oh yeah sure, there are a few people who are scarcely touched by the strike, even me, my union settled at 4 30 am and i went back the next day, scarcely missed a beat, teaching as full time as i ever did. or the secretaries, or the janitors, their unions settled too, so life went on as usual, they didn't have to feel a thing. but a ground war is taking place over the faculty classes, some people are teaching, some aren't; some are teaching others'; some are encouraging marches and standing out at the entrances of the campuses; some are encouraging disruption, or disrupting; the war is played out on the internet, in the media, on e-mail, in the press. having come from a civil-war encampment weekend, and being an escapist kind of guy, thoroughly averse to conflict but still totally engrossed in it, my thoughts naturally turn to the civil war, brother against brother, everyone wrapped up in it, nobody unaffected. i think of something i heard over the weekend: our local hero, john a logan, he could have gone either way; he could have been a northerner or southerner, so the reb sympathizers tend to think of him as a traitor, to his people, to his area, for going off with the north, selling out to the highest bidder. when i run into a history buff, as i did, i ask, what's up with that. i guess the question really is, if you grew up around here, as he did, who would you have been expected to fight for?

john a was a political dude, a jacksonian democrat, got elected from southern illinois as an ally of douglas, lincoln's adversary, but jacksonian democrat in these parts meant, anti-abolitionist, pro-states' rights, and it was perfectly natural to represent illinois, believe in the union, yet still not believe in war; to believe, at first, that illinois should discourage slaves from seeking freedom here, yet also believe in preserving the union, and then, as it got worse, joining up with illinois and union forces, because he knew grant, and knew other illinoisans, and was, after all, part of the state. but his friends and family were more than rebel sympathizers; they were outright confederate allies. this place had been settled by people from virginia, kentucky and tennessee; almost everyone, all the settlers, had come up that way.

interesting to be in such a treacherous environment, where you don't quite know who's on what side, where you have good friends that go both ways, on either radical pole of the situation. i myself, as i've said, have quaker inclinations, feel that the rhetoric wraps people up & makes them lose reason, that both sides are wrong, especially inasmuch as they start in on lying, cheating, censoring, disrupting, destroying, etc. & i'm talking about both sides here...in a war, you do war-like things. and you develop a network of spies, and people talk to each other in corners in low voices, trading stories of what it's like in this department or that, in the ground war. brother against brother, bloody campaign, scorched earth, march to georgia or wherever.

on my mom's side they were pennsylvania doctors, got called into the service i presume but then asked to be doctors thus living through what killed a vast number of countrymen. on my dad's side they'd taken a sawmill, loaded onto a buggy, and were walking out towards pike's peak when everyone told them it was bust and you might as well turn around. they settled in a little corner of nebraska near kansas and missouri, and a little girl died out there on the prairie, but worse, the civil war came and found them as it was especially hostile out on the kansas-missouri lines where people seemed to think that if a new state like kansas went slave or free it would upset the delicate political balance of the rest of the union. upon returning to illinois, the ancestor was called into service and marched to alabama but it was too late, battles were over and he lived through the war, almost by chance. no brotherly conflict in our family; the part of illinois he was in, it was relatively unambiguous. if he'd lived down here, in what they call egypt, it might not have been so clear.

don't want to give you details of a ground war while talks are going on as we speak at what, appomattox or wherever, that might resolve the whole thing, but you never know, and to tell you the truth, i know absolutely nothing about what they are still fighting for, or whether they might resolve it in the coming week, or not. doesn't matter though; you can get those details if you want; might even be over by the time you read this. a different kind of problems looms. homeless and drifters have taken over the building that houses our quaker meeting, an interfaith kind of place, funky, a bit run down, lacking leadership except for that of activists who have keys but whose main problem saying no is stemming from philosophical belief that the movement is here to save the drifting class. the problem is, it's not meant to be a homeless shelter. wasn't made for that; doesn't have showers, for example. now that doesn't stop a true drifter, and i think, as obamavilles go, or rather, hoovervilles, one takes what one can get, and it appears to be getting worse in that direction, rather than better, as the unemployment rate hovers over ten, and people need a place to go. so to some degree, if it's not this place, it's someplace else, and the organizing principle of the occupants may be, hang onto these people, as they're warm bodies, and will hold a sign in a pinch, as long as you feed them. it's a ground war.

i fall asleep at the keys; computer makes endless i's and a's as if i'm screaming out, from within, for rest. time to get some; more later.