Has anybody out there read David McCullough's 1776?  Good little book.  After "the woozies" settled down, "the wireds" set in and I found myself laying in bed staring at the ceiling...again.  I decided to go out to the kitchen and read.  I got through Dorchester Heights and am in New York building the forts.

 

I like the book because of the comments from the personal letters of the people involved.  When reading it, you feel as though you're in the heads of Washington and the others, thinking along with them, seeing our world as theirs in their time period.  Imagine the North East Corridor as farm country and Boston, New York and Philly as little more than villages.  Mentally, I understand it, but have a hard time conceptualizing it.

 

Reading the correspondences of our founding fathers is really an amazing thing.  The faith and spirit these people had was incredible!  I guess the word I'm looking for is "conviction."  They really believed that what they were doing was right, even though many in this country didn't.  The "tyrannies" they protested seem small compared to what happened in Iraq under Saddam.  They didn't involve mass genocide of significant segments of our population.  It really wasn't about much more than money and inconvenience.  I guess they drew the line there so it wouldn't go that far.  Now a nation of our own, we've kind of jumped right over the line and continue on.  Now we live at a point where, if MacDonalds wants to buy my house to build a fast food restaurant, I have to sell it to them.  The Tories felt that kind of stuff was okay too, as long as they got their Happy Meals...

 

Kind of makes you wonder where the right place to draw the line is, doesn't it?

 

And 22 more people died in Iraq today.

 

The terrorists continue to walk down the path of genocide.

 

Democracy was intended to be an interactive game that all of us participate in.