Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The Best Piece of Cheese and Beer I've Ever Had


I've been backpacking for a number of years now. My schedule usually allows me about two trips a year, one in the summer, one in the winter. I've been to the vast majority of SC's mountains and done a little wandering around in NC and GA, and, until this past weekend, I've never felt like I'd been beaten by a mountain. However, Sunday afternoon, as I stumbled out of the woods into a parking lot at some boy scout camp in the Pisgah National Forest, I truly felt beaten. I keep telling myself that its just because I haven't been exercising, or that my 8 year old boots failed me, or that I simply wasn't mentally prepared for the grueling itenerary we had plotted. But then, it was only 2 nights and 12 miles. People do that sort of thing all the time.

I guess I should have known this trip would be particularly brutal. Things didn't go according to plan from the start. Half of our 6 man party didn't even leave Columbia until 6:30 pm (I was included in this half) and, due to certain navigational miscues, we didn't hit the trail until about 10 pm. Thankfully, the other 3 guys were kind enough to leave glow sticks along the trail so the late-comers could find our way in the dark. Of course the batteries in my head lamp were dying, so the normally bright, concentrated beam of light was reduced to a faint shimmer on the rocks below my feet. But the first night's hike in wasn't bad, only about 10 minutes of walking, and there was a meager fire awaiting us when we arrived...and plenty of scotch. Ahhh, scotchy scotch scotch, I love scotch.

The plan was that the next morning, we'd wake up early, have some breakfast, and break camp. We'd hike up some ridge, change trails, and some 6 or 8 miles later, we'd find a suitable place to camp for the night and do it all over again the next day. Nothing new here, I've executed similar plans for years. I though 8 miles might have been a bit ambitious condsidering that I'm not in the greatest shape of my life, but I could do it, I was sure.

So the next moring we left about 10 am and hit the trail. Thankfully, I had packed light for the trip and my pack was probably only about 30 lbs. The same can't be said for some of the other members of our party. The thing about backpacking is that, when you're new to it, you see all these neat gadgets that purport to make life in the wilderness a bit easier. What the marketers don't tell you is that you have to carry all those gadgets on your back and, even though most of them don't weigh much, when you bring a bunch of them, the weight adds up. I've learned that, while things like a candle-lantern seem neat and cozy, they don't justify their weight in the pack, at least in a pure utilitarian sense.

Anyway, we hit the trail. Because we were hiking in a wilderness area, the trail was not exactly what you'd call "maintained". There were no blazes and often we had to stop just to figure out where the hell the trail was. A few previous hikers had been kind enough to leave rock markers along the way, but they were sparse and, at many times, the trail was nearly invisible. But we managed to stay mostly on trail the whole trip, for better or worse. You see, when I said earlier that we were going to hike up a ridge, I really meant UP. In fact, we ascended what our guidebook (obviously written by some sadist) called a "moderate ascent," words that, in retrospect we relied on a bit too heavily. In reality, that trail was brutal...brutally brutal. And the so-called "moderate ascended" turned out to be 6 miles of ascent that left our hiking party completely wasted and in pain. I don't remember much from the trail that first real day of hiking. Only the pain in my feet from stepping on the thousands of sharp rocks that made up the majority of what some might call a trail.

When we finally arrived at the top of the ridge, the trail, thankfully, leveled out. It made for a nice hike along the top of the ridge and, since all the leaves were off the trees, excellent views of the surrounding mountains. After a bit of heated debate among the party, we decided that 6 miles was enough for the day and that we'd camp on top of the ridge. I took the picture above from our campsite. Its a view of the famous Cold Mountain (which we had originally planned to summit as a sidebar to or route, but, given the condition of our party and time limitations, we could not). We set up camp, cooked dinner (summer sausage and rice never tasted so good) and then broke out our libations. I made it through about 2 sips of scotch when I realized that water was going to have to be my spirit of choice for the night.

