
Since my last issue I have been thinking a good deal about a project I had started then, dealing with our trip to
That means I have been avoiding current events more than usual partly because here so near
The daily papers I picked up at some of our stopovers for a flavour of opinion in the local areas stayed in storage for lo these many years and now become a reminder of those times. Ronald Reagan was just five or six months into his second term after a resounding victory in 1984. By June Reagan was having trouble getting his budget through Congress, reports were abroad about a White House connection to both overt and covert support for the Nicaraguan contra rebels, columnist George Wills, who 25 years later is still a talking head on television, was writing about trouble with the liquidity of some of America’s Savings and Loan institutions. He pointed out the complexities of the banking system requiring the populace to trust the bank system mostly on faith and surprisingly for one on the right side of the political spectrum, he said “modern society requires government that looks over the shoulder of, and occasionally nags, the makers of the many networks of institutions on which we depend.”
Weather was hot during the whole of four weeks on the road. Our car, a diesel, was not air conditioned and most of our driving days were long. On May 22nd we drove some ten hours from
“Another thing that impressed us was the mile after mile of arid, semi-desert country so well connected up with super highways. The few places that are tamed for human use are really only oases in a vast desert.
It strikes me too, in driving those many desolate miles today, how narrow is the margin between life sustaining growth and extinction of our kind. Amazing as it is to see what wealth has been wrought by our technological exploitation of available resources, we are always near the brink. There seems no security to our existence. In this arid country fantastic quantities of food are produced in the few tamed oases where water from the rivers and deep basins can be used for irrigation. But imagine how quickly this would all turn to dust if the taps were turned off. All it would take is one serious interruption of power sources to stop the pumps and the flow of water. That is only one example. ”
It took us three more days across the emptiness of
We left the convention on the morning of May 31 and took another couple of weeks to get back home via visits in
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