Catching up

Well, I leave for home tomorrow. Classes start less than a week from now.

I guess I'm ready to go back; still, I wish that I weren't so far from family. And I wish that instead of living in a tiny town with little more than a wal-mart and a 1/2 hour drive to the nearest bookstore, I lived somewhere more like where my parents live - with a gourmet shop and really, really nice grocery stores, and several bookstores and all kinds of craft-supply places. That said - if I lived somewhere more like where my parents lived, I'd probably either be living in a small apartment or in crazy deep debt trying to afford a house. So whatever.

Family wise the break was uneventful which is good; I have had too many years when I came home and got bad news that was being "saved up" because whoever didn't want me to have to deal with it when I was alone.

Worldwise - well, I can hardly say things were uneventful. President Ford dying and then the execution of Saddam Hussein. Sort of an interesting contrast, I guess.

Ford is the first president I remember; Nixon resigned when I was 5 or so. I look at all the coverage of Ford's life and I find myself thinking, "Another grownup gone." I realize that to a certain degree there's revisionism, and there are probably some commentators who might not have had a lot nice to say about Ford when he was president who are now falling all over themselves to praise him. But. I do think many (though not all) of the Baby Boomer generation and of my generation - the ones currently in power and coming to power - are not "grown ups" in the sense that earlier generations were. We simply haven't known the same kinds of hardship and the same immediate threats. Yes, Sept. 11, 2001 was a sort of a turning point but it almost seems that people outside of the directly impacted areas forgot too soon. And there were also all the cynical-making "now more than ever" ads exhorting us to buy new cars or coin investments or God knows what.

I also think from what I've read of Ford that I appreciate the man for his quietness. Humility - true humility, rather than the "oh, look at me, I am so humble" attitude you sometimes see, especially in certain television preachers - is rare today. It probably always was rare. Ford seems to have been an ordinary guy in a city where far too many people try to insist on a certain extraordinariness beyond their capacity to live up to it - if that makes sense. I guess what I am saying is that there are a lot of people who are "all hat and no cattle" as the old Texas phrase goes, and so it's sort of refreshing to read about someone who didn't boast about his cattle, so to speak.

I don't know. Others may differ. But I think people who do their jobs, who do what they are supposed to do, who don't draw a lot of unnecessary attention to themselves - they are often overlooked in this world, but they are the people that keep this world together.

(Perhaps I feel this a bit because I tend to see myself somewhat as one of those ordinary, capable-but-not-superstar types, who keeps her head down and who works without getting much fanfare. And I will admit - and this is not a pretty part of my personality - that I often get irritated when I see people that I consider low or no talent hacks being lionized [coughParisHiltoncough]. Or in my everyday life - people who are quick to grab credit for things they had minimal input or work on, and leave the people who worked harder in the dust, kind of. I'm not good at self promotion so that sometimes happens to me.)

And then the Hussein execution, which happened faster and more suddenly than I would have expected.

I have to say I am more than a little conflicted about the death penalty; as much as I joke about people "needin' killing," really, deep down, it is a horrible thing to contemplate - that someone would know the minute of their death, that they would have to walk up to that gallows or into the gas chamber or into the execution room. It is certainly a fate I would not want. (However, I will say that is not the primary deterrent that would keep me from comitting a capital crime. The fact that it is wrong to murder is the main deterrent for me.)

That said - if anyone deserved death, it was Hussein. And he got a fair trial - far more than the Kurds did, far more than the other citizens of the country did. Several commentators I've heard have referred to it as being like taking a rabid dog out (and I am oddly reminded of the scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird" where gentle Atticus Finch comes out and shoots a mad dog in the street to prevent it harming anyone in the town). I could see a scenario where if Hussein had life without parole, there might be people just depraved enough to try to bust him out of whatever prison he was in. And that would be a horror - a Saddam restored to power.

And yet - I think it was unseemly that his executioners taunted him. Oh, I can totally see the temptation. But in a way, it lowers them a bit - lowers them to his level, because surely he taunted some of those he had killed before they died.

I didn't expect this to materially change things in Iraq, I guess I wasn't disappointed.

Here's to a less newswise eventful month of January...