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WARNING – LONG WINDED EDITORIAL NESTLED BELOW.
Good day! It’s about 10.9 degrees Fahrenheit here at Jackson Acre today. And that’s with the sun shining (up from 5.7 degrees at 10 AM)! The children, dog, and I are all sitting in the south side of the house, trying to stay warm in the sunlight coming through the windows.
Some of you reading this message are fortunate (wise) enough to not live in an area with normally cold winters, although this weekend winter appears to have overtaken everyone! There was enough snow in Mississippi to build snowmen, for goodness sake! Global warming???
My wife just won the 2004 World Championship of Poker, with winnings of 5 million dollars! I’m going to quit my day job! She’s been playing that same computer game for four months now and she’s beginning to think she’s good enough at online/computer poker that she keeps threatening to start playing online poker with real money. We’ll keep you posted on that one.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a government holiday that results in giving us lazy government workers yet another day off. But King was a truly great man and anyone who’s never heard him speak is missing out on what a tremendous orator he was (click here to listen to some of his speeches). He had a passion and presence that moved people, that stirred the soul and drove change.
Sadly, I believe that God’s done making men and women with King’s mettle. And in today’s society, we really need those kinds of visionaries, with the ability to see things that could be, the vision to see change for the better, and the skill and passion to urge us all towards that change, however difficult getting there may be.
I look at the current presidential race and realize that visionaries like King and Kennedy are long gone. Heck, even Reagan had vision and the abilities to share that vision with us. Today we are left with petty bureaucrats and corporate pawns, interested in their own bottom line and the next four years, lacking the courage to admit that things are broken and need to be fixed.
No one looks beyond the next election cycle anymore. It’s A-D-D (attention deficit disorder) in government. And to quote a joke received by a friend, I suffer from electile dysfunction – the inability to become aroused by any of the presidential candidates running for office in 2008. They’re all the same shade of gray, and will all become part of the problem, if elected. It’s the political environment of Washington DC that is poisonous and anyone elected will succumb to its toxins (if not already poisoned from past exposure).
Another part of the problem also lies with we, the people – we don’t want to admit that things are broken and need to be fixed, shaken up. We can’t seem to peek behind that curtain and see the myopic wizards pulling desperately at levers and stabbing at buttons as they continue running our country’s state of affairs into the ground.
No, we stick our heads in the sand and continue guzzling oil, spewing greenhouse gases, buying and producing crap we don’t need, and sending our troops all over the world to protect our “national interests”. And all the while we deny that things need to change, that we need to reevaluate our foreign, domestic, energy, and economic policies.
As the naysayers say it, if we don’t start dealing with the hard truths now, with some hope and expectation that going through this effort, while difficult, will make us stronger in the end, then we will be left with even more radical and tragic change on down the road.
But rest assured, change is coming – always. It may not affect you or me in our lifetime, but I’m sure it will impact my children, and probably my grandchildren. Humans rarely look beyond their own life spans – Americans rarely look beyond the next election cycle or quarterly stock report. And it is this shortsightedness that will do us in.
As parents, one of the most important things we do for our children is to leave things better than when we received them. This message got lost somewhere, but that doesn’t mean the words aren’t still being yelled just because we’re no longer listening.
Okay, off my soapbox and onto my little contribution to the betterment of the world. Yes, I believe that Civil Servitude makes things a little better. Just a little. Our latest episode sees Spurburt redeemed (this one’s for all you union reps).
Click here to get a little bit of that good stuff and enjoy!
At least I can make Bluff City a better place!
