You've endured three more birthdays. There have been three Academy Awards ceremonies, three new Super Bowl champions, three full winters and three summers, three complete cycles of jeans styles and hemlines and pleats in the fashion world, and there has been the rise and very quick fall of roughly 146 horrible TV shows you never even saw.
Your skin has changed. Your teeth have worn down. Your bones have shifted in their sockets. Your fingernails grew 4 inches and you consumed roughly 5,850 pounds of food and 600 pounds of meat and your hair grew about a foot and a half.
There have been killer hurricanes and earthquakes and devastating tsunamis, heat waves and cold fronts and dramatic shifts in the general temperament of the Earth. Ice caps are melting more rapidly. Young wine has aged nicely. Babies born three years ago are now walking and eating with utensils and uploading digital photos to their MySpace pages via their cute little Nokia cell phones. Times, of course, have changed.
But through it all, through your life like an undercurrent of cold black blood, like an unshakable stench deep in your nostrils, like a disturbing stain you simply cannot get off your shirt, our country has been at war. Endless, raw, insidious, interminable.
Here's the rest:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/03/24/DDGR9HSGF91.DTL&type=printable