I woke up last the next day, some time around 8:30 am, and we were gone by 9. Breakfast was a granola bar and a few sips of water, but I had to be conservative because I was running low and the next stream we'd cross would be about 4 miles down the trail. Our trusty guidebook told us that the remaining portion of our route would be a moderate, easy hike for about 2 miles (he actually got that one right), followed by a "strenuous descent" of 4 miles. I've been hiking in the mountains for a long time, and I've never heard of a "strenuous descent". After all, going up is the hard part, right? Wrong.

Maybe it was the fact that my feet were already hurting when we started out that morning (along with my legs and back) and that every step, even on level ground, was full of pains from all sorts of different places, but the strenuous descent, once we began it, was indeed strenuous. In fact I've run straight down the side of mountains before and had an easier time (that is until I tried to stop, but hey, that's the fun part). By about the 5th mile (1 more to go) my ankles and knees were shaking, I was relying on a stick I'd picked up along the trail for balance, and my walk resembled more of a stumble than an actual gait. But I kept going, slowly, but going nonetheless.

Finally I heard one of the guys ahead of me (and by this point, they were all ahead of me) say that he saw the car just around the corner. Just prior to that my trusty stick had failed me, broke in half, and sent me hip first into a big, sharp rock. All I could do was sit there and absorb the pain. God that hurt like hell. But, after a minute or two, I resumed my stumble and, sure enough, just a few switchbacks away was the car, and the rest of the hiking party. I've never felt such a catharsis. As soon as I reached the car, I dropped my pack and was handed, of all things, a hunk of cheese and a beer. And that, is the story of the best piece of cheese and beer I've ever had. Funny thing is, as I walk around the house a mere 2 days later, I can't wait until I do it all again.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Real quick...

I'll be busy studying for, taking, then getting over exams until Dec. 18...but I promise I'll be back.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Election Reflections


There's been a lot of speculation about what the Democratic takeover of Congress meant in the eyes of the American voter. Here at the Blue South we think we've reached a bit of a consensus. It has been said by many that people don't necessarily vote for something or someone so much as they vote against something. This sentiment definitely meshes with the efficacy of negative campaigning (despite being detested by us ideologues). And I don't think there's much argument from any side of the political spectrum that the Democrats never really formulated an affirmative message prior to the mid-terms. So what, then, were the American voters against?

The obvious answer here is the Iraq war. That idea has been beaten into all of our heads by the media, but we here at the Blue South think it's not entirely accurate. The real thing that the voters spoke out against, at least as far as we can see, is the specter of neoconservative thought as manifested in our foreign policy. Of course the Iraq war is exactly that, but it is important to point out that Americans have rejected an approach to foreign policy, not one instance of bad judgment and poor execution.

Beginning after WWII, as the Cold War began to rage, early neocons such as Irving Kristol (pictured above) began to formulate their opinions. The idea, originally, was all about the containment of communism and fighting an indirect war with the Soviet Union. We had the moral high ground at that point because it was the Soviets who were viewed as the ones with imperial aspirations, and we were merely fighting the good fight to contain their influence.

However, the Cold War has been over for a while now. Communism has exposed its fatal flaws, namely the social-engineering catastrophes that lead to the deaths of millions and millions of people. If any lessons can be learned from the failure of the communist utopia they must be that utopias don't, and never will, exist and that societies and governments are best left to evolve in their own ways without intervention from outside ideological forces.

This brings us to the tragic flaw of the contemporary neoconservative- the idea that America's best interests are served by spreading democracy throughout the world. On its face it seems like a good a idea. No one here will argue that Democracy is not a good thing. It has been a major contributor to the vast freedoms that we have grown to love in this country. However, the policy of spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun, toppling regimes and then forcing elections, has become the subject of the ultimate democratic criticism- the voter. The fact is that, while spreading democratic values is a good idea, it is not a good in and of itself. The method matters, as do the results and, most importantly, the will of the people being "democratic".

