Katrina hit. It's about time someone started connecting the dots and beginning to tell the full(er) story.

"Politics" - the new "politically correct"

To Uncle Dan, in response to your comment:

Last week, like all the rest of us, I sat glued to the television, living a life best described as "all Katrina, all the time." I watched in trepidation while it became apparent that Katrina was gaining in strength, looking for all the world like a once-in-a-century storm, and headed on a collision course directly for New Orleans, the most vulnerable city in the United States. I watched people packing up what few belongings they could take with them, clogging the freeways, trying to get out of a city that had become a massive trap for hundreds of thousands of people. I watched the initial drops of rain falling, and the winds rising, and went to bed on Sunday night with a vague but portentious sense of worry, not sure what Monday morning would bring.

When we turned the news on first thing Monday morning, it looked like the city and the Gulf coast, and the country, had dodged a bullet. The storm had died down a little before it hit land, and turned just enough aside from New Orleans for the city to miss the worst of it. I thought things would still be pretty dire, especially for the folks in Mississippi who had taken the full brunt of the storm - but it appeared that everyone's worst fears had been deferred until a future storm, that New Orleans' luck had held.

And then, over the next few days, we started seeing the images that we've all become so familiar with:  faces (almost universally black faces) looking back up at the helicopters carrying the TV cameras, waving in desperation from rooftops and balconies, trying to call the helicopters down to lift them out, or at least let them know that they were there and needed rescue. TV crews on the ground capturing images of increasingly hungry, thirsty, desperate, dirty, frustrated people looking for help to come, and getting more and more angry when days and days went by and no help came. Stories of the Superdome and the Convention Center piling up with filth, thugs taking control (since the police and National Guard were nowhere to be found), people breaking into stores to try to get food and water for their families, the total breakdown of law and order, rapes, murders, suicides. Old folks dying for lack of medicine, or dialysis, or just sheer lack of water.

And on this went, and on, and on. And the help DID NOT COME.

At first, in spite of the shock and horror I felt, I couldn't help but wonder what those people were doing there at all. Did they just ignore the order to evacuate? Were they stupid, arrogant, foolish, or just careless? And I'm ashamed to admit that at first, my attitude was basically "well, if they ignored the order to evacuate and just didn't think it was important enough to get out, why should the rest of us have to bail them out after the fact?" I figured they made their choices, and they alone should be responsible for the consequences.

And then I started learning more, and paying more attention, and the more I heard, the more I empathized. Try to imagine this:

• You are trying to raise a family on $7,500 a year (which, according to the Census Bureau, is the median income - median income - in some districts of New Orleans), and you get the order to evacuate. You have no car. Clearly, you have no money for a plane ticket, or even a bus ticket, especially since it's the end of the month and you're scraping by on loose change and bottle deposits, waiting for what little assistance you get from the government to arrive on the first of the month. What are you going to do - walk?
• You're old, sick, maybe homebound, maybe disabled, alone or with a spouse who's not in much better shape, not very easily moved. You're on fixed income, which as we all know doesn't generally leave a lot to spare after healthcare costs are taken care of, especially if you're also poor. How are you going to get yourself and your medicines and maybe your home dialysis machine moved several hundred miles, with maybe 24 hours' notice, to somewhere safe - assuming you can even figure out where "somewhere safe" is, and find a place that still has room for you?
• You run a nursing home (just to pick an example at random, here, Uncle Dan) - or a homeless shelter, or a foster care center, or a hospice, or even a hospital - and you have 24 or 48 hours to get all the people you care for to some other facility where they can be properly cared for, at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are also trying to get out, straining everything from the transportation and communcation systems to the airlift capacity to the ability of the surrounding areas to absorb more people. Do you have the time you need? Can you do it? Or do you sit and try to ride it out and hope for the best?

These are the poorest, sickest, most vulnerable, oldest and youngest and most desperate, who were left behind with nowhere to go and/or no way to get there. (And, yes, some folks who just didn't get the news, didn't take it seriously, or thought they could ride it out like they have other storms before.) And however they wound up stuck in that hellhole, they needed our help - they deserved our help.

And that help DID NOT COME.

