Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"One evening, sitting on the back porch and taking in the news on CNN, I sat in horror as I watched George W. Bush, the President of the United States and leader of the free world, stand before the country and pronounce that marriage needed to be protected by writing discrimination, marginalization, segregation and oppression into the Constitution of the United States for the first time in its history. It was then that I began to realize how ignorant I was of politics and of our country.

"I had been living in a bubble of idealism which had been spoon fed to me by my public school education. All those ideas about the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the freeing of the slaves, woman's suffrage, the heroism of US soldiers liberating the Jewish people from the horrors of the Nazi holocaust, and the Civil Rights Act. I was taught to be proud of my country and I was proud. But that night was when I realized that I had only been taught half of the truth - the pretty half all tied up in a bow like a present under the tree on Christmas morning.

"They never told me about the dark half."

-- JohnVisser, 2009-07-06, "The View From My Window"