I'M THERE -- FINALLY

It's taken nearly eight decades, but I've finally found my perfect calling.  I was meant to be a journalist, a writer, a master of the written word.  It's my natural bent and calling.  Maybe I could have gotten there quicker taking a different route.  Who knows?  If I'd gone to a different college and studied journalism instead of theology, what might have transpired?

The experiences certainly would have been different.  Maybe I wouldn't have the same insight I feel I now possess.  I could be better off financially or worse off.  I'd probably be living somewhere else or maybe long dead from natural or unnatural causes. Familial and marital circumstances would have been different.  Etc.  Etc.

It's sort of like thinking about a parallel universe, which I don't think can exist as so many imagine.  The history in parallel universes would go so differently, that the human race might not even exist, let alone a parallel of you or me.  Take billions of years and the crapshoot of happenstances beyond measurement, and the possibilities are beyond comprehension.

The important thing is that I did get here in this universe as my unique self and that's the only important reality I have to, or can, deal with. 

I used to wonder how syndicated authors could continually write interesting pieces that just seemed to flow like water on such a regular basis.  Now, I know.  I'm doing it myself -- right here on this blog and Facebook!  There comes a time when a writer like me is so filled with the urge to say things that they will be compelled to do so if an avenue opens up.

It's taken a lot of living.  A lot of experience.  Never ending study and learning.  Much heartache and emotional trauma.  An ocean full of water under that proverbial bridge. 

I just can't stop myself now.  This is the interest of my life.  The good thing about it is that I can do it as long as I have a computer and the mental capacity and manual dexterity to type on it.  It all came to be in my lifetime, thanks to technological geniuses who did what they were born to do.

Thank you all!

OUR CITIES ARE WAR ZONES

What a way to wake up!  The Huffington Post headline, "Mother Loses 4th Son to Gun Violence," will jar the brain of just about anyone with normal sensibilities.

"CHICAGO ... seven people were killed and six wounded in gun violence in one day.

Among those killed Saturday was a 34-year-old man whose mother had already lost her three other children to shootings. Police say Ronnie Chambers, who was his mother's youngest child, was shot in the head while sitting in a car."

 

Read the full account here:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/27/ronnie-chambers-death-chi_n_2562014.html.

 

The gangland bloodbaths of the 20s and 30s horrified the nation and led to the banning of machine guns as private firearms.  The NRA never uttered a peep about that common-sense limitation. 

 

Things have changed.  Now they insist that every citizen has a right to own and carry around assault weapons -- a junior grade, but much more handy and portable version of a machine gun.  Couple that with easily concealable semi-automatic pistols and a plethora of other relatively cheap firearms being carried by more and more macho and pisssed off citizens of unknowable mental states and you have a situation which would make a walk down 1880s Tombstone streets look like an afternoon stroll through Cottonwood's Riverfront Park by comparison.

 

I think we've become so accustomed to ordinary citizens having to dodge bullets sprayed by psychopaths who consider whipping out a gun and blasting away indiscriminately as normal "anger management" that we view it as normal.

 

So far, nobody has been shooting up Cottonwood, but I have a doctor's appointment at 10 am, so I have to drive downtown.  I hope I live to drive back.  I don't know where in Chicago Ronnie Chambers was going, but he didn't make it.

 

 

MASTERS OF DECEPTION

I have a very skeptacle attitude toward much of what I see or hear in the "news."  If it comes from a religious or political source (especially right wing), I'm downright suspicious and looking for the lie. 

Religiously motivated politicians are the worst of the lot.  Most of them should be wearing swastika armbands and identifying themselves as cousins of Josef Goebbels.  The middle eastern and catholic originated drive to keep women and minorities down and skew everything to the benefit of the privileged rich and powerful never ceases.

They're masters of double speak, always looking for some high sounding euphemistic way to hide their real totalitarian agenda.  Like the recently put forward attempt to prevent abortion choice by outlawing such pregnancy termination in cases of rape or incest as "tampering with evidence."  What a transparent load of bullshit!

No subterfuge is beneath them.  They would riot to keep a list of the ten commandments posted in a classroom while they flaunt the one against lying.  (Yes, I'm aware that it is actually a command against perjury, but most people understand and pontificate about it otherwise and the principle does apply.)

I've had a lifetime of witnessing the outright lies and dishonesty so blatantly practiced by people posing as the holiest of the holy and there is no way I can trust any of them.  Many of them, I'm convinced, are just as unbelieving in the nonsense as am I, but the gravy train, people control and the easy life it affords is just too lucrative. 

