The Decline and Fall of Humanity

Tags

evolution, Internet, life, satire, Social Networking

I don’t mean to scare ya or nothin’. That is not my intent. And I’m not complaining actually either. Hardly. Just a little.

Mostly, I’m just wondering.

I been kicking this around the old brain pan for a few days. You know what I mean. A thought raises an interesting idea, but it doesn’t really seem to connect or go anywhere. So it just lays there, floating around in the hungry sub-conscious, peeking out every so often to inquire if any new facts have come along that it can connect to. You know what I mean.

Actually this blogging is symptomatic of it. It’s that idea that really valuable ideas are generated on the fly, just letting the old fingers fly over the keys, caressing them in synchronicity such that they produce words in an order that makes intelligible sentences if not intelligible thoughts. Blogging is defined by talking out of your ass about any subject that comes to mind with no filter and no grade at the end. It eschews the very notion of editing. What you write today is not even what you believe tomorrow.

But isn’t life becoming that. If you want proof go to The Tale of My Heart, and her post, Proof of the Doomed Society.  We now go nowhere without our smart phones. To have a dead battery stops the world until you are recharged and redownloaded. Google announces it is shutting down its reader and panic ensues. HOW WILL I GET MY NEWS? Newspapers are for wrapping gifts to be avant-garde.

It’s all about the sound bite. It’s all about the photo snapped. A picture is worth a thousand words you know. And we are all photographers now. News agencies depend on us. They depend on us to snap the “I was there at the critical moment when death arrived!” My opinion, written in the semi-formal but oh so official looking template from a free blogging platform is sought by journalists who sit in Starbucks with laptops aglow while sipping the latest de rigueur in designer coffee blends.

We are all so with it with our “clouds” and our insta-messages. No one is disconnected. No one is alone because there is a vast matrix of interconnected “friends” instantly at hand. You aren’t lonely any more are you?

So connected am I that I have to “manage” my social media, and set up filters, because you know, you have your business socials and your college socials, god forbid your high school socials, your hometown socials, your family socials, your kids friends parents socials. Filter!

I live in a city where I as an Anglo, am a minority. So I’m doing my best to learn Spanish, even more urgent since my new housekeeper (meeting her Monday) doesn’t speak any form of the King’s English. So I have a program for that.

A nice virtual “coach” tells me “way to go Sherry” and “now you’re really moving!” at the end of each lesson, although I can call on her at any time for words of encouragement. And boy, do I feel encouraged!

I bought a piece of software to organize all my recipes and connect my pantry to my grocery list, to my ingredient list, to my blog, to my brain. I will have the most interactive and clean little piece of recipe joy in a few months after I have painstakingly “captured” all the nearly 300 recipes I’ve published on my web site. And then interfaced them with the pantry inventory that I will spend days painstakingly adding. I will be able, so they tell me, to put in ingredients from my inventory and it will “find” recipes that I can make with nary a foot in the food store.

No more stuffed little 3 x 5 boxes crammed with newspaper recipes and handwritten ones that one day you will sit down and copy to a card. No more of that. And while you’re at it, no more sisters sitting around with kleenex with “mom’s recipe box” going through each and every one, laughing and crying at the memories induced by “Aunt Tilda’s Wild Jello Swirl” and the fun that was at the family reunion back in ’93. No, Mom’s recipe box is online, and prints out professional looking copies, instead of the one that used to be in the box–you know the one–with the chocolate frosting stain on the corner where it fell in the bowl when Alicia grabbed it out of Becky’s hand that time?

No more of that. Let’s hear it for the INTERNETS!

Let’s hear it for technology and connectedness and never having to look someone in the eye who you are calling a jackass.

But hey, I can play games and I can “beat” other people, real or otherwise, and do I really care? I win!

And after all, I did learn how to fold a fitted sheet. That’s something to be proud of.

And I did learn 7,329 more ways to cook chicken.  That’s something too.

And if I want to, I can publish a book, and not have to wait on some snotty editor to tell me I write like shit. I can ignore that. After all, what do they know about this rockin’ civilization at this point?

Gibbons was wrong. Rome didn’t fall. It just re-invented itself.

Don’t we all?

Every week?

It’s all just evolution, can’t you see that?

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These were all generated as “related” so I’m relatin’ ’em.

