There was one African-American kid in my class at Aledo. His father was a normal, law-abiding citizen who used to get pulled over by law enforcement personnel about once a month, just because he was African-American and an African-American man driving around in our community looked suspicious.

After college and a few years in Austin, I returned to the Fort Worth area and met and married a beautiful African-American woman. After our third child we moved to Aledo to be closer to my parents and raise our kids. One day a co-worker who was also a member of the Willow Park Volunteer Fire Department (an adjacent town which feeds into Aledo ISD) received a call on his radio reporting an “NIWP.” I asked him what an “NIWP” was. He said it was a “Nigger in Willow Park.” I confronted him and informed him my wife was African-American. His facial features shrunk into a disgusted grimace and he said “That Ain’t Right.”

Right or wrong, we stayed in Aledo and I began to think things were changing. Then Barrak Obama ran for president.

My kids encountered theretofore unheard racial slurs from classmates and were bothered by the petty prejudices the school seemed to tolerate more than discourage. My wife and I were disturbed, but we assumed the bigotry would subside after the election was over. Unfortunately, it didn’t.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my oldest son’s high school teachers asked the class what they thought of Obama. Many of my son’s classmates said Obama was the Anti-Christ, vaguely alluding to passages from the book of Revelation. I was shocked and wondered which local church fostered such inanity.

Then, last week, one of my son’s instructors asked students to record in their journals how they felt about the school refusing to air the live broadcast of Obama’s speech on education.

My son usually keeps a low profile, but on this subject he expressed his sense of alienation and frustration. In his journal he wondered if Obama’s speech would have been televised if he had been an “old white guy like most presidents.” His sentiment cut to core of the issue.

If George Bush or John McCain were president and either wished to address American classrooms on education, most schools in the Metroplex would have televised it. No one even bothers trying to pretend otherwise.

This is an ugly time to live in America. There are good people in our communities, but they’re not speaking up, defending our better principles or challenging the sad elements that perpetrate these outrages. Albert Camus once said that the evil in the world almost always stems from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

The decision to prohibit the broadcast of President Obama’s education speech in local schools was malevolent and the rationale behind it was clearly rooted in a lack of understanding.

The vilification and dehumanization of our president is ignorant and dangerous. The racist indoctrination of our children is evil and loathsome. Why is it being tolerated? Why are we condoning Jim Crow tactics by our school officials and the rhetoric of lynching by media pundits and politicians?

The current hostilities go beyond sour grapes and unpopular policy proposals. When malcontents attend political forums with guns, it’s not just a 2nd Amendment stunt; it’s KKK tactic. When my son’s classmates believe our president is an agent of Armageddon, Aledo becomes Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. And when rabid tea-baggers hang politicians in effigy, it’s no longer the 21st century. It’s November in Dallas, circa 1963.

The Army’s new solution is “resiliency” training. Instead of completely eliminating the back-door draft or reasonably limiting the number of deployments a soldier and/or his (or her) family has to undergo, Uncle Sam is simply trying to make sure our warriors can better stomach the strains and inequities we have required them to endure.

Clearly, the logic seems to be that there is nothing wrong with what we’re asking them to do; they’re simply ill-equipped or not up to the task. As noted in the New York Times, the “resiliency” program will be offered in weekly 90-minute classes, the sessions designed “to defuse or expose common habits of thinking and flawed beliefs that can lead to anger and frustration.”

Wow. “Flawed beliefs that can lead to anger and frustration?”

Arguably, the “flawed beliefs” that lead our soldiers to thoughts of anger and frustration and, for that matter, rage, revulsion, self-contempt, etc., don’t originate from an individual belief system gone awry so much as an ill-considered, insidious conflict. If your friends or your fellow platoon members die on the battlefield or the grounds of an occupation or simply transporting gas or materials to a no-bid, over-budget Halliburton project, you’d like to believe they died for something noble, something important or even something understandable. But in our current wars this “something” isn’t sufficiently articulated or demonstrably real. Our troops are caught up in spuriously concocted pre-emptive wars that are so laced with lies and propaganda that, in the end, they almost appear to be the very thing our men and women in uniform should be fighting against.

Our soldiers can’t sincerely claim they’re defending our country. That’s a joke. And if they shipped out with the old “my-country-right-or-wrong” mentality, many have learned how insufferable and spirit-crushing blind patriotism can be.

