Democracy, from a certain point of view

The United States has put forth this notion that the armies, er, peacemakers of democracy should march all over the face of the earth. The goal, however, is not to *actually* get people to govern themselves as they see fit. The real goal is to get people to govern themselves the way that the United States thinks that they should govern themselves.

So much time and energy has been expended on the Middle East peace process. The goal is to get all of these different groups, tribes and factions to get along, by force if necessary.

The situation in Israel is probably the most difficult, complicated and delicate. After all, after World War II, the Allies told the Jews that of course they could return to the homeland they believed theirs by the will of God. Nevermind that the land was already occupied by people who were equally convinced that it was *their* homeland. Oh, don't worry, you all will work it out and find a way to live together in peace and harmony, said the Allies. Sixty years later, and the argument has yet to be resolved.

The Palestinians have held elections of their own. Lots of people participated. While there doesn't seem to be a question of whether or not the process was carried out fairly, the United States is unhappy with the result, the government is planning to withdraw aid because it has labeled the group in power as terrorists.

The United States only wants to play if it can make the rules and win. Otherwise the most powerful country in the world gets on its high horse and rides home in a snit.

What is withdrawing aid going to do? It's going to aggravate the terrorists and increase the resistance to U.S. influence in the country and the region. It's not going to hurt the leaders, the people actually in power. It's going to hurt the people who really need the aid, and they are only going to resent the capricious arrogance of the United States.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there are plenty of hungry suffering people in *this* country who are not getting the help that they need.

Democracy at work.

Care and Feeding of Those in Need

Driving home from work, a local public radio segment informed me that the federal government has reduced the funding for a program that provides low-income elderly people with some food staples--such as rice, pasta, beans, canned meat and fruit--on a monthly basis.

These are retired people who have worked most of their lives contributing to society, and now that society is not going to help them out when they need it. Something like 59000 people currently receiving benefits will no longer be covered by the program, and people signing up for the program for the first time are being put on a waiting list.

The wealthiest country in the world can not . . . wait . . . make that *will* not feed its own people.

In a similar vein, there is apparently also an appalling lack of support for the families of the men and women overseas fighting for . . . or against . . . whatever it is that they have been sent to fight for . . . or against. Then when soldiers come home, they are more likely to be neglected or marginalized than they are to be taken care of, at least not without navigating a complicated, dense bureaucracy.

Maybe the people highlighted in news stories are the exceptions rather than the rule because the sad stories and/or shocking stories are what get people's attention, but all I can think is that there *has* to be a better way to allocate the resources of this country and all I can wonder is how tax payer dollars are *really* being used.

Grammatically Uncool

I have never been cool in the traditional sense. (Cool in the traditional sense?) I'm not hip. I'm not stylish. I'm a nerd and a bookworm. Square by nature as opposed to by choice. I resist change and frequently border on being a bit of a Luddite. I am proud of the fact that I know what a demonstrative pronoun is. I use snazzy words that tend to make the people around me wonder, and, due to the classical nature of aspects of my education, I am a firm believer in the rules of grammar and spelling. I must admit, however, that--as a fan of the creatively and effectively used sentence fragment--I am not saying that all rules should be obeyed all of the time.

Maybe the best way to say it is that I am a grammar snob and hypocrite. The rules exist for a reason and should be obeyed. Unless they are being broken in a way of which I approve.

The specific victim of this diatribe is urban slang in the form of deliberate misspelling, and my current (least) favorite example is "teh." To me it just looks as if the user can't spell "the," one of the most basic and popular words in the English language. If something is "teh suck," then it is terribly unpleasant. Teh suck. Say it out loud. It sounds like some sort of anatomical noise.

I feel the same way about the truncated language of text messaging. I am all in favor of acronyms and abbreviations, but "how ru" and "cu l8r" are not sentences. It doesn't even qualify as garbled. It's just nonsense.

Sure, go ahead and argue that the point of language is communication, and as long as the person to whom you are speaking understands what you are saying, who cares?

There is a big difference between simply getting a job done and doing a job well.

Fact or Fiction? Enjoy it either way.

One of the blogs I try to keep up with belongs to an author named Jonathan Carroll. Frequently his blog entries are beautifully written little vignettes of observation which go a long way to restore my appreciation of and interst in human nature. Sometimes the entry is a character sketch. Sometimes it is a quotation (perhaps from a book he is reading or had read). Sometimes it is the description of a scene. Sometimes it is a (very) short story.

Since Carroll is a writer of fiction, I often wonder if these entries are fact, fiction, or a combination of the two. Most of the time they are so easy to believe that I want them to be true, but it never really occurs to me to write to the author and ask. I don't want to know. I just want to enjoy.

Hurrying will get you nowhere

Every once in a while I encounter someone in so much of a rush that I almost want to stop him or her and ask just what it is that is so amazingly important and urgent that the rest of the world is just in the way.

Yesterday evening I decided that I needed a desk type calendar to keep track of things at work because my grasp of time tends to be somewhat shaky. I wanted one that had the whole month on a single page as well as breaking down the year week by week. The only thing that really fit the bill was the Far Side calendar. Not quite what I had in mind, but it will do. I also bought a cute little organizer/planner featuring a winsome character known as French Kitty. She's a little cuter than my usual taste, but this little organizer was blue rather than pink and only about four dollars, so I indulged. I thought about using it to smack the gentleman behind me in line.

Actually he was a couple of people behind me in line. It being six o'clock on a Monday evening, the local bookstore wasn't exactly overstaffed. The two women working the registers weren't particularly swift and were occasionally encumbered by needy and/or equally non swift customers. As a result, other customers has to the spend five minutes or so waiting in line. Hardly an inordinate amount of time in the grand scheme of things.

The impatient gentleman kept craning his neck around the front of the line to check on the progress of the cashiers and asking if they could get more people to help. Finally, before he
made a complete idiot of himself, I turned around and said, "If you are really in that much of a hurry, they can ring you up in the music department." Thankfully for the rest of us, he took my advice. And I am pretty sure that he was the only one in line who felt the need to do so. The rest of us were content to wait a few extra minutes. Zoiks. Some people.

Maybe he truly had somewhere pressing and urgent to be. Maybe someone's life depended on whatever he was buying, but I have to say, I have my doubts.