Day Three

Our third day on the trip from Austin, Texas to Hingham, Mass. was a trip through the leaves and trees of the Fall countryside of Missouri, Ill., Indiana and Kentucky. It was a beautiful day, that's for sure. Texas is a beautiful place, too. But, it doesn't take long for a traveler to realize that the rolling green hilly farmland of the East is something special.

The trip is a long one. One of the ways we keep ourselves from listening to the same set of rock and roll tunes on the radio (yes, different stations across the country pretty much play the same thing) is to listen to a books on tape version of "The Bourne Legacy". It's an action packed adventure, filled with intrigue and shoot-outs about one every three minutes. Not exactly a great expose of the everyday world of Intelligence. But, probably a good way to get one's book turned into a movie script, again.

The story is interesting enough, but for a change of pace, I grabbed Bob's book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance" and read it aloud for a chapter or two. In his book, the author describes a journey through the Northwest he and his son took on a motorcycle he rebuilt. Also, he talks about the split between technophobes and technophiles. Having seen this in academia, spening five years in Liberal Arts studying sociology and another twelve years or so in Engineering, I can definitely see the split between those who embrace and those who abhor technology. The two different colleges, Liberal Arts and Engineering, at each of the schools I studied at, pretty much looked upon each other as some kind of weird, alien life form.

We can to Lexington, Kentucky around the dinner hour, and started looking around the University of Kentucky and it's surrounding area for a place to munch. Actually, we got off the road looking for Transylvania University, seeing a sign for said school (yes, the department of Goths and Vampires is what we envisioned). We never did get to find Dean Dracula, but did find a nice pub on the outskirts of the University of Kentucky. The place actually had heffewessin, which is a beer made by leaving the vats open to the air inside a sort of barn like brewery, and opening up the doors and windows somewhere along the process, allowing the "secret sauce" to remain secret, since no one really knows what kind of stuff floats into the brew. Best beer in the world, I guarantee.

Gave Bob a quick run down of how the Pearsons, and our ilk, were deeply involved in the building of the early Unitarian church in America, the Old Ship Church of Hingham, Mass being one of the early meeting houses of American Unitarians. I told him how Ebenezer Gay brought the idea of the Liberal Church to the fore, how Harvard was founded as an Unitarian Divinity School, and how Liberal back then meant free thought, not just always agreeing with the head of the Democratic Party.

In fact, the partisanship of today is the antithesis of Liberal thought. More like Socialist Democratic Centralism, in which the leaders of the Democratic Party state their agenda, and the rest of the party members are supposed to fall in line.

I explained that it would be as if you were the driver of a bus, and if you were a Democrat, you always turned Left, no matter what. Compared to if you were a Republican, you always turned Right, no matter what.

A real Liberal, or free thinker, is supposed to know that the only way to get anywhere is to take left turns when it is appropriate, right turns when that makes sense, and for a good bit of the time, keep the wheel pretty much in the middle.