The Fall and Rise of a Lovely Day

So there I was, sitting in my living room, laptop perched on knees, I-Pod across the room belting out tunes from my collection of jazz, blues and gospel. It was September 28, 2010, the sun was trying to peek out, and I was looking forward to a lovely day.

And just to seal that deal, my I-Pod was playing an old favorite of mine:

America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee,

"wailed Ray Charles.

For the first time in a long time, I actually heard the words: And crowned thy good with brotherhood"

Must have been a portent because my next mouse click brought up a story by IPS, the news service I work for. The headline read Iran's "Blogfather" Gets 20-Year Prison Sentence." The story ran:

SAN FRANCISCO, California, Sep 28, 2010 (IPS) - A week after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told heads of state gathered for the U.N. General Assembly in New York that his government does not jail its citizens for expressing their opinions, Iran's Revolutionary Court sentenced Hossein Derakhshan, an internationally known Iranian-Canadian blogger, to 19 and a half years in prison.

Bummer!

For a lovely day, that's a killer. What to do? I assess my situation:

Here I am, blessed with that rare breed of editor, who figures I know better than she knows what's going down in my particular area of interest today. So she rarely assigns me anything to write; apparently used to living on the edge, each day she lets me write what I want to write. Then she edits it to keep me from looking like a fool.

Most of what I write is critical of the President, his Cabinet, or other government officials. The policy doesn't make sense. Or the policy's OK, but some particular agency doesn't have the resources to execute the policy. A member of the Administration is behaving in a way that discredits his team. Members of Congress who'd rather retain campaign talking points by letting critical issues fester rather than by fixing them. A judicial decision I may find particularly shameful because it ruins someone's career based on the decision of a judge who thinks furthering his ideological agenda is more precious than using the rule of law to further the Republic. The litany is endless. And angry-making.

Yet, I like to think my comments are constructively critical. "What's gone wrong, why, and does anyone know how to make it better?" are the questions I ask myself as I sit down to write.

But today was to be different. I am not generally a flag-waving hand-on-heart type of guy; my patriotism is quieter, just about silent and always most undemonstrative. Maybe it was my mother, who admonished me: No Public Displays of Affection. Or it's a British thing I learned during 20 summers in London; the Brits are understated in this way (and just about every other way) except when they find themselves at a football match.

But my hesitancy came before I read the words of Mr. Ahmadinejad, tried to digest his world-class hypocrisy and tried to comprehend how the impact of any blog could be so cataclysmic as to justify taking away 20 years of a young man's life.

And that's when the light went on. Sure, the NSA could be monitoring my blog but they can't just throw me in jail and forget the key. And we do - collectively. Those who really believe in our Constitution regularly go to court to demonstrate that our Bill of Rights may be suffering from some acute maladies, but reports of its demise are vastly exaggerated.

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