Risky Observations from the Rocky Mountain West

Pink is a color that DOES run

2012-02-02T22:32:00.002-07:00

Pink is a color that DOES run

I’m sick of people who believe that life begins at conception and ends at pregnancy.

I’m tired of groups going after a woman’s right to choose and then blame the backlash on “politics.”

I’m tired of the backwards talk of the right.

I’m tired of The Komen Foundation blowing pink smoke while undermining women’s health.

Last April the Komen Foundation hired virulently anti-choice republican Karen Handel as Senior Vice President for Public Policy. Karen Handel has gone so far as to promise to eliminate funding for breast and cervical cancer screenings provided by the organization.

http://jezebel.com/5881057/susan-g-komen-foundation-bows-to-pro%20life-bullying-stops-contributing-to-planned-parenthood

And now, with Komen eliminating funding to Planned Parenthood, she has a chance to make good on that promise.

But the craven, money grubbing, hypocrisy doesn’t stop there.

A major sponsor of The Komen Foundation is Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of famously anti-regulation Koch Industries and major manufacturer of epoxy resins that contain BPA.

Numerous studies have shown that in human cell cultures, BPA has caused breast cancer cells to proliferate and has also reduced the effectiveness of chemotherapy.

And The Komen Foundation has made numerous statements denying the BPA-breast cancer connection.

And BPA makers, like Georgia-Pacific, use the statements made by The Komen Foundation to justify the continued production and sale of BPA containing plastics in consumer goods, in particular consumer goods used by women.

http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/09/breast-cancer-komen-bpa

So while they splash their nauseating pepto color across every product from shotgun shells to mp3 players they’ve handily hijacked all the woman-power they can and funneled it neatly into consumerism, while at the same time running interference for the kinds of pollutants that will make sure the cancer game has no end.

What does Komen give women?

A run for their money.

Occupy Democracy

2012-01-31T21:58:00.000-07:00

I’m just sick of politics.

How did I ever campaign for a guy who would appoint a Monsanto Lobbyist to oversee Food Safety?

Meanwhile we have the GOP parade of fools: the screeching fundamentalists, the philandering, hypocritical blowhard, the heartless ken-doll who specializes in stripping communities of their jobs, the second idiot from Texas, the blithering lemur with the gay husband, and the take-your-money bus tour from Alaska. There are more, of course, but that’s discouraging enough.

I listen, amazed, while my countrymen spew barely veiled racism, and falsehoods so wrong they would be laughable, except that they are now deeply held beliefs by a group seemingly taken over by a mass hysteria.

And I listen to the news reports saying that the only choice away from this is to endorse a man and a party that has already betrayed my faith.

You know who I’m supporting this year? The Occupy Movement.

Let go of the “parties” and all of their balloons of hot lies and their clowns.

Stand up against corporate rip offs and false promises.

Give your loyalty to each other. Withdraw from the political theatre of the absurd.

Democrat vs Republican.

It’s a false choice.

Choose yourself, your family, your community.

Occupy the Election… with your own commitment to yourself.

Uncharitable

2011-12-29T19:43:00.001-07:00

I have something horrible to say.

There’s a charity that involves being nice to dying children and I hate it.

It horrifies me and it saddens me. Not my own reaction. The charity itself horrifies me and saddens me.

A friend of mine approached me, knowing that I am charitably minded, knowing that I spend a portion of my yearly income on charities, specifically to help women and children, and she asked me if I would help out.

I’m lucky that her initial request came in the form of an email so she couldn’t see my face.

The charity raises tens of thousands of dollars every year to send dying kids to corporate theme parks.

I could not have thought of anything more cynical if I tried.

Tens of thousands of dollars for airlines, theme parks and marketing; all driven by the image of dying children.

Bald children.

Skinny children.

Big eyed, bald, skinny children, almost all of them Caucasian toddlers.

I read through the plea, felt a little confused and then did some online research.

It turns out that you don’t have to be actually dying, much less a toddler. The one she wanted help with was to send a young man of sixteen to a specialty camp that any kid would have loved to go to.

And he wasn’t dying. He wasn’t even sick. He just happened to be under the age of 18 and had previously been diagnosed with an illness that could have been fatal, even if it wasn’t.

And those are the rules.

And corporate donations to this charity get the same tax breaks as to charities that support research to cure disease, or offer the struggling parents of the actually dying help with bills, or a place to stay near hospitals.

But this charity just sends kids to corporate theme parks on regular air planes.

I’m lying, they also do something else.

