A Gift to Remember

Back in the early 90s, a work friend and I split a Denver Nuggets’ season pass for the 1992-1995 seasons. The 1993-1994 season was a particular highlight as the team was actually decent for the first time in a lot of years. The Nuggets lineup was deep and included Dikembe Mutombo (center), LaPhonso Ellis (forward), Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (guard, aka Chris Jackson, prior to the season), Rodney Rogers (forward), Reggie Williams (forward), Bryant Stith (guard), Robert, Pack (guard), and Brian Williams (center). I’m sure most of those names are now lost to sports history, but at the time they were up-and-coming young players who set at least one record that year. They were exciting to watch and Denver’s McNichols Auditorium was a fun place to watch a basketball game.

The ‘93-‘94 Nuggets (42-40) were the youngest team in the league and the last seed in the Western Conference playoffs and the Seattle Sonics (63-19) were the first. After losing the first two games in Seattle, the Nuggets won both of their home games and went back to Seattle and beat the Sonics 98–94 in overtime. I had tickets for the first two home games. In the second round, they almost did the trick again, taking the Utah Jazz to a 7th game before losing that series.

Early in the next (‘94-‘95 season, Abdul-Rauf began to speak out against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the US positions in North Africa. He had converted to Islam and made a point of not standing for the anthem because he interpreted that act as worshiping idols and he called the US flag “a symbol of oppression.” He took a public opinion beating from both the fans and the local and national press. Denver, contrary to current fascist delusions, is not a particularly liberal or progressive city and sports fans in general are “conservative” in all of the worst ways. Abdul-Rauf went from being a fan favorite to being his sports generation’s version of Colin Kaepernick overnight and, like Kaepernick was eventually suspended from the NBA and spent the rest of his career in European basketball. Born Chris Jackson in Mississippi, Abdul-Rauf had plenty of experience with US repression and oppression from the start. He was also cursed with Tourette’s Syndrome and it could be “entertaining” to be near the court when he was bringing the ball up, spouting random curses and sound effects. Fans once appreciated his ability to work past that handicap, but they quickly turned into vicious grade school bullies when he demonstrated that he had a conscience.

Almost immediately, Brian Williams spoke out in support of his teammate’s convictions and in agreement with the fact that the US’s history in the Middle East is nothing to be proud of. Likewise, Brian quickly became a pariah to the city’s basketball fans and a fair number of his teammates. You might guess from reading this blog that I didn’t disagree with either Brian or Mahmoud and felt compelled to say so in a letter to the Rocky Mountain News’ editor, which was published in that paper’s Letters section.

A couple of days later, I was home, late in the day, and the phone rang. I answered and the deepest voice I have ever heard responded, “Is this Mr. Day? This is Brian Williams. I wanted to thank you for your letter of support.” I, of course, was convinced that some friends were pulling my leg and said so in particularly ungracious terms. Brian was patient, funny, and finally convinced me that he was who he said he was. He was extremely complementary about the things I’d written in my letter, which made me incredibly suspicious that I was still being pranked. We had a fairly long conversation, as much about basketball as politics or music. (Brian’s father, Eugene Williams of the Platters, had sung the national anthem at a game earlier and proved that there was nothing wrong with the McNichols sound system that decent mic technique wouldn’t cure.) As we were wrapping up the call, Brian mentioned that he’d left three floor seats for me at will-call for the next evening’s game.

The only time I have had floor seats for a big-boy’s basketball game was at the NJCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship in Hutchinson, Kansas. I have no idea what those Nuggets tickets cost, but it was way out of my league. The team was very popular, games sold out regularly, and the seats my friend and I shared were well into the nose-bleed sections. Still suspecting I was being pranked, I called some friends and asked if anyone wanted to go with me. I was probably a reluctant salesman because of my suspicion, but I couldn’t find any takers. I worked a long way down my list of friends and acquaintances without finding any interest. Without much to lose, other than minimal self-respect, I went to the game alone.

