I write to you from the mountains of Northern California - Applegate to be precise. I am visiting friends, which is always a good thing, but this is particularly relaxing since it's in the high foothills outside of Auburn. There is a train line across the small valley, and a couple of slow freights made their way up the mountain last night as I was falling asleep. I used to stop here regularly when I taught skiing (I would come for dinner on my way back to the San Francisco Bay Area and wait out "ski traffic" for a couple hours each Sunday night after teaching Saturday and Sunday) - I hope to have that same schedule again: possibly next winter (we'll see - this winter is consumed with massage school and helping my Mom fix up her house to be the way she wants it).
This seems much more diary-like than my past political posts - maybe that's a bad thing, but it is what you're getting today. Up here in the mountains politics seems much less important; as I sit here listening to classical music and looking out on the oaks and firs and pines... But I suppose that politics are as important as ever, since all this that I am gleefully experiencing could easily be taken away by a "bad government".
I was in the shower this morning thinking that everyone wants the same thing, a world that they understand and which seems coherent to their metaphysical beliefs. So those who believe that moral turpitude is an abomination to God expect someone to act as a moral guide, and if necessary a moral policeman, to keep the populace on the straight and narrow. And those who believe that behavior is behavior, and good and bad are judgements that edge closer to irrelevant than important do not want those moral police "infringing on their freedoms". With such wide divisions in belief, it really is pretty surprising that we haven't all killed one another already - perhaps that in itself is reason to hope.