Christmas Break's Over

I took Debbie back to the airport today. She lives in Houston, I live in Denver and her presence pretty much takes up all my time. I was on Christmas break.

It's been refreshing. I love our holidays together. We go to Colorado Springs and pick up her stepfather for Christmas dinner. Hermie is a Holocaust survivor, son of a mixed Jewish-Aryan marriage, who had to flee from Munich to Hungary during World War II. He knew hunger, abject poverty and the yoke of a government of absolute power. His father died in Dachau. He came to America and would not speak German, even to help Debbie out with her German class. He became a U. S. citizen, served in the Army. This Christmas he told us more stories than ever of his life as a refugee.

If you want an earful, get him talking about whether it's right to torture or whether a government should have power to do whatever it desires to its citizens.

Congress will soon be back from their winter breaks. The question is which Congress will return, the one with the courage to take back some of the power the Shrub has usurped or the spineless wonders of the last five years. The Democrats finally managed to mount an opposition in the last month of 2005. How will they react in 2006? Will the Patriot Act be extended and our civil liberties bashed in the name of the Shrub's absolute power? Will there be an investigation into the illegal wiretapping of, now we find out, countless Americans or will the Shrub's ascent to royalty proceed unchecked? Will the Republicans make another attempt to end-run Congressional debate and insert Alaskan oil drilling into unrelated legislation or will we finally have a decent conservation program? Will we continue to lose things like student loans and medicare or will the rich again be asked to pay their fair share?

I'd like to hope that the end of this year marked a turning point, the point where we finally said enough and began to act as the good nation we are. I fear there will be more revelations of Bush administration excesses in the coming year, that our reputation abroad will suffer even more and that we will continue to hector other nations over abuses we ourselves commit in the name of a so-called war on terrorism. So far, the only shots I've seen fired in the war have been against our civil liberties, the war in Afghanistan aside. I fear more of the same or, if the Shrub realizes he's losing the House of Representatives, even worse.

But I can hope.