Now, I'm a big believer in people helping themselves, helping their neighbors, helping their fellow citizens. Like so many other people, we gave money, and we're sending food, and we've checked on the people we know in the region (and the loved ones of friends and family members too) to make sure they're someplace safe. But if there were ever a situation that demonstrates just why we have a government in the first place - to keep security, to help those in need, to organize resources and assistance when all other means have been overwhelmed or disabled - we saw the living example last week. We saw it in the faces of the survivors, growing increasingly desperate trying to find the most basic necessities, right down to water that was fit to drink, a dry, safe place for their kids and parents to sleep, food to put in their bellies, protection from thugs and gangs, diapers and medicine and formula to keep their babies and old folks alive until they could get out of there. We saw it in the local officials, and even the state officials, not just in Louisiana but also in Mississippi and Alabama, crying - in some cases, literally crying - for help, help from someplace that had phones, and roads, and helicopters and boats to reach people, and manpower, and food and medicine and water and the means to distribute it all... none of which were available to, say, local mayors, or sheriffs, or even governors, especially with more than a third of their National Guard (and half the Guard's equipment) deployed elsewhere. We saw it in bodies floating in the water, the Superdome looking more and more like something out of a Mad Max movie, the fires burning out of control, the streets taken over by looters (both those taking the opportunity to grab some goodies, and those trying to get formula for their kids from any source they could find). If there was ever a living demonstration of why we pay taxes and give authority to people in Washington, it was last week.

And the help DID NOT COME.

Our President was on vacation. When he finally did start realizing there was a serious crisis at hand, his response was to do a flyby on his way back to Washington, while his Secretary of State went shoe shopping in New York and his Vice President continued to enjoy his time off in Wyoming (for all I know, Cheney is still there). When Bush finally did go to the hurricane zone and actually put his feet on the ground, he spent the time reminiscing about his party days in Nawlins when he was younger, and speculating about how big a house Trent Lott would build (and how much he, Bush, was going to enjoy sitting on its porch), while not far away people were dying of hunger and thirst and exposure and lack of medical help. Later in the week, the Administration spent its time in fighting over control of the relief effort with state and local officials, and waiting for the proper paperwork to be filled out and the proper requests to be made by people at the state and local level, while piles of food and water and medicine, along with field hospitals and rolling morgues and an entire Marine Corps ship full of empty hospital beds, sat waiting, unused. And now the focus is as much on spinning things to put the blame on Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco as it is on helping the survivors and getting them relocated.

I'm, by turns, saddened, sickened, angry, disgusted, grieving for the victims, furious over the "spin" coming from Washington and the conservative media, tired of photo ops and press conferences from those who should be in meetings around the clock getting help to the people who need it, proud of this country's people and utterly fed up with the folks those same people elected and put in positions of authority. Most of all, I'm shocked at how many lives were just thrown away through sheer incompetence, people who survived the storm and its immediate aftermath only to die because help didn't arrive in time, because the folks in Washington were fiddling while New Orleans burned.

Call that "politics" if you so choose, even though I suspect it is, like "politically correct," a dismissive term to shunt away opinions that you don't agree with or don't want to hear. I call it anger, and fury, and grief, and sympathy. And even though what I really want to do is strap on my hiking boots and walk all the way to Washington with Joshua on my back to demand accountability from those who let so many people die while they blathered on about bygone days, or went shoe shopping, or mugged for the camera with a few carefully screened victims in places of safety far from where the help was most needed, what I'll actually do is send what help I can, in money and food and whatever else is needed.

And write. I can do that.

In the meantime, don't dismiss my opinions and emotions by labelling them "politics" and turning your back. For shame.

More reading material...

Another piece on Katrina that I happen to agree with entirely, this one from Bob Herbert...

Reading material

There was an excellent op-ed piece by Anne Rice in the New York Times this morning. Take a look...

Shame

Shame on FEMA, shame on the Congressional leadership, and shame on President Bush, for focusing more on making excuses and holding press conferences than on saving lives and human dignity in New Orleans. It's hard to say what's more shocking - the incompetence, the delays, or the Administration officials spending more time on talk shows offering excuses than getting their people out there to offer help.