As I was standing in the will-call line, a young man with an adolescent daughter were trying to find scalped tickets, since the game was sold out. I collected my 3 tickets and offered two to him. Since I hadn’t paid anything for them, I thought it would be disrespectful to ask for money and I didn’t. I don’t think he had any idea that they were floor tickets until they found their seats. I’d also been given a coupon at the counter and wandered over to the concession are to see what the coupon was for. It was for this jacket and that was not a cheap item.

When I joined my guests on the floor, I wore the jacket through the game. I suspect, thinking that the two people sitting beside me were old friends, Brian made a point of swinging by our seats several times giving the girl high-fives as he passed. His hand was about the same size as her body, so they were very careful high-fives. Until you’ve watched professional play at close range, you have no idea how different their game is than what you’re used to. Those giant, ripped, fast young men would make Viking berserkers cower under their shields and they could run down wild game or beat down predators with their huge, bare hands. Even though he didn’t love basketball, when he played he played with passion, energy, and an astounding level of skill.

We stayed in touch, rarely, through email from that Denver game to my first year in Minnesota, in 1996, until he started playing with the Chicago Bulls when the ‘96 season started. After being a Lakers’ fan while I lived in California and a Nuggets fan from ‘91 to ‘96, the Timberwolves were a letdown and I wandered away from my last vestige of sports fandom. Brian was a critical part of the 1996 Chicago Bulls championship team and he almost enjoyed that season. He always wanted to be doing something he enjoyed as much as he imagined his father enjoyed music, though. He’d changed his name to Bison Dele in 1998 and I saved about a half-dozen of the email conversations we had over the years, but the last one came before the 1999-2000 Pistons were going to be in Minneapolis and I’d offered to meet him downtown for coffee or a beer, my treat. His last email said, “Coffee or beer, sounds good.” And I never heard from him again.

When the season ended, the Pistons offered him tens of millions to stay with the team, but he’d had all of basketball he could stand. I’ve read a lot about the last years of his life, but hadn’t kept up with him until his disappearance and, likely, death hit the news. This, “The Love Song of Bison Dele,” is the best wrap-up of his incredible life that I’ve seen and I’ve come back to read it several times.

I will remember Brian with his statement, “I always figured there were two ways to go. You can die from living, or you can die from just dying.” I still wear the jacket he gave me when the weather is right and I keep it stored in a cedar closet when it isn’t. Not long ago, I was grocery shopping wearing the jacket and an older man in a wheelchair and what appeared to be his son called me “Old School” and complemented me on my 30-year-old jacket. It reminded me that I have meant to tell this story for years and probably better do it soon or never. Ms. Day wanted a picture of me standing next to a guitar sculpture and that gave me one more reason to tell the story.

Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.

I’m Done with “Progressives”

I am done with “progressives” or radical left, anarchists, and the rest of the purists who insist that they either get everything they desire or they want to blow it all up and test the waters of total social breakdown. My interest in their opinions on everything from politics to economics (especially banking) to engineering (social and otherwise) has gone from minimal to zero in the last three years of Trumpian chaos and insanity. I have heard some of the dumbest, most childish things spew from the mouths of the far left without self-reflection or even the slightest bit of humility. The next some half-wit quotes Chris Hedges to me will the last time i hear anything from that person. I can not, in fact, see a significant difference between the actions and attitudes of the far left from those of the far right. The are both spoiled teenagers in mind and spirit.

From example, take this “analysis” of the current political situation, “All I read is totally gloomy, including the prospect of Sleepy Joe Stuttering Biden, Uncle Tom Obama and the Clinton’s pick for prez…what a loser who has already stated what an ongoing pal he is of Israel, and that he won’t sign a universal health care bill. Welcome to Amerika, a fucking joke of a nation!” The only clue that this was written by someone from the left might be the Israel dog whistle. Of course, it could just be a wingnut who, stereo-typically, mixed up the nation he has decided is the enemy. Any way you read that (sentence, run-on phrase, spewing of venom?), you would have a hard time knowing that it wasn’t a Trump tweet. Any time you have written something that sounds like Trump you should really consider rewriting.