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Oh, SNAP...In Yo' Face Pelosi!


In the coup of the century Steny Hoyer (D-MD) has defeated seemingly insurmountable odds to defeat Pelosi's man, Jack Murtha (D-PA) for the number two spot in the Democrat pecking order in the House. We at the Blue South obtained an exclusive interview with Hoyer, mere moments after his triumphant victory over the Pelosi Faction. Here's what he had to say:

TBS: Well, Steny, how's it feel to undercut the clear will of your party's leader in a self-serving power grab that potentially could divide your party before they get a chance to do anything at all in Congress?
Hoyer: Excuse me? Who the hell are you anyway?
TBS: That's beside the point, Steny, I just want to know how it feels to be a party-debasing, leadership-circumventing, snobby East Coast liberal power broker.
Hoyer: Pretty damn good....SECURITY!
TBS: But seriously, Murtha could take you in a bar fight, right?
Hoyer: Murtha's a patsy.
TBS: Whatever, man. He fights dirty- he'd take you.
Hoyer: Nonsense, Murtha's a lightweight. I'd break him in half. In fact, I just did, democratically speaking.
TBS: I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Thanks for your time, Steny.
Hoyer: My pleasure, jackass.

There you have it, an exclusive Blue South conversation with like, the 6th most powerful man in America (billionaires exempted). No where else could you find such hard-hitting journalism than here, at the Blue South.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

King George's New Pants



With all the excitement of football in the air, although my beloved Gamecocks have gotten off to a somewhat lackluster start, as well as my new daily routine of reading page after page of silly torts cases, I haven't had a lot of time to spend with my blog...but I want you all to know I'm still out here, so I'll post a few of my random thoughts.

President Bush has apparently adopted a new strategy in his speeches these days, he's no longer denying things that we, the public, have known were true for quite some time. Take these secret CIA prisons...the Washington Post published a story about them in November of last year, and since that time, under Bush's omnibus excuse of national security, the administration has vehemently denied their existence. That is, until last week when Bush hit the speech circuit fessing up, not only to their existence, but to their moral objectionability as well. This change in strategy for Bush is nothing new in the Republican party, all of the '08ers have been distancing themselves from Bush for quite a while now. It was only a matter of time before Bush jumped on the bandwagon and started distancing himself from himself. Makes political sense, right?

In other news, Al Gore has earned pariah status for his power-point movie about global warming. I guess Americans have been too busy gassing up their Hummers and cutting donuts in the Wal-Mart parking lots to realize that Gore's video actually puts up some compelling evidence in a viewer-friendly format that the NASCAR moms and dads can understand enough to totally reject. Scientists have been calling global warming a problem for years, but nobody pays any attention to them. Why would someone who has spent their entire life studying Peruvian glaciers have anything useful to say about my life?

What else has been going on? Oh yeah, Mark Sanford still hates public schools and poor people. Glenn McConnell is still dry-humping the Hunley and leaving millions of public dollars on the nightstand. Mid-term elections are coming up and the buzz is that people are sick of the Republican incumbents and are going to vote for change this November...Yeah right, I'll believe that when I see it. Not to mention that my beloved Dems haven't put together a solid enough platform to be able to espouse any sort of political agenda. At least the Republicans can fall back on their hatred of gays and abortion to rally the troops. What do we Dems have, social justice? Welfare reform? Universal healthcare? Americans would rather attend a good ole gay bashing session than bother acknowledging the actual problems facing us.

