Civic Minded!

Protesters outside Mankato High School

So a coupla months ago, Kylie was assigned to cover a Health Care Town Meeting in our area.  I tagged along and sat 'with the press' which means I sat next to my sister in a filled to capacity high school auditorium.

As you can imagine, there was heated debate, gross misinformation, yelling, clapping, booing, cheering, rabble-rousers, and regular old folks.  We all know about that stuff; we hear about it everyday. I'm not going to try and explain my position on health care or anything like that...

I am going to say this: It was a very American experience. There was a lot of emotion involved in this 'get together' and not all of it was positive, but the fact that we could all get together and talk about it without getting arrested, molested, or lined up at a firing squad afterwards was quite inspiring to my sense of nationalism.

We may never all agree on anything. There will still be people out there who will be convinced by the absurd things they read on the internet. There may even be a time when the government makes a mistake (or five).  However, our democracy is formed by the people, and our ideals are reflected in it.  Their mistake is our mistake.  Once we take responsibility for that, I think we can better work toward positive outcomes.

We are a strong people. We have choices. We can participate in our government. Nothing is hopeless. Let's stop pointing fingers and work with what enormous amount of resources that we have been given.

*** stumbles of soapbox***

ahem. WELL, I say.

Now it is time for LITTLE KNOWN QUEEN OF HOWKTOWN FACTS:

Here is something that I have always wanted to do:

Randomly search Amazon public wish lists and buy someone a gift.  It is a wish list after all, and wouldn't it be awesome to have something magically appear?

What wish would you like to grant?