Grown-ups in charge

By Carol Gee

For a time prior to November 4 of this year, I was afraid to hope for a set of healthy-sized Democratic victories. Eight years of things going wrong with elections had worn my hopes thin. Then the positive numbers began to come in and I could breathe more easily. The grown-ups were going to take charge again. The adolescent was on his way to Texas.

For a time following the election, I was hopeful that Democrats would have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Two years of near-impotence in the face of Republican leaders' obstructionism had worn out my faith in the Senate's Democratic leaders. Now the numbers are in and I must reckon with the necessity of bipartisanship to get anything substantive done in the 111th Congress. Grown-ups in both Executive and Legislative will rebalance their power. The bully on the see-saw has left the playground.

For a time following the official transition into the "Obama Transition," I was optimistic about a standard set of Progressive nominations fitting my agenda. A month of leaked names, intros and announcements has tempered my wide-eyed optimism. On the scale of left to right the numbers fall more toward the center than the left. Grown-up leaders can inhabit the Center and we will still be OK. Childish ideologues will be replaced with pragmatic over-achievers.

For a time after the world economic crash and attacks on Mumbai, I was anxious for the world's well-being. As the weeks have passed and I am out and about in my community, I see for rent signs in stores, empty parking lots, and fewer help wanted ads in bankrupting newspapers. And I hear tension in my grown-up children's voices as they ask without saying, "Am I grown up enough to handle what's coming?" While Bush president fiddles their Rome is burning.

For the time being I understand the recession has spread to my own, and my turf. My hope that the downturn is time-limited and finite is buoyed by my own history as a "Depression baby." I am grown up now and so are my children and most of my grandchildren. Our change-leaders are having to grow up fast as they face the worst challenges since the Great Depression. And we have grown desperately tired of Bush 43, the neocon's darling, manipulatable, boy wonder from Texas.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Bond lives

By Capt. Fogg

As I keep saying, it's not terrorism if you're not terrified. The notion of a United States with 300 million people cringing and cowering in fear that a dozen nutjobs from abroad might come and shoot us all is, quite frankly disgusting and reminding ourselves at every football game that we live in the home of the brave doesn't seem to have much of an effect. Very odd in a country where so many of us are heavily armed.

As one who grew up in the years immediately following WWII, I've long been impressed with the stories of the citizens of London going about their business, upper lips as stiff as Sheffield steel while the bombs and rockets fell from the sky, night after night. People slept in the underground and in the suburbs, houses such as my parents once lived in had a reinforced bomb shelter in the back garden. If they were terrified, they kept it to themselves. England was devastated, the English were not.

I have to be impressed by the story related today in the Daily Mail by an Englishman who took refuge in a restaurant in the Taj Mahal hotel while the shooting went on on the other side of an improvised barricade.

I was extremely lucky. I was with a very good bunch of people. Three or four of us were Brits,

said Nick Hayward. Remaining calm and sober, they conducted a search for booby traps and built barricades.

At 5 o'clock in the morning, as it began to seem that Indian troops would soon retake the hotel lobby, the group, stirred but not shaken, found some glasses and a bottle of vintage champagne:

[T]he head waiter came rushing across to me and said, "No, no, you can't do that!" and I said, "Well we're going to" and he said, "No sir, those are the wrong type of glasses. I shall find you champagne flutes."

My kind of people -- and my kind of hotel.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)