Ooh, ooh, speaking of healthcare, these pharmaceutical companies disgust me. Do you know that they have instructions on how to "talk to your doctor" about certain pills. You can go to their websites and they will instruct you on why you need their drug, give you a list of ambiguous symptoms to aid in your self-diagnosis, and then tell you how to lie to your doctor to make her believe you're actually sick so you can convince your insurance company (assuming you have one, otherwise you couldn't afford to visit the doctor, much less actually pay for a prescription drug) that you NEED this pill. What a farce! There will be more to come on this problem, but for now I'm going to spend the remaining time I have before football starts (I've got about an hour) to put together some sort of visual aid for this post, because if there's one thing we Americans need in order to actually read anything, is a catchy picture to sex it up a bit.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

My Favorite Quote of the Day


Ok, so I leave my radio on NPR all the time because commercial radio is crap and you can only find good music if you look for it. Normally I get a hard dose of news and commentary from the nation and world with only a small parcel of SC news...that is until Your Day comes on at noon. Today's show featured an interview with Mike Petrie, the maintence director for the city of Union, talking about his city's progressive energy policy. When asked about the contents of Biodiesel, Petrie was happy to oblige with his own expert analysis: "80% Diesel, 20% Bio." PRICELESS! Oh yeah and the picture is one from my camping trip this past weekend...for Mr. Petrie's benefit, we're burning 100% Bio.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Energy Woes (Pt. II)


So Bush tells us we're addicted to oil and that we have to do something to stop it. The problem is he's right and anyone who understands addiction knows that it takes tanamount to an act of God to kick one. Ever try to quit smoking? Try quitting plastic, driving, indoor lighting.

The fact is that petroleum products are ubiquitous in our society and our way of life relies on oil. I have had conversations with friends about this problem and they all seem to come to the same startling conclusion: technology will prevail. In other words, somebody will come up with some new solution or gadget that will save us all from oil dependence.

The problem with this point of view is that these people fail to see just how dependent our society is on oil. In the absence of oil, we won't have the ability to sustain a way of life that is conducive to technological advances. We would have to start from square one, something like the industrial revolution. Computers would be useless, cars would go nowhere, there would be little electricity.

So true believers in technology without limits, I submit to you a fast approaching deadline. You only have until the oil runs out (it is already running short) to produce your new gadget that will spare us our way of life. We are an oil-based society and are on the brink of losing the lynch pin of our economy and livelihood.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Energy Woes


I recently had the pleasure of finally graduating college and, even though I participated in the smaller, less guilded ceremony of August, I was surprised to find that our speaker would be Dr. Samuel Bodman, W's Secretary of Energy. Seemed like quite a high level speaker for a crowd comprised mostly of Van Wilder types who were more interested in the what bars they were headed to that night. However, I managed to stave off my own hangover long enough to notice something very interesting about Dr. Bodman's speech.

He began with a trip down memory lane, all the way back to the 1950's and the roots of his own political philosophy- the Cold War. Bodman proceeded to draw many loose parallels between the world of today and the world during the Cold War and he made it well known that many of the tactics utilized in today's energy policy were informed by Cold War experience.

So now it all makes sense. The problem with our nation's foreign policy, energy policy, and even domestic policy is not that our leaders are blind to the world around them. It has to do with their paradigm. These people see the world in black and white, good and evil, Soviet and American terms. Instead of recognizing our problems with terrorists as their own species of conflict, these leaders have chosen to swap them out for Soviets and to fight the good fight the only way they know how.

But I'll take one on the chin for my liberal friends and go ahead and denounce those naysayers to the Iraq war that call it another Vietnam. Iraq is Iraq, terrorism is terrorism, and neither of these things has the least bit to do with the Cold War, save some policy mistakes we made in the region during our stand-off with the Soviets.

The world I see is not a polarized, good and evil, Cold War world. The world I see is nuanced and difficult to explain. The lines of causality for the crises around the world are nebulous and sprawling. In truth, I imagine the people who were living during the Cold War saw it much the same way. It is only the mistake of these few remnants of Cold War era leadership to oversimplify their historical perspective and attempt to apply it to our modern world. That old saying that he who ignores history is doomed to repeat it may be true, but I would add that with the passage of time our perspective changes in such a way as to make it very dangerous to put too much stock in lessons learned from historical situations.

