Sunday, June 5, 2005

I surprised myself a little last Friday when I caught myself thinking that maybe having a gun or two in the house might not be such a bad idea. I paused at that and had to do a self-evaluation but I determine that as best I could tell I was not being taken over by an alien pod nor was I in the path of an NRA mind ray. The best I could tell, the late 90's rhetoric of the right-wing apologists for the militia types in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco started to make some wacky kind of sense. I mean, it was pretty ludicrous then to be referring to the ATF as "jack-booted thugs" but boy how times change. Our current government (I won't say "current administration" anymore because it goes far beyond that) seems intent on taking away every Constitutional right EXCEPT that of individual gun ownership and in the meantime ensuring that the rich keep getting richer at the expense of the rest of us. From the Patriot Act I and II, erosion of a women's right to control her own body, attempts to destroy Social Security and an assault on the right of many Americans to simply vote to stuff as seemingly innocuous as mandating digital rights management technology be written into all new hardware, our rights to free speech, a free press, free elections and privacy are being attacked in a far greater way than certainly I can remember in my lifetime and they seem intent on using our money to pay for it. It really has become us versus them. And actually, it's not the right-wingers I realized I was hearing in my head - it was the words of Paul Simonon:

When they kick at your front door

How ya gonna come?

With your hands on your head

Or on the trigger of your gun?

I'm not sure I'm willing to give up without a fight.

Ok, so I'm probably not really going to get a gun - chances are it'd get stolen and used in some crime and I'd feel really bad about that. Instead I'll keep trying to find ways to minimize the damage that the crooks and liars that are running the country now are inflicting on us until such time as we manage to throw the rascals out (and hopefully into jail). I haven't been writing much about politics the last few months but it hasn't been because I haven't thinking about it. The liberal bloggers have done a good job covering all the lunacy and I didn't really feel it necessary to echo them. However I do find that they get heavily into the minutiae of each issue - sometimes you've got to step back and look at the whole picture and quite frankly it's scary as hell. So I may heat up my own rhetoric a little because even without a gun, I don't intend to take this crap lying down.

I'm a little late in posting this but congratulations to my nephew Ryan, who graduated from high school in Cabarrus County a week ago Friday. He's the less attractive one in the picture on the left below. We're extremely proud of ya, kid!

(Note to jw: I didn't notice any gum-chewing. Must be a Greensboro thing.)

Thanks to my sister and brother-in-law for their hospitality, as usual!  They do bring new meaning to the phrase "rec room" as I don't seem to be able to escape without getting wrecked!