Thoughts while stuck

By SKIP MENDLER

The back gate of the pickup truck was plastered with bumper stickers. We couldn’t go anywhere until the road crew guy turned his stop sign around, and it looked like that wouldn’t be happening for several minutes at least. So in the meantime, the bumper stickers provided me with a little reading material, and some food for thought.

One had the UN symbol and the words “U.N.-AMERICAN” – it took me a moment to realize that the truck’s owner meant to call the UN un-American, not to say that he was a “UN American.” Another declared he was “Not as MEAN, Not as LEAN, but still a MARINE.” On another, there was an early display of allegiance to “RICE ’08.” And then there was this one:

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Finding the sentimental journey

It’s been quite a while since my last column. Of course not more than the usual two weeks, but more than usual has happened to me since then. I sit writing on a train somewhere between Paris and Amsterdam.

I wish I could say that I grew to love the city of Dublin and that the high school students that I’ve been teaching stopped annoying me and started to inspire me. I can’t say that exactly, but I did start to venture out of Temple Bar, and in the end found a few students to believe in.

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A vision of actions

By DICK RISELING

Al Gore gets it. Millions of us get what his movie and book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” have to say. We just can’t live this way anymore. Every week, this summer of 2006 delivers a fresh reminder by floods, terrible heat, increasing oil prices, news of higher rates of asthma and autism, terrible expenditure of life and national income in never-ending wars and obsolete, dangerous and ugly projects like NYRI and Millenium. We never intended this. So, let’s get going on solving the problem at the local level.

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