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Hopefully you’re enjoying the warm glow that comes with a New Year. All the hopes and possibilities of a better year lay in front of us all. This is as good a time as any to dash them.
I don’t intend to be mean, but there’s nothing quite like a political and constitutional crisis looming to put a damper on the festivities. And boy, do we have a good one in the works.
All politics is local, but local politics is plain personal.
Yesterday was the culmination of our city council election cycle in Saint Paul. The great mystery of Democracy worked its way across our city as people did their part to confound all the expert predictions. In the end, it wasn’t all that surprising, with slate of DFL candidates of various kinds elected in all 7 wards and 3 of the 4 open School Board slots (DFL is the Minnesota term for Democrats, the result of a merger between the Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party some 60 years ago).
I am rarely interested in current events. I believe that more often than not they are a shadow of what is actually going on in the world, and that it is better to look in the other direction, towards the light, to know the score. Looking into a bright light may seem better suited to an interrogation than being informed about the world, but life is something of a grilling. What do you value? What will you do?
My Dad has a theory to sum up all the changes he’s seen in his life, which started in the Great Depression. It is “The General Inflation of Everything”. His basic premise is that everything has gotten bigger, more expensive, and more involved than it was when he was young.
Every so often, I find something like this in my mail:
“You are obviously against the war in Iraq. Why don’t you speak out against it in your blog?”
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 