In Iraq, we’ve fought, killed and died for a handful of stupid lies, defined, redefined, denied and then disavowed by the very malevolent agents who introduced them. The same thing happened in Viet Nam. The same thing will happen in Afghanistan. We’re simply prolonging the inevitable.

And our soldiers’ and our nation’s troubles won’t end then we finally leave Iraq or Afghanistan. As Stephen King once put it, wars don’t end at truce tables “but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams.” Wars die a piece at time, a soldier at a time. And if our leaders make the grim decision to sacrifice our young men and women, scramble their psyches and tax or exhaust the limits their humanity, and all this for oil or profit margins or corporate imperialism or spiritual prejudice, then the sacrifice is made shabby, sad and criminal and our soldiers will have lived and died on distant battlefields as pawns in an enterprise of villainy. The repercussions will be immeasurable and the attendant grief will reverberate throughout our culture for generations to come.

Before we counsel our soldiers, then, on their resilience in the face of madness and lies, hadn’t we better assess the sanity of their dispatchers?

If you tell me America has been attacked and knowingly send me to a country that had nothing to do with the attack and have me unknowingly slaughter innocent people who also had nothing to do with the attack, I will eventually find myself alienated from you, my community and myself. I will lose my center, become unsettled and feel undermined. It’s one thing to be made a fool of; it’s quite another to be reduced to a murderous fool and a pathetic, discarded marionette.

If it is the U.S. Army’s intent to bolster our troops’ resiliency in the face of such absurdities, that’s fine. Good luck. The plan obviously addresses the symptoms of the problem instead of the problem itself, but our servicemen and women need all the help they can get. My hope is simply that we don’t stop there.

Our leaders need to be scrutinized and held accountable and we, the public, need to be chastised for our ignorance, apathy and frightful gullibility. In fact, as the troops receive treatment and training for their psychological maladies, we could stand to be screened for our own potential neuroses, particularly of the collective or communal varieties. We elected and continue to elect low representatives who usurp young Americans to perpetrate mad acts. Clearly, our soldiers are not the only folks whose sanity we should be concerned about.

I was at Lenscrafters in Ridgmar Mall, waiting to get my glasses fixed. It’s funny how much Ridgmar has changed. I can remember playing hide-and-seek with my teenage friends there in the 80s. Now, in the A.M., the mall is an air-conditioned walking track for the elderly. They’re not really there to shop except for a stop at the 2nd floor food court after a to and fro workout, strolling the mall circuit sanguinely, like it was the most productive chore of the day. And it probably was.

To the rest of us, it was a septuagenarian regatta. The walkers were slow-moving and purposeful, chatting up fellow participants as they ground it out around the kiddie area and took it up the escalator when they had finished the 1st floor or down the escalator if they had started on the second. It occurred to me that Ridgmar Mall should be subsidized by the AARP. I wondered if the walkers actually drove to the mall to walk? At least they were getting exercise and the climate-controlled mall biosphere spared their weakened skin and thinning hair from the insane Texas sun in August.

It was a strange spectacle, but at least they weren’t in nursing homes. These septuagenarians were the lucky ones, the ones still cutting it. They didn’t have anything to worry about except—according to Republicans—the Democrats. And that’s what my Lenscrafters discussion revolved around.

A sprightly, 65-year-old woman was getting her glasses worked on next to me. She told the Lenscrafter technician that she planned to have some kind of optical surgery done in September, but was going to wait until March when her Medicare kicked in.

“But that’s government-run healthcare,” I said jokingly. “Sure you wanna subject yourself to that?”

She smiled. “It’s good government-run healthcare,” she said. “I don’t know about this new stuff. I’ve heard they’re going to let people like me die. They’re already doing it in Oregon.”

“C’mon,” I replied. “They’re not refusing to treat people or forcing them to die. They just allow assisted suicide for terminal cases.”

“Well, that doesn’t square with my Southern Baptist upbringing,” she said.

“Pope John Paul could have gone on living if they’d have kept him plugged in to this machine or that,” I said. “But he chose to go. He’d had enough. Does that square with your Southern Baptist upbringing?”

“Well… that’s different.”

