by James Glaser
September 12, 2003

Northome had another 9/11 community remembrance / fund raiser. The money raised went to the volunteer fire department which is always a good cause. The attendance was less than half of what it was last year and people were saying, enough is enough.

Many people I know sent a check to the fire department, but decided to stay home, as most said, they were just burned out on this whole terrorist war thing. It was VFW meeting night and none of us went, but every guy there follows the war and knows what is going on.

We have a couple local people serving over there and the whole community get updates after every letter home or when there is a phone call. Both of those serving are in the Marines and their parents are holding up under the strain. I know they are proud of their childrens service and at the same, wish the whole thing was over and they would be heading home. At the meeting some guys told me they pray for all of our troops and one guy was praying for the Iraqi people too.

One thing I have noticed the last couple of years is that more local people are heading to the cities looking for work. For almost a decade it was boom time up here. We didn't have enough carpenters and it was darn hard to find an electrician. Now some guys are only working part time and more and more people put off projects they were planning on doing.

It is kind of a shame, because building materials are down right cheap now. Three years ago it was hard to find sheet rock and now every lumber company has stacks of the stuff. Windows. Windows are less than half of what I paid ten years ago and there are way more window companies. I wonder if some of them are not made in China.

Not everything has gone down though. Land prices are so much higher. A lake lot was about ten thousand a decade ago and now they go for eight times that. Taxes seem to keep going up too. Now when the appraisers come out, they come in a group with cameras and tape measures recording any new improvement so they can jack up the tax.

More and more people report about children that have been laid off from their job or that they had to move across country to keep one. People are less upbeat. The World War 2 Vets tell me it is that way during every war. The war starts out with lots of cheering crowds and flag waving, but after a while the daily reminders of Americans getting killed or wounded starts to drag down the whole country.

People can understand losing men and now women in a battle, in fact they expect that. It is the constant day after day, reports of deaths that gets them down. At our meeting so many guys were talking about the fact that battle deaths no longer make the front page and that the nightly news talks about Iraq, but most nights they have no video to go with the story. Some of us feel this is planned by Washington, because those nightly news programs that had vivid film footage about the Vietnam War are what turned the people against it. They will not let that happen this time and the Networks are not covering this war like those in the past.

It looks to me like it will take a clear cut victory, which I doubt will happen or a real turn around in the economy to get our country back on its feet like it was in the 90s. All President Bush has to do by election day, is get us 2,800,001 jobs. That is how many jobs have been lost under Bush's watch. If he can get them back, plus one, he can say things are better under his leadership. Hope he can do that.

POST SCRIPT DEATHS IN IRAQ

Two American Soldiers were killed in Iraq. One trying to destroy a homemade bomb found near a convoy route and one in a vehicle accident.