I got another email asking if I would join her for a day of helping terminally ill children go shopping.

Because kids can’t think of anything they’d rather do to celebrate the season of peace than to go shopping.

Our kids can’t think of anything else.

Even when they are dying.

That’s our legacy to them.

They want to shop.

It makes me ill.

I'm baaaaack!

2011-11-11T19:25:00.001-07:00

Just a quick note to my fans.

After a five year hiatus I have returned and I'm ready to dish.

Buckle up.

Sophia

The Head of the Beast?

2006-03-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that George Jr is our 9 trillion dollar man. Did you like the little 300 dollar tax rebate you got from him 3 years ago? Well, it got biblical on you. It went forth and multiplied. Sort of.

According to thedenverchannel.com "The increase to $9 trillion represents about $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States."

"Is this the first time?" you ask.

Answer: "It's the fourth such move - increasing the debt limit by a total of $3 trillion - since Bush took office five years ago."

Ah, I guess not.

This from the man who promised fiscal conservatism. Georgie has presided over the 3 highest deficits in our history. Is this a math problem? Surely this drink addled idiot doesn't really understand the damage that he's done. Maybe he's just fallen in with bad company, with gun slinging oil industry servants posing as vice presidents, with Arab business connections that get free rides out in the middle of terror attacks and saucy business deals opening up our valuable ports.

Yes, this whole thing has reached mythological proportions. Just what did the heroes do in mythology when confronted with such a destructive beast?

Cut off their head.

But, we know that in this case, targeting the president would be cutting off the wrong end.

Our country is being led by the ass-end of the beast.

Dick Lamm and the anti immigration phone spam

2006-03-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

Here's an email I just got from a friend, thought I'd just share it with "all" of you!

Hi,

Are you a Colorado voter? Did you recently get phone spammed by former
Colorado governor Richard D. Lamm?

Perhaps you remember Dick's 2003 speech warning about the fatal dangers of
multiculturalism? "History shows that no nation can survive the tension,
conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures."

The text of it is here:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp

Well, what I don't like about phone spamming is that generally you get no way
to respond back. Well, maybe there's a way if you listen to the whole thing,
but I personally disagree strongly with Mr. Lamm's position and don't want to
spend time listening to a recording of it.

But I did want to call him back and tell him so.

It's only fair. After all, he did call me first. And I'm on the Colorado No
Call list.

It took a while, but I found some contact information for him on the internet.

If Dick has called you, perhaps you'll take the time to call him back. Issues
like immigration are important enough to dialog about and dialog requires that
you have a chance to respond.

Here's the contact information.

Richard D. Lamm
Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues
2199 South University Blvd.
Denver, CO 80208
303.871.3400

Fax 303.871.3066

I encourage you to share this information with anyone you think may be
interested. A dialog on the issues can only happen when we speak back.

Emergency contraception

2006-03-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

A pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription for emergency contraception is like a vegetarian waiter refusing to take an order for steak. If it's against your personal values, then get another job.

Meat eaters don't show up for a burger at a vegetarian restaurant. Yet they reasonably expect to find beef at a burger joint. Ordinary citizens reasonably expect a pharmacy to be the place where they can fill the prescription given to them by their medical doctor.

Anti-choice activists should ply their trade openly and politically and not hide behind the white medical coat of a pharmacist. And pharmacies should fire the infiltrators that take positions intended for legitimate pharmacists.

Faulty Intelligence

2006-03-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

Did you vote for the democrat in the last election? I did. I even supported his campaign. But I've discovered that my decision was based on "faulty intelligence." Happens to the best of us.

In fact, the fellow who's senate campaign I supported has something to say about "faulty intelligence." Ken Salazar's website blames a whole lot of things on "faulty intelligence."

Specifically he thinks that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was based on "faulty intelligence." The administration says that the attacks on September 11, 2001 were possible because of "faulty intelligence" and this same group of actors claims to not have known that the levees would break in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

But the missteps of the current administration haven't been the result of faulty intelligence. They aren't even the result of a lack of intelligence, although a good case can be made. The mistakes and tragedies of the current administration are based on the fact that they have a different agenda than the rest of us.

Let's take the biggie: the attacks of 9/11/01. Faulty intelligence? Nope. The towers had been targeted repeatedly, the administration knew it. Planes flying into buildings? The administration knew it. An excuse to militarized everything in sight? Priceless.

