There's More to Life...

Yes, politics, wonkery, ideology are part of the AR raison d'etre, but Peter Robinson lends some nice perspective:

Opening my in box just now for the first time in some 30 hours, I found several emails asking if I’d like to comment on Barack Obama’s speech this afternoon. I missed it. When the senator rose in Berlin, I was in Brunswick, Maine, joining my oldest son and daughter on a tour of Bowdoin. A compact, exquisite campus dominated by several elegantly simple brick halls from the late eighteenth century and a series of imposing stone structures from the nineteenth. Oaks on the central green and dark, aromatic pines on the edges of the campus. Lowering skies. Gusting sea breezes. Tablets commemorating Hawthorne and Longfellow, and a fine bronze statue of Joshua Chamberlain, the professor who commanded the 20th Maine at Gettysburg, saving Little Round Top—and the Union. And, through an open window somewhere, the sounds of a violinist practicing for the summer music festival.

As Jeff Hart once remarked, life consists of more, thank God, than politics.

I'm sure this resonated with me because I'm a Maniac myself and spent many-a day on the "campii" of various small Maine colleges attending sports camps (or meetings) of one sort or another while growing up. Of course, as a kid focused on training for a sport, I didn't appreciate the aesthetics then as much as I do now. Politics has its place, but we should be wary of having our lives swing into orbit around a political sun.