I was in Golden, Colorado over the Christmas break. Golden is the home of the Coors Brewery, and also the home of Kersti, a friend from Ashland. We were at the Buffalo Rose – a biker bar with dollar bills with tacks in them stuck all over the ceiling – if you throw the dollar up and it sticks, you get a free drink.

And I talked to a veteran of the first Iraq war. He enlisted to get an education and to travel, and served for two years. His politics had now shifted to the point of being against this conflict.

We talked about union politics in the merger between Coors and Miller – Miller is unionized, apparently, but Coors isn’t, and the Coors employees don’t want the union because their benefits already exceed what the union guarantees – and then we talked about Iraq.

I told him that wherever I had gone in the US for the past six months, people started talking about the war, and he agreed that it was on everyone’s mind. His perspective was that the only people who weren’t willing to consider that the war might be a mistake, or its continuation might be a mistake, were those whose conviction in it came from religious beliefs.

The next day, as Kersti and I were driving back to Denver to have breakfast with the Millans, under falling snow, we heard the news about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and mourned the death of another moderate political leader.