Solutions for modern problems need to involve logic and modern philosophies, not archaic aphorisms gleaned from a misunderstanding of the past. We need to take a long, cold look at ourselves and our environment and go forward together, with some sort of unifying principles that can apply to all people in the world if we ever expect to bring peace and stability to the forefront.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

A New World Order






Photo provided by www.DownTheRoad.org the Ongoing Global Bicycle Touring Adventure


In this age of globalization and increased competition from foreign entities, our economy finds itself in a bit of a conundrum. One of the surest signs of a robust economy is the willingness and ability of companies to offer their employees benefits at what I will call the societal level. These types of benefits, pension plans, retirement, stock options, and health care are the types of things that make jobs worth the while. These benefits represent long term security for the worker and display the true magnitude of a particular corporation's economic clout.

The problem is that U.S. companies have been facing increased competition from foreign companies that can pay their workers much lower wages and offer little to no benefits. We are a rich country and, therefore, our people expect a certain amount of wealth from their jobs. Poorer people may be perfectly willing to accept their low wages that at least provide a little bit of food and material substance. The fact is, Americans don't want to give up their wealth, but companies are continually forcing them to in the name of competitiveness.

I see this phenomenon as a trend of global redistribution of wealth that will spread the limited amount of material well-being in existence more evenly around the globe. If it continues it will materially harm the average American. There will be less wealth to go around in this country. However, the upshot to this, at least on a grand scale, might be more prosperity in the rest of the world, alleviating many of the problems associated with poverty cycles, including the mass discontent caused by the anguish of living in poverty. In short, the redistribution of wealth around the globe, that results in a more even distribution of wealth and power might result in a more stable and, ultimately, peaceful world society.

The problem is that here in America, nobody wants to lose their way of life, nor should they. All productive members of society spend vast portion of their lives seeking material goods and the expected sense of well-being associated with their accumulation. That is one of the founding principles of our society and has been built into the very framework of our government, economy, and even our very lives. Proponents of globalization and worldwide free markets cite the need for new sources of labor, raw materials, and capitol in order to sustain the American way of life- and these people are not wrong. However, the expansion of our economy into a global one comes at a price and we, as Americans, must ask ourselves whether we are willing to pay it.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Minimum Rage

Our Republican National Congress has done it again. In less time than it takes to say "morosely ironic" Congress has both voted to give themselves a raise (those are the only votes that always pass) and NOT to raise the minimum wage. I mean really, at $5.15 an hour, haven't those greedy working poor gotten enough out of our struggling corporate empires? They're lucky their jobs haven't gone to 5 year old Indonesian kids by now (for those of you who only recognize sarcasm in the tone of one's voice, I invite you to apply that tone to your inner narrator right about now).

Conservatives place too much faith in the capitalist system. The simple fact is that laissez faire capitalism proved itself a failure years ago. Need I remind us that the Great Depression really did earn the title, "great" for a reason. But laissez faire is no longer an issue. Congress has expanded its power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution by exponential proportions. Our conservative forbears have been forced to admit that there is no longer such a thing as intrastate commerce, at least for the most part. Now we must once again force reality down the throats of the conservatives.

The basic, driving principle of our economy boils down to greed, pure and simple. Proponents of the system will call it self-interest, but that's just a candy coating on the harsh reality of our economic existence. The story goes that capitalism works because each individual is motivated to accumulate as much wealth as possible, thereby encouraging both production and consumption, while the free, unimpeded market is guided by the "invisible hand" (I'm not making this stuff up, read "The Wealth of Nations") that works to fairly dispense commodities to those who work hard enough to deserve them. The problem is that with accumulated wealth comes great power and, when accompanied by a largely unregulated inheritance system, that wealth and power stays in the hands of a few individuals until we end up with the picture we all now see (or at least ought to see): the overwhelming majority of the world's resources concentrated under the control of the overwhelming minority of people. Karl Marx thought this phenomenon would lead to the inevitable uprising of the working class and subsequent mass redistribution of wealth. Marx, however, was wrong because he underestimated the stranglehold of power associated with great wealth and the phenomenon we Americans like to call our "dream," but what rightly ought to be called what it is- greed.

