[Peach]

You write beautifully. Thank you for sharing your memories of your mother. I do believe you are correct that there are people who believe in the Democrat party who are perhaps a little naive but certainly not partisan in an ugly way.

We lived in CT until five years ago and I understand your Freeper name completely! Being in South Carolina has been an education and enlightening. The mainstream press, which is primarily located in the Democrat strongholds, do not typify how the average American thinks or what they believe.

Those who don't believe in evil are hard to understand. I've met a few people like your sister and they are the people who scare me the most. The dumbing down of our schools and the lack of any morality based teaching is going to be the country's undoing.

Regards

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

You write beautifully.

Thank you for saying so. My mother was an author. Are you interested in the Civil War, and books of that genre (historically based fiction)? She published four novels, the first of which was set mainly in New York City during the Civil War. They even filmed a short TV commercial for it. The name of that novel is "For us the Living". The title comes from The Gettysburg Address.

I always try to spread the word of her works, since her books are out of print (but can be found at many used bookstores -- try www.bookfinder.com, which is a meta-search engine for dozens of online used book sellers). Her name is Antonia Van-Loon. She spelled it with the hyphen because, back in the day (and even still today) computers parsed out 'Loon' as the last name, when in fact it is 'Van Loon'. So if you search, try it both ways.

For anyone else who may be interested, her books were, in order of publication:

"For us the Living"
"For Love and Honor"
"Katherine"
"Sunshine and Shadow" (also published under the title "A Woman of the Dawn")

I've longed to actually write a novel, but never seem to believe enough in myself to set about to doing it. How she did it, while raising two children, is a mystery and a marvel to me. I think she had a lot of the qualities of a conservative, with the overly-idealistic beliefs of a liberal. In fact, the world could do much worse than to have people like her around.