Tales from the Inner Ring

We're cool, everybody else sucks

          I'd vote for any candidate who doesn't use the phrase "fight for you" in a campaign.  Who would he be fighting?  "Liberals" "Conservatives" "Pro-Lifers" "Pro-Choicers"  "Fundamentalists"  "Unitarians"?  Take the phrase "fight for you" to its extreme, and we we have a worse civil war than Iraq.  What gave America it's goodness, influence, and power was that we were too busy working to fight.  Working for a lot of things.  Cash, sure, but also building a better place for the kids, a place where people would be judged by the content of their character, the only "empire" in the world where everyone could communicate and call themselves Americans.

         Think about it:  when just about any other country acquired other territory, that land was a colony of some sort; it's people a lower class of citizen.  But when Jefferson planned the Louisiana Purchase , it was to be divided into states which had the same rights and status as the original states which bought it.  That's the revolutionary idea which became the American tradition.

         While the culture warriors of today--on either side--think they're trying to preserve America, what they're creating is a nascent Iraq.  Fortunately, people recognize this.

          At a recent single-parents discussion, I mentioned a group a nieghd, but I didn't really feel comfortable with the Church where it was based.  "It seems like everything they said boiled down to the attitude 'We're cool; everybody else sucks".  While I thought I was being discrete, everybody in the room--who came from three different counties--immediately recognized the church I meant.

         We are all not only smarter, but more empathetic and compassionate, than people caught up in culture wars believe.  In fact, the very people who want to take refuge in an ideological fortress often do so from the desire to protect their loved ones.

          So . . .