As I said in my previous post, I was sick for Christmas. I have never in my life been so ill for this holiday, directing a lot of the shopping by cellphone with Mr. Strega, who, among all the shopping for gifts and Christmas dinner, had to move Prada out of her student housing in another city just before the holiday. He deserves the Congressional Medal of Christmas Honor...BUT--we survived, and wrapped all the gifts, and the kids were pleased with everything...and, much more importantly than things, we had ourselves. Mr. Strega and the kids gave me a telescope for Christmas (I am an amateur astronomer, but haven't been out stargazing much this winter).
I didn't want to let this post slip by without mentioning Gerald Ford's death. I have a great deal of respect for Betty Ford, who has done important work in the recovery field, and I think was an extremely brave person for going public about her own recovery from addiction and alcoholism. I don't want to do a political commentary about Ford, except to muse on the fact that, though the happenings in the government then were insane, they were not, in my opinion, at the fever pitch of lunacy they are now. Ford seems like Mr. Rogers compared to Bush; he (Ford) had the difficult task of trying to reunify a fragmented country after Watergate, though that was not really possible. I remember Watergate very well and was old enough to see the terrible disillusionment it caused among people in my mother's generation, who had seen presidents like Roosevelt and Kennedy--so many of them had been raised to trust the government, to not question the integrity of people in office, especially the President. I think one benefit of Watergate was in its cautionary tale of not placing blind faith in institutions and people--and yet that lesson also carried with it a tremendous loss of innocence from the idea that the government cared and that elected officials had the best interests of the people at heart. So Ford's passing reminds me of that chaotic time, the lessons of which might be good to remember in these even-more-chaotic times.
I tend to write longer posts when I have been away from the computer for awhile. The flags at half-mast today reminded me of something a commentator on this blog pointed out awhile back.
It has been over three months since Joanna Veil, known as Asha to her family and friends, was found murdered in Ben Lomond, dumped on Love Creek Road like a sack of trash. She was in her last trimester of pregnancy; her daughter Anina would have been born by now. That Asha is not alive today, holding her daughter in her arms, enjoying their first holidays together as mother and child, is an unspeakable sorrow.
I was sadly disturbed by the winding-down in the media about stories concerning Asha, as if she had become "old news" to our local paper.
Still, there was FINALLY a Sentinel story again about it, the only real news in it being that the investigative team is waiting on laboratory results from the state.
I realize that real investigations take a lot of time, that this isn't an episode of CSI, but all I can do as a lone blogger on the outskirts of Felton is simply urge our media to keep Asha's case visible and for the investigative team to keep up their work diligently until a suspect can be named. Asha and Anina deserved their lives; these were selfishly snuffed out by someone who MUST, without question, answer for this and be brought to justice.
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