Dis/reconnects.
Wednesday, May 19th, 2004
We live in a world these days where most newscasts contain images that cause many to avert their eyes–acts of graphic violence carried out on human beings by other human beings. I go to the video store, to the grocery, out to lunch with friends, and an inevitable subject is: how messed up things are. How the out-of-control war and the secret Defense department programs that encourage torture and policies that alienate the rest of the world are making it hard to be very proud of our government.
I know some folks–some otherwise mild-mannered folks–who are talking seriously about leaving a country they love, because it isn’t the same place anymore.
And it seems to me like it’s this additional layer of stress that just sorta overlays everything we do. That can’t be good.
I get up in the morning and delete piles of spam from my mailbox and then go and find what words we need to add to the MT-Blacklist filter so that our blogs aren’t clogged with enticements to visit nasty-ass sites. If you block the word “incest”, they’ll spell it “insest.”
That’s not terrorism, we’re told, it’s commerce.
And we now routinely have two dollar a gallon gas in Atlanta. in Atlanta! And folks with huge Chevy Suburbans in my neighborhood have the ‘we support our president’ signs in the frontyard and apparently the incomes that can keep those vehicles moving no matter what the price. An outsized Mcmansion is being constructed a few blocks from here and the insulation-wrap is printed with “God bless America–made in USA.’
And that bothers me too. If I’m building a house, do I get to choose insulation that doesn’t have a religous statement on it?
I’m ticking these off as much as anything so that when I read this entry years from now, I hope I can look back on these times as an aberration that we grow out of…that we come up with a way to have a nation that embraces differences and is genuinely respected worldwide…and we have a global network of intercommunication that works, respects others, and allows a healthy anonymity while not serving as a breeding ground for the worst that people are.
I’m hoping.
