Blog Archive/November 2008

November 25, 2008

Reasons to Be Grateful

It's Thanksgiving, and a lot of people I know are hardly in the mood for giving thanks. So many Americans are out of a job, or in foreclosure, or suffering the heartbreak of separation as sons and daughters continue to fight and die in winless wars abroad, that counting our blessings seems like either the most insufferable of platitudes or the cruelest of jokes. Yet, ironically, it's precisely times of hardship that gratitude is most needed.

Read Mary Beth Crain's Giving Thanks in Thankless Times.

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November 16, 2008

Reflections from a Red State After Obama's Win

For decades and decades, the old Colonial Drugstore in Chapel Hill was a mainstay of the University of North Carolina crowd. Generations of students popped in for pencils and blue books before an exam, or breath mints and condoms before a keg party. The Colonial epitomized the Southern college-town quaintness of Franklin Street, a hoppin' main drag with a small-town feel--picture Mayberry Ph.D. It had big plate glass windows, a tattered awning and squeaking swirly stools at the classic Formica-topped soda fountain. It was there that black students staged a sit-in in the spring of 1960, and there that Martin Luther King visited not long after, igniting Civil Rights flames in this Tarheel town. And it was there, at the Colonial Drug Store soda fountain, that I had my first Big O.

Continue reading Stephanie Hunt's Seeing Red.

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