Old Times There Are Not Forgotten- Or Really Understood Either

We all owe our ancestors.

They walked the earth, and bore us, and raised us. To the best of their ability. Which often left something to be desired.

This post was started before Thanksgiving, and finished on the night I returned.

Nashville (outside the commercial idiocy) is still as beautiful in nature as ever. The Warner parks remain some of the nicest places I've ever run in. Green and yellow maple, mostly green hickory, yellow pin oak, just beginning to fall. Deer crashing through the woods. A taste of winter wind in the highland rim. Falcon in the sky, mockingbird in the tree, and cricket in the sunshine.

Almost everyone I saw in the parks there still had Kerry stickers on their cars. Outside West End and the Vanderbilt area, it is a red state. Of course, the newspapers reflect that totally. The main issue in America today, of course, to those drinking the red state Kool-Aid, is the loss of "Southern Identity". Demented nonsense. I love the land that is the Southern Appalachians, but I can not love an ethnic construct that would have most everyone living there minimally in fiefdom and possibly in slavery to an aristocratic monied few.

Oh, and by the way, did you know Alito's abortion stance is "tough to decipher"? If you have a hard time reading what he's written, that is. Can you say "burn the fornicators at the stake after you take their infants from them"? Do they lace their Kool-Aid with methanol to make themselves drunkenly blind?

Of course, my parents reflect the Southern disconnect with reality utterly. They're worried sick about what the Medicaid drug "benefit" restructuring is going to do to them. They loathe Bill Frist as much as I do- for different more personal reasons- although they'd vote for him or Dear Leader any day over any Democrat. They are confused by what is happening around them because their own lives don't reflect the happy pictures painted for them by their Leaders on TV.

They view their inadequacies as their own fault and not the product of the lies they've been sold.

And they are their own fault- but not the way they think they are.

Still, I owe them something. But my parents won't listen.

Still, I try to use them to teach a lesson to my own kids.

Appearances are deceptive: if you accept what you are told uncritically, you will be sold a lie.