Teachable Tidbits

Tags

America, bookstores, Internet, Sarah Palin

No doubt you heard that a few weeks ago, Border’s Bookstore went into bankruptcy. I hadn’t had the delight of being in a Border’s for some years. I never found one in Connecticut nor have I found one in Iowa. No matter, they are gone now.

I, as I’ve spoken of before, have a love affair with books. I like to touch them, hold them, move their pages. I find joy in their makeup, their choice of papers and decoration. Most of all, of course, I love the wisdom I hope to find within them.

I don’t think any day was as grand to me when I was a college student than the day I went to the campus book store to buy text books for the upcoming quarter. I carried this pile home, and one by one examined them in detail, growing in excitement at the contents.

I have, amassed books wherever I lived in America. A goodly number of boxes will be accompanying us on our move to New Mexico in a year or so. I lend books rarely, since for some reason, people tend to “forget” to return them, and I, not wanting to be petty, mention the subject a couple of times, sigh, and realize that I have lost one of my children. Sometimes I replace them.

But bookstores, my favorite haunt, are going the way of the dinosaurs. It seems inevitable with iPads and Kindles and other sorts of electronic reading apparatus. And something good and wonderful will end. I recognize my own participation in this slaughter of the book seller. I confess that most of my books are bought from Amazon. This is simple finances. They are just cheaper since they added the “used” books sellers to their repertoire.

And I confess that I tended to haunt the environs of the bigger national bookstores rather than the local seller. These poor but wonderful folks have been virtually wiped out. They can’t carry the breadth and depth of choice that the major chains can or could. But even the big chains are dying.

I don’t like the idea of not having my book with me, there to touch, perhaps reread, but gaze upon with fondness. I like the idea of convenience in the e-reader, but I will lament the loss of my friends in my bookcases. No virtual bookcase can suffice.

For an article about this inevitable changing of the guard, read the TNR article here.

♦

Goodness knows it’s easy to look upon the American landscape and find little that gives us hope for the future. We seem mired in a class war, largely pushed by the extreme right. Our state legislatures are busy with all manner of utterly silly and dangerous bills, having little if anything to do with the real issues that confront us. Our national politicians are comprised of mostly people unfit to collect our garbage.

It is easy to be pessimistic. Fareed Zakaria is one savvy political journalist. There is a link to his Time‘s essay, Are America’s Best Days Behind Us? in this Foreign Policy review of his essay. It’s well worth your time to read both.

♦

Okay, just to return to some sense of reality. This just in: Sarah’s panting lap dogs (read fans) are planning a show of “how I hate, hate, hate, Obama”. How you say? Well, supposedly on Sunday and 4pm, if you hate Obama, you are to pull off to the side of the road, and honk your horn for a solid hour. Yep, this is the brainchild of some group called Stand Up for America. Yeah, I’d say America’s best days are far far behind it.

♦

We hold the people of Japan and Libya in our prayers today, as well as the people of Wisconsin now facing life at the hands of a demagogue.

 

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Ahead of That Curve

Tags

Internet, marriage, newsgroups, Online dating service, relationships, The Contrarian

I was reading an article in the Boston Globe today, realized that I had never really talked much about how the Contrarian and I met and married.

We first met via the Internet, a process that now comprises something like 22% of all heterosexual relationships.

In our case, it was not via such things as EHarmony or other similar dating sites. A few of those were around, but they were as I recall, pretty much self-entry kind of places. Free of charge.

Most interactions occurred by a device called mIRC, knows as Internet Relay Chat. You entered rooms and spot to whomever about whatever. But we did not meet that way, though we used it as a tool for better communication during our “courting.”

I don’t know if there were such faces as Facebook back then, in the last century, 1998, to be exact.  But if there was, it was off my radar and his as well. We didn’t meet that way either.

No we met via the “news groups.” I think they still exist, though I haven’t look at them in years. It was part of you e-mail process and you looked up hobbies or interests you had, and subscribed. People left messages, and you responded or wrote your own.

I was living in Connecticut at the time, and the Contrarian was here in Iowa. He had been a long user of newsgroups, but for me, it was fairly a new thing. I’m not sure how I found it or even heard about it.

There were plenty of men seeking women, and so forth, and I posted on a women seeking men. I made it clear I was looking for a long-term relationship, would relocate, and general information about me, age, education, and so forth.

