Sodomy and Witchcraft

We live in a country where we routinely invade foreign nations for reasons unrelated to anything that the invaded government or it's citizens are involved in. We live in a country where the government is trying to weasel out of providing a social or medical safety net for the old, sick, poor or young but is willing to shell out trillions to shore up corporations who have nothing but their own greed to blame for their current predicament and whose executive class is sitting on 90% of the personal wealth in this country, which has increased 400% in the last eight years. The government does all this on the cuff. They don't pay for any of it. Simply take out another loan and let the next guy pay.

I know a guy that sero converted positive for HIV a couple years ago. He's 52. He has a small business and works as a dinner house waiter on the side. No benefits, no 401 K, nothing saved. At least he doesn't owe anything.

I know a lady that is 67, with diabetes and several related health problems. She needs to retire. It shouldn't be a problem. She's worked for the same State Agency since 1967, full time, never missed a day. She has two adult sons. They had some problems with the law. They have some problems with drugs. They have some problems with employment. She never spends any money on herself. She owes 400 thousand on a condo she bought for almost nothing 20 years ago and is worth almost nothing again. She cashed out her retirement plan for what she had into it. She can get it back if she pays what she would have contributed over the last 40 years, with interest. Not a chance she can come up with that kind of money. There's even a kicker. Since she works for the State, she never paid into Social Security and isn't eligible.

These things represent the kind of problems that our country is facing at different ends of the spectrum. There are other problems. There are productivity problems. We are dependant on petroleum based power sources with rapidly decreasing access to petroleum. We have climate change related to petroleum use and no consensus on how to deal with it and large scale denial that it even constitutes a problem.

It's election time now. I don't know what the main issues people are basing their votes on where you are but here, two of the main concerns are gay marriage and abortion. What this boils down to, is sodomy and witchcraft. The three biggest contributors to political advertising in this State, this year, for these issues, are the Mormon Church, the Catholic Church and the Focus on the family organization. It doesn't seem to me that we have come as far as we need to have in the last six hundred years or so, in the areas of social and political awareness. Maybe these are the things people are really going to fixate on, no matter what else is happening.

I would like to move on.