Boat show...pre

In just a few hours Deb and I should be jumping on a plane and heading for the boat show and a visit with some in the family we rarely get to see. Pretty exciting stuff. Though there is a whole list of boats we want to check out I hope we still have a little time to be surprised, to see some boat we haven't heard of before, maybe run across the "right" one without knowing it yet. I'm sure we will never see all that we want to see in just a day and a half, but it should be pretty cool for Deb to get her first "on the boat" look at the catamarans and center cockpit mono hulls we have been reading about for months. A weekend to spend with her playing in the world's biggest toy store. How much fun is that? And a good time for it, I say. At the moment it looks like retirement might be a bit further away than we thought. (Us and everyone else with a 401k and a house.) There sure are a bunch of clouds on the horizon and (in boat talk) it might be time to reef the sails and figure this is a storm that will be hard to avoid. It is difficult to see to the other side of this one; a serious economic decline coupled with a political debate that gets uglier, more mean spirited and more filled with hate with each passing day. Maybe this is the way it has always been? The days of Vietnam and Nixon, Watergate and riots, saw bodies lying on University lawns, tear gas in the streets and whole city blocks reduced to war torn rubble. I remember tanks on the roads of D.C. and I doubt that the death toll of those tragic times has ever really been told. It hurts my heart to think that those days may be upon us once again. We survived it once. But this time the divide may be even deeper, the two sides more vehement, the hate more passionate. No matter which side wins the current election, after the things said and the charges flung how can either claim to represent the whole? Who on the right will willingly support a President Obama? Who on the left a President McCain (or Palin)? It seems that neither side can bare the thought of living in the country the other side wants to build. And neither side speaks for those of us who would hope the country is big enough for both. When did we decide that the woman who wants to stay home and take care of her family couldn't live next door to the woman who wants to fly airplanes for a living or run a business? Who decided one was better than the other, and when and how? When did we determine that the air was so poisoned by the religious or the atheist that the other couldn't breathe it any more? When did it become my business to tell you who you could love, how you could live, what you could eat or drink (or smoke); and when did it become your job to decide those same things for me? When did it happen that any of us decided that we, and we alone, were the only adults in the room? Scary times indeed. But for tomorrow and Saturday and Sunday the biggest and baddest debates I want to hear are; catamaran or mono hull, in-mast furling or lazy jacks, hank-on or rollers, and how big an anchor is big enough? In the end we all sail the same sea and a large enough storm can take us all to the bottom.