Time for a Nor'easter

This is a blog without a photograph, and thus for me it is an internal blog. The kind you wake up with after a fitful night of sleep and you have been tossing a bit wondering about this and that. You see today was a cold day, with drizzle. The comet's trail so to speak of the Nor'easter off the coast that has matured in the Appalachians and either married the system coming up from the southeast or spawned something altogether new. And behind her, we bundle up and look to the sky and shiver a bit. But you know a day like today makes you feel good to be alive. And I guess it tends to make me contemplate. We were riding to my son's soccer game. I happened to interrupt a great conversation about many things to comment that in an odd way the United States is at a crossroads. We are like a child that hasn't quite grown up yet is poised to make choice(s). One can glance across the globe and acknowledge challenges across the board that in one way or another the United States has some connection to, and hint at decision-making to go with it. That's when I returned home and read Bono's opinion piece in the New York Times today. He talked about America and the need, "...the world needs to believe in America again." I think Bono has it right, to a point. You see America is much more than simply the United States of America. A problem with this America, and what my friend and I talked about, is that our educational system (and maybe the rest of us too) still hasn't quite recognized it yet. The yet is that there is a Canada, a Central America and a South America in this America. That there are other languages rather than simply English and other cultures besides our own. It is a very rich world, diverse at that, for which we still tend to hunker down upon in a bit of a fetal way. Don't get me wrong there is a place and time for a Teddy Roosevelt response with a hammer too. But it is the "ideas" part of Bono's take that I feel an affinity for. We need ideas now - strong ones that equally arise from a strong-value driven system. Our connections flow from our country, and return again. Curiously enough I made it to another year today on my day. My eve of today and today were, gratefully so, connections to my past with individuals that I have encountered over a span of life. Those connections simply convey to me that we as a country owe it to ourselves and to others to promote those connections in our homes, in our schools and through our mosaiced heritage in a relatively new country that can make a difference - and that must.