First day of the Conference on World Affairs

Monday, April 7, 2008

This week we are attending the Conference on World
Affairs (CWA) which is held annually on the Colorado
University (CU) campus. This is its 60th year!
I won't try and describe all the sessions we went to,
but shall share some of the highlights. Robert and
I both attended the conference and sometimes the
same session, but often we split up to hear different
panels.

Today we attended the panel "Bush Legacy: Too Early
to Tell too Late to Matter." Caroline Daniel was on
this panel. She is a journalist and has an impressive
biography, but she herself if even more impressive. I
enjoyed her sense of humor as well as her many statistics
of the firsts in the Bush administration. She had a
quote from one of Bob Woodward's books describing Bush
and his legacy, " Walks on Water, Takes on Water, Glug,
Glug." Clearly we are in the Glug, Glug stage. She
also said that the Statue of Liberty had been replaced
in the world view by the Abugrave prison.

The Keynote speech was given by Wendy Chamberlin who
was American ambassador to Pakistan on September 11,
2001. She was an excellent speaker and emphasized the
need for the US to learn much, much more about the
culture of the Mideast.

The most fun panel of the day was titled
"Out of the Closet, into the Suburbs." The panel
members were all gay and with interesting backgrounds.
Fintan Steele, the one with the lightest sense of humor,
is an MD Molecular Biologist and a very interesting guy.
The three were commenting
on how they had each, with partner, moved to the suburbs and
happily been accepted. Fintan and Emily Resh ( a gynecological
nurse) are both legally married and living in Massachusetts.
Terri Jentz lives with her partner near San Diego. Terri is
the author of a mystery book about her bicycle ride across
the country which ended in Oregon where her room mate and
fellow bike-rider, but not gay, was murdered. Her
current partner is in the process of making a film from
the book.

I found it astounding and interesting that they each
described their avoidance of anything demonstrative in
public and Emily even admitted that she and her spouse
have a cottage in Mexico which is in an idyllic setting
and they love to go there, but have never made love
there because of fear. They represent themselves as
widows and are scared to death that IF the villagers
knew they were Gay they might even be killed. Of
course the question was asked "how can it be idyllic
if you can't even make love when there?" The answer
was pretty vague and she said they had been thinking
of selling it. But they all voiced fear as being part
of their lives. That is so sad!