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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5884)	9/7/2002 12:08:09 PM
From: Cactus Jack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

WR, Re: Preston Riley, I got my years mixed up. He booted the Niners' opportunity to go to the Super Bowl in 1970 against Dallas: sfgate.com < ". . . Lou Spadia became president. The closest the team came to going to the Super Bowl under his regime was in 1970, when the 49ers played Dallas -- wouldn't you know? -- at Candlestick for the NFC title. Let Lou tell it: ``We were ahead something like 28-24 with 90 seconds to go. Dallas had just scored and tried an onside kick. All we had to do was get the ball and run out the clock. The ball went right through Preston Riley's legs -- he was our wide receiver -- and Dallas recovered. Roger Staubach threw a touchdown pass and it was all over. Preston Riley didn't say a word. He dressed, left the clubhouse and was never seen or heard from again." > Amazingly, 1972 playoff game ended similarly, hence the curse of the Cowboys. All that ugly history made The Catch in 1981-82 Championship Game that much more incredible. Agree with you about our QBs. Young was great, but Montana was unparalleled. The Stick is good enough for football, but sure seems underwhelming now that Pac Bell Park is finished. I've caught wicked colds at the Stick in May at Giants (baseball) games, but gotten sunburned in October at 49er games. Go figure. Best game I ever saw at the Stick (other than any win over Dallas) was a December 1990 Monday night 7-3 win over the NY Giants, ending with Phil Simms and Lott in each other's faces. Absolute war of attrition. A month later, Craig fumbled in the NFC title game in the last 2 minutes and the Giants went to the Super Bowl. Geez, it all seems like yesterday. jpg

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5884)	9/9/2002 8:24:17 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

War makes politics real By Joan Ryan Columnist The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, September 8, 2002 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When people talk about how much we've changed since Sept. 11, I wonder how they can see it. We're still going to the movies, still dialing the pizza guy on Friday night, still wondering how we'll pay for college. Real change happens so incrementally that you can't map it until much later, when you can see how one thing led to another. Only then, from a distance, can you see how we might have changed the course of events -- if we had taken a right instead of a left, if we had divined the signals that this decision or that would be the turning points that led us down the wrong path. I've been having this vision. My son and his classmates are young men in uniform. They're on a military air base on the Eastern Seaboard, climbing into a plane headed for the Middle East. In the vision, I'm watching and wondering how it got to this. How did the story of 9/11 lead here, to a line of crew-cut boys who should be holed up in the library with Faulkner or fixing transmissions at the corner garage? As we mark the tragedy's one-year anniversary, I don't fear for our safety today as much as I fear for it down the road. I fear hillsides striped with fresh rows of headstones. I fear we'll forget all we have learned in the last two centuries about the march to war -- how it begins and unfolds, how easily it can build its own momentum. My generation, and those that have come after, have never had to hold ourselves accountable for drafting our young men into a protracted war. We weren't alive during World War II or Korea. We came of age at the very end of, or after, Vietnam. It wasn't our war. We had nothing to do with supporting or opposing it, or with examining later what part we played in returning home so many sons in caskets. So for us, patriotism has always belonged to another time. It has been a word in a book, a lace-trimmed concept trotted out on the Fourth of July with the picnic baskets and sparklers. Patriotism meant reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at school and taking off your cap during the national anthem before the first pitch. It was a collection of social rituals more than anything -- symbols and language and music that loosely connect us to one vast American tribe. But there was nothing personal about patriotism. We never had to define what it means to us as a guiding principle. Until now. The time is past when we can roll our eyes at political decisions and respond to new policies with dismissive jokes, as if the goings-on in Washington were a bad television show whose plot we only loosely followed. America is not some Them over there shaping the future. It is Us, right here, making a million individual, thoughtful decisions -- decisions to pay close attention to what our leaders are saying and doing, to consider consequences, to reason and question and examine. Maybe the Bush administration is right to go into Iraq. Maybe that would turn out to be the safer path than not invading. Maybe the war on terrorism can be won in some measureable way. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. How can we make decisions whose consequences are impossible to predict with real certainty? Yet that -- more than recovery, more than rebuilding, more than presenting a united front -- is our most important challenge as we mark the first anniversary of Sept. 11. And to do that, we have to answer for ourselves what patriotism is and what it now calls on each of us to do. We have to figure out the balance between trust and skepticism, between questioning and supporting, between action and acceptance. Because whatever events unfold from that September day last year, we will be accountable, every single one of us. We are, at this moment, a dot somewhere along a time line in our great- grandchildren's history books. We are making the decisions that will determine what ends up on future dots on that time line. In these future history books, the terrorist attacks won't merit even a chapter. They will take up a page, maybe two, the way Pearl Harbor does or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The main history lesson will be about what happened next. When the twin towers collapsed, people were asking, "Where was God? How could he let this happen?" Years from now, if we're unloading our sons from military airplanes in flag-draped caskets, entrenched in a war with no end, the only question then will be "Where were we?" E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com. sfgate.com