Better By a Mile

If you need to catch up, you can read up on the resurrection of my dad's van  here .  That old van carried us around for several years.  She was a workhorse.  She was also a jerk sometimes.  In the Fall of 1994, my dad decided it was time for us to make the move from Mississippi to Pennsylvania.  We had a lot of relatives in PA that we hadn't seen in a very long time, so my Dad thought it would be good for us to get to know them.  We packed as much of our stuff as we could fit into our van and hit the road. Somewhere in Virginia, our headlights started to go dim and the van started to die.  We were able to take a quick exit before she decided to shut off completely.  We tried to start it up again, but there was no response.  My dad quickly concluded that the battery was dead, but he didn't know why.  We popped the hood and noticed that the alternator belt was really loose.  Ah-ha!  Without the alternator working, it wa...

I recently read a story about a woman who got caught selling her food stamps online.  While I don't endorse or approve of her actions, I was saddened by the number of people who had plenty of unkind things to say about her.  I thought about that old Everlast song, "What it's like", and that most of these people (myself included) probably have no idea what was going on in her life to make her do that, or what it was like to walk in her shoes.  The unfortunate truth is that many people find themselves in desperate situations where they feel they must resort resort to actions that other people might consider extreme and unacceptable. People have different limits, just like many of us have different definitions of  needs  and  wants.   A philosophy professor once challenged my class with a dilemma: A man's wife is dying and he cannot afford the medicine that will save her life.  Is it ok for him to steal from the drug store to save her life?  O...