What Would Thoreau Say?

On my refrigerator at The Hermitage I have a million magnets.  I know, weird a 65 year old guy has refrigerator magnets but I do. I enjoy collecting them telling me where I've been and what I've done. Most of the magnets are on the top half of the refrigerator so you can actually read them.  There are a bunch of St. Francis; Jefferson; Emerson; places I've been to... nice collage of my whereabouts and interests.  (I've often thought Dave Barry or someone like him could write a fun book called "You Can Tell a Lot About a Man by His Refrigerator Magnets.") Anyway there are also a bunch of them on the bottom of the refrigerator, at what I call Max Level.  Max is my almost two year old grandson, one of the two smartest and best looking children on the planet.  Max also likes my magnets.  He moves them around, throws them across the room, often places them in the microwave, which I discover before I put my soup in there, most of the time. And when Max and ...

PART I Anyone who knows me knows I have this bromance with Thomas Jefferson.  I can't explain it really, and lord knows I've had my breakups with him.  Even sworn off him a time or two when I was feeling indignant about his hypocrisy, after the proof about Sally Hemming came to light.  Really... this is your hero I said to myself? This 'relationship' actually started while I was in college.  I went to college a full scale, 24 hour a day jock, and soon found myself organizing demonstrations against the Vietnam War (actually I remember organizing ONE demonstration against the Vietnam War.  Unfortunately my radical life has grown in my minds eye over the years...I was really just a jock who made believe he was radical). Anyway as I got political I decided I might want to learn a little bit more about this country I was screaming at and more about why I believed what I believed.  This lead me to Jefferson, of course, who had written the great document of ...