Support for Israel has devolved into a mindless march to global suicide for the faux-Christian right and an equally mindless anti-Israel dog whistle for the left. The fact that Biden is the chosen “back to normal” Democratic candidate is disappointing for everyone and will, likely, be a one-term President followed either by a young Democrat with ideas or another mindless Republican borrow-and-spender. I get that we’re screwed in this election, like so many in my lifetime and the country’s meandering and decadent history. One of the fatal flaws in being a quasi-democracy is that we only get to choose between one of two evils. Most democratic nations have a parliamentary system that forces some sort of coalition between two or more special interest factions: Canada’s Liberal Party, Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party, the Bloc Québécois, and the Green Party of Canada for example. Not us. We are only willing to digest two faux-opposing political parties because we’re not bright enough to cope with more. Most US citizens are too dull-witted to even comprehend Ranked Choice Voting as a way to break out of the two-party morass.

This far-left crowd, is who we should always remember who put G.W. Bush over the top in Florida in 2000 and who elected, by default, elected D.J. Trump in 2016 with their “alternative candidate” votes. They “work” in politics, every four years, for candidates with little-to-no-hope of winning primaries, they throw tantrums about having to vote for the “lessor of two evils” and, instead, waste their vote on no-hope alternative candidates so they can pretend the resulting mess is “not my fault.” We end up listening to both sides whining about not getting what they want for 4 years and fall further behind the world in every important category from education to science and technology to economic stability and equality while the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting dumber.

Sweet Dreams

I recently connected to an old friend who I haven’t seen or talked to in at least 30 years. He spent his entire life, outside of vacation travel, in Nebraska and most of that in small town Nebraska. I could have easily led that life at one time, but economics, chance, opportunity, and restlessness ended up sending me to a lot of places I would have never expected to see and experience. In one of many conversations with my friend and his wife, we touched on the dreams we’ve had that carried emotion, meaning, and resonance to our lives. My friend and his wife are religious and the dreams they described had to do with that subject. My dream was very different and their perspective and ideals reminded me of that near-spiritual dream that I still occasionally have.

After my decade in medical devices, I was a mental train wreck. Being asked to help the richest people I’ve ever known cover-up device failures that had killed patients, tortured even more patients, and bankrupted many others caused me to lose the ability to read for almost half of a year. In retrospect, I realize that some part of my brain decided that if my consciousness wasn’t going to do the right thing the next best thing was to incapacitate my ability to do the wrong thing. Many people imagine that becoming a whistle-blower is either some form of treason or is as easy as going with the flow and doing what the higher-ups demand. It isn’t and if you have never had the skills or talent to be in a position to be pressed to consider having moral backbone to blow the whistle on corruption and evil in high places you have no basis with which to compare your situation to that miserable place. This essay isn’t about that dilemma, but if it were it would be longer, sadder, and more revealing that I am likely to ever be in this blog. This essay is about the dream that signaled my release from that situation.

About three months after I quit Guidant, a St. Paul medical devices company and my last corporate employer, I had the dream that turned out to be an important part of my release from the hell that had become my employment “contract.” I was mostly unemployed, living on savings and some meager self-employment and contract tech work, the economy was in free fall because of the 9/11 attacks, and my future as a 52-year-old mid-tech technical writer and engineer was totally in doubt. I still could not, yet, read and comprehend the captions below pictures in newspapers. My sole dependable income was teaching motorcycle safety classes on weekends and, occasionally, weekdays. That particular early morning, I would be teaching my first classroom in this new career. To that day, studying the materials I had to absorb to become an MSF instructor had required that I read a list of 132 questions and memorize the course-accepted answers. Because of my reading disability I had spent hundreds of hours staring at the study guides and instructors’ manuals to get to the point that I had the gist of those documents memorized. The chance that I might have a clear moment and would be able to read the test questions to my students was too much to risk, so I memorized the test. That evening I had spent six hours just going over the test questions and I could spout “What is important to know about a convex mirror?” and when #19’s time came or when I heard “#39” my kneejerk response was “List the three-step process to shift to a higher gear.”