If this hurricane had hit Greenwich, or Beverly Hills, or Georgetown - much less Kennebunkport, or Crawford - the victims would have been airlifted out of there before they'd had a chance to get a scratch on their Jaguars. They certainly wouldn't be sitting on their rooftops five days later with no food, water, or sanitation, much less cowering in piles of garbage and human waste trying to hide from gangs while watching their babies wither from dehydration, their parents die for lack of medicine and water, and their daughters being raped. I don't blame the stranded people one tiny bit for their anger, or their frustration.

We can never let this happen again in this country. And I, for one, am taking careful note of who's spending more time on the talk shows making excuses, or swooping in for photo ops, than mobilizing help for the people on the ground. Starting with Bill Frist, and Dennis Hastert, and basically the entire management team at FEMA. And if Bush and his staff and the Congressional leadership come back from their nice little vacations and make any movement toward getting back to their usual refrain of giving tax cuts to their rich friends while slashing Medicaid and programs that help the poor, I'll really know our country has been taken over by troglodytes.

I should have loaded up the pickup truck with bottled water and headed for Nawlins. Sure, it would have taken me four days to get there from deepest, darkest Oregon, but even so, I would have beaten the Feds.

Interesting article...

Here's a little bit of mind candy for those who are getting all infatuated with real estate as an investment. Take a look.

London Calling

Yesterday, as Felicia was hanging all her various paraphernalia (breast pumping gear, bag lunch, purse, etc.) around her shoulders as she prepared to head off for work, she looked at me as I came up to refill my ever-so-essential coffee cup and said, "Did you hear what happened in London?" (She's started watching CNN while she does her pre-work pump, which is about as natural for my wonderful, fascinating, but utterly a-newsie wife as, say, the Pope watching the Playboy channel. If Felicia's starting to scoop me on the news, I really need to start paying more attention to what's going on in the world.)

So along with the rest of the world, I spent a fair amount of time yesterday, in between bottle feedings and errand-running, watching updates from London. Now, London is one of my favorite cities, even though I've spent only about five days (total) there in my life, and all of it while just totally brain-fogged with jet lag, since it always seems to be my first stopover in Europe on my way to places farther afield, but on my few visits it's struck me as an utterly charming, vibrant, diverse, welcoming, noisy, ever-changing city, one which has become, perhaps more than any other city on earth (with strong competition from New York), a true World City, home to pretty much all the planet's many colors and cultures and languages. It's a city that, to my mind, is not just English, but uniquely Human - and perhaps that's why these attacks strike me as so utterly barbaric.

Here's an op-ed piece in the New York Times (yes, I'm a junkie) that, to my mind, sums up the state of things on a global level pretty succinctly.

What feels especially haunting about these attacks over the past few years is that each of the major ones (New York and Washington on 9/11, Madrid, Bali, and now London) has hit a place that I have spent a fair amount of time in and particularly love. Which makes me in no way unique, since there are about, oh, six gazillion 30-something Westerners who have played the tourist in these same spots... but I guess that's exactly the point, since it's people like me and the rest of my apparently decadent generation of Americans and Europeans and Aussies and Kiwis and suchlike, and the places we congregate in our debauched travels, that are the prime target for these sick people. Which doesn't make me feel any less haunted at my ability to picture the places and scenes of these attacks all too well, and put myself back in those places in my own imagination.

I can remember, incidentally, back in 1998 during a day wandering through a village in eastern India, being approached by a very well-spoken, thin young 20-something man who (obviously) realized I was a tourist and wanted to know if I was an American. When I admitted that I was, he spent, oh, about 15 minutes or so there on the street asking me polite, curious questions about America, what I thought about our government's foreign policy (he was a fan of the Soviet Union, which of course was long defunct by then, and said so, though not in a confrontational way), what I thought about President Clinton ("Monicagate" was just getting into full swing, and I spent a lot of time having to respond to various peoples' reactions to that whole affair, if you'll pardon the double-entendre, as if I was Clinton's roving PR person in the Third World, which was annoying), and so on. I remember it was a strange, random, but interesting encounter, one of the more memorable of the many chance exchanges of real inter-cultural thought and philosophy that I had while I was abroad for much of that year.

