Okay, I am as big a shopper as anyone, but I do my best to make purchases at stores and online retailers where my principles and I can sleep soundly at night.  I do not shop at Wal-Mart,...ever...and I discontinued my Curves fitness membership when I realized the CEO and founder, Gary Heavin, is a Republican right-wing fundamentalist (I know they are franchises, but still..).  And, because I doooo love a bargain, the holiday shopping season is an especially difficult time to put my $$jingle$$ where my mouth is...damn this progressive conscience of mine!  One issue I care deeply about is animal cruelty, so I have just recently decided Amazon.com will no longer get my holiday (or otherwise) dollars.

Over President's Day weekend, Charlie Rose gave a tribute on his PBS show to the late Arthur Miller by airing several interviews he had with him over the years.  I thought the interview that took place in 1992 had a poignant and relevant moment as Charlie Rose asked him about "Incident at Vichy," a play about the anti-Semitic ideas that fed the Holocaust.  Miller said the play was an attempt to deal with what he thought was the most significant single event of the century, possibly of all time- the destruction of German culture.  He said that there was a lesson for us all in how the German people were transformed into barbarians (his word).  It was saying to the world, "Watch out, these people were the most cultivated people in Europe, they were probably the best educated people in Europe, the most socially disciplined people in Europe, and, in many ways, the most progressive people in Europe."  In the space of a couple of years they were burning people.