Thoughts

I'm moody.

I dreamt ill, and awoke to be accused of all sorts of fell things.

Which I am used to. Ideologues and I don't get along. I am broad-minded, but willing to speak my piece, even to bearding lions in their den. This makes all stripes of the pure of heart and mind, less tolerant of me than otherwise. Even when we agree on ends, they tolerate means I can't abide.

They, in turn, see my sense of compromise as betraying the cause. Politics being the art of the possible makes my way harder. What injustice is so severe it won't wait. Civil rights? It waited. Too long, and it took odd little nooks of the society to make it happen (Don Newcombe relates "We were paying our dues long before the civil rights marches. Martin Luther King told m in my home one night, 'You'll never now what you and Jackie [Robinson] and Roy [Campanella] do to make it possible to do my job.). It's still waiting, even in Baseball, where so many of the races being run today took their first solid strides.

I suppose I strive for a happy medium. Work, as hard as I can, for the things I believe it. Be as pure as I can in how I live my life.

What brings this up today? In another forum I have been accused of things I'm not. Of things I rail against. It stings. Do they know me? Not as much as most of you. Does it matter? A bit. Because those who read me there, know me no better. Which is the problem of bearding those with religious fervor for "The Cause", in the halls of their church. The audience is pre-disposed to believe the orthodox. The heretic can be lampooned, but the heterodox must be put beyond the pale.

So, I'll go and make some coffee, toast some of the banana bread Maia made last night and prepare for a trip to the grove of monarch butterflies this afternoon.

Now for something (slightly) different

I am ambivalent about the war.

I can hear the gasps of shock, and surprise at this revelation.

I think this was, to quote somone else, "The wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time." I also think we've screwed the pooch and even an effective cleaning up won't be immediate (though it ought not take years, this isn't the former Jugoslavia, yet).

I dislike how the Right is using the war.

And I don't like Bill O'Reilly. I think him a fat-headed bag of wind, who manages to use Limbaughean tactic in person, which is even more offensive than in the passive abuse delivered to callers who've been hung up on.

So I like to see him euchred, as Scott Ritter did (the trick with O'Reilly is to spot the dead cat, or as someone said elsewhere, to deny Milton Friedman the liberty of defining the terms).

Last week a Quaker did the same.

A Friendly Letter [This is not a permanent link, so if it's changed go to Feb 25, 2005]

The show was about, sort of, Ward Churchill, but it was, so Chuck Fager, thinks, about supressing dissent.

If nothing else, it's an interesting account of what it's like to be on O'Reilly.

Current Quote: "Quakers historically are pacifist and don’t like war. And we understand that, everybody understands that, and I think it’s respected."

-- Bill O'Reilly, FOX News, February 23, 2005