And I also clearly remember mentioning this conversation to the guy who ran the hotel I was staying at a day or so later, and that he said, "Oh, yeah, he's a sympathizer of Al Qaeda. I'd be careful around him." I vaguely remembered at the time that Al Qaeda was suspected of having organized the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had just happened a few weeks before, and that they were Bad News if you were an American. And I remember thinking how random - and alarming - it was that this group had enough grass-roots support in the developing world that I could possibly run into a sympathizer in a relatively small, backwater little town in rural India, a long way from anywhere.

So, enough random ponderings. As your reward for putting up with Heavy Thoughts the past couple posts (which isn't what you're here for, durnit!), I'll shortly be posting a WHOLE NEW PHOTO ALBUM here on the site, and on Neptune too. The wonderful, marvelous, great-guy photographer who shot our wedding, Chris Briscoe, graciously gave us a CD with digital copies of about, oh, 500 or so of the best pictures on it, to use however we wish. So even if they're not the up-to-the-second baby photos you're constantly demanding, I thought I'd share them, as a little trip down Amnesia Lane for us all. It seems so long ago already - but then, everything pre-baby feels so remote that I should have to get help from a psychic to dig up the memories.

Here's a small sample, to encourage you to check out the rest:

Keep in mind, folks, that the beautiful lady in the wedding dress is, yes, 14 weeks pregnant. That's right, it was a shotgun wedding, which was SO Grants Pass - but in our defense, I had actually proposed a good six months or so before we found out little Joshua was baking in the oven. Up to that point, Felicia was a pristine virgin. Honest!

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon

It has been pointed out to me by an anonymous but apparently dissatisfied source that "there has been a L-O-N-G dry spell on the blog lately." Therefore, having been dragged kicking and screaming by my fingernails back to the keyboard by my ever-demanding public (consisting, no doubt, of about, oh, three people, but what the hey, it's a "public" in my book), I'm now pummeling my so-called brain to come up with interesting things to say.

Failing to come up with anything scintillating, enlightening, or even (at the minimum) marginally distracting to say, I'll fall back on the cheat used by veteran bloggers (of which I, clearly, am not one) all over the world - I'll throw pictures at you!

That one's for you, Pops.

(There, that should keep them occupied for a few minutes, while I think up something else.)

At the risk of getting into way too much detail for those of you who aren't sitting on the edge of your seats to hear every little detail about Joshua's every movement and utterance, here's what's been going on with him this week:

1. He has backslid a bit on the sleeping-through-the-night thing - last night he woke up twice, to his mother's semi-dismay. (Even then, she said on her way out the door, "He's just so cute, I can't possibly be mad at him, even when he keeps me awake at night!") This is perhaps somewhat related to Small But Subtle Change in Behavior #2, which is...

2. ... that he has started looking at his before-bedtime feeding as a Wrestling Opportunity, as well as a Chance To Argue His Way Into More Time Awake With Parents. This started Monday night, when after gulping down his first two ounces of formula, he began twisting around and yelling and complaining and wrestling the bottle away every time the nipple came near his mouth as I tried to give him more. One thing's for sure:  whatever other body parts he might not have figured out yet, he's certainly developed his tongue into an impressive tool, since he can come up with all kinds of ways to use it to thwart my attempts to feed him with a bottle when he really doesn't want it. After battling with Simba the Grumpy Baby Lion Cub for about half an hour, I finally called for reinforcements, and Felicia brought me a bottle of breast milk to substitute for the formula, to see if that made any difference. It did, but only for a little while - I guess he must have decided that hey, if this squirming-and-complaining-and-going-on-a-hunger-strike routine worked that well in getting an upgrade from formula to breastmilk, he might as well try it again and see if he could get bumped up to Booby Time (read: Baby Nirvana). We drew the line at that, and ultimately got him to bed, after much mobility and bottle-dodging on his part. He got his revenge, though - he was up again within three hours, and this time got The Boob. Victory was his! (Sigh.)

Let's hope this doesn't become a pattern.