“Not really. It’s humane.”

The technician handed her the repaired glasses and she checked them.

“Sending people to their deaths has never been a big liberal or Democratic ideal,” I added. “It’s just Republican propaganda.”

We talked for a few more minutes and the discussion remained civil. She reiterated her concerns about euthanasia. I told her we had to reform the system before it drove the nation to bankruptcy. We agreed on that point, but it was clear her concept of the new Democratic healthcare proposals had been effectively broad-sided by a Fox News swift boat. Any chance of her critically considering or understanding the new ideas was taking on water if not already sunk. The Republicans had beat the Dems to the punch and the patient would probably never recover from the first blow. It was sad.

My glasses were done, and I told her I had to leave. She said it was nice chatting and that she would pray for me. It was a nice gesture. Especially since the Republican Party was portraying people like me as her executioner.

As I rejoined the spectators of the Ridgmar morning regatta, I almost got run over. Today’s stage was winding down, but there were still stragglers on the track. With a couple of knee replacements, I would probably be joining them in thirty years. I just hoped I’d still retain enough of my mental faculties to know who my opponents were. And who was breaking the rules at my expense.

         O, here
   Will I set up my everlasting rest
   And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
   From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
   Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips, O you
   The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
   A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

Edward, a knighted, 85-year-old British music conductor, had serious health problems and was almost blind and deaf. Joan, a 74-year-old former dancer, choreographer and TV producer, had cancer.

Rather than suffer under the “yoke of inauspicious stars” or perish at the whim of their increasingly decrepit, “world-wearied flesh,” the Downes’ chose to pass on together with shared grace, dignity and courage. Unfortunately, they had to travel to Switzerland to do it.

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are banned in Great Britain as they are in most places here in the United States. The healthy majority generally believes it knows what’s best for the rest, and the chorus of misery that emanates from many of the terminally ill and the grotesquely suffering ultimately gets drowned out by a din of Christian rhetoric and ludicrous moral posturing.

In Romeo and Juliet, the abrupt, hardly weighed suicides of the protagonists are considered romantic. Almost 500 years later, the peaceful, deliberate passing of the Downes–a couple that had been together 54 years–is frowned on by many as selfish, immoral and damning.

Some say it’s a direct violation of God’s law. Others quote Corinthians 6:19, 20 (KJV): “Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own.” They believe God has proprietary rights and we mortal chattel dare not question His plans, even after His arguably having been asleep at the wheel for the last couple of millennia.

I couldn’t disagree with them more. Their stance suggests that terminally ill folks should voluntarily play Job, regardless of the pain and anguish that accompanies these often horrendous and hopeless deaths.

I think what God allowed to happen to Job was a sin and worse than a sin. The Book of Job reads like a bet between two sadistic guards at a Nazi concentration camp. If two human beings of sound mind choose to die quietly, bravely, and determine their time, their own end, to alleviate their sufferings or agony or induce their own demise before they’ve lost all semblance of their lives or themselves–if they decide they’ve played Job long enough, how can we fault them for cheating their torturers and how can any good god punish them for refusing to fulfill the wager?

Religion is not all that demands this abridgement of free will, this prohibition of peaceful oblivion. America used to be at the forefront of compassionate ideas. Now, we lag behind, hobbled by short-sighted conservatism and wide-eyed profit-mongers. The powers that be have no problem with us killing ourselves slowly with cigarettes or alcohol or their unnecessary drugs or the synthetic poisons they peddle or indirectly place in our food, air and water supplies. Each and every one of us is a captive consumer and even after we can no longer eat, drink or defecate their poisons on our own and we’ve forgotten who we are or were, they can still make money off us rotting away under hospice care or in a nursing home.

Who are we to take matters in our own hands? Who are we circumvent the burgeoning assisted “living” industry?

I’d like to think we’re human beings. I’d like to think we would be treated humanely. Unfortunately, only the states of Oregon and Washington have “Death with Dignity” laws in place.

Here in Texas, regardless of how identity-erasing, volition-robbing, life-transmogrifying, excruciating, needless or pointless a dying person’s wasting away may be, he or she is expected to grin and bear it.

What we want doesn’t matter. Even after there’s hardly anything left of us, they still place the cross, the yoke and the burden on our shoulders. It’s a state-sanctioned martyrdom for God and Capitalism.

