Welcome, World-Wide Readers

A warm welcome to our many international guests. I'm old enough to remember a day when in my little town (Circleville, OH), we could only get the local paper. My dad ordered the Wall Street Journal, which came in the mail two days late. We did get two of the three national networks, and if you went out back and banged on the tv antenna pole (where we kept a chunk of wood for that purpose), you might even get ABC too. No movies, no videos, no Comedy Channel. Books we had in abundance, thanks to the Pickaway County District Public Library, where I worked after school.

Thank goodness for electronics!  And satellites, and cable, and video recordings. And now the Internet. As long as the powerful don't manage to pass their "internet control" bill through Congress, we can talk with one another worldwide. It makes me smile.

Just checking our visitors log, I find we have many guests from the USA, but also visitors from Germany, Peru, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Austria, South Africa, Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, Kenya, Morocco, Indonesia, Spain, China, Norway, Italy, and France. So this is a welcome to you.

We know you can probably see the Convention itself on television or video streaming online, so we are bringing you as much of the locale and the responses as we can. The city is awash in activity and we are plunging into that and reporting as we can manage to.

Father Michael Sheehan, Ph.D., S.J., welcomed us to Regis University, where we are living, early last week. 

He told us that he'd been on his dream vacation this summer, to Spain and Ireland. Whenever he'd get into a taxicab or sit down on a train or stop in at a pub, people would quickly figure out he was a United States-ian. (My Venezuelan friend points out it's false pride to call ourselves "Americans" when there are some 37 other countries that are also American.)

Father Sheehan found himself in the same conversation many times: Who will win the U.S. election? Who do you favor? How is it going? 

He reminded us what a privilege it is to be able to vote in the U.S. election. So many other people who are deeply affected by U.S. policies have no voice.

You can have a voice here, if you like, by responding to our posts. Please join us. We'd be happy to hear from you.