The Contrarian responded with a lengthy e-mail about himself. We began to write back and forth for a few days, and felt very quickly that we had found something significant in each other. We made plans quickly for me to visit him.

I had a number of online friends (men mostly), from IRC, many whom I had met. I left them the pertinent information and flew off to Iowa on February 1, 1999, only about two months after we had started communicating.

I arrived in O’Hare in the early morning, and was supposed to connect with a flight into Eastern Iowa Airport. Fog was my nemesis. I spent the day in the airport and finally got a bus late in the day. I arrived very tired somewhere around 9 pm that night. Not an auspicious beginning.

But within a few days, we felt very sure of “Us” and I notified my moving company to set a date for packing me up. I returned three weeks later to Connecticut, and the Contrarian followed by plane about two weeks later.

Oddly, he got snowed in in Chicago, and ended up on a different flight. I too had to wait a good while for his flight to arrive.

We left Connecticut by car on March 16, arriving back in Iowa on the 17th. And well, that about says all there is to say. We married in September of that year, and are now approaching our eleventh anniversary this September.

Telling people, early on, of our method of meeting, usually brought some stares and some “wows”. Most people had tales to tell of Internet meetings going awry, and the media usually reported stories of dead women who had gone off to meet serial killers.

Plenty of folks gave us that “look” that said, “it will never last.” You can’t build a relationship over a computer! And truthfully, I knew a couple of such relationships that had gone sour  after some months. But I suspect that the statistics are pretty much the same as the more “normal” means of meeting.

Clearly, people aren’t afraid of this method any more. I’m not sure it’s better than other methods of meeting people. Smart people I think find it an easier medium to fess up the truth about yourself. After all, you can only communicate by mail and phone so long. There is no point in lying about things that will be discovered at meeting. But then, perhaps some thing that by then the person might care enough to ignore the extra poundage or the lesser stature. I’m not sure.

All I can say is it worked for us.

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The World Went On Without ME?

Tags

Catholicism, corn, energy, environment, fundamentalism, Internet, Muslims, Newt Gingrich, pasta, racism, Recipes, right wing, Zoology

It always comes as a bit of shock to me when the world doesn’t grind to a halt when I am somehow incommunicado. Yet, it seems that everyone went blithely on, mostly unaware that I was not producing fine literature for you to consume every day.

I shall remember this! Vengeance is sweet. When you least expect it, I shall get my revenge on everyone who actually lived life just fine thank you, with nary a thought about poor little old me. So, harrumph!

Not sure how things are around your neighborhood, but it’s intolerably hot and humid here. Everyone is grouchy.

Did I mention that it was hot? Dinner is a nice big romaine salad with feta and a ranch steak sliced on top. Some bread sticks. It’s all I can manage. It’s hot. It’s muggy. It’s miserable. Fans going everywhere. It’s hot.

Epicurious has a really nice recipe that seems perfect for the day. Pasta with corn pesto. Not too much effort, I’d make it except for the pasta in the morning and just reheat for a nice light meal with a salad and roll. Did I mention that about the only crop we got from the garden this soggy year was corn? Well, we put up 39 servings, which should take us through pretty near to next season.

I kept ready more hate stuff about Muslims and felt compelled to write our local Mosque here in Cedar Rapids (which has a really historic role in America by the way) and to the Imam who is in charge of the  proposed Islamic Center in NYC. I received lovely replies from both. Please consider just offering a word of support to your local Islamic community. And you can write to the Cordoba Initiative (for the NYC Islamic Center) at the following places:

FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cordoba-Initiative/134998249864725?ref=ts
BLOG http://cordobainitiative.wordpress.com/
TWITTER http://twitter.com/cordobainit
WEBSITE www.cordobainitiative.org

It is essential that we combat this war of hatred being waged by a very few fundamentalist Christians and their instigators, the far right politicos, who are willing to risk violence in pursuit of votes.

Apparently there is quite a juicy article in Esquire this month by one of Newt (slippery) Gingrich ex-wives. It’s pretty much what you would expect of a right wing spouter of “family values” who tells his wife he need not live by what he preaches. He’s indispensable you see, and can be forgiven his many peccadillo’s. Of course he’s a fine Roman Catholic now, having annulled all the trouble away. (H/T) to Right Wing Watch)

There’s a weird little article at the NYTimes Science section on ugly animals. We are predisposed to like furry binocular visioned animals and dislike others. Some pics and some talk about how we just don’t like the creepy among us.