What about Katrina? Have you seen the latest video? Well, I guess that all of that smoke and mirrors about being "uninformed" falls into the same big box of horse pucky as the faulty intelligence about the 2001 terror attack. The president stayed on vacation, Condi Rice went shoe shopping and then out to the theatre. New Orleans drowned. The worst U.S. disaster in history should give ordinary citizens the opportunity to spot the problem, but it is being used to justify militarization of domestic resources.

Let's be clear. Democracy is not a military state. The closer we move toward militarization of domestic civilian life, the farther we move from our democratic values.

Most of us recognize that the Patriot Act and the administration's militarization designs are a part of moving us away from our democratic values...but not our Democratic senator, Ken Salazar. He supported the president's plans to invade our privacy and jeopardize our freedoms. Oh yes, he stood against it until they produced a legal fig leaf to cover up the gross assault on our constitution. But once he could dance to the music of obfuscation he jumped up to jig.

What we need is a democratic candidate that actually supports democracy.

I guess my previous support of him was based on faulty intelligence.

meat won't save you

2006-01-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've recently seen a few billboards around town touting beef jerky as a masculine snack. Probably the movie "Brokeback Mountain" is making everybody pretty nervous, especially around early-January-rodeo time.

There's one billboard in particular that caught my eye. It says "Because banana chips lead to figure skating." It doesn't take a mathmatician to figure out that figure skating is cultural shorthand for homosexuality in men.

I gotta tell ya. If you are one banana chip away from a homosexual act, all the beef jerky in the world isn't going to save you.

Beef, it's what you're using for cover.

Well, it’s a crime in Georgia....

2005-05-03T19:11:00.000-06:00

According to WSBTV in Georgia

“Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter is checking out reports that runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks may have broken off a previous engagement shortly before the wedding.”

Mr. Porter is investigating the ways in which Ms. Wilbanks may be charged with a crime, a felony if he can swing it. There’s no question but that her fellow Georgians are all het up about it. They thought they were grieving a heinous crime of kidnapping and goodness knows what against the flower of well to do white womanhood, a tragedy that unified.

Now they find that this uppity female took a look at her impending southern marriage and did something quite masculine about it: she took off.

A motivational speaker has published a self serving press release that offers to help women with the solution that Ms Wilbanks should have implemented:

“ women tend to gather with other women when faced with stress. ...a woman’s intuition prompts her to seek support and rapport with other women. By doing this, a woman can still maintain her composure and make better decisions about her next move. Had Wilbanks relied less on her masculine response of needing alone time and instead, used her feminine response of seeking comfort, she would have looked at her upcoming marriage in a new light.’”

Now there’s her crime: a masculine response. I imagine that’s a felony in most of the South and think about how important it is that a woman maintain her composure and see marriage in a new light.

Not the harsh light of morning that might reveal a future of endless boredom masked as service to others, disappearing behind your husband’s good name.

After all, isn’t that what all this fuss is about? Men run off and leave women at the altar daily. We understand that. We accept that. We rarely have the nation holding it’s breath and looking for the errant groom. I’ve never heard of a prosecutor trying to pin a felony on a wayward fellow. Nope. Not in this country.

Not in Georgia where decent outraged people like Mr. Porter have amended the state constitution to declare that marriage is defined as being between One Man and One Woman. Viva la differance...because after all, if marriage can exist between two men, or between two women, then we would see that marriage can exist between equals.

And I guess that’s a crime in Georgia.

You don’t know Jack!

2005-04-12T21:12:00.000-06:00

I’m so sick of corporate radio. I feel like a trapped rodent careening down the stressed out freeways of my life while I punch buttons frantically searching for some escape.

Yes, I listen to CPR and KGNU, especially when BBC News or Free Speech Radio News is on. I like WINGS, too.

None of that represents an escape, however.

I know that KGNU offers very interesting music. If I took the time to listen I could learn a lot.

I’m not proud to admit it but I really like pop music. To my credit, I like Hindi Pop, Latin Pop even Arab Pop music as much as I’ve ever enjoyed American Pop.

I want to tap my toes, I want to sing along, I want to loose track of my environment just enough to realize I’m oops! over the speed limit. Is that so wrong?

No. what’s wrong, as far as I’m concerned is the insane repetition. There are moments when I can punch 3 radio buttons and hear the same song on three different stations. That’s wrong. Everyone seems to be dealing from the same deck. Yeah, okay, different formats, same lack of depth and creativity. Lack of real personality.

I’m tired of knowing that my favorite jocks are broadcasting from the coast and in all my years of shuffling stations I’ve never heard a woman broadcaster that didn’t make me cringe.

