It’s hard to think of a tragedy worse than that which befell Elena Veach last week. A talented teacher and wife of Bloomington’s New Tech High School principle Alan Veach, Elena, just 27, fell after giving birth to her son. A victim of genetics gone bad, Elena passed from a congenital heart defect; too soon, and too tragic.

But not without a legacy. For now Elena’s family is struggling to raise funds for which to pay her posthumous medical bills. Bills accrued during her life, due now that it’s over and because it’s over.

A bake sale of sorts, for the past health needs of a vibrant individual. Covering the obligations that she, in death, was forced to lay on the feet of her survivors. Here, in the most prosperous nation on earth.

We mustn't forget George Orwell, not at a time like this. He wrote the phrase "Big Brother is watching you," pertaining to the government spying on its people; the statement that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others;" and the memorable essay, "Shooting an Elephant."

Orwell was a terribly truthful writer, especially when writing about the power of the English language to obvert and obscure the truth for political purposes. In his novel 1984, the state controlled its citizens minds by fear, and by erasing and revising history. In Animal Farm, the animals who made themselves more equal than others were, of course, the pigs, who, as in government, came out dominant.

He was born Eric Blair: George Orwell was his nom de plume.

Now let us consider George Ohwell, whose real name is Bush. It is he who has so recklessly abused the English language to control the citizens, invoke fear and put the pigs in power, with utter disregard for truth or reality:

We gnomes stay away from roads, as a rule, but there are so many roads now that sometimes we have to cross them, or walk parallel to them, to get from one wooded place to another.

I'm sure you have never seen a roadkilled gnome. We're too smart to let ourselves get hit or run over.

The worst thing that happens to us on roadsides is that sometimes we get hit by Budweiser cans and McDonald's wrappers that motorists throw our of their car windows.

There's a saying that goes: The more things change, the more they stay the same. It's true. The struggles of a century ago are alive, here and now.

The robber barons built their industrial empires on high finance and the backs of cheap labor. Their battle cry was "tax cuts and deregulation." But on the way to the bank, the industrialists ran into an immovable force -- the American labor movement.

The elimination of child labor, the eight-hour work day and safer work places are just a few of the achievements unions have won for all working people in this country. Unions created the middle class.

Today, having put our industrial base on a fast boat to China and our financial house in a mortgage crisis, the global economists are still calling for "tax cuts and deregulation" to fix our problems. They were wrong then and they're wrong now. The answer is to reinvest in America: our infrastructure, our people, our future.

Petitions to government are older than democracy itself. The 13th-century British Magna Carta declared: "If we, our chief justice, our officials, or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons, they shall come to us -- or in our absence from the kingdom to the chief justice -- to declare it and claim immediate redress."

Redress. The righting of a wrong, the tortuous equalization of one man's transgression against another. Furthered by the 17th century British Bill of Rights, which steadfastly declared: "That is the right of subjects to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal."

Petition. The sending up of a complaint, from a locality, a municipality, a community, to a government more catholic than that, in an effort to obtain relief.

Jane Mayer's brave new book on the Bush administration's moral nadir -- the use of torture -- is titled The Dark Side.

The title is from a long-ago remark by Dick Cheney, ominously hinting that the War on Terror might require using practices from "the dark side."

It seems so appropriate a title. The Dark Side means "where the sun don't shine," and that's where Cheney, as we perceive him, seems to dwell.

The following letter was written by Rebecca Riall, a former board member of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center, which dissolved after the resignation of all members. Riall resigned to protest IU’s lack of attention to the interests of American Natives.

I am writing to tell you why the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center (FNECC) Board is dissolving and to share with you my challenge to IU to include American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians in diversity policies.

In the remainder of this letter, I speak only for myself, not my former fellow board members.

The FNECC board fought for the establishment of an American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian student center and has, on a volunteer basis, organized the FNECC's programming, represented IU to American Indian communities and provided student support services since 2006.

We gnomes, guardians of Mother Earth and her secrets and treasures, didn't have to worry much about this thing called "energy" in the Olden Times. We never even heard of the word until about the 1600s, and then it just meant, uh, the inclination to get up and go.

Getting up and going in those days was a bigger deal than it is now, because you didn't "go" in your house. You went outdoors to the privy or into the bushes. On cold days we called it "breaking frost," and it wasn't a peasant way to start the day. But it was necessary.

Now "energy" has become a primary concern of us gnomes, because you folks discovered fossil fuels and the uses for it, and in a mere two or three centuries used up most of it, creating shortages, oil wars, global warming and the economic impact of $90-a-tank gasoline fill-ups -- none of which we gnomes had ever heard of or imagined in the thousands of years of our existence living under tree roots in the quiet woods.

Now we have to think about "energy" matters all the time, because you madly consuming humans have brought us close to the brink of extinction by your profligate squandering of fuel energy.

It may be that my generation was the last allowed outside. Born in 1964, the final year of the baby boom, mine was the ultimate generation whose parents either didn’t care about, or were blissfully ignorant of, the real-world’s dangers.

As a 6 year old, I broke my first bone on a jungle-gym that today would violate every tenet of the Geneva conventions. Sharp, metal and covered in rust, it was a geodesic monolith, buried in the school playground, lacerating every kid who dared climb upon it.

Which was all of us.

For my seventh Christmas, my parents bought me a backyard trampoline. As far as I could tell, its purpose was no higher than that of a personal abattoir. Replete with exposed bolts and a brace of jagged springs, the trampoline daily extracted pounds of bloody flesh from both myself and every other kid in the neighborhood.

With so much going on in media and politics these days, it's difficult to settle on any single topic to write about. So I haven't. Instead, here are a few thoughts on what is, and isn't, making headlines these days.

I want to believe

Ever since he clinched his party's nomination, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has been battered by charges of flip-flopping on a range of issues: from gun control and late-term abortion to public campaign financing and troop withdrawal from Iraq.

The extent to which Obama's position has changed on any of these issues is debatable. After all, one of his great strengths is his willingness and ability to discuss public policy in a thoughtful and nuanced fashion. In an age of sound-bite politics, this is an admirable quality in any candidate for elected office.

But Sen. Obama's about-face on the Bush administration's electronic surveillance program -- with its controversial provision of retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies -- was a textbook example of politics as usual.