Isn’t there anyone around to read these two the riot act? These kids today get worse and worse. Great, now we have to deal with these idiots. We exchange no words whatsoever, instead conduct an entire conversation with minimal movements of mouth, eyes, brows. A woman my age is seated directly across from me our eyes meet. I am riding on the subway when two young teenage boys burst into the car, bristling with energy, laughing, swearing, thrilled at the possibility they could be seen as threatening. This, this is what brings them out these days? After all the civil rights marches, the anti-war demonstrations, this is the sort of event that galvanizes them? We shake our heads, in perfect harmony.Ĭ. I back up, and find myself standing next to a woman my age whose expression reflects my own almost exactly we immediately start talking. They are simply waiting for an Apple store to open so they can buy the newest technological toy. An air of sharp expectancy is in the air for a second I am shot back to the protest movements of my youth. I am walking down a street in Washington DC when I come upon a crowd of young people, standing, sitting, congregating. Is this nuts? Wouldn’t you think-? They go to all this trouble and then this is the best-? Can you believe it? It just goes to show…ī. We fall instantly into one of those senior women exchanges that need no introduction, no explanation, involving head shakes, eye rolls and perfect connection. Clearly the woman my age standing a few feet away is in a similar situation. I’d love to help, but there is no way I can fit in the room. I am waiting outside while my daughter in law attempts to attend to my grandchildren, one of them a newly trained two year old whose bathroom requests are ignored at one’s peril. Sumptuously renovated, that is, in every respect but one: the restroom is tiny, jammed, totally unequipped to accommodate the constant flow of visitors. I am standing outside the rest room near the children’s section on the ground floor of the main Brooklyn Public Library, a sumptuously renovated palace of soaring ceilings and gold inlays. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru.| A Provisional Dictator in Cairo » ABC of Race & Gender By Judy OppenheimerĪ. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. The very darkest places in the continental United States today are almost never darker than Class 2, and are increasingly threatened. Today, the sky above New York City is Class 9, at the other extreme of the scale, and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. "In Galileo's time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1. The ground is literally pitch black, but the sky is breathtakingly illuminated and you can see the Milky Way plainly. One of the darkest night skies I've experienced was in the South Australian outback. That leader's name is Barack Obama." ( Quicklink ) It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. "The election of Obama-a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America-would, at a stroke, reverse our country's image abroad and refresh its spirit at home.
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