I want lots more music that easily moves me, and I want a sense of connection while I listen.

It got worse when I went south for a couple weeks. A brand new city, something completely different from home....until you turn on the radio. Then America is the same all over. I was unnerved.

But maybe that’s why Jack! is so popular.

I remember when I first heard Jack. He gave me the creeps right away, Sure he played all the songs I liked and said all the right things. “Locally programmed and locally owned.” How did he know I craved to support the home team? His careless defiant attitude was attractive though I hated to admit it. “Playing what we want!” he growled. I hated him, but I listed.

Then I left town again.

Imagine my surprise to find him muttering the same things into the ears of another city! How could he?!!

Ah the cheating son of a slick format. I knew it was too good to be true. As soon as I got back to my hotel room I hit the ‘net and found Jack! all over the place.

I still don’t understand what loophole he’s speaking through when he growls: “locally owned and locally programmed” but Jack is a radio bigamist.

It’s only my fault that I was so vulnerable to his lies, but can toe tapping, steering wheel slapping, off key singing desire be so wrong?

We’re only vulnerable when we don’t know Jack.

Dead Catholics, nearly dead Catholics and the great Catholic unborn

2005-04-05T21:21:00.000-06:00

You can’t even throw a rock these days without hitting a dead Catholic, at least if you are throwing a stone at a nearby television set, and how many places can you go these days and not be within a stones throw of one of them?

I’m not trying to pick on the recently departed Pope, after all, he’s not my pope. He might not have been your pope either if you are a part of the nearly 76% of the United States that does not identify itself as Catholic. Nope, for most of us United States citizens, the pope is not our spiritual leader.

That might surprise you if you were trying to figure out “just how Catholic is this country anyway?” while watching the boob tube. It would seem that we’re all Catholic these days.

But you’d be wrong. We’re not. I’m certainly not and I can’t wait for the news to get back into the business for which it receives constitutional protection; the business of educating the electorate on issues of political importance.

It is of political importance that the United States Congress recently stood on its collective head in an unsuccessful attempt to interfere in a private medical decision for a near corpse in Florida at the behest of her Catholic parents, while at the same time cutting funding for medical programs that would save a statistically vast number of lives...but you really can’t video tape a statistic. Statistics rarely give you the satisfaction of seeming to follow an arbitrary balloon.

Meanwhile, in Texas, our president’s “hometown,” Sun Hudson had his ventilator removed over his mother’s objections because the money ran out. The medicaid money.

In my opinion is it better to let some of these people die? Maybe. But neither you nor I want to put me in charge of your family’s most devastating life decisions. It’s none of my business, I’m not a doctor and I’m not your spiritual leader.

I’m not your governor either, but if I was I still wouldn’t consider myself an expert on your faith. That’s not stopping our Governor Owens. No, if you are raped and you get yourself to a hospital in Colorado, you may or may not find out that there’s a way to prevent pregnancy from occurring as a result of this heinous felonious assault.

That’s because Governor Owens believes that institutions have First Amendment rights. Not individuals, they are already protected, Institutions.

The Governor is concerned about the rights of Institutions under our Constitution. The Governor is concerned about what an institution thinks, feels, believes and has to say. He expresses his concerns when he uses this phrase: “by forcing an institution to say things to patients that it explicitly does not believe to be morally or ethically valid...”

I’ve got a news flash here. An institution doesn’t have beliefs, nor morals, nor ethics. Institutions do not have rights; particularly not rights endowed by (a divine) Creator. People do. Rape victims do. Citizens do.

And as citizens, we need to take back the public space. We need to take it back from the commercial industry of the entertainment-news. We need to take it back from those with a religious agenda for the rest of us.

There are some decisions that are private, and they need to stay that way. They may be agonizing, devastating and polarizing, but they are deeply private.

There are some decisions that are public, like supporting or opposing a politician or an elected official.

Governor Owens isn’t my conscience, he’s not my spiritual leader and I deeply regret that he is my governor, not only because we have such different views about personal decisions and about the role of government. But more than that, because Governor Owens confuses the difference between people who rightfully have ethics and morals and need to make decisions; and institutions which do not.

Governor Owens lacks the clarity of judgment to represent me.

Somebody hand me a stone.

The made up news

2005-03-29T16:52:00.002-07:00

There’s a lot of fuss over the New York Times report that the federal agencies under the Bush administration spent a quarter billion dollars on fake news reports that they send out to “local” news organizations as actual news, when it’s actually a technicolor press release for the president’s favorite policies.

