Instead I walked a mile, took a train, walked 5 minutes, took another train and spend all of my Saturday morning and some of the afternoon crossing Chicago and Northern Indiana to spend time with the Mr.'s family.
We are a one-car household and the Mr. had taken it to a wedding in Purdue-land where he's from. While on his way he got a call from his aunt in N. Indiana that if we wanted to see Grandpa, we should come soon.
That translates to "He's on his deathbed", right?
Wrong.
He answered the door himself and looked super surprised and sorta peeved that we showed up on such short notice.
Of course he wasn't really peeved. He just thought that everyone was assembling to pull the plug on him. Shoot, I'd be alarmed too. "Am I being put down?" Is what I would think.
So over-worry aside, it was a good trip.
Then Grandpa gave us some reading material for the way home. Cut me to swearing at page 5 of 8 of a local man's rant on how America's the greatest and how it totally screwed if we don't do something about it. (Confused? You should be!)
I wont go into what was said (total racism: "The U.S. is great... as long as you can just put those black people in a box and ship them back to where they came"), but I'll give you a hint: as a Jew he was surprisingly removed from what it's like to be oppressed.
That was just the icing on the cake.
Being in Indiana made me realize just how different states can be. We live right next door to a state with similar demographics, similar climate, similar crops, accents and landscapes. But turn on the TV in IN and you get an expensive, long commercial on "clean coal" with a male voice-over featuring sexy female models, naked under overalls, using jackhammers in a glistening mine of what looks like black diamonds.
From a marketing standpoint, the intended audience for this commercial would be straight men in labor jobs. Or just men for that matter.
Meanwhile in Illinois our "clean coal" ad is a woman in a pantsuit in front of a white screen speaking for herself and discussing options with minimal graphics and lots of jargon.
The audience here would be intellectuals, men and women. The words speak a lot louder than the images.
But note that BOTH are conservative viewpoints.
During our visit and discussion the Mr.'s Grandpa came back to one underlying statement, "Let each state do for themselves."
He wants to get rid of several agencies in the government (and hilariously, he couldn't remember them just as Rick Perry couldn't remember the Department of Energy), one of them being the Department of Education.
I asked him what about the kids in Alabama or New Mexico who receive some of the worst education in the U.S.
"Let them figure it out."
But kids can't vote. Unlike any other issue (gay marriage, abortion rights, healthcare, taxes), the citizens most affected are those that cannot vote and some of them cannot even write (to their congressman).
So should New Mexico just fall by the wayside?
Should it be up to the states?
What if you were a child/parent in Nevada? (the worst state for education as of this year)
Massachusetts is #1 in education. Maybe Mitt-bot has a plan he can employ for the nation that he used in MA.
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