Did I mention it’s hot? I thought I forgot. Mauigirl recognized just how hot it was and escaped to the cabin in the woods. I live in the woods, and did I neglect to say it’s hot? She has some venting to do. It’s worth reading. So go there, and read about how the US is falling to wrack and ruin while European countries PLAN FOR A FUTURE–we’re too busy playing gotcha politics. Nero fiddled? The grasshopper played? Remember any of this folks?

I seem to have become generic again. My feather is missing on comments I leave. What gives WordPress?

Jan at Yearning for God fell and has some minor damage. Stop by and give her a hello. I’m sure it will help her feel better!

NCR‘s Melissa Musick Nussbaum has an older but still important post on sticking with your church even when the fit has become uncomfortable. Food for thought.

See the right wing is evil. More so than you think. Given their rich only, racist rhetoric, that seems most apparent. And as much as the scrabble about our “freedoms being trampled” it seems they are the ones always doing the trampling. Witness how they are trying to manipulate DIGG to reflect greater traffic on right wing sites and burying liberal voices. I guess their freedom is my stifled voice.

Well, since I have just noticed that it’s HOT, I’m going off to shower, and get under a fan for a while. Keep cool.

What’s Up? 07/02/10

Tags

Architecture, Art, brain study, economy, GOP, Internet, neuroscience, poverty, Sharron Angle, teabaggers, unemployment, wingnuts

It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep does for a person, especially one who is sadly having to give up on the idea that middle age is any more much of a descriptive phrase. Still, I think I can push old age to 75 doncha think?

I slept good last night, which is commendable and all around right, since the nights are so conducive to it–being both dark and cool.

I often get up in the night, around 12:30 am or so, and sit up with a glass of wine and watch the goings on in the meadow. Most of it revolves around the escapades of the cats. The dogs tend to lay outside to keep cool, and the cats rather saunter and swagger around like they own the place.

They tend to rush in and out, much as the Mad Hatter, stopping to splay out on the floor and take a quick bath before heading back out for more late night entertainment. It’s a rather glorious time of quiet reflective peace. I often write in my head at that time, my creative juices are all bubbly.

So, I’m ready to lay back, open the reader and see what’s going on. Oh and I should tell ya, I’m fallin’ in love with “Despicable Me” promos. I haven’t felt such a pull at my heart since that adorable little garbage dude in that other flick. Wall-E was it?

I don’t know much about architecture which certainly qualifies me for an opinion. I know what I like (love in the case of Art Deco), and what I don’t. Anyway, a bunch of snooty “experts” collected by Vanity Fair, for whatever reason, has named the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (that’s in Spain as I just learned) wins! The work of one Frank Gehry. They have a slide show where you can see his other stuff. This will all turn up on Jeopardy sooner or later, so it’s wise to at least know this stuff. In a word–the dude doesn’t like 90° angles, but he does like every other kind. Actually, I may have to do a full piece on this. One admirer broke into tears on visiting the Guggenheim, but I truly tell you, this stuff is simply awful!

I nearly lost my lunch on that lunacy, and I’m still woozy, but press on.

Things get definitely worse when you read this article in Prospect, claiming that the internet is rewiring our brains, and not for the better. Lots of neuro scientificy stuff here. I’m not sure whether I should be scared or insulted. I did find this quote from the Spectator from 1889 on the “Intellectual Effects of Electricity” to be mildly amusing:

 All men are compelled to think of all things, at the same time, on imperfect information, and with too little interval for reflection.

Little did they know of the spread of information!

We do seem a bit artsy today. I have read part of an art book, so I am superiorly qualified on this one. It seems, we are told, that the “new” art of today can be summed up in this self-promoting, self-defending mode:

 I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious.

It would appear that batshit crazy has invaded the world of art as well as politics these days. I think the number of us who are certifiably sane is dwindling. No slideshow here, I guess they were mindful of my sensitive stomach.

Speaking of teabaggers, Sharron Angle is single-handedly making HarryReid’s chances of re-election look positively grand. The DailyKos has all the scoop on her latest inanities via “interview.” She is simply astoundingly stupid. She can expect a lifetime of Christmas cards from Harry I’m sure.