The last thing that I remember from the fleeting moments of sleep the morning of the day I regained my ability to read again was an incredible feeling of well-being as I rode my motorcycle from my garage into the street and in every direction I saw “suits” hanging from every telephone pole down my Little Canada street, along Little Canada Road to the I35E freeway entrance and all along the freeway to the Century Avenue exit on I694. Then I woke up. I don’t remember what led to that image, if there was a story that precluded the sight of so many corporate executives getting their just deserts. The dream was more a release from the self-torture I’d subjected myself to as a consequence of working for one of the many entirely self-serving, psychopathic, and outright evil corporations this greed-loving country has spawned. There wasn’t much of a story behind that grand sight, as I remember it. It was just a beatific scene from a world gone wrong that had self-corrected.

I had that wonderful dream repeatedly for about a month and intermittently for the next year or so. Then it stopped. The part of the dream I remember always woke me up about the time I needed to be getting out of bed. The feeling it left me with was always a great sense of peace because “truth, justice, and the American way” had been restored in my world. Sometimes, I suspect that there is a lot of French in my English and German heritage because the revolution I most empathize with is the French Revolution. Being a savage US citizen, I see the 1% being hanged from telephone poles rather than guillotined, but the end result is the same.

Of course, none of that will ever happen here. We’re a nation of serfs who love to serve and obey our masters while they misdirect our anger and violence toward other members of the 99%. The chances that Americans will rise up and throw off the shackles of failed and corrupt capitalism and its bedfellow, fascism, are about as good as are the odds that we’ll figure out space travel before the next ecological catastrophe wipes us from the earth: zero-to-none. But . . . damn! That was one sweet dream and I go to bed every night hoping I’ll get to experience it again.

Who Democrats Need to Be

"I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." Will Rogers

I’ve used that quote to define my own politics for most of 50 years. While it’s true that most of the history of the Democratic Party is full of disorder and general stupidity, it wasn’t all like that. The Democratic Party that gave the country FDR and Henry Wallace was a lot more unified and a lot less concerned with bullshit. In 1933, Roosevelt desperately needed his Iowan farmer-intellectual Secretary of Agriculture New Deal star to bring order and discipline to the country’s collapsed and desperate agricultural economy. In 1940, Roosevelt dumped John Garner after the conservative VP opposed the attempt to stack the Supreme Court and ran against Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination. Roosevelt picked Wallace for the job and the Roosevelt/Wallace ticked won 449 Electoral College votes and won the election by 4,000,000 votes. Wallace was a practical Progressive who ran as a real Democrat along with Roosevelt’s more traditional ruling elite Democrat. The party hasn’t seen that many actual Democrats since.

That, however, is the solution to the party’s current schizophrenic lack of personality. The problem with what’s left of the Democrats is “the left.” If you read the stupid crap the DNC lists on its “mission statement,” you’d think the party’s purpose is to get anyone willing wear a DNC badge elected to any office they can afford to run for: “The DLCC's mission is to build and maintain winning, state-of-the-art campaign committees through a continuing partnership with legislative leaders, professional staff, and supporters.”

What the hell is that bullshit? The purpose of a political party is NOT to get elected, but to accomplish something useful for the country. Doing stupid, selfish, greedy, useless crap is why people elect Republicans. Democrats need to quit trying to appeal to every CEO, bankster, moderately liberal Hollywood actor or rock star, or, most importantly, any aspect of the usual crazy-assed left wing of the party. Let the progressives, LBGT’s, anarchists, BLM’s, socialists, communists, and whatever else has been swept up by the disorganized party of mostly losing candidates. If any of those groups can find a home or make one for themselves, they’ll be lucky to attract the usual 1% of the alternative vote; just like the Libertarians, Socialist, Communist, Progressive, Green, Independence, and the other responsibility-avoidance distractions.

