Sorry, Tom.

I forgot you have a crush on Pegeen. ;) She and I have this much in common: I worked my way through college too, and then waited tables to pay the rent and the grocery bill while my husband got his master's.

The article didn't make me feel good, so I said why. Those men in the truck will sink back into obscurity, and labor until their bodies break, and heaven only knows if there will be any pension or medical assistance to help them in their later years.

My grandfather whom I loved lived in a second-story walk-up that he and my grandmother got for a song because the building was owned by relatives, and after his legs could no longer make the trip, was a virtual shut-in. His mind, his greatest resource, gradually left him in his later years, and after the family's savings were depleted by his care and my grandmother's terminal illness, he spent the last year of his life in a state hospital, which was all his pension would support. I was not allowed to visit him, as I was only 12, but I used to sit on the stairs and listen to my parents in the kitchen. I learned that conditions were less than ideal. It bothers me that the men going off to raze the wreckage and disinter the remains of so many people's children may face a similar fate.

The September 11 fund is for victims and their families. It's a noble thing, but it's for the survivors of those who died and for the injured. It's not for the working people who move the rubble unless some of it should happen to fall on them.

I agree about business people. They take risks with their own money, and even more important, with their precious time, every day in pursuit of a dream or an idea, and deserve credit for trying even when they don't succeed. Those who manage to succeed and still maintain the kind of respect for and civility to their customers that we associate with Norman Rockwell paintings have actually, in my opinion, been the bulwark of the capitalist ideal. It's not just the money.

The real grunts... what can I say?

As long as I'm being personal here, I'll admit to being a few months shy of 15 when Woodstock was in full swing, old enough to want to go but young enough so my parents could refuse to let me and make it stick. And I lived close enough to make it a day trip. >sigh<

I was old enough to form an opinion, that I thought the war was well-intentioned but had gone wrong, so I was against it. But against the soldiers? How could I be? I knew some of those guys. They were very young, like me, and I even dated a couple of soldiers, though my parents didn't know about that. (I wasn't supposed to be dating grown men, but they didn't seem all that grown to me. ;) Beware, Dad.) They made their decisions and enlisted, or sighed bitterly when their numbers came up in the lottery -- and God help me, I thought of the Shirley Jackson short story every time that word "lottery" came up -- but they did their duty as they saw it, just as I do mine now. I admired them. I also admired the ones who went to jail rather than serve, because that, too, was a principled stand. I admired conscientious objectors who would nevertheless serve in the medical corps and get shot at without shooting back.

I understand why people spit on returning soldiers: they wanted to spit on the war. What I didn't understand then, and still don't, is how people can protest an activity they see as dehumanizing by themselves dehumanizing the people who are trying to do their duty as they see it. The protesters lost their way when they hated in the name of peace.

Mary Anne