Now for those of you with just enough sense to know that Marx founded his own economic system, one that became a very dirty word in this country, let me clarify my own stance. I am not promoting a communist revolution. Communism has its own set of very dire problems that I will not address here, but suffice it to say that's not what I want. I simply have to add this caveat because the very mention of Marx's name tends to invalidate most arguments in this country, particularly those arguments with the ill informed.

My purpose here is to give a Stephen Colbert-esque "wag of the finger" to Congress for not increasing the minimum wage. $5.15 an hour is a joke, albeit a very unfunny joke to those who have to live with it. What I am saying to my conservative friends is this: don't whine about our welfare system, state-supported healthcare, or those dirty poor people who so inconvenience your lives and rob you of your hard-earned money through taxes when YOUR Congress, full of those people YOU keep voting for, won't even raise their wage to a paltry 7 bucks an hour. YOU asked for it, YOU got it, now deal with it.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

A Strategy of Denial

Under the guise of some lofty notion about freedom of choice, many of our state republicans, including our embattled governor, are pushing for government subsidies to send children to private schools. For those of you who read my previous post about the racist roots of the republican stranglehold on South Carolina politics it might benefit you to know that the overwhelming majority of these private schools were founded in the mid-50's and early 60's...hmmm right around the time our national government was forcing an end to segregation. Why is it that today, in 2006, we are still debating incentives to segregate our schools?

But the racist roots of the republican push to privatize education is not my main concern here. The fact is that our public school system is suffering in many ways and that providing a tax incentive for upper-middle class white kids to flee our public schools is simply the wrong answer to the plight of our school system. School vouchers are a band-aid fix to our educational problem. Meanwhile, those poorer students who really don't have a choice even if the government offered tax breaks, would be sent back into a separate and unequal school system that perpetuates the cycle of poverty in our state that can only be broken with quality education for all.

And yet one of the firmest foundations of GOP dominance in our state comes from poor, rural whites who are continually preyed upon to vote against their own interests by saavy politicians who appeal to their sense of freedom. Sure, you'll be free...free to watch as the priveledged remain priveledged and the good jobs go to the only kids whose parent could afford to send them to a school that provided a decent education. State money for private schools is simply wrong. The money spent by the government (and yes, tax incentives are de facto government spending) rightly belongs to all the people, not just those who can afford to pay the balance of private school tuition, the cost of transportation to and from school, as well as the hidden costs that come along with poor kids trying to fit in with the rich.

Sanford and his republican colleagues are espousing a policy that is devisive and insidious and our state will continue to suffer for it. South Carolina is a relatively poor state and one of the key ways to break that trend is to provide a quality education to all of the state's students, rich and poor, black and white. We have to understand that our state cannot progress, cannot attract meaningful jobs, unless we provide business owners with a pool of well-educated, goal-driven, hopeful employees. So conservatives, if you really want to keep things as they are, if you really want to remain at the bottom, then vote republican and your wish will come true.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Onward into the Great Morass

The single biggest issue of late in South Carolina politics has been what its supporters have termed "Property Tax Relief." It was recently pointed out to me by someone intimately involved in the debate that when politicians include the term "relief" in any sentence about taxes, the public tends to support it without question. Of course, no one likes to pay taxes and tax "relief" seems like a good deal for everybody. But let us examine exactly what this property tax "relief" is, who it benefits, and who it does not.

