And Happy Birthday to Me!

Ah, September...what a lovely, refreshing month. It is the time of year when Kroger starts selling cranberry-colored mums, I wait in eager anticipation for football season to begin, and my wedding anniversary is marked by smiley faces at the end of the month. It is the month of my birthday and typically the first month of school (although in an act of unusual cruelty, county schools opened their doors in the middle of August this year. If you still sweat through to your underwear when you walk outside, then it is not yet time to return to school). So to celebrate my birthday (which was actually 2 days ago but I was too busy being a Princess to sit down and blog) I shall do something that I don't normally do. I shall lapse into the world of politics.

I tend to shy away from making obvious political statements here because what better way to run off readers - and since I seem to have about 13 readers, I would hate to lose even one. However, it's my birthday and I will cry (or blog about ridiculous right-wing behavior) if I want to. Please understand that I consider myself a tolerant individual and generally fall within the conservative democrat category. I believe in many things liberal and many things conservative. I strive to be the bipartisan posterchild. But events in the past few days have lead me to believe that I'm much more liberal than I had once previously thought. Let's take for example the events of Sept. 8th. Happy Birthday to me: President Obama will now address the school children across the nation. (and just to be clear, he is still the president. It would be really great if everyone - politicians, the public and media alike could stop referring to him as Mr. Obama. I think he has probably earned the right to be called President...y'know, just out of respect and all). So, we followed all of the debate about whether or not this was a good idea - yes we were on vacation but we still had full access to CNN (hallelujah) and sometimes it was even on a flat-screen plasma TV. The left said one thing, the right said another. I love a good debate...as long as it's logical, of course.

So fast forward to Tuesday morning. We headed down to the breakfast bar at the Homewood Suites in Baltimore and as I sipped on my coffee and broke off pieces of my cinnamon roll, I read the president's full speech in text in the USA Today. I looked up at Neal, "this is actually a really good speech. I would fully appreciate someone in authority telling our children to listen and respect us and to do their best everyday." (And the children would probably do anything the president asked, as long as they were not raised in a household that used "Obama" in place of a swear word). When I got back up to the room to check facebook, I had an email from a local conservative group in Lexington reminding parents who were pulling their children out of school to avoid exposure to the speech that they would be meeting at GattiTown at noon. Uh, wait, WHAT?? To prevent your children from hearing a speech by the president in which he encourages them to stay in school and aim for the stars everyday, even if they fall short everyday, you will pull them out of school to eat limp pizza and play video games that suck quarters like the wind across Indiana?? I am SO confused. Not being a parent to an actual birthed child, it is hard for me to say for sure what I would do. But I am a parent to one that is doubling in its size every month, so I would like to venture a guess. I would guess that we would allow our child(ren) to watch the speech at school and then come home and re-watch it with them (because that is the beauty of DVR) and use that as a teaching/learning opportunity with our child(ren). You can't really teach your children that if they are about to experience something they may disagree with, that it is OK to leave the situation and go have Italian. Only the Italians can do that. (And really, I must refer to GattiTown as very loosely Italian. It's more like American grease with a side of oregano).

Anyway, I was happy to see the nation come together (even if it was only for 30 hours) to express gratitude for a well-given speech to the nation's future leaders. After all, I believe Whitney said it best, "I believe the children are our future" and the future should not be skipping school to play air hockey.