On a Good Day...

The Question Is…

What is the question?

Why should you care?

Why should anyone care?

Are there anymore frozen waffles in the freezer?

While Tiger Woods gets out of sex therapy and his wife tries to decide whether or not she can handle a public life stained with his indecency, the politicians of our country continue to fight over healthcare for political clout, and our soldiers keep killing and dying in the biggest poppy producing nation in the world. You think I’m insane? You think You’re insane?

Maybe we’re ALL insane.

Religious extremists are promoting an anti-abortion agenda at the expense of everything else. They see abortion as murder, and are probably be willing to put ANYONE in charge of the government in order to make it illegal. (Hitler comes to mind) It isn’t about partial birth abortion, or stem cell research, it’s about the entire concept of abortion being legal. To them it’s murder. Murder is murder – and they won’t stop until murder is no longer allowed. This in itself wouldn’t be scary if it weren’t for the fact that they have drug all of the rest of the right wing along with them in one big group. And THIS is how Bush got elected twice. Want to do it again?

Atheists and non-Christians are getting pissed, partly because religious organizations keep shoving shit in their noses. When you don’t want to drink the Kool Aid, you generally keep your mouth shut. But lately the religious and the unreligious seem to have been going out of their way to trade barbs with each other. If it’s not a nativity scene at a court house, it’s the concept of “intelligent design” or a re-write of the bible to make it more conservative. Another holy war is just what we need. But a holy war inside the country? How long has this shit been brewing? What can the ultimate resolution be? Seems like this country was founded on freedom of religion, so who gets to say what’s real and what’s for sale? There’s the query. There’s the button. Push it and see what happens. I guarantee you it won’t be pretty. And what’s it all about? A picture in a textbook. The view of reality that we present to our children. A book full of fairy tales to some, and tomb of ancestral knowledge to others. Here’s an idea – let’s kill each other over it!

Or maybe not…

Hatred gets spewed by one side, and disgust gets spewed by the other. The left thinks the right is stupid, and the right thinks the left is bereft of ethics and morals. Both are correct, of course – to one extent or another. The battle goes on. Should we stop taking care of old people? Should we make young people pay for insurance so that the old people can get health care? Should we let anything happen if it makes the other side look good? Fuck the benefits to the people, if it comes at the expense of making the Liberals look like they got something done, then the people can go to hell.

Throughout all of this, the universe keeps spinning. Sooner or later there will be a supernova in our local area of the galaxy, one bright enough to be visible during the day. Sooner or later there will be a major earthquake in a major city and a shitload of people will die. Sooner or later there will be a massive drought, and food prices will go through the roof. Millions will die. Sooner or later some asshole country will set off a nuclear weapon and dump tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Hundreds of thousands will die, but millions will get cancer because of it. Sooner or later a deadly virus will appear from some weird mutation, and we won’t be able to come up with a cure fast enough. Millions, maybe even billions, will die. Even some of the atheists will pray. But it won’t matter. Society will live through it – pass through it – changed in ways we can’t even imagine. Sooner or later our sun will release a massive solar flare that will screw up our satellites and wreak havoc with our communications and computer networks, causing blackouts all over the world, followed by riots and civil unrest. Sooner or later mankind will learn how to create an artificial mind that thinks like we do, and unleash who knows what kind of social change into our midst. Sooner or later our world will be hit by an asteroid or a meteor of a size large enough to cause the plate boundaries on our world to break apart and shift globally, blanketing the atmosphere in ash and fire. Billions will die in a plague of starvation, and a new ice age will come.

Or we could be ready for it. We could get our act together. We could start regulating our population, and maintain it. We could ensure our children are educated with goals in mind. We could watch the heavens and be ready with a plan to stop an asteroid collision. We could prepare a plan to deal with plague – one that would isolate individual pockets of society into cells to stop an epidemic.

There are a lot of things we could do. A LOT of them. But we aren’t going to do them, are we? We’re going to fight for political reasons. We’re going to kill for money. And we’re going to hate each other over religious choices and our own personal illusions of right and wrong.

Damn but I’m optimistic today!