First, the gentleman who I have personally witnessed in the lobby of the Statehouse and in the gallery for every Senate debate on property taxes, the man who is arguably one of civil society's greatest proponents of the tax bill, lives in an old house in Charleston overlooking the Battery. For those of you unfamiliar with Charleston real estate, his house is on one of the most valuable pieces of land in the state. This is that man who is championing property tax "relief." It seems to me, a man of relatively meager assets, that any tax legislation supported so vigorously by someone holding such valuable assets is dubious in nature and deserves close scrutiny by those of us who find ourselves out of the highest tax brackets.

Also, because our local property taxes provide for the vast majority of the money spent on education, eliminating such taxes opens a Pandora's box of issues for those of us concerned with South Carolina's public schools. The Senate Democrats saw this opportunity to push for an equitable school funding program to be attached to the property tax "relief" bill. Under this bill, monies from the richer counties would be filtered through statewide programs into the school systems giving a roughly equal amount of money, per student, to each school in this state. I have personally attended public schools in both poor, rural counties and richer, more urban counties and I can vouch for the vast difference between the two. We must ask ourselves, is it fair to those kids who have the misfortune of being born in a rural area that their schools are underfunded and void of any of the newer technology and innovation that has made a few of the schools in this state great?

Paul Harrison wrote a famous book in the 1970's on the subject of worldwide poverty and, according to him, one of the root causes of poverty is geographic location. The logic goes that those peoples living in places that are naturally disadvantaged by climate and topography make up the vast majority of the systematically impoverished peoples of the world. Seems to make sense: if you live in the desert, it's probably thought to grow crops. Along the same lines, those students who were born in rural areas, where property values are low, attend underfunded schools. By allowing such a system to persist, we are dooming these kids to a life of poverty because we refuse to sacrifice a few of the creature comforts of our rich schools in order to promote equality of opportunity.

You should have seem the look on the President Pro Tempore's face when the issue of equitable school funding came up in Senate debates. I was a look of shock, horror, and disdain. The problem with our state's schools is that we allow a small percentage of them to prosper at the expense of the vast majority. But hey, we need people to shine our shoes, pump our gas, and bring us our filet mignon...right?

A Quick Note...

I have gathered from some of the comments posted that I was not as explicit as I should have been about my wishes not to discuss religion in this blog. Politics is a contentious enough issue without involving religion which is why I don't wish to continue any more theological dialogue. I'll never be able to change anyone's mind about religion, that is a matter of faith and something I have no desire to do anyway. But I'm not going to reply to any religiously charged comments here because I don't want this forum to turn in that direction. If you desire to debate politics that is fine, I'll debate you until I'm blue in the face, but I don't think its my place to comment on anyone's religious views, so I'm not going to.

Monday, May 29, 2006

On Memorial Day

Being that today is Memorial Day, I think it is appropriate to take a moment and reflect on the many sacrifices that have been made over the years that have enabled people like me to say the things we do. Apart from any politics, from any feelings for or against a certain war, or war in general, it is of paramount importance to recognize that since our country was founded war has been a part of our heritage, and that over that span of time many people have given their lives and livelihoods in times of crisis in order to preserve our great country.

I am not just speaking of those who have died in war, but also those who have survived. It is much easier to recognize the sacrifice made by a fallen soldier, but we must not forget those who have witnessed the atrocities of war and have returned, forever changed, to rejoin the society for which they fought so bravely.

A stark reminder of these people came to me today in the form of an article in The State about a new Pentagon-backed program to develop better prosthetic limbs for the mounting numbers of disabled veterans returning from Iraq. The older model limbs were said to be cumbersome and often so useless that they were shelved, serving only as a daily reminder of the sacrifice made by a disabled soldier.

There will be a lot of high sentence today about how the sacrifices of soldiers have contributed to our most fundamental and basic rights and freedoms, but my point here is aimed at the more mundane priveledges we enjoy, like the ability to button a shirt, to walk to work, or to live an emotionally stable life. Even those soldiers who returned from war with no physical injuries carry with them images so atrocious that those of us who are fortunate enough to be ignorant of the gruesome reality of war will never be able to relate to those soldiers in the same way, on the same level.

