Of Germs, Guilt, and Gathering Wool

I keep looking at this space and thinking, man, I really need to write another entry. But for the past several weeks I have been down with the bug to end all bugs, and man am I tired, not only physically but also mentally. Couldn't sleep due to coughing fits. Lost my voice entirely for a week. The whole wonderful package. Lovely.

Yeah, I'll be back. For one thing, I simply like to write, and to hear my own voice in writing, regardless of who reads it. Certainly I've no shortage of topics, opinions, or arguments wandering through my head, currently ranging from the outcome of the recent election to the potentialities of alternative medicine. They'll just have to keep wandering for a bit longer. Right now I'm off to bed.

The Politics Of Fear, and Its Remedy: VOTE!

"... the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

(FDR, Inaugural Address)

This campaign has been awash with the language of fear. Socialist, communist, terrorist - words not intended to invite careful analysis, nor backed by the details of evidence, but meant to raise emotions, to create doubt and hesitancy. What tomorrow's final count will tell us, among other things, is to what degree we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by these evocations of fear.

In 2004, the politics of fear gave us another four years of governance by the current administration. We did not repudiate the ethical transgressions, the incompetence, the arrogance, because it also promised safety in the known and familiar.

Fear, doubt, and caution all have their places, and sometimes help us to make wise choices. But we have seen what they do when invoked in the name (or should I say, in the game) of Presidential politics. Voting out of fear in 2008 will only further entrench us in the pit.

Slogans oversimplify life. Age is not automatically better than youth. Experience is only valuable when we deeply ponder its lessons. It may be more comfortable to elect someone we'd like to have a beer with, but it is more effective to elect someone with a keen intellect, a clear sense of direction, and the calm integrity to use them both well. Because, when all is said and done, politics IS rocket science, and it IS brain surgery. At its broadest it is the realm of the Everyman, but at its pinnacle it is - and ought to be - the realm of the Expert. Nor is this elitism; it is pure pragmatism.

I don't know if change will really come. But I do know that it will not, cannot come unless we are willing to take a chance on it.

Take the time. Take the trouble. Get out there. Make it happen.

"It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof... But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, 'be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?'"

(Henry David Thoreau)