I am at a crossroads today, blogging-wise. Since yesterday, most of my time has been consumed with the health care bill that just passed in Washington. The time that I haven't spent actively reading about the bill, or watching debate, I've been thinking about the bill and, more deeply, where this country and its population is heading (or arrived?), philosophically-speaking.
But I don't want to talk about that on my blog. It's not that I want to ignore important events, it's just that it's hard to discuss politics in any type of text-based forum; people become their internet handles and the breathing person, the one with real feelings and varying, nuanced opinions, is forgotten.
So, today, I offer this. I had a friend over for coffee this morning. Sadly, I don't see this friend much these days; I home-school, she does not and, as life travels along, our paths do not cross as much as they once did. My children cooperated, completing school work they're able to do on their own while she and I talked. We, as friends so often do, relied on comfortable rhythms of conversations past: politics, theology, literature and our children, all topics that have interested us in the past and offer varying conversations.
After a few cups of coffee she left. She drove back into her world of PTO meetings and work related obligations and I went back to fractions, Peter the Great, predicate pronouns and the health care bill fallout.
But talking to her made me appreciate the beautiful things in life: well-written blogs, good books, pretty clothes, appealing architecture and other things that stimulate our hearts and minds.
It would be easy for me to let myself become another conservative blogger who is somewhat frantic about yesterday's health care vote and to champion a small-government philosophy that I passionately embrace; I am that blogger. But I am not only that blogger, and in a digital world that creates caricatures based on electronic musings, I will not let myself become that blogger, even on days when when political thoughts are what consumes me for the day.
Distressed I am, but not it totality. Who could be on a day when the sun is shining? On a day when I was given time to verbally appreciate some of the many beautiful things life has to offer, not the least of which is, for a home-schooling mother, a silly four-year-old dressing her baby doll in a swimsuit in March?
Monday, March 22, 2010
Distressed, but not in totality
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2 comments:
You have never been, in my mind, an angry, single-vision blogger and so anything you say here is always appreciated by me -- even when you and I don't always have the same perspective. In quiet ways, you've demonstrated many many good things about paths you've chosen for yourself and your family and I've learned a lot about what you present here. Much more than in places where hostility and arrogance are so rampant.
I'm hardly surprised that you would want to comment on yesterday's vote. Of course.
This is not the place to write why I think HRC, like Medicare, is a good thing. But I do want you to know that I respect totally the thoughtfulness you bring to the issue. I do know there is another perspective! And that we cannot tell how this all will play out.
I'm glad you had time to spend with your friend.
Beautiful post, Cate. Thank you.
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