Filed under: Politics
I am delighted to report that the sky from my second story window is mostly a healthy blue, with hazy white clouds on the horizon. Bland pale grey is not particularly pleasing or promising, but we get a lot of that here. I get to complain about that frequently, which I do, because I come from Idaho, where the skies are always blue. That of course is not true, but closer to reality than the assumption that Seattle has lovely weather. (“The skies are always blue in Seattle”)
Seattle is a major city on the Northwest Coast, but actually several miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. The City of Seattle has the very large Puget Sound (saltwater) from the Pacific Ocean to the West side, and Lake Washington (freshwater) to the East, where you have suburbs, then another lake, and then the land rises to the Cascade mountains, capped by lovely Mt. Rainier., a range that extends on down south to Mexico.
I don’t know about you, but I never got much of any geography in school. Perhaps that has changed, but my adult kids apparently never got any geography in school either. I certainly have to pull up some maps online when the news is going on about locations. If you have kids, you might consider buying a globe, and making it a part of conversation about the rest of the world. It is a very good thing to have a firm mental construct of the shape and contents of the globs, so when something happens like major wars of devastating earthquakes you actually know what they are talking about, and whether they are spending your tax money wisely. Whenever my mind starts playing around with dates, I immediately switch to “It was the eighteenth of April in ’75, and hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year of the wonderful ride of Paul Revere”.
How many major dates do you have stored away in your head with prompts like that? If course there is Pearl Harbor, December 7. 1941, does anyone forget that? But a lot of others that are just as important that we just sort of put in a cupboard expecting to have them available if needed. I think we are better off if we have that cupboard available when needed rather than taken for granted. Do you involve your kids in dinner table conversation about what’s going on in the world? That should get them somewhat interested in current events, and a globe to show where Dubai is may make the world around them more understandable as well as more interesting. My guess is that way too many of us are relatively clueless, and in poor shape to be selecting the folks who are going to represent us in the national conversation.
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American Elephants 