Oh my God – we’re in Greenville, NC, and cigarettes are cheaper than gas. We’re driving, and we’re passing pumpkin patches. Last night we played the … let me get this right… North Carolina Women’s JamFest and met Someone’s Sister. You know – just Someone’s Sister? Everyone’s sister.
We ended up crashing with Chris and Georgia and Kat, talking long into the night as we all slowly became less coherent over gig afterglow and gyros. I’m in Love with Kat’s humour, and with Chris for her shining friendliness, and with Georgia’s fervour for… for what? There are self-affirmations scattered throughout the house – a sense of someone who’s really conflicted in Life, in a lot of ways, and is well on the way to finding a solution to a Life that works for her.
Now, normally – a person that seems on their way to sorting out their place in the universe sort of exudes a level of Zen calm that, frankly, kind of bores me. Georgia, on the other hand, has perhaps not so much found her PLACE in the universe, I suppose, as she’s found her mission. And she persues that with all the zeal and fervour that most people reserve for … I don’t know, what do most people have zeal for? Getting their morning coffee, possibly. She had fallen into a Life that she didn’t like, and she forcibly redirected it. Sort of like me, except she kept money and a house in her Life.
As if to reinforce this – well, as usual, I’m afraid that this entry is shortly going to turn to talk of the bathroom: I don’t have any idea what time it might have been, just as the sun was rising in Greenville, NC on October 10th, I was hanging out in the bathroom,reading the numerous bits of sage advice taped up on the bathroom wall. There was a beautiful moment of peace as I was reading about listening to birds sing “the whole song” and the first morning bird woke up and provided me with the chance to do just that.
Anywho, driving driving, passing through Goldsboro, North Carolina, encountering cotton for the first time… (hehe – the Airforce Base we’re coming up on is “Seymour Johnson”… hehe … get it?… sigh) it’s beautiful out – I’d kiss Heather out of sheer exuberance and Love of Life, but she’s just popped bubble gum all over her face. Good thing it’s a STRAIGHT road.
So, this isn’t an answer to a question – to my question, to any problem. But I read the news, and then I read BEYOND the front page, and wonder why the FUCK certain headlines aren’t… well, more headliney? Today I read this article – which I’ve saved to our website for the moment, as articles like this never seem to stick around for very long. My understanding is that a portion of the recent report on WoMDEs seems to me to be a huge deal, and for some reason, hasn’t really been emphasized.
So, we all know that the recent CIA report stated unequivocally that Saddam’s WMD programs were halted back in 1991, and that he was in no position to restart them, or even think about restarting them, as of our invasion last year (and by “our”, I certainly mean “his” – though more on THAT thought later). It states that no weapons were found, were there, could have been there, or could be there anytime soon.
The part that really bothers me, however is the “section of the 960-page report [that] says the risk of a ‘devastating’ attack with unconventional weapons has grown since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq last year.” And that all of these insurgent groups that have popped up since our invasion are who is spearheading this effort. Unaligned with Hussein, and for that matter, entirely non-existant until Saddam was deposed, THESE groups are the ones that are getting dangerously close. Closer in the past seven months than Saddam had come over the past 13 years.
And why is that buried? Why isn’t that front-page news? Why wasn’t THAT mentioned in the debates? It only comes out as a under-the-radar news story a couple of days later? And how do I make it change. Can one ask all you friends to click that little “email this story” button, so it moves up on the “most emailed stories” list, drawing attention to it? That probably doesn’t even matter. The least I can do is write about it in my own little forum here… what else do I do? Heather doesn’t want to Live in this America – it’s frightening. I don’t touch politics much here, but – we’ve all got to move to Florida and register to vote THERE very, very quickly.
Oh – and about who’s war this is – certainly it is also owned by everyone who is not going to vote for Kerry on November 2nd. I’m appalled that Nader is taking up his 2% in this time of crisis, and I’ve heard he’s on the ballot mostly through Republican donations (though don’t quote me on that since I don’t remember where I read it – and that’s why I’m SAVING news articles now) This war is owned by everyone who… who doesn’t get it. It seems that every news source in the world is denouncing every reason Bush gave America for entering this war, and yet the polls are still neck and neck. My only explanation for that is that most people don’t pay attention to most any news source in the world. They listen to whatever financial institution they buy into, whether it’s the NRA or the “Gay Rights Agenda”. When did special interests groups become our news and information portals? “Portal” is an internet-age term for a one stop information access point – and the internet gives us access to all the information we could possibly want, all the portals we want – it’s potentially, through a bit of filtering and intelligent weighing of information – a portal to probably truth.
I know there are so many people that are still “unplugged” – are they the source of this tie? Or are people really that lazy that they can’t see past abortion and the fear of a man holding hands with another man that they aren’t horrified by the entire American military machine being brought to bear at the random whim of a Christian conservative Allahphobe?
We’re back to Deanne’s in Wilmington – and as dinner coalesces (real lemon meringue!) she tells us stories from her day job, which involves the rehabilatation of people who are in danger of slipping through humanity’s cracks. Recently, that’s included some returning soldiers, fresh from the fields of Iraq.
Even if I didn’t fully disagree with the reasons for going to war, I could agree that taking Saddam out of power was a good thing – that though it was poorly planned, and the struggle that we’re facing now could have been avoided, that eliminating Hussein’s government… I could be convinced that that’s a good deed. But seeing how some of the soldiers are treated upon their return, who they are rewarded – Deanne’s working with a man who has just returned from three tours of duty. He narrowly avoided being burned alive with the rest of his (squad? group?) friends in a Humvee targeted by a hand grenade. Though he was thrown clear, he got back in time to see the rest die…. here he is back in America, having seen and done horrible things – and he can’t pay the taxes on his car, and can’t pay off a speeding ticket that he recieved, because of the penalites assigned for missing the court date…. the court date which he missed because he was deployed over in Iraq.
That’s absurd.
I’m done. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Wild grasshopper Love on the verdant fields of Nashville, North Carolina.