Me, I’m a concerned about my mother. She’s is a big fan of the news. No matter what I’ve told her about the lack of credibility of our local news organizations, she just loves our local reporters, their hairstyles and the touching stories about their families. She just loves them. Although she’s grown from a chirpy suburban Republican to a sharply observant Democrat over the span of the last generation, (based solely on her love for her own offspring, and her grandchildren), she still thinks that Pepsi is wholesome and that the news offerings are genuine. She thinks that that Katie Couric is just adorable.

While I have spent most of the last few years quietly avoiding local news as completely irrelevant, my mother has soaked up what they have to offer. While I comment that any corporate event for which you can buy a ticket for over $40.00 is news to her favorite local station, she has delighted in hearing about the 9News sponsored Parade Of Lights and the Grand Opening of the Pepsi Center. Like most of the United States she was transfixed by the war coverage...brought to you by the public relations arm of the Pentagon.

I had a job for a manufacturing plant once. I wrote press releases about our new products, and sometimes about products that weren’t new, or improved at all. The Director of Sales, a sharp eyed fellow that I actually respected explained it to me, “Just send it to the trade magazines, they’ll publish it.” “But it’s not news,” I offered, thinking that anything I put forward as news would have to be, well, news, not just a product advertisement disguised as news. It needed to be justifiable, researchable. I was wrong. He was right. They needed “news” to fill up their space and they don’t have the staff to research it and write it, we do. We. The businesses seeking to sell product to their readers. We have the time, the staff and the motive. We write the news.

Once I got past my own conscience with the explanation that I wasn’t working as a journalist, I was working as a marketer and it was the “journal’s” responsibility to uphold journalistic standards, I spent many happy hours creating what I considered to be totally bogus “press releases” that touted the benefits of our products. It was a lot like making up “journals” in college when I had neither the discipline nor the inclination to provide an actual journal to my professor. With my brief background in broadcasting and my flair for creative writing I felt it went rather well. I actually enjoyed writing “make believe news.”

And so, apparently do a lot of writers and public relations persons. I particularly like the story of the woman who is pretending to be a real life reporter and even using a fake reporter- name in her work for the Transportation Security Administration. She’s not just pretending to make up the news, she gets to pretend she’s giving the news; add acting to the creative writing skills and you’re really having a good time.

At my mother’s expense, of course.

My mother is the perfect consumer. She likes to be touched by human interest stories. She wants someone to tell her when something really is serious enough to worry about. She loves the feeling of belonging to a local community even if it’s a huge metro area. She sits down in front of that television at least as much for feeling as she does for information, and she doesn’t get her information from any other significant source.

How is my mother ever going to know how much they are lying to her and where is she going to go for the truth if she ever comes to terms with the deception?

Memorials

2005-03-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

You see them all the time, along the roads and the highways; little crosses of wood or styrofoam, faded wreaths with ribbons hanging limply in the sun or fluttering in the dusty wind. Usually there are pictures or papers with writing, too small to read, and seemingly smeared by the weather. These expressions of loss, of grief and rage and pain are a memorial to some, to others perhaps a warning; something terrible happened here. It could happen to you, or it could happen here again. A wail in styrofoam and crinkled note paper in an otherwise silent landscape, a tragedy that 20 years ago in our culture would have gone unmarked, grief invisible to passersby.

But for some of us, certain landscapes will never be the same. Marked or unmarked they harbor the intensity of memory, the echoes or ghosts of misfortune, a reminder of something precious wrenched loose from loving hands.

I was in the crowd at the rally at a pet store on 6th Avenue, showing support for the woman who was raped there. Her fiancé spoke, and her council woman. There was a representative from RAAP and other community activists. Many in the crowd held up signs and most of us chanted back at the places where they paused for us, perhaps a little too predictably. There were a lot of rally veterans in the crowd.

I approached a local tv journalist and asked her how many other open rape cases are being investigated right now by the Denver Police Department, other than this high profile case. It occurred to me that there was probably somewhere in that crowd at least 1 woman who had been sexually assaulted who didn’t get a rally, or a call from her council woman, or flowers from a stranger, and I wondered how she felt. She nodded and smiled. I faded back into the crowd. It was a nice rally, and I’ve been to a few.

But what about those other rapes? What about the ones committed when we don’t have a national sports event in town, or those committed against the most vulnerable, the homeless or prostitutes, those committed in the poorer parts of town?

