QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I think it would be a good idea."
- - Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization.
Rhino here:
I'm grateful to have the opportunity to communicate with my friends,
relatives and others with this weblog. I'm also grateful to my friend Jim
Woolum, the webmaster of my websites
http://www.kifaru.com
and
http://www.dreamcatchers.org
who wrote me one day when I was still calling this my "AAA Serious List" and
informed me of the new phenomenon on the web called weblogging or blogging.
He told me the content I was creating was perfect for a weblog and he'd be
up for creating the website to host it. I'm not a great journalist nor a
very deep thinker but I hope what I'm doing with this is helpful in terms of
offering ideas that may be different than what many of you receive, food for
more thought. At least its a way to stay in contact with people that I wish
I was able to see & speak with more often.
The following is a column by Maureen Dowd from The N.Y. Times. Many of you
may have already seen it, but in case not, I wanted to call attention to it
because for me, it hits home. Have a great weekend.
New York Times | Opinion
By Maureen Dowd
Wednesday, 26 June, 2002
WASHINGTON -- A friend of mine over the weekend was recalling her days as an
idealistic child of the 60's. Students sitting around the dorm, amid the
water bongs, water beds, strobe lights and Che posters, listening to Led
Zeppelin and Dylan, dreaming about remaking the world in their own image,
trading nightmares about spying Big Brother and soul-robbing corporations.
"We thought America was being run by the corporate-military-industrial white
male power structure," she said. "We were certain there was a right-wing
conspiracy. We thought civil liberties and free speech were imperiled. We
were suspicious of rich people. We had reason to believe there was corporate
malfeasance and Wall Street was bad. We worried that the government was
backing coups in Latin America. We figured the administration wanted to
topple all the overwrought, self-appointed messiahs who didn't know how to
run their own little societies. We assumed that powerful people were rigging
elections. We feared there were people who wanted to blast roads through
forests and rip up the tundra."
She recalled all the old leftist tracts in the Nixon years about a secret
government plan to suspend the Constitution and declare a national security
emergency and round up people without charges, and that the oil companies
and banks would plunge us into nuclear war.
"And now," she concluded with a rueful smile, "all our worst paranoid
nightmares are coming true. We wake up in our 50's and our enemies from the
60's have crept back into power. And we were the empowerers, because we've
turned into the same selfish people we thought we were against. We forgot to
be suspicious."
(middle of article deleted - see below for address of entire article)
And now, faced with the evil of Osama bin Laden, they can no longer imagine
there's "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too."
These utopian sentiments were buried in the rubble in Lower Manhattan.
To Read Entire Article go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/26/opinion/26DOWD.html
OR
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.27E.dowd.acqui.htm
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright
law ( http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html ).
All copyrights belong to original publisher.
4:52:45 PM 
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