Four days with my daughter and family put me in another reality, one suffused with conversation, laughter, play, sunshine, and time — things I don’t have here, where the insistent needs of a 92 year old woman hold just about every moment hostage.
I was able to sit in the dappled shade and finish the mystery novel I started to read last month. I was able to relax enough to ease the spasms I’ve been getting in my back from an out-of-place rib. I sat on the floor and with my grandson and his various construction, rescue, and police vehicles. I slept like the dead.
I never got to post a new piece on the education issue. That will have to wait until next week. As for now, I’m struggling with re-entry.
Meanwhile, if you’re hungry for something more important to read, go over to No Utopia to this post about what conservative and writer Andrew Bacevich had to say to Bill Moyers during a PBS interview.
Bacevich’s responses include this:

Well, I think the clearest statement of what I value is found in the preamble to the Constitution. There is nothing in the preamble to the Constitution which defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in our image, which I view as a fool’s errand. There is nothing in the preamble of the Constitution that ever imagined that we would embark upon an effort, as President Bush has defined it, to transform the Greater Middle East. This region of the world that incorporates something in order of 1.4 billion people.

I believe that the framers of the Constitution were primarily concerned with focusing on the way we live here, the way we order our affairs. To try to ensure that as individuals, we can have an opportunity to pursue our, perhaps, differing definitions of freedom, but also so that, as a community, we could live together in some kind of harmony. And that future generations would also be able to share in those same opportunities.

The big problem, it seems to me, with the current crisis in American foreign policy, is that unless we do change our ways, the likelihood that our children, our grandchildren, the next generation is going to enjoy the opportunities that we’ve had, is very slight, because we’re squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth. In many respects, to the extent that we persist in our imperial delusions, we’re also going to squander our freedom because imperial policies, which end up enhancing the authority of the imperial president, also end up providing imperial presidents with an opportunity to compromise freedom even here at home. And we’ve seen that since 9/11.