  

SHADES OF THE CIVIL WAR

While I slowly extricated myself from the extreme right wing and fascist-minded mental delusion that captivated my life for so long, much of that mindset maintained its control over my subconscious and far too much of my conscious mentality.  The growth out of it has been slow and by no means painless.  I have not yet attained, and probably never will, total freedom from it.  It's like a software program that buries electronic "hooks" in your computer and tenaciously refuses to let go. 

For decades, I assumed, like millions of others, that the second amendment to the constitution was inserted primarily to make self-defense possible against foreign incursion and domestic tyranny.  That's not necessarily the case.

Here's a very thought provoking post from the Freethought blog Pharyngula:

Root of all evil?

Categories:

History, Politics

by PZ Myers

While I’m criticizing the South, I should also damn the whole country. They Yankees also contributed to the history of slavery: that whole second amendment thing that troubles us so much now was a sop to slavery, enabling ‘militias’ that were intended to capture escaped slaves and suppress insurrections.

…most southern men between ages 18 and 45 – including physicians and ministers – had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. …slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

So many of the high ideals of this country were poisoned by compromises to allow deep inequities. And the founding fathers were complicit.

GO BARACH

I helped every way I could to re-elect Mr. Obama.  I've sent him many emails and a bit of financial support.

Here's My latest:

Mr. President, I just listened to your inaugural address for the second time.  It was inspiring.
 

I know you will probably not see my message, but I have to express it anyway.  My wife and I are behind you one hundred percent as part of that now famous 99%.  We’re both pushing 80.  Not much time left and you have a precious four years left to do whatever you can to make our beloved nation more of what it was meant to be.

Go for it!  We’ll be cheering you on.

Allen and Phyllis Dexter

"ASSAULT" MEANS ASSAULT

I'm all for law-abiding, mentally competent citizens having whatever shotgun, rifle or pistol they feel is necessary for home protection, hunting, etc.  When farmers in North Dakota, my original home state, couldn't hunt deer during and immediately after World War II, the deer population got out of hand and were destroying crops, hay, etc.  As soon as a hunting season was declared and ammunition was handy, the over-population problem went away.  There are still lots of deer in North Dakota, but a yearly regulated hunting season keeps the population in check. 

You don't go hunting that 12-point buck with an assault rifle.  A bolt-action rifle with a moderate ammunition clip suffices just fine.  Even a slug-loaded shotgun will do.  People aren't contemplating hunting animals when they buy assault rifles.  What's in their heads is the possibility of hunting people they regard as enemies and/or threats or nuisances.

That's where the "assault" part and the multiple round clips come in.

A lady who attended one of our free-thought get-togethers summed it up succinctly when she stated that we need them to protect ourselves against "the government."  Our group doesn't endorse that kind of thinking and she hasn't been seen again.  I think she was looking for something much more anarchical than our opposition to religious and philosophical despotism.

There is an undertone of suspicion in the minds of too many Americans.  They regard "governemnt" with a jaundiced eye, forgetting that the government is us and is controlled by those we elect.  They're absolutely convinced that there is some grand conspiracy to impose a dictatorship on all of us and that dictatorship comprises anything with which they happen to disagree. 

If the government doesn't go along with what they demand, they dream that they can take to the hills and trenches and forceably supplant it with the "freedom" of their government -- which would be the real dictatorship.  Their 'Ramboesque" dream is made all the more erotic by holding that marvel of assault power in their hands.  They might not be all that well endowed down below but that assault rifle is a mightly potent phallic symbol -- in their fantasies.  Real he-man stuff!  (I haven't quite figured out the basic appeal to some women.)

We have enough problems to deal with in countering foreign terrorists.  The last thing we need is a Middle Eastern style civil war erupting in our own nation.  Our problems need to be hashed out in legislatures, not battlefronts.  We haven't totally recovered from the effects of our last civil war, a century and a half ago.  We don't need crazies bringing on another bloodbath while they sacrifice themselves to jet aircraft, missiles, drones -- you get the picture -- and tear our beloved nation apart, making our international position all the more perilous.

It's time for reason and cooperation, not assault!

DEAD IS DEAD

There was a blog entry on The Painful Turht website dealing with the death of but not end of Herbert W. Armstrong's pernicious effects on multiple thousands of former followers and their families.  Far too many people still conduct their lives and base their thinking and logic as if the old reprobate was still alive and in control.

That's all very true.  However, there is another fact that far too many people never grasp, and I wrote the following comment to deal with it:

"I have a news flash too.

JESUS IS DEAD!

Jesus has been dead for nearly two thousand long years now!

His promise to come back almost immediately, if any person called “Jesus” actually said those things (we can’t know because decades and centuries passed between the supposed statements and their written recording) was a lot of hot air. All the prognostications for his imminent coming today are also a lot of hot air.

The cosmic Christ of all those people claiming to be “Paul” is likewise a lot of hot air and empty ink on the pages of a book called the Bible."