Saturday, December 29, 2007

Trying to make a comeback

I'd have to check the date of the last post prior to the crash of my site to give you an accurate timeline, but I've decided to take a crack at this again.
My Stolen Nation was a grand vision realized through the help of a huge brain that I still consider a friend. I'm pretty sure he'll make an impact on something and at the very least I want the very best that life has to offer for the young man. He is of singular genius in his own right and I think if things change, or ever settle down, we may venture together once again onto a more stable political landscape that is more accommodating of a balanced opinion. And by "balanced" I mean both Left and Libertarian. I consider myself the former, and in this day and age, I believe that anyone willing to admit to being a Republican, without immediately tossing out a disclaimer disavowing association with the current administration, is either ill-informed, delusional, or high on prescription substances obtained by their maid in a Denny’s parking lot somewhere near Palm Beach, Florida.
I used to go by the nom de plume Dissident Dexter. I recently celebrated my 45th birthday and I live in the suburbs of Chicago with my wife and 2.5 elementary age kids and as I sit on the brink of 2008, I’ve come to the liberating realization that I no longer give a shit what other people think about me or my political leanings. I am secure in the knowledge that I’ve been right all along.
Ok. So it took a good friend to help me pull my head out of my ass. But, hey, after September 11th, 2001, I was scared. A lot of us were. I think in some strange way, even pacifists wanted someone to pay for what had happened.
I think I’ve always been political. There weren’t many other kids my age that rushed home from the grade school to watch the latest news on the Watergate hearings. I didn’t really care much for sports. I played a few and watched even less. I figured you were either a participant or not involved. That wasn’t the case in politics. Some day I’ll go into my earliest life memories, that I thought to be just a repetitive dream until my mother, the brains of the parental structure in my family, told me that it wasn’t a dream, but a memory.
JFK, MLK, RFK, Lunar landings, “I’m not a crook”, christ, I may have been young, but some things you don’t forget.
Now there’s Bush. Holy shit.
Ever since I was five, I knew I would be 37 years old at the turn of the century. It always seemed so distant. It always seemed so “Jetson”. But somehow, it always seemed so sunny and optimistic.
I could see so many things that were previously only imagined by SciFi writers. All the modern conveniences. Cool cars. Moving sidewalks. The elimination of “representative government” and the electoral college, replaced by a real One Man, One Vote system that held weekly referendums on just about everything.
What? At this point in our history, when a computer knows when I’m late with a bill and calls me on a Saturday morning at 7:30 to tell me so, you’re telling me we can’t come up with a better solution than paying a group of corrupt corporatists who can only seem to agree on what’s best for them and their careers in “public service”? I’M NOT FUCKING BUYING IT.