On my way back home, Lincoln was a nice rest stopover. I had choices of lodging and good cheap food to revive. Hurricane Gabriel in the Gulf had people as far north as Dallas evacuating. It seemed more likely that the backlash would come toward us in East Tennessee. Across the Midwest the weather was warm and dry. "Arid" is a better word to describe what I saw in Iowa. Nowhere was I so dispirited as when I saw the corn crop in Iowa. Completely stunted, it looked almost like the Gehu we grew in Wyoming.
I made a stopover in Iowa City, which bouyed my spirits. As I watched students settling in for a new term at my Alma Mater, it was heartening to see a cooperative transportation service, run and operated by the students. Staying at the Student Union, I awoke in the morning to the shrill of the Engineering Building's whistle. Parallel memories burst forth--time for eight o'clocks, and the announcement when World War II was finally over.
By leaving Iowa City in the afternoon, I could take a local bus along Mississippi River towns--Davenport, Muscatine and Burlington--in time to make a stopover in St. Louis before heading back to Knoxville. When I asked a friendly cabbie where to find lodging at midnight, he looked at me benignly and explained the Cards were in town. (After 66 years on this planet, my brain had never taught me to read sports pages.) So I rescheduled and found myself at sunrise, skirting Fort Campbell as I had at the trip's beginning at sundown. In Nashville, I called my husband and told him I was heading in.
The best thing about the time until election day was that the drought at home started to break. The worst thing on election day was that the man who became President didn't understand how weather, oil slump, and The Economy Stupid were already with us. The Democrats were still in a political desert. It took the ramp of further distress to convince politicians that citizens always vote their pocketbooks.
In 2008, by the time Barack Obama was elected, the handwriting was already on the wall. The Wall of east and west in Germany had fallen, but that was mostly an example of which major nation would succumb first to an economy built on military one-mindedness. All the various bubbles, ensuing from 1992 to 2008 had only been pricks to a false notion of production. I thought once again of that Sunday in 1968 when Dr. Gordon Gilkey told us in church that we would have to foresake nagging at each other and provide food, shelter and hope to the citizens of the Globe. Good stewardship is mandatory, not a gesture of benevolence.
As 20 nations sent representatives to London this week, I itched to be there to observe how such men and women were going to look at "the least of these." I rely on C-Span to fill me in where my legs can't take me.
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