Musings of a Dumb Ass

The world became a place for me to pay attention to in about 1957. That was when I really discovered women, cars, clothes and music.
Girls didn't have tattoos and cuss, and not many 'put out'. If they did, we mostly didn't talk about it. There was no such thing as abortion or the pill. If you had a date, most of us knocked on the door when we picked her up, and generally had her home by midnight at the extreme latest.

Cars were a statement about who you were. There was no such thing as a foreign made car in my little town in 1957. The first one I seen around town was in 1958 and none of us would have been caught dead in a Volkswagen, no one had ever heard of a Honda, Toyota, or Kia or anything else not from here . Everything was American made, and we loved it.

Clothes were all american made including our shoes.

Music was also American made and the wildest thing I heard was Little Richard.

All in all, America was a pleasant and respectable place to live anywhere in the country, and you were safe anywhere.

Just 52 short years later, we are now in a world community where foreign goods have just about completely taken over our country. We have been told that true capitalism works best when we trade with other countries and that may be so, but while we eagerly bought the cars made somewhere else, we slowly crippled then killed our own great automobile makers, filled our shelves with everything made from foreign soil, (the only thing I can find made in America at WalMart is Mason fruit jars) and now our farmers are threatened with the same dilemna as the manufacturing sector as food processed and grown somewhere else flood our markets.

Not many work at the 'factory' anymore simply because there are no more factories to work at. Instead we are by far the greater percentage working for the Government ( that means anything subsidised by government money as well as directly employed by the government. Our good paying manufacturing jobs have been replaced with lower paying jobs in the retail market or servicing each other in health care, child care, home care or a myriad of other government funded entities.

We've been taught to take welfare, we call it many things, but if you are not presently working for it, then it's welfare. Simple and brutal, but true.

Our government and legislators are out of touch with it's people, and have taken on a life of it's own spiraling out of control.

Health care will finish burying us, because everyone is out to lunch on the issues, legislature, and populace, and global warming just adds insult to injury. Doesn't anyone realize there was once an ice age that went its way, and we've been warming ever since. To truly believe we are powerful enough as inhabitants on this globe to create or even enhance our climates is just another act of complete and total idiocy. We've managed to destroy ourselves quicker than any other leading civilization in history. Such a tragic way to leave the stage........

Musings of a Dumb Ass

Sometime ago I became acquainted and involved with a church group, not particularly in a religious kind of way, but more so in a friendship and social way. I've found that I need to be around people of faith. I'm not sure why, only that it makes me feel better.

A few weeks back the Minister, who I admire and respect, delivered a message about loneliness and depression. While he wasn't completely on point about it in my world, he realized there was such a thing, and wanted to help those troubled with it.

My entire life has been on a ringside seat for depression, and for that matter, loneliness too. My depression is of the deepest and most miserable kind, and I've experienced loneliness of the most devastating nature even while surrounded by those who admire me and want to be near for whatever reason, and over the years there have been many who wanted to be around for the laughs and fellowship, never suspecting how miserable I was even to the point of being suicidal.

I've often wondered what's to become of a damned fool like me and have no answers.

I think not many around me ever guessed how I really felt about life and those in it, and the miniscule few I've ever talked to about it found it so very hard to believe, I think they just sort of set it aside as something I imagined or wasn't that big of a deal. They just weren't present when I had a gun barrel in my mouth or my foot on the accelerator wrestling the temptation to swerve into the semi I was meeting. It is a terrible feeling with no explanations nor cure.

Most believe those with the problem need professional help. I believe there is no such thing as help, and those who were helped by someone else never really had the problem to begin with, because there is no relief, no cure, only interludes, sure to be followed by your old nemisis, just waiting to visit again.

The Christmas season is here, and many find it hard to navigate, and so do I. While I don't completely understand my problems with life, I can promise I certainly don't understand anyone else's.

I made a rule some years ago that's kept me from doing something stupid, and I recommend it to anyone who truly feels life itself is unsurmountable and not worth living. It's very simple. If you truly are to a place that ending it is a temptation, wait 24 hours. So far there's not been a time that life didn't look much better for me, and hold promise.... in just 24 hours..... Merry Christmas

Musings of a Dumb Ass

The absence of an identifiable enemy complicates war. It has been so since men began killing each other.

To help matters out someone long ago came up with the idea to dress armies in a certain way so they could simply kill each other and generally leave everyone else alone except for destroying private property and taking assets away from those in the way, and of course killing anyone who might piss them off for any reason, and occasionally raping the women found along the way.

This worked well for a very long time and the uniforms of the enemy became the identifier that we all hated.

As we became more civilized right and wrong became the reason we warred, more so than the wishes of an individual ruler. It should be said that right and wrong has always been up to the victor as opposed to real right and wrong.

When we invaded Iraq the standing army that existed under Saddam was defeated in real time in about 24 hours.

That particular invasion by us, fundamentally changed the way we do war forever more because we attacked a country who had no ability to do us harm. There are those who might differ with that assessment but they wouldn't last long in the court of debate. We continued on with our rampage, and with no identifiable enemy it became an attack on the people on the streets of Iraq, who predictably hate us with a venomous passion and desire to get us out at any price and plant bombs on the side of the roads for us to drive over to say so. When a bomb goes off and takes the lives of our finest we say it was done by the enemy, but we can't identify who that is and find victory impossible to acheive, and it will always be that way.

Now we are looking at the ninth year of the same travesty in Afghanistan and no end is in sight. There is no standing army to shoot and no uniforms to aim at, so we are relegated to the same failure we've experienced in Iraq and it will only get worse. There is no victory to be had in an American sponsored puppet government. We should have learned that from Viet-Nam, Iran and now Iraq, and Pakistan, but we march on in Afghanistan as if we are hypnotized and unable to reason. If Osama is what we're after, we simply should have taken him and be done with that. There is no point in saying we can't find him. That only insults the intelligence of the brain dead.

We're decimating the soul of our country with our behaviour. Not only worldwide, but in the halls of Congress, but as history dictates, we won't last much longer........