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.