DCap has a rogue’s gallery of GOP remarks about how unemployment benefits are dangerous because people get used to them, and get too lazy to find work. Disgusting, callous, cold-hearted. That’s what they are, and they deserve our approbation. Shame on them and their psychologically distorted view of human beings.

Listen to Me–A Recipe for a Sane World

Tags

God concepts, Internet, opinion, power, quotations, Sophia, thinking, women, writing

I often sit down to write with little or no idea where I might end up. I figure that’s a good thing mostly. And frankly, on occasion, I start one place and end another. There is no road map after all.

I picked up this article in the NYTimes, which seemed provocative and in the end enlightening. It warned implicitly at least that we are usually wrong when we form opinions mostly from anecdotal evidence.

It seems to me, that most of what we do is in the form of  concluding from whatever “evidence” we have acquired up to a certain point from actual research or reading and experiential events. Depending on how heavily weighted the former is, we are more likely right or wrong.

The article pointed out that while it may seem that we are being turned into attention deficit superficialities by the ready speed of the Internet, in fact we aren’t, as attested by any number of actual scientific studies. Okay, I can buy that. And frankly, I’m relieved.

But the unintended consequence of the article, was a off hand link to a site I’d never heard of, and that was worth ten times the article to me. Where I started in the direction of discussing how we prefer 500 words or less in our posts, I drifted into the realm of thinking my opinions mostly shit.

So I developed this tongue in cheek title and went looking for a suitable image. I, as most writers, undoubted assume that we have something you should hear, so I typed in “God Complex” thinking it an amusing image for the post. Alas, not a single one portrayed a woman as suffering from this. So I tried “God as Woman” and that got me “God as women?” and then mostly tons of images of God creating woman. Then I tried feminists as God, and I got more garbage in the form of symbols, and this went on for some time.

My frustration grew. Finally I got the above sweet nurturing image of God as Sophia. Not at all what I was looking for. No ripped abs portraying woman as conqueror or powerful overlord of earth–no I got sappy sweet mother goddess stuff.

And I was reminded that yesterday, the owner of The Daily Beast was on GMA. She was asked what it meant that most of the Tuesday primaries had been won by women. Her response was, “well it proves that women can be wingnuts too.” And I agree.

It’s not that I’m arguing that I want women to be power hungry, insensitive louts like some men are. I’m acceding that they already are, and probably always have been. Yes, I believe that there are differences between men on women on a whole plethora of levels, but given the right motivations, women are as greedy and blood thirsty as any man thought of being.

So why no women with God complexes? I dunno.

Finding Arts and Letters Daily, (the above link) is like finding nirvana. It’s like you want to redo your entire blogroll, and well, spend a few days, weeks or so meandering around. That for me is the point of the Internet, but it’s a little like walking into the Library of Congress or the MMA–you have a day–choose wisely.

Once upon a time it was possible for a man or woman to know virtually everything that there was to know about any given field of endeavor, and perhaps several. Today, you can but keep generally abreast of the trends in a field. There are more books, articles and such than you can ever hope to read or even know about.

And the amazing thing, is that we (the writers of whatever) in our pathetic egotistical sadness actually think that somebody has time to listen to our pathetic whinings. Yet, the human spirit appears to forge ahead, confident that somewhere an audience exists. Dangerously, this thought occurs to the serial cannibal as well and they can but be encouraged when they find their own among the billions who inhabit the planet.

It all leaves me with no depressed feelings, but a shrugging feeling. I distinctly felt a shrug coming on as I thought about it. I don’t care. I write because I like my own voice inside my head, and I think myself devilishly funny and acidic and witty. I’m always surprised when my best prose, my most humorous repartee is met with silence, but it’s simply not my fault if you are unable to see the genius I am.

Now that was supposed to elicit a huge guffaw, before you snap off thinking me insufferably arrogant. The fact is, there is more talent on planet earth that most realize. I am not exceptional but the norm I suspect. That is not cause for sadness, but gives hope that in the end, this planet will survive its experiment with the human species.

So as you can see, this post is a bit incoherent. I am aware of that! But it’s what I chose to do today. Wandering as the thought carried. Thanks for wandering with me. I like the company. After all, there is a worthwhile couple of links, and you can skip the rest.

Two quotes:

Speed reading is touted as letting you read much faster with good comprehension. Woody Allen read War and Peace in one day and proved the truth of that by responding: “It’s about Russia.”

Jean-Paul Sartre quipped:  In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.

