Loggerheads, Dunderheads & Constipated Congresses

      Since July of last year, I've spent a good deal of mind-time in the Civil War researching my Margaret Chew monologue. Maggie was wife of Thomas Chew, owner of the Cascade Mill, and the city's most prosperous and prominent citizen circa 1850 and 60. I am using her to tell the “True story of John Yates Beall, who spent the summer of 1862 in Cascade with the Chews and was hanged shortly before the war ended. By then, the Union army was gunning for him.

      A fascinating and very scarey period in U.S. history that one doesn't inhabit long before seeing where the war came from: intransigence. Everybody dug into their position. The current constipated U.S. Congress seems similarly afflicted and might benefit from reading up on the period.

      Recently, somebody asked why I hadn't publicly taken a stance on gay marriage. Ans: for this very reason. At present, the movement seems on a roll and willingly to ignore the fact that a portion of the population considers their activities anathema, a violation of the natural order.

      However, on another such thorny issue, abortion, as a nation (though Texas and couple Southern states may be exceptions) we appear to have arrived to a place of stasis, where neither those who consider it murder nor those who don't and want unlimited access prevail. 

Years of mulling these tough issues with a critical eye convinces me the thornier ones may require equivocating solutions, but intransigence only brings war.