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SAMWolf, I think the re-enactment has become too full of it's own importance. Not the historic Crossing itself -- just the re-enactment. Even had the weather been good, I wonder if attendance -- which has been growing year after year -- might have turned some tail.

The story of the Crossing is heroic ... Washington and his remaining troopers continued to go on in the most adverse of circumstance. Yet it is an unconfortable story too. It is about suffering great discomfort, the loss of all realistic hope ... yet of a an uncessing committment to do the some future glimmer of Liberty, not even for oneself, for all who served in that era knew that even Liberty at its best doesn't clear woodlots, dig up stone, plow a field, plant a crop, build and keep a house, harvest the crop and prepare it for the table. All that took really arduous labor in those days. Took years of effort, the troopers all knew that in their own liftime the Blessings of Liberty they struggled to secure were likely to be small, if acheived at all.

Very uncomfortable. Extreme continuing hardship, constant risk of life, limb and health, danger to current family and home, a promise of enduring poverty for years until a household and business could be established afterards.

No comfortable "homecoming" like after the WWII, WWI, the Civil War -- even after Viet Nam and Korea the veterans had more to return to despite the common social ignorance and occassioned rudeness to their return.

There is no comfort for the body in the story of Washington's Crossing.

And that lack doesn't play well these days. Everywhere people seek comforts, we have not yet seen the moral wick of America relit. G. W. Bush's strength -- that has played to the great public in his favor is not yet his own moral fiber -- which I suspect from observation is very strong -- but from the cloak of comfort he has worn in his actions and presentations to date.

By some measures I have found that a pleasant comfort is the order of the day in the public resonance -- this is for good a G-d fearing comfort, yet it is not an awakening. Perhaps it is a needed poltice over a horrid wound we have made in our own spirit for wantoness and materialism.

In the Crossing in it's time, there had been an Awakening of the Public Spirit -- that in Providence's hand carried the day, although only ever a minority were significantly awakened.