CAMBRIDGE -- This is an open letter to all the baby boomers in the local school district, in language you can appreciate. Isn't it weird the way things have turned around, man? I mean, who would have thought that the generation that brought psychedelic drugs out of the pharmacacy and into the general population would three decades later be making their kids pee in cups to stop the reefer madness? You remember the days, don't you -- Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane? The Grateful Dead? Pink Floyd? You remember the Vietnam War and the student riots, the long hair, Woodstock and sit-ins and love-ins? Yoko Ono? Cheech and Chong? Ken Kesey? Hunter Thompson? [continues 367 words]
CAMBRIDGE -- I helped raise two kids through their teen-age years (they are now in their 20s) and I did some parental snooping and eavesdropping. I listened in the hallway as I happened to be passing by their bedrooms while they were talking on the phone. I peeked in their doors when they weren't around and I peeked in the windows of their cars when they weren't inside them. I didn't trust everything they told me and, sometimes, I checked up on it. [continues 613 words]
There he was on the front page of The Post-Star, eyeing the splitting maul in his hand like it was some fascinating foreign implement. Behind him were some of the people of Wilmington, and they were eyeing President Bush in the same way he was looking at that maul. They were thinking about which way they should duck if he actually swung that thing. But they were smiling through their fear, trying to act right in the presidential presence. [continues 371 words]
