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June
30, 2003
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
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June
30, 2003
Kentucky Woman
Three
Days in the Bluegrass Country
By ELAINE CASSEL
I took the weekend off and visited old friends
in Lexington, Kentucky. I had intended to write from there so
as not to miss two days of posting to this blog, but the distance
between Washington, D.C. and Kentucky consisted of much more
than miles alone.
Simply, once there, I had no inspiration.
My hosts did not have home newspaper delivery--and if they had
it would have been local papers from Louisville or Lexington,
as there is not home delivery of the New York Times on the farm
where they lived. Their Internet connection was via modem dialup--no
cable or DSL out there in the hills where the horses and cattle
roam on the limestone rich bluegrass range.
It took so long to access the home page
of The Washington Post that I had all but lost interest by the
time it appeared. And gazing out on the steep hillside covered
with wildflowers rendered the headlines of the Post most unappealing.
I clicked off the Internet connection and went to have coffee
on the porch and watch the horses graze in the tall grass.
My friends had moved from Washington,
DC. three years ago. Both the typical Washington professional,
politically savvy and somewhat sharing my views, I asked them
what I write about--civil liberties, war on terror, unjust justice--resonates
in Kentucky. Quite simply, nothing, they said.
Oh, it's not that the people don't care,
they said. It is that they live life. They work hard, count every
dollar, and care more about family and livestock than politics
and policy. Civil liberties are but an abstraction, they explained,
as long as the government is not an obvious presence in their
everyday lives. But try to take away their guns, and they will
turn libertarian. Support for Clinton faded with gun control.
They are not in favor of incarcerating everyone for the slightest
offense. Oh, sure, pedophiles and murderers, maybe they ought
to be incarcerated. But drug users and small-time dealers? Several
people I met while there had family members caught in that penal
trap, and they considered it a waste of government money and
energy. They don't need a "peace officer" to right
every wrong.
An evening with friends of my friends--a
couple educated not in college but by extremely hard lives--provided
some insights of a personal nature. The man said that the origin
of most problems arose from people "broadcasting when they
should be tuning in." In recounting my recent heartbreak
of a romantic nature, his wife, a salt-of-the earth-mother of
wisdom, chided me for responding to the hurt with mere words.
"IIf he had done me that way, I would have kicked his ass
so hard he would have had to have my foot surgically removed.
Where's your head, girl?"
She had me in stitches as she dramatized
a recent encounter with a snake in her perennial garden. What
did you do when you realized you had stepped on a snake, I asked?
Reaching into her shorts pocket, she pulled out a six-inch knife
and stabbed it into the ground. "That's what I did,"
she said, as I looked in amazement at the knife sticking out
of my friend's lawn. As if to say to me, "What would you
have done, talk to it?" I want to be more like you, I thought!
A kick-ass woman--with a knife and a sharp tongue.
She talked about how she was the only
of her several siblings who made a decent life for herself, in
spite of extreme childhood deprivation and abuse. For her, being
a mother "is the most important thing I will do in my life."
What makes you different from your brothers and sisters, I wanted
to know? Again, a straight-talking answer, devoid of psychobabble.
"So my girls would not have a no-count mother like I had."
That evening, on a country porch under
a starlit sky, I stumbled upon an essential difference in what
I do and how they live. Life for me inside the Washington, D.C.
beltway consists of, in the words of my friend who retired from
government, "spinning the spin." But talk is cheap
in the hills of Kentucky. Real people live real lives and deal
with real problems in concrete ways. They care about the rain,
the hay crop, the horse that went lame, the fence that needs
mending, and the cow with the sick calf. They love their kids--and
each other. There, Sunday is still a day for going to church
and having dinner with grandparents and aunts and uncles. Summer
is for swimming holes, making hay, breaking yearling horses,
growing vegetables, and making preserves.
Three days in Kentucky--where the skies
were bluer, the night sky clearer, and the future brighter than
the one I read and write about. Where ignorance was, for three
days, indeed bliss.
Tomorrow, I will be back to writing about
civil liberties, refreshed by a much-needed respite from bad
news and gloomy prognostications.
Elaine Cassel practices
law in Virginia and the District of Columbia and teaches law
and psychology. She is writing a book on civil liberties post
9/11, and keeps and keeps an eye on Bush and Ashcroft's trampling
on the Bill of Rights at her Civil
Liberties Watch.
Weekend Edition
Features
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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