Yeah, two postings in one day, don’t get too used to it…
The evening news just ended and I’m in the mood to rant, and with some cause, get used to me doing it, from time to time, you can write it off as a middle-aged chick thing.
I’ve been chewed out, and royally so by people who are totally anti-China & pro-Tibet, anti-China & anti-communism, pro-Saint Christopher Columbus & anti-“any whispers about Chinese exploration”, pro “God Bless America, first” & “China is the great atheist stronghold/heart of darkness that should be allowed to go to blazes”, and just plain “Yeehaw, ‘aint we God’s lil’darlin’s & anti-“them-dang-furiners.”
Those people make me really, really tired.
I am as patriotic as anybody, and in my mind (at least) more patriotic than most.
I agreed, this is a rough patch we’re in, and may be for a long while yet.
Fear and rage are easy. Getting off our collective fannies in our safe little hidey-holes and stepping outside our comfort zones and risking doing something personally to keep the world from ending is not. And I have heard lots of reasons for staying mad, a few even make a shred of sense, but never enough good sense
The one thing that I can be utterly certain of is that, nobody’s going to get their piece of the “peace & prosperity” pie if they insist on the whole thing going just to them and their chosen few.
No, don’t howl at me and call me a democrat, or a liberal, or even a tea bagger.
I used to call myself a Republican, and I still do…
Just now I add, “but not the kind of Republican that is at the throttle of that out of control freight train.”
Pro-life & pro-business means to me – affordable health care for all of us means less expense for business in lost productivity & fewer workers screwing up on the job because they’re fretting over a sick kid or spouse, and better future workers, because healthy kids get better grades.
Fair taxes mean – to those whom much is given, much is expected, and the strong who were given the gifts (financial or otherwise) needed to tend properly to keeping things going don’t get to slough off the part of our joint burden on the next person in line or the next generation.
Human rights & right to life means – you don’t get to chose if I am a human, and I don’t get to chose whether or not you are one either. But, we both have a responsibility to each other to protect each other’s rights to make choices and to live, and hold each other accountable for what ripples and echoes arise from those choices when our “fine & upstanding” intentions go awry. And people outside the womb have a right to life too -- from cradle to grave.
A contract with America should mean – keeping promises to protect and serve more than just ourselves and our personal agendas or the agendas we’ve auctioned ourselves off to support.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean – freedom to drown out another’s voice with rage and hate, big piles of cash is not speech, companies are made up of people but are not people and so don’t get to claim that right, and it certainly isn’t bullets.
The 2nd amendment means – if you want to be part of the National Guard, go for it. Join up, be part of that well-regulated militia the founders were talking about.
Now, don’t shriek that I’m anti-gun, and anti-hunter. Guns are not bad, they are not just as important to everyday life & safety as those people running the gun manufacturing companies want us to think they are. And, anyway, if you really need 30 bullets in your pistol’s magazine to take out Bambi, you should get your eyes checked, or get some practice before you go hunting, or better yet buy a decent, plain old rifle minus all the over-built bells and whistles. And, do you really want to pick all 30 of those slugs out of the pile of hamburger you’d end up with after using that over-loaded popgun???
Yuck, every mouthful of venison brimming over with a billion bone fragments and shredded bullet … that is so not tasty…take it from a gal who loves her vension and all other kinds of wild game when it’s cooked right.
And last but not least, Good Politician means – that I haven’t seen anybody in my political party of choice that I think is fit to vote for next year yet, and I don’t hold out much hope for that changing this time out either.
So, I face down those who sneer at me for being pro- “all this Chinese exploration stuff,” and I say…
I’m not listening to anything but the demands of the future.
And, the future and the past that you all seem to be so hung-up on are not what they used to be.
I am working for what they can be.
This blog is part of that, even though sometimes it feels like I am yelling in an empty room with the doors and windows nailed shut and boarded over from the outside.
The next generations of America, China and the rest of the world need to hear the lessons the men of the Ming treasure fleet learned both in their moments of greatest triumph and in their most disastrous mistakes. We need to open all of the doors that got slammed shut six hundred years ago by what I have learned happened and happened largely without any malice-aforethought. Those next generations will be both humbled and lifted up by the knowing.
Today’s rough patch is only growing pains, if we chose to make it such, and make the difficult effort to grow beyond where we are now.
That is something that I DO have great hopes for.
That kind of crazy optimism is just part of my being cussedly stubborn and generally cantankerous, ask my mom, she’d tell you that you might as well give since I was born that way.
(Yeah, I’ve heard the Lady Gaga song too, not that kind of born that way, but hey, the lady made more of point than even she knew.)
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