My point here is that these people, both alive and dead, have sacrificed so many things that we overlook in the grand scheme of things. So please, whether you are a raging liberal or a staunch conservative, or anything in between, forget about our petty differences, at least for today, and take a moment to reflect on those that we know and those that we don't know who have given up their very existences and plunged themselves into a world of horror and atrocity, all so that we who are lazy, content, and spoiled can know and love our freedoms- not just the freedoms of speech or of religion, but our everyday freedoms like the freedom to dress ourselves and to live reasonably happy lives.

There are many among us who will never see those freedoms again and to those people I say "Thank You, I love you, our country needs more people like you!"

Saturday, May 27, 2006

One Trillion Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers

I want to turn my attention away from South Carolina politics for a moment to discuss a bit of the national debacle. As of a few minutes ago our national debt was sitting at just over 8 trillion dollars. A little more than half of that debt is said to be held by the public and the rest lies in intergovernmental holdings. Each American family's share of the debt, according to the National Debt Clock website, is about $131,000 (much more than the average family can make in a year).

But what I'm really concerned with is what exactly is 8 trillion dollars? Is it even possible for the human mind to grasp such a figure and really understand what it means? I don't think so, but in an effort to make the debt a little more concrete, I've thought of a few comparisons:

$27,000 per person in the U.S. alone (a bit less than what the average U.S. family makes in a year)

Things you could buy with $8 trillion:
9 machine guns for everyone under the age of 18 in the U.S.
28,000 sexy dresses (priced at $56) for every woman in Afghanistan
534,000 private islands in Fiji (based on what Mel Gibson paid for his)
5,000 world peace flags for every member of the NRA
1 junior bacon cheeseburger a day for every impoverished American for the next 591 years

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Welcome to the Blue South

These days it seems that South Carolina politics has been plunging deeper and deeper into an ultra-conservative, archaic debate on issues that should have been settled years ago. There is no doubt that most of the voting population of our fair state votes Republican, even when those votes are so obviously against their own interests, not to mention any idea of the "public good." My problem with conservatives, though, doesn't stem from their moralistic, holier-than-thou attitudes, false pretenses of "small government", or even their misuse of public trust and power...no, I think that those attributes are intrinsic to politics and unavoidable in a form of government such as ours. My problem with conservatives stems from what I believe to be a fundamentally mistaken view that they take in regard to human nature.

There is little debate among those who spend their lives thinking about politics that the decisive difference between a liberal and a conservative boils down to their basic assumptions about human nature. If you were to draw a continuum ranging from conservative to liberal, you would have to place the assumptions that human nature is essentially "bad" on the conservative side and that human nature is essentially "good" on the liberal side (I'll define "bad" and "good" as best I can a little later, but I don't want this particular discussion to devolve into semantics). One can trace philosophically the positions taken by both conservative and liberal politicians to these fundamental assumptions about human nature.

While I personally don't believe that either camp has it all right, my beef with conservatives is the sheer hypocrisy contained in their fundamental assumption about human nature. Conservative Republicans spend tons of money espousing and promulgating images of themselves as good, moral, dependable people...precisely the types of people that they believe do not exist. Therefore, if the conservatives have it right, then they spend their entire campaigns (or even lives) lying to the public (and often themselves) about their images. You'll never find a Republican candidate for any office that will tell you he thinks that all people are essentially "bad," themselves included. That would be political suicide. So I encourage you conservatives out there to look in the mirror and ask the question, "Am I essentially a bad person?" My guess is that none of you will say "yes," except for those of you who recognize the Calvinist doctrines and can add the caveat that you have been made "good" by some exogenous factor (at which point this conversation would turn to religion, which is another conversation for another day). But really, are you intrinsically, inescapably, NATURALLY, evil? I didn't think so.