On The Road - with Bill Holiday

Local history guru Bill Holiday leads remarkable tours to amazing locations. Bill has been honored as a national expert on the JFK assasination, and has also made similar inroads into our expanded understanding of the Vietnam War. Take a look at his website for his upcoming tours, then figure out why you're not signing up! Go to Holiday Travel and review the speakers and participants he's got lined up for his trips. Very impressive...

Student Software Special

Really - this is a great deal. Microsoft is once again offering its "Ultimate Steal" deal on the top-of-the-line version of Microsoft Office. If you have an ".edu" e-mail address, get this software for $59.95. You'll download the software, so DON'T try this on a dialup connection. Also, make sure to backup your software to CD once you download it! Click right here to check it out. This is significantly cheaper than even the "Home and Student" version, on sale, with rebates, etc.

Evening Star Grange

Ever wonder what's happening at Dummerston's version of Madison Square Garden? Now you can take a look at the online calendar that Ruth Barton is building. No hard hat required...

Highway Travel S-t-r-e-t-c-h

The Vermont Information Center Division publishes a handly little guide called "Park Bench Yoga". It's designed to help visitors loosen up their muscles after their long trek to our corner of the world. The exercises look like they'd also be just the thing for recovering after a long flight, though certainly not possible whilst in your "cozy" seat! Take a look: Park Bench Yoga. The file is 1.4MB, and it'll print wonderfully to a regular 8 1/2 by 11 page.

Antivirus update time!

Those of you who have been using the free version of AVG Antivirus should be updated to Version 8 by now - otherwise, your virus definitions will no longer be kept current.   If you haven't yet installed Version 8 (which is still free for individuals, by the way!), read on.

If you're unsure as to which version you're running, open AVG, click on "Information", then click on "About AVG Free".   If it shows you've got program version eight-point-something, you're good.   If not, click here, download that puppy, and install it now.   Then go back to your homes and go about your normal business.   There's nothing more to see here.

4,000   4,200

Consider this.   We're now five anguishing years into a discretionary war.   The costs have been staggering, whether measured in young lives, in financial terms, or in what the fallout has done to tear apart the fabric of our society.   The moving-target reasoning of why we got into this quagmire does a smirk-faced tango with an ever-changing pastel of "victory".   And please, please don't ask for an actionable definition of victory.   Powerful old white men will cast you as unpatriotic - as if you're incapable of respecting OUR children, OUR spouses, OUR friends and cousins.

If you dare ask why we continue to feed the fire with our best and brightest, you're told that we don't want another 9/11.   Ask why, then, we've committed to wasting our time, resources, and reputation in Iraq, and you're cast as a quaint, dim dolt who just doesn't get it.   Tell our vice-president that two-thirds of Americans condemn the handling of the debacle, and his seasoned, reasoned response comes back, "So?"

Why are we posting this today?   Well, we've now sacrificed 4,000 young American lives in Iraq.   FOUR THOUSAND "regret to inform you" notifications, body transports, identifications, funerals, burials.   And countless families, forever, casualties of war.  

To our elected officials in Washington: DON'T YOU DARE question our patriotism.   If you ever got beyond the Beltway you would see how ridiculous you sound, how truly clueless you appear.   Yes, that might have worked in the days immediately following 9/11, but now you just sound like, well, dim old white men.

Think back - remember those post-9/11 days, when Russians were saying "We're all Americans"?   When the French were saying "We're all New Yorkers"?   Candlelight vigils for us, in Asia?   Out of the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania COULD have arisen the new world that has always been an ideal.   Rather than seizing the moment, though, we opted for the low road, for business as usual.   We suffered catastrophically from the lack of, as somebody's father once called it, "that vision thing."

Oh, and by the way.   Thank you for reading this far.   It's important, because each and every letter in this piece - every period and comma, every quote and hyphen - each one represents TWO Americans who never made it home from Iraq.   Perhaps their brave families and friends can teach our leaders a thing or two about patriotism.


ADDENDUM: With great sadness we acknowledge the raising of the horrible toll in the middle of November, 2008, to 4,200.