3. More enjoyably, His Squirminess finally discovered why opposable thumbs are such wonderful devices this week - he started grabbing onto toys that his Daddy hands him. Granted, he doesn't hold onto them for very long, and he hasn't yet discovered the Next Fun Thing that'll no doubt come along (namely, that opposable thumbs, along with all those fingers, can also be used to pull every possible kind of grabbable object toward one's mouth), but I'm sure it won't take him long.

Yes, I've got this major milestone in his genius-caliber existence on videotape. Maybe this afternoon, if y'all are especially nice to me, I'll dump the video into the computer and get it posted on the Neptune site. (So stop yer grumbling, or else! Ha!)

Otherwise, life has been going on as normal. I've been at work in the garden, a bit, as baby and other commitments and weather have collectively allowed. I've been doing my best to get back into a physical therapy and gym routine to take better care of my knee, having been suitably cowed by my various doctors and therapists and other such sadistic torture-mongers. Felicia and I took the baby out to Ashland yesterday, and had a nice relaxing afternoon, me meeting with Rabbi Jackie for another in my long sequence of conversion classes and Felicia breastfeeding the baby in the park and doing some baby shopping in a wonderful little store on the plaza. A good time was had by all, except for the puppy, who was left home alone all this time and was very, very happy to see us when we got back late in the evening.

Meanwhile, on the larger canvas, like everyone else in America who isn't living under a rock and has some vague awareness of the political process, I've been watching the events unfolding after Sandra Day O'Connor's surprise resignation with a mixture of resignation, indignation, and bemusement. It's a strange thing, to be sitting here fully aware that one's country is changing while one watches, due to perfectly obvious and visible processes and events, and not be able to do a thing about it - just sitting by and looking on and listening while the wall that has separated church and state so well, and with such great benefit for so many people, for the past two hundred years and more, comes crumbling down around us, while an appallingly large number of Americans cheer and egg the President on.

Including members of my own extended family, no doubt, which is what particularly saddens me. Case in point: I received an e-mail from one of them, no doubt sent with the best of intentions and in all obliviousness to the effect it'd have on me and those like me, the gist of which was that this is a Christian country, and those unpatriotic souls who keep trying to keep (Christian) prayer out of schools and keep (Christian) Biblical excerpts and (Christian) holiday decorations out of the public realm should just recognize that this is a Christian country founded by Christians for Christians, and just get over it. After all, it was the religious right who won the last election, and that's what elections are about, isn't it? The majority that won gets to impose its will on the minority that lost. If you were in Saudi Arabia, you'd expect to hear Muslim prayers; if you were in Israel, you'd expect to hear Jewish prayers; so anyone who thinks we shouldn't expect to hear Christian prayers in America is simply denying reality and the intent of the Founding Fathers and, basically, being downright un-American.

There are so many things wrong with this outlook that I don't even know where to begin, but it's really had me down, and upset, and frustrated for the several weeks since I got it. (And no, I haven't said anything about it to the relative in question, at least up to this point - though I have no idea whether or not this person ever checks this little blog. What can I say? I'm a chicken about confrontation.) Let's just sum it up by saying that this was a country founded, in very large part, on the principle of religious freedom - which means not having the will of the majority religion, whoever they are and whatever their beliefs, imposed on the minority who believe differently, whatever they believe. And "freedom of religion" does not mean you are free to choose whatever brand of Christianity you prefer (unless, of course, you want to be Mormon or a Jehova's Witness, of course, in which case you're almost as screwed as you would be if you were, say, Jewish, or Muslim). It means you're free to choose to believe whatever you want, including no religion at all, and not be hounded about it, made to feel un-American because of it, given a litmus test for public office (explicit or implicit), be required to submit to another religion's public and compulsory prayers, in school or elsewhere, or otherwise be made a second-class citizen or be excluded from full participation in American society because you do not share the mainstream's religious views.

