I’ll admit that I seem to carp a lot here. That’s the nature of the beast, the things that make us angry are the things that are most likely to send us to our keyboards. So it’s great to see, and note, when one of the good guys makes the news. Friendly, mild-mannered, incredibly-famous Rick Steves showed up in the lead of Timothy Egan’s Fresh Ideas for a Tired Crusade in todays New York Times. Apparently, Rick is almost as opposed to the incredibly-misguided US War on Some Drugs as I am. Larkin and I used to go to Trinity Lutheran Church at Lynnwood, Washington. (We almost always go to a church with that name, it’s just that the city changes from time to time.) Rick and Anne and family were also active members, and I believe they still are. When it came time to sell my piano when we moved out of Lynnwood and didn’t have room for it, Rick’s dad handled the sale. So we have a personal connection, and I can tell you that what you see in all of his travel guides on PBS is the real thing. The quiet, cheerful, reasonable man you see on camera is exactly the same man you would be delighted to run into week after week in church, or probably anywhere else. And now he’s taking a stand on the decriminalization of marijuana. No, nice guys like Rick Steves aren’t likely to take the kind of radical position that you would see If I Were King, but it’s a step.