Thursday, October 21, 2004

WAYBACK MACHINE: On Getting Past Fear: A Reality-Based Analysis

This ASZ blog post was originally written on 5/11/04, and was selected by the author for the ASZ Wayback Machine project. All text is exactly as originally posted. Formatting has been updated to fit current Blogger templates, and in many cases, original links may no longer work.

Getting Past the Fear Factor

This post is a little expansion of a comment I made over on another blog tonight. Comments come and go, and you always think of something to add after you hit the "submit" button. Here's what kicked off my thought process - a comment from another poster (and yeah, Kate, I spell checked this one):

As I said many many many moons ago, I think Bush (esp if reelectd) will kill us all. I'm way past worrying about abortion, Supreme Court nominations, etc. We're in DEAD ZONE country now.

I'm an optimistic geezer by nature. I made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis, living near a ground zero first wave target area.

NEVER, EVER, forget that "scared" is exactly what TeamBush wants. It's the coin of the realm. Karl Rove is pinning his pasty-faced future and upcoming paychecks on the fact that America will be scared and angry.

Am I angry? I can get that way, especially when I see and read and hear the lack of humanity exhibited by the 70 percenters in this country. Actually, I suppose even my "anger" is more like "incredulosity" (is that a word?). I'm incredulous that the morons running the show are still allowed to run the show by consent of the governed, even after everything that's happened in the past few years.

What I can control is "scared". Maybe I simply have too much mileage on the wheels to be really scared, at least for myself, any more. Maybe Osama will blow up a train somewhere around Decatur. Maybe he'll light off a stink bomb in the Mall of America -- not that this would be necessarily a bad thing. Maybe, just maybe, he'll find some way to nuke Portales, NM. The bottom line is that the chances of him actually making a physical impact on my life are nil. I expect to outlive OBL by a wide margin.

Again, Dubya lives and dies with the fear factor. If more people started acting less like scared rabbits and more like rational human beings, we wouldn't be in this mess. If we all viewed the country in which we live in terms of geography and happenstance of birth rather than nationalistic jingoism (and I freely acknowledge that every nation has it), we'd probably all be happier people...

...at least if we all had our partners performing oral sex on us occasionally (see how I kept that non-gender specific?). And that's the root of the problems today. Too much Jesus, not enough blowjobs.

But I digress. Folks, America's not going anywhere -- Dubya or not -- at least unless the San Andreas fault decides to open up, and even then we only lose a little piece of it (sorry, Kate).

Believe me, I don't want the thugs in the Bush admin running things post-January 20, 2005. But look at what Hitler did to Germany. Look at what the U.S. did to Japan, in particular, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We will survive these trying times without the rapture taking place, regardless of whether God's agent on Earth (Dubya) wants it or not.

Peace. Sleep well tonight. And get laid.