There is a very large difference between being a country that has a majority Christian population, and being a "Christian country," in the sense that this cousin meant it and that many on the religious right are claiming the United States is or should be. In Saudi Arabia, Islam is the official religion, and is compulsory - no other religion is tolerated, no other is recognized, and the country explicitly and heavy-handedly denies full rights (including freedom of worship and expression) to those who follow other faiths. Is that the kind of country we really want to be? Israel, although it embraces freedom of religion and has very large Muslim and Christian (and other) minorities that are full citizens and are granted full freedom of worship, was founded explicitly to be a home for the Jewish people, and Judaism therefore and understandably has a special role in the public and political life of the country. The United States, in stark contrast to either of these cases, was founded upon the principle of full freedom of religion (along with freedom of occupation, speech, and all the others that so many fought and died to establish and protect) - and although most (not all) of the founders would have identified themselves as Christian to a greater or lesser degree, they explicitly rejected the idea of enshrining their own personal beliefs in any official way in the founding documents of this country (although a few relatively harmless and non-specific references to "God" and the "Creator" managed to find their way in, at the insistence of what passed at that time for a religious right). Indeed, the country's founders went to great lengths to protect freedom of belief and conscience - perhaps because the memory was still very fresh in their minds, back then, of what can happen when a religious majority (including a Christian one) is allowed to mix church and state, with all the power and authority and force and potential for abuse that comes along with the trappings of the state. The experience most of them had in mind, after all, was with the England of the time, which most of their ancestors had fled specifically to escape the tyranny of conscience and belief imposed by the Anglican Church.

This country was founded by French Huguenots (Protestants) who had fled from Catholic France, Methodists and Baptists and Quakers fleeing from persecution in England, Jews fleeing from persecution pretty much everywhere, and Deists and Enlightenment thinkers who believed only vaguely in God, if at all, who wanted to be left to philosophize or experiment or just plain think in peace. All of them, minorities who had been oppressed by a State-empowered majority religion in their home countries. And all of them, when they got here and set about to found a country of their own, agreed on one thing, if only one thing, when it came to religion:  none of them wanted the others imposing beliefs on them, however many of the "others" there might be, and however few of them. And to a remarkable degree, up until fairly recently, and with a few bumps along the way, they succeeded in creating a country where everyone could believe what they wanted.

So this cousin's e-mail both saddened and irritated me. Not least because it was simply wrong, on many accounts, both philosophical and historical. Also not least because the kind of country the e-mail seemed to be advocating was one in which I'm not sure I would recognize, or particularly like. And also not least because it's an attitude that I seem to be hearing everywhere these days, in the press and among our neighbors and co-workers and, yes, relatives, with few of those people even bothering to think twice about the implications or where they would lead us.

But most of all because, in case any of you have missed it (or forgotten), His Poopiness is... Jewish. (As is his mother, and yes, as will be his Poppa, once I get through these interminable conversion classes.) And I really don't want my son to be made to feel like a second-class citizen in the kind of country that will result from the unthinking, no-doubt-unintended religious supremism that is being so easily and jingoistically embraced by so many otherwise well-intentioned and wonderful people in this country at the moment - including this cousin of mine, whom I won't name. I don't doubt they meant nothing harmful in it, and probably didn't even stop to think that this kind of e-mail could be in the least bit hurtful or upsetting - but that's the essence of the problem, isn't it? After all, if you're a member of the complacent and ebullient majority, how would you possibly know how it feels to be the one person in the school classroom who feels utterly alienated, alone, isolated, confused, and above all, utterly different while the rest of the class repeats a prayer that to them seems simple and harmless, but that goes against your faith (whatever yours might be)? Or to send your kid to school and wonder if he's going to be beaten up today, because he's different, an outsider, a Jew (Jesus-killer) or a Muslim (terrorist) or an atheist (unbeliever) or an immigrant (job-stealer).

This is why our laws, our Constitution, and our traditions all go to such great lengths to protect the minority - and yes, why winning an election does not mean you get your way in everything, and why the Senate has a filibuster (to provide the only check that exists in the legislative or executive branches of our government against the tendency of the majority, however slim, to impose their will, whatever it might be, on the minority, which would otherwise be voiceless outside the courts)... and why maintaining the independence of the courts, including their ability to defy a popular President, is so critical.

Sorry for preaching, and thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Mostly I just keep my own thoughts about these things, but when it's something that could make the world a darker, more difficult, less welcoming place for our little Joshua, it's a lot more difficult to just eat it.

Now we will return you to our regularly scheduled programming...