Hello Texas!

My first entry of the new year finds me in Texas for a class.  Or two.  This is my first time back here since somewhere around 2001.  Somewhere over the past years I’ve gone from looking forward to a trip for work to almost dreading it.  Maybe if it wasn’t to a city I’ve been to before it might be a little better, but I don’t know about that.  It’s only a few days.  It’s nice to get the training.  But somehow it feels like I’ve already missed too much of my daughter’s life and now that she’s 12 and well on her way to 13 I see less of her even when she’s with us. 
I’m not good at this growing old stuff. 
Something seems to be missing from my life.  I’ve asked myself if it’s just me wanting too much and that may be a part of it.  But it’s more than that.  Somehow it’s like a contagious disease that was passed on from my parents.  And try as I might I seem to follow in my father’s footsteps even almost 15 years after he is gone.  After he died I wanted to try to understand a man I felt like I never really knew.  Brilliant man in so many ways but so crushed by a cruel world?  I still don’t have the answers.  He grew up during the depression.  I think that must have been hard.  I think his father was hard though I never knew him.  He died 12 years before I was born.
It strikes me as ironic that the promise I made to someone over a decade ago turned out to be one of the reasons we aren’t together.
Is it just me or did the sense of hope that came with the fall of the wall evaporate?  Governments can’t have hopeful people that they can’t control.  9/11 played right into our government’s hands.  Fear, uncertainty and doubt spread like a cancer.  Propelled by George Bush and his total disregard for the constitution. Two wars later and almost triple gas prices all hope that the world could get along is gone.  Paranoia is abundant.  Not just in America, but other countries as well.  About us and what we will do next.  No wonder Obama’s message of hope is so longed for.  And yet columnist decry that it is false hope.  Well, maybe it is, but is life worth living without any hope?
I don’t know if Obama has what it takes to be the leader of this country, but he does seem to inspire something no other candidate on either side does.  I don’t know that much about McCain but Ronald Regan’s son wrote the other day about how bitter McCain seemed and how much he hated him.  I see Clinton as a determined person, but probably somewhat bitter also.  Was hope what JFK offered?  I was just over a year old when he was shot in the city I write from, but I think it must have been.  Was it a fairy tale?  Maybe.  A little bit.  But I think maybe it came at the right time. 
Today millions are seeing their hopes of home ownership go up in a cloud of smoke.  If housing prices decline by the 25% projected in a recent article in Business Week it will take prices back to their historical trend line and wipe out many people’s hope. 
Obama may yet not make it to November and if he does may not make it past November and I somewhat fear for his safety if he does because some people fear hope more than more of the same.  Regardless of why or how or how many were involved in the assination of JFK a lot of it comes down to the fact that there were those who were afraid of change. 
No slight intended to Texas, but I think we have had enough Presidents from Texas over the past 50 years (and VPs) to do for a while.  Heaven forgive me if I have this wrong, but I believe Obama is from IL.  Somehow it would seem fitting to have the first African-American president be from the Land of Lincoln.
Onward, upward.