A bird in the hand is worth a country if you're Bush
Today is one of those day when I wished I was in a musical or something because there have been at least half a dozen times where I’ve wanted to jump out of my chair in the middle of my ‘office’ and just burst into song. Of course, being that I live in the fq real world /fq that isn’t exactly advisable…at least not if I want to keep my job and keep the bars off my windows.

I’ve also been thinking about politics lately too, which is odd. I try not to let my brain dig too deeply into the whole thing because all that ends up happening is I get an idiot contact headache and have to lay down for a week or two. But I haven’t been able to help it lately.

A jury found that guy, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of killing those 3 civil rights workers in 1964. Although they didn’t find him guilty of murder (manslaughter) it’s still enough to fill me with warm fuzzies. Anyway, that got me to thinking even more about it. What is it that is in our history, our collective national DNA, that keeps us from being like so many other countries on this planet. We’ve had our share of strife in our nation’s history, there’s no doubting that. From woman fighting for the right to vote, to black people fighting for freedom and just the right to be considered people. These sorts of struggles nearly tore our country apart in the past. Yet, we made it through these tough times. Some people might still suggest that blacks and women have quite a ways to go, and in some instances that’s true. There are still white supremacists running willy-nilly shaving each other’s heads and carving swastikas on their man teets. There are still Former.Mississippi.Mayors who protest the fact that the KKK is a ‘peaceful organization’. There are still people who think that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, or that she should not be allowed to make as much as a male counterpart. These are all things that our nation has to overcome. But the core difference between ours and other nations is the very thing which will make that a nearly impossible task.

Our founding fathers believed overall in an individual’s right to certain freedoms. And with those freedoms should come responsibility. All too often though, they do not. People see nothing wrong with demanding to be able to live their lives as they see fit in one breath, while denouncing the lives of others in the next. We are a country made up of individuals with intense personal survival instincts coupled with the feeling of superiority over any and everyone else, which (as is evidenced by recent political events) is a dangerous combination.

Still, it begs the question; what has kept us afloat for so long? Why is it that we are not in a constant state of civil war? Why are our roads paved and our plumbing (largely) indoors? We have all the same basic human flaws as the rest of the world, along with all the same political and interpersonal problems. Why are we not killing each other in greater numbers in the streets as we cry at the top of our lungs to our God to justify the act while burning the flag of another nation in protest? It isn’t like we have the insight and wisdom that age and longevity bring a nation. We’re TNKOTB for Christ sake (Hangin’ Tough) if anything, we should be the worst ones, the brattiest ones….well ok, I guess in terms of foreign policy that is us.

Still though, why is our country still ‘…One nation, under God…’? One segment of our population has always been stronger than the other, whipping the other into shape and getting it back on track. But at least that bullying was always kept ‘in house’. We’ve officially overstepped our bounds. And it breaks down to ‘Who can be the bigger, better liar?’ The terrorists tell their people that America is Evil incarnate, the world watches as they burn American flags in their streets and hang stuffed Bushes and draw mustaches on his pictures and equate him with Hitler. Meanwhile, Bush tells us and the rest of the world that in order to defeat the Beige Menace, we must go in hard and strong, Shock And Awe, knock them down, then help build them back up to gain their respect. Uhm…Mr. Bush?


You’re an idiot.

I’m sure I have more to say but it’s about 5 minutes until I have to leave work and I have to get ready to go. I’ll probably write more later.