There have been serial rapists in Denver since before it became Denver, you can count on it. The same is true for every other city you’ve ever lived in. How many pieces of our urban landscape mark silently for some woman a site of unspeakable loss and rage?

Maybe we should mark those places like roadside accidents, memorials to our grief and rage. Women could set out markers, memorials wherever it had happened, however long ago. You remember where it happened, don’t you? Whether it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago, even if it was a lifetime ago. You remember the apartment building, the office building, the alley the warehouse, don’t you? Maybe you pass it sometimes if you still live in the city, or when you come back to visit. Especially if you’ve moved on in your life, you don’t even mention it to your new friends. Only for you the landscape screams. Quietly.

Imagine. Suddenly the city would be peppered with them. Unburdened seeds of grief like painful peas beneath the mattresses of time would suddenly sprout, flowers of outrage blooming across our city, words finally finding form. “A woman was raped here 1979.” If you’ve never forgotten, would it be less painful to remember? Our truth would rise to the surface like secrets written in lemon juice becoming visible under heat.

Even namelessly our pain would be named, our losses honored, our truth told. We would see that we weren’t alone. In some places our silent screams may form a chorus, a deadly curve in the city where the lives of many women have spun out of control. It might be time for a guard rail here and there. It might be time for a different route.

I like this organic trend toward spontaneous personal expression, a move away from the organized, the controllable, the predictable. I think we should take it into our own hands, memorialize, honor our pain and warn others of treacherous stretches of the road.

Killing in a democracy

2005-03-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

This is about the controversy over the military general who admits he enjoys killing people. I’m surprised that people are shocked about this.

I have shared grade school, college and work spaces with people who cared little for democratic tradition or the finer points of constitutional principles; people who feel that a fair trial is a waste of taxpayer money and that negotiation is “too good” for our hated enemies.

Some of my fellow citizens would have been just as comfortable being raised in a theocracy, giving up the freedoms of our democratic tradition as long as they were on the “side of right” and others were getting “the punishment they deserved.”

I am one of those who wish that, if capital punishment were not abolished, at least it would be applied with absolute fairness and dignity, not merely dignity for the condemned but dignity derived from a respect for the awesome nature of life itself and the solemnity of presuming to take it as a right of the state.

Capital punishment on a grand scale is the business of the military. Sure, it provides an education and you can work within it repairing trucks, filing reports or applying medical skill to the wounded, but at the heart of it the military exists to apply lethal force to our enemies. And while the military may recruit and attract people for many reasons, and we could say that nearly all of them serve with patriotic honor and provide at risk of their lives a service that ensures our own freedoms, I find it a form of neurotic disconnection for us to not admit the military provides an outlet for those who find great comfort in being handed the distinction between “us” and “them” and allowed to pursue lethal justice against “wrong doers” without the tedious bother of thoughtful self reflection nor the irritation of relinquishing swift judgment in favor of fairness.

I find it equally hard to believe the shock expressed in the media over the Abu Garib torture scandal. I felt that by the time we actually went to war against Iraq I could have walked into any bar in town and found 5 or 6 people more than willing to apply that same sadistic torture or worse to the “scum” who are our “enemies.” Why are we surprised that some of these citizens have found their way into military service?

I am one of those who longs to remind some of my fellow citizens that we are fighting for democracy, not just fighting “evil.” These freedoms that our “enemies” allegedly hate are enshrined in our constitution, the jewel of our government, of our citizenship, of our history as a nation. It is our constitution; not our flag, not current public opinion polls which shift like sands blown about by the winds of passion and manipulated by information campaigns; which defines the United States and which provides the foundation of our existence as a people, as a country.

The U.S. is not a team with team colors: red, white and blue; not a product with brand loyalty. We are something so much more amazing than that. We are a democracy founded on a constitution. This is the breathtaking achievement that we have modeled to the world.

...An a achievement whose apparently subtle glory is lost on some of my fellows in their rapture at the opportunity to “hunt down” and “punish” our “enemies.”

Why do I read that some people are surprised that our military includes generals who enjoy killing people and service people who take pleasure in disgracefully humiliating prisoners? Did you overlook these people in school? Did you not listen to the suggestions for the proper “punishment” of “evil doers” spewed out on talk radio and passed along at work?

It is beyond cynical to deny that citizenship and military service are shared by those with cruder notions of justice, even by those who think our highest goal is to protect the colors of the flag and not the content of the constitution.

And though I personally wonder what to do with these contradictions, I’m not the slightest bit surprised that they exist.