Democrats, on the other hand, need to appeal to one group and only one group, the 91-99% of the American voter pool; working class Americans. Fuck their special interests, but everything that should matter to the 127 million working adults in this country should matter to the Democratic Party. Subtracting the 1-9% of that group who represent the faux-working bunch of executives, that leaves 126 million voters whose votes should be the exclusive property of a functioning Democratic Party.

The problem the voters have is figuring out who the actual Democrats are. Nobody, right or left, wants to vote for a Republican wearing a DNC badge. Harry Truman said, "Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time." I suspect that is true for real Democrats, too.

Fighting for Position

Apparently, I do not understand the purpose of “social networks.” I admit I’m a holdover from previous generations who learned to tolerate diverse opinions; even if those opinions were not respectable. Today, we’re either on one side or the other.

I got into a Facebook discussion about the purpose of our military over the last 50 years with a kid who seems to believe that having served in our military gives him a “higher power” platform for his opinions.

After disagreeing with his devout opinion1 that any military service gives the service member some sort of religious standing, he wrote: “Ah, I see you very well now, Thomas. You're a one-note choir without anything to add to _this_ topic unless it involves knee-jerk opposition to your military and everything it does, stands for, or is capable of. You disregard even the possibility of something valuable or noble in soldiers, whom you see as lesser citizens -- even lesser humans -- than yourself. You blithely generalize that hundreds of thousands of your fellow American citizens would be ‘perfectly happy’ to shoot you up on any order, because apparently you can see into their heads and hearts better than can their peers.

  “If you say it loud enough and long enough, to enough people, that may make it true -- for you. Some of us have a broader experience of fellow soldiers, and expect them to comport themselves faithfully and professionally because that is more than their job. It is their sworn oath, undertaken on your behalf and mine.

“You've shown yourself a condescending bigot, sir, and have confused your personal contempt with understanding.”

I’ve heard this definition of “bigot” before, but failed to understand the intended meaning (something considerably different than the traditional Webster’s definition). I’ve heard it from biker gangbangers, when I disrespected their “right” or moral authority to terrorize the general public. I’ve heard it from modern country musicians after I questioned their rural authenticity, when the only thing they know about the country is that audiences in the country are insufficient to support the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.

With Jack’s response, all of a sudden, I got it. What “bigot” means is that I am unwilling to submit to their threat of banishment or worse if I don’t, at least, pretend to be afraid of them. It gives them a position from which any sort of violence, from cyber to physical, can be justified. It’s obvious where members of our military would learn this response.

The good thing about these probably-short-lived social networks is that disparate people and opinions have the opportunity to break across social, physical, economic, and spiritual barriers. The sad fact is that we Americans have lost most of the capacity to see across those lines because of our personal history (what you would call "bigotry"). While the technology our country has concentrated on developing has been massively destructive to the world, our democracy, and our nation's future, it's nothing new. Failed empires have pounded on their chests exciting young men to useless, amoral, destructive wars, invasions, and to overreact to oversized (relative to real) threats as long as humans have recorded history (and likely beyond).

It is no surprise that men and women who have given a portion of their lives and sanity to this pretense of national "defense." Our discussion has reminded me of friends returning from Vietnam who desperately wanted those who didn't engage in those atrocities to "honor" their sacrifice. I can't express how sad I was for them and for the many wasted lives resulting from the damage they  suffered, physically and mentally. Some good friends returned from that war so angry and incapacitated that they never recovered. This insistence on "honoring" the warrior even if the war was evil seems to be a new thing. My father's generation spent a lot of energy trying to forget what they were forced to do in WWII. Korean War vets were the first guys I knew who had a sense of desperation about getting credit for having done something questionable or awful.

Vietnam and Iraq vets have a lot in common in that they both have massive sins to live down and want to be told they did something less awful than their senses witnessed. I get that, but can’t help them with their illusions of morality. They fell for the oldest trick in human history and want to be comforted for their error. There is a reason the military wants young men for this task and it is not because they are “the best and the brightest.”

