In fact, if I were to look towards nature for a phenomenon that most closely resembles us, the hurricane would be it. Nature churns, and an unseen hand plots the course for the hurricane. Everywhere it goes, it spawns chaos, death, and destruction. In its wake there is an eerie sort of calm, where one can scarcely believe the devastation that so closely preceded it. No sooner do the waters again lay calm, more often than not, another storm will rise and carve out its own swath across the world. Its a natural cycle, and one Ive bore witness to many times, living as near the Gulf of Mexico as I do.

The comparison I am forced to draw between us and the hurricane is that of war. Far from being something uniquely modern,  humanities tendency towards war goes back for as long as there are written records (and much longer, almost certainly), and just as with hurricanes, the order they follow is easy enough to trace. The waters are churned and the course is plotted… only this time, a very human hand and mind steers the course. Something is to be claimed, power is to shift, and profit is to be made; and, just as with the hurricane, everywhere war goes it sews chaos, death, and destruction… and when the rains have stopped, humanity will look around itself, reviled that such heinous atrocities could be committed by one man against another. And, for a time, this will mean peace… but it is really only the time necessary for the waters to once again settle and calm. In this case, the time is takes for the horrors to be forgotten, and the time it takes for humanity to re-learn the oldest lesson, I suspect, currently still taught: that our enemies are less human than we are. That what “they” are is to be reviled, while “we” are a bastion of hope for the hopeless, and strength for the weak. In short, that we should do unto others not AS we would have them do unto us, but BEFORE they can do unto us, for “they” are surely the wicked, and will destroy “us” if we do not act first. And so the waters, calmed for a moment, sire another storm.

I wish I could continue to believe it was only my own cynicism that makes me believe that, truly, this pattern we follow as a species is as natural a part of humans as hurricanes are a part of the climate of the world. What will it take for the world to know peace? Nothing very complicated, really. Everyone in the world would have to spontaneously develop an understanding that every human being is worthy of their own life. Respect. Such a simple notion. Impossible, I suspect… but imagine if it weren’t.

-=Vic Veritas=-

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace” ~Jimi Hendrix~

1. Distraction: Gas Tax Holiday- woo! 18 cents a gallon is sure to make up for the $2 a gallon increase over the last 18 months.

Issue: Oil companies are paying civilian contractors an obscene amount of money to “keep the iraqi oilfields in working order” and are still managing to record record profits, in the 30-45% range depending on who you ask. Prior to the war, they were making profits in the 15-25% range. So the price doubled, and their profits almost doubled. That’s called price fixing. It’s illegal and we’d rather freeze a beneficial tax than confront them about it.

My Solution: Any profit they make over say… 20% should be taxed at a rate of 99%, and watch the gas prices fall back to a reasonable level. Keep in mind this is 20% PROFIT… after overhead. They still grow making this, they just won’t be able to gouge us as much to do it.

2. Distraction: Democratic Nominee hooplah. You know McCain is loving every minute of it, because the closer we get to the election with the democrats still fractured, the less chance they have of winning.

Issue: This one falls under the same headline as every partisan distraction tactic used by both republicans and democrats ever since the media became a cheap and easy way to manipulate our opinions. That being one aimed at hiding (in plain sight) the fact we’re currently in a country that’s being run by an unofficial two-party duopoly that is a complete bastardization of everything the constitution’s framers intended.

Solution: Eliminate the antifusion statutes that currently prevent a viable third-party candidate from appearing. Not being able to run with the support of multiple political parties will always favor the two most extreme and/or polarized parties because people will side with them out of fear that if they don’t, the other extreme will win. This lends itself towards the polarized feeling that purveys America. Now, if these statutes were to be removed, what could happen? Compromise. Without having to pick an extreme, there’s a chance politicians might calm down and seek a rational compromise instead of the “my way of the highway” crap they spout now. If one of them could, reasonably, draw the approval of multiple third parties, we might even break free of the two-party duopoly we’re mired in. (yes, this is a nearly word-for-word quote from my comment on Lofter’s blog)

3. Distraction: War in Iraq. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but try to look past it for a moment and you’ll see what it’s really hiding from us.

Issue: Just look what we’re ignoring because they’ve given us something more selfish to care about. Haven’t heard much about Burma or Darfur have you? The former is having a huge human rights crisis, and the latter is undergoing an ethnic cleansing on almost the same scale (per capita) as Hitler did in WW2. But because we’ve been too distracted by our troops first being deployed and at war in Afghanistan, and now Iraq… we’re just blinded to it… in fact only one news program I’ve seen even mentioned it… and it was entertainment tonight, because Jim Carry said something about it. That’s just sad.

Solution: Quit letting the media choose what you hear. Seek out the truth and seize it. You know if we’d spent the money we did going into Iraq helping Darfur instead fewer people would hate us? I’m just sayin.

Thats all for now. My brain is tired and I have one more final to get through tomorrow. Maybe I’ll think of more things to list later.

Peace.

Vic Veritas

Often in the olden days, cartographers would mark the boundary of their then limited knowledge with the phrase “here there be dragons” as an ominous warning to anyone who would sail into the unknown beyond which lay past the map-maker’s understanding of his world. Soon, an intrepid few proved the tales of dragons a myth and the world took a step forward.

As humanity progresses, it has gone through many periods of “fearing the dragon” and followed them up with a progression forward. We always find a new way to mire ourselves in some foolishness just deep enough to hold us stuck for a while. Maybe it’s human nature. After all, it gives us something to move beyond. The illusion of progress, at the very least.

All that was just an introduction to my blog… sound and fury signifying very little. Well this is my space to talk about things that bother me, and this is the first one of many. So, what do I think we’ve mired ourselves in this time around, you must be asking yourself? Useless labels.

I know, that could refer to a great many things, each valid and silly in its own right. But the one in particular that’s been pestering me the most of late is our tendency to label people as “liberal” or “conservative”. Are most people even aware enough of the issues associated with these labels to use them to describe themselves safely?

I can really only offer up an example of what I mean to explain this further: earlier this week, I was in a rather lively discussion of politics (specifically, the issue of abortion had somehow arisen) and I observed, in what I confess was a less-than-polite way, that anyone who was hard-line liberal or conservative was a “fucking moron.”

Someone who I believe had considered themselves to be a hard-line conservative made an attempt to defend the pro-life as the only option mentality to me. It only took about 2 minutes for her to make the transition from “conservative hard-line” to “well, I’d get one if I was raped… I’m not having some psychopath’s baby”.

And let me tell you, I applaud her. In her mind, she progressed much further than either self-imposed label would have let her. She applied her own sense of logic to it and found the place where a compromise met her actual beliefs. This swings the other way, just so you don’t think I have a liberal bias. Liberals are simply notorious for quoting someone else to defend their stance instead of using their own sense of logic to do so.

Basically here’s what I’m saying: there is no issue on the planet with only two sides to it. So these labels? They’re useless and harmful. They’re the dragons of our day. I say it’s high time we slayed them.

-=Vic Veritas=-

“Only a fool is one thing. And that thing is a fool.” ~Clinton Jeter