Georgia On My Mind

"Georgia On My Mind" is one of my favorite songs of all time. Sung by the gritty-voiced piano-playing Ray Charles, the song brings the chills, stands arm hair on end, and makes me yearn for "the olden days" where, as a child, my only worries were whether I had enough money to get into the public pool at the local high school on those hot summer days during school break.

Now, the words in the song inspire something else; they stir the mind to think: How far have we regressed in the past 10 years or so? I remember thinking around 1999 how fortunate we were to live on a planet where, for the first time in my "remembering" lifetime, I felt like we weren't all going to die in a series of nuclear blasts.

That ill feeling is returning, what with our invasion and permanent occupation of the Middle East and worsened by Russia's war with Georgia (damn, I thought Bush would defend Georgia, thinking that Russia had attacked a "sovereign" US state, but he didn't. California, you're next.), which, until today, looked like it might spill over first into a war of words between Bush and Putin and then a covert war of us against them (kind of like our first go-round with Afghanistan, where the Soviets tried to conquer Afghanistan in their own version of Vietnam and we, the good ole USA, supplied -- what was his name? -- Osama something-or-other with weapons to defend against the USSR. That turned out real well for both super powers.).

(That's a really long run-on sentence, no?)

Anyway, I heard there was a cease fire today, though I also heard that the word hadn't actually gotten out to either side's military, as they continued to fight the bloody fight.

Let's all hope that things settle down. I really don't want my kids to grow up with the fear that I had growing up.

News coverage here -- Fighting with Russia spreads to cities across Georgia - CNN.com