  As for my belief that more than enough of our current members of the military would be “‘perfectly happy’ to shoot [me] up on any order,” I think history has already demonstrated that to be likely. This is very much the old Churchill question about prostitution. Based on the response of too many members and ex-members of the military to any sort of dissent from within (including the article from which this discussion originated), I think Newspeak is the only language the military can handle. My phrase was “most military members" will be perfectly happy to fire on American citizens if they are so ordered.” We could debate their happiness, but I have no doubt that at least 50% of the current mercenary military would fire on order. From what I’ve seen, military happiness is a rare condition, so they’d be as happy as usual, at worst.

A discussion that includes the possibility that our oversized military has often been used to defend interests other than that of the average citizen is off limits and “unpatriotic.” However, there is a good reason why police departments give priority to military vets and it is not a politically correct reason; it is because they will follow orders regardless of morality, legality, or any other rational argument. I suspect in my lifetime, we will find that the “volunteer army” will be volunteering for some pretty nasty domestic duty.

1 The words that inspired Mr. Lewis to such irritation were, “. . . the original post used several examples of men (like John Kerry) who openly opposed the militaristic bend of the nation of the time as cowards and called soldiers who disguised their identities as cowards. Clearly, the ‘thought’ is that if you're in uniform, you should conform. If the JCS comes to congressional hearings and television interviews in uniform to promote their wars, it seems disingenuous to disallow their opponents the same ‘credibility’ platform. ‘Most military members’ will be perfectly happy to fire on American citizens if they are so ordered, so using that generality doesn't make me feel much safer in my opposition to the military.” [NOTE: For the math-disabled, “most” means more than 50%.]

How to Know if Your State Is an Armpit

Regardless of the wingnut slant to modern United States, there is a fairly easy and reliable way to tell if your hometown or homestate are reasonable and, at least, contains a few rational people. There is one community organization that has been a place for a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning" Since the founding of this country, this one organization has been an ethical and moral, logical and spiritual community for the best and brightest the country has produced. Political leaders such as John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, Horace Greely, Adlai Stevenson, William Taft, Paul Douglas, Kent Conrad, Mike Gravel, Roman Hruska, and many others were and are members. More brilliant people than can be listed in a short rant are famous members. The organization I'm talking about is the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations community. They don't even call themselves "churches."

I'm not religious, superstitious, spiritual, or slightly interested in the future of humanity, but I absolutely respect the Unitarian Universalists' congregations and organization. They are consistently on the right side of every major moral and social issue. Unlike evangelistic and traditional religion which claim to speak for (and control) the mind of gods, Unitarians Universalists talk about what they know. They work to improve their communities. They are a reality-based organization and, therefore, are progressive and liberal (as were the country's founders). They support the sick, the weak, the old and anyone who needs their help. The two churches, Unitarians and Universalists, can fairly claim to have been the original American churches. They have been on the leading edge of American independence, abolition, women's rights, civil rights, world peace, science, and world-wide human rights.

For the last 50 years, Unitarians Universalists have been on the decline; along with every other positive attribute of this country. In some states, like South Dakota, the remnants of once-substantial UU communities are relegated to senior center meeting rooms. That should be all the evidence you need to know how backwards those cities and states have become. It's not necessary that everyone in an area be intelligent, progressive, and rational. But when people with those qualities have declined to the point that the community can not support a UU organization, it is a very telling sign. It means the marching morons have driven the area's intellect below self-sustaining levels (also indicated by the usual Red State's inability to live off of the federal tit) and the place is unfit for intelligent life. 


If you want to know where to live or find out if where you live is populated by idiots, use this search: http://www.uua.org/directory/congregations/results.php?state=?? (replacing the last two question marks with your state's two letter ID). Not surprisingly, red states are just as dependent on federal welfare as they are devoid of UU organizations.

"You may notice that UU's tend to take a couple of months off during the summer with some churches completely closing. Other denomination might question this practice, saying 'God never rests.'


"The right answer is that UU's are the only ones that God trusts enough to let out of his sight for a while."