Cruising the Inter-tubes

Tags

comspiracy, Internet, psychology, right wing extremism, sociology, teabaggers

Yesterday, we chatted a bit about the extreme right wing and whether this expression of hatred and vitriol was something unusual in American politics.

I concluded at least, that it was not new, but that our history was replete with examples of extremism, often resulting in rioting and outright violence.

Although not unusual, it bears, as we suggested continuing watching and every effort should be made to diffuse and to speak against such lawless and ugly rhetoric and activity.

Yet, the perception is clearly that these are extraordinary times. While historians understand that there is not much profit in reviewing past events too quickly, since we are trapped in our own response to it, the troubling thought that this is different does not go away easily.

It is profitable, I believe, to look at what powers this phenomenon. Without doubt, as we go back in time and review past instances of public outcry, we are awed at how it could have happened at all. Just think about it. Towns and cities were islands, camped within vast tracts of land, mostly farmed. Distances were traversed by horse and whatever vehicle a horse might pull.

Under such circumstances, it is amazing that the flames of revolution or civil insurrection could be kept fanned. People were often left their own devices, unsure if others in other places were also working for the cause or, in fact, if they were lonely sojourners in the land of change. Courage was at a premium in those times.  It required courage to act, seemingly alone, trusting that others were doing the same in far off places.

Today, the landscape has changed unbelievably. We live in a  technological wonderland of instant communication. This has its pluses no doubt–how General Washington would have loved to be able to communicate so quickly with forces and political backers. But the downside is just as mind blowing.

I speak of the crazy. In years gone by, the crazy person, if he did not suspect he was loonie, at least acknowledged that nobody else much cottoned to his opinions or beliefs. He knew he was an outsider, knew that most people got on with life in a much different manner than his mind directed him.

He lived in his own world, where he might well feel largely ineffectual. His actions were limited as well. In the best of all worlds, he got some inkling that he was not quite “right” and began to explore the possibility that he might need help. At least, he might admit that he was one sick bastard.

But that is no longer the case. I would not want to test out the hypothesis, but I’m fairly certain that it would be true, that every certifiable wacko can find other wackos just like himself. How you ask? Why, via the Internet to be sure.

Here, one can test the waters of acceptability, and frankly, one can be as outrageous as one wants, and all fairly anonymously. Soon, other vermin extrude from the woodwork and give credence and validity to our nut case. And that is how the ball starts rolling. Surely every utter lunatic can find 500 more just like himself without much effort. No doubt crazies troll the Internet looking for others like themselves.

And, no doubt they find each other. And they re-enforce the worst in each other. They commiserate in their passions, and discuss how their putrid worldview is actually correct. Only they are reading the Bible correctly, only they have seen the intricate connections between various groups existing around the globe. They see the connections, they see the conspiracy, and they are patted on the back for being “one of the ones who get it.”

It is the curse of the Internet, the ability to give strange backward bat-shit crazy people, the confidence to go out and act out, confident that there are many others like them. That must mean they are right, right?

As we all are busy linking up and sending material to each other, secured from “the Internet,” we would all do well to remember that anyone can say anything. Anyone can make any website look “official” or legitimate. Anyone can create any number of bogus “resumes,” claiming to be doctors, lawyers, or nuclear physicists.

We must be ever vigilant of the content of what we peruse, but more than that, we must realize that every wacko site, we happen up by accident that outrages us with its content, is in fact, lauded by hundreds if not thousands, as speaking truth. If you don’t believe me, then actively look at the worst of the right wing rags.

You will read comments that will blow you mind. As one woman put it regarding the claims that the teabaggers were shouting Ni**er at Congressman Lewis and fa**ot to Congressman Franks:

“Why,” she said, everyone knows that the worst violence comes from the left. I’m sure that if there was any of that kind of thing on the steps of Congress, they were left wing plants who were trying to stir things up. That is what they do.”

The woman had no evidence of this of course. But her worldview prompts her to assume that the other side is the perpetrator of bad things, not her side. Her side is simply free speech. No matter the ugliness of the slogans slapped upon the signs held aloft by ranting slathering teabaggers.

Indeed, the crazies today are dangerous, and we must do all we can to call them out on their violence-inducing speech. But we must also remember, that they do not change their minds easily. Not since they can find each other so easily in the shadows of the Inter-tubes.