The Crazy Things I Believe

I believe in conspiracy theories. I guess that makes me a nut job, but I’ve been slightly nutty since childhood. When I was ten, I believed that women and people of color were equal to white men. When I was twelve, I sided with my oldest sister against the war in Vietnam. When I was 18, I believed that gay people should have the same rights as all other Americans. At the time of those beliefs, I was not in tune with the common wisdom, but eventually, people began to agree with my nutty reasoning. Of course not everyone, there are many people today who still believe that women and people of color are not equal to white men, but fortunately, they are not allowed to say it in public, or if they do, they must phrase the hatred in a way that is less obvious, coding it so that only the other hateful people understand. I’m not sure I believe that John F. Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman. I know, how crazy is that? I’m not sure I believe that there was a conspiracy, but in my own little nut job world, I’m not convinced either way.

When I take a real hard look at current events today, I worry that the military has become so strong in America, that no President or Senator dare oppose it. Okay wow…that sounds insane doesn’t it? But if you think about it, while there has been so much debate about health care and the climate change bill, what public opposition was there to the defense spending bill passed just a few weeks ago? The $636 billion defense spending bill was only slightly less than the $700 billion bailout package of last year that we agonized over nearly every night for months on CNN. This defense bill doesn’t include the surge in Afghanistan, or the actual defense of our nation, those are separate supplemental checks that our nation must write at sometime in the future. Not a word about it on CNN, no fiery debate by our fearless leaders in Congress, we handed over our tax dollars without so much as a peep, as if someone were holding a gun to our head in a dark alley.

So here we are, 2010, looking forward to a decade more enlightened than the one recently past, and we are more or less, in the same predicament that we were 2002. Recession, war on many fronts, and now we are not only deeply concerned with Afghanistan and Iraq, but we are working on adding Pakistan, and most recently Yemen to the mix. I like the analogy of sticking fingers into the dyke, (hey…there should be something fun in this dreary post,) but we have only two hands, and the fires we have to put out now are more than we can handle. My crazy conspiracy theory brain is thinking that there is some evil genius out there, keeping us distracted swatting at these flies, putting all of our fingers in all of those dykes about to burst, (love that visual image) until we run out of fingers, and we drop from exhaustion, not able to defend the homeland, or pay off the interest on the huge tab we have run up in all of our little wars.

Someone, has got to stand up to the military.

It doesn’t look like Obama will.

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