Not to be ungrateful, but it made me uncomfortable. It was almost like a country club.

My wife and I are barely on the middle side of middle class. The only reason she received this superb treatment is because her employer offers an outstanding benefit package.

Without her job, we might have wound up at a cheap clinic or over at a public hospital where the closest you get to valet is an ambulance.

Later in the day, after my wife was safely back home and I was watching my youngest son play soccer, I looked out at all the boys and wondered if their families had decent insurance and what kind of treatment they’d receive if a serious ailment arose. What if their parents didn’t have good insurance? What if their parents didn’t make enough money?

Who in good conscience could stand up and say one person or his or her children deserved better medical care than another? Who would do that?

That’s easy.

The good ‘ol U.S. of A..

That’s how our healthcare system is currently run, right now, every day.

Figuratively speaking, if you have money, you stay at the front of the line. If you don’t you languish at the rear, limping forward till it’s your turn.

If you have good insurance, you get V.I.P. treatment and valet parking. If you have bad insurance, they get to you as soon as possible, but the cost is often more debilitating than the injury you get treated for. If you have no insurance, they get to you when and if they can. And only after you’ve staggered into the ER from your car.

My grandfather on my mom’s side was involved in one of the forward campaigns of D-Day. He got shot squarely in the upper part of one of his thighs and lay on the battlefield, probably thinking he was going to die. But he didn’t. A German combat medic came to his side and treated his wound. My grandfather didn’t speak German and I don’t know if the German medic spoke English. But I doubt he asked my grandfather if he had money for the procedure or good insurance so the Third Reich could be reimbursed for his life-saving treatment. My grandfather—the enemy—was wounded. And the German medic simply did his job, regardless of uniform, nationality, rank, class, etc.

American combat medics are instructed to do the same. Such treatment is mandated by the Geneva Convention, but apparently it doesn’t apply to American civilians.

Arguably, my grandfather received better and fairer treatment on the battlefield from the enemy than many Americans get from their own healthcare system today. And make no mistake. The medical industry and the insurance companies that discriminately dole out access to its wares too often treat the poor, the disenfranchised and the migratory with less respect than they would afford an enemy.

I don’t blame the doctors or nurses or surgeons. I blame the system. Any system that offers better or worse treatment for my child or any of his soccer teammates or their parents because they have more or less money or better or worse insurance is wrong, unconscionable and evil.

The Declaration of Independence clearly states that we are all endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The right of “Life” is made alienable by our healthcare system. It’s un-American and it’s unacceptable and the Obama administration is trying to do something about it as you read these words.

So think real hard before you laud the status quo or oppose a major overhaul in the inflated, bankrupting nightmare that serious medical treatment amounts to for millions of people in this country. If you found yourself on the lower rungs of the economic ladder or the uninsured end of our healthcare system, you wouldn’t want to be dying on the health insurance industry’s class battlefield. There might not be any Nazis around to save you.

Also at the May 4th engagement, the North Tarrant Republicans allowed 30-year Tarrant County Medical Examiner (and Muslim-American) Nizam Peerwani to rebut O’Brien’s claims, but O’Brien had exited the premises before Peerwani spoke.

O’Brien’s one-sided dialogue on this issue unfortunately typifies the prevailing tendencies of American conservatism and Republican politics over the last eight years or so. There’s the world according to them, wherein they are patriotic, morally superior and righteous, their positions unassailable; and then there’s world according to the rest of us, but our political, philosophical and social divergences are simply wrong, un-American, godless, evil, etc. This is why so many of Bush’s press conferences and town hall meetings were strictly populated with conservative disciples who gushed with weepy-eyed pride no matter what Bush said. His handlers wanted a controlled, homogeneous crowd where objections could not disrupt his talking points.

In the event that contentious views were aired, the Bush Administration made the progenitors of such impieties pay. If you were a general who disagreed with the Bush Administration’s Iraq war strategy, you were forced to retire. If you were the chief contracting officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and you charged that major Pentagon officials exercised questionable favoritism towards Haliburton in regards to military contracts, you got demoted (See Bunny Greenhouse.). If you were a CIA agent whose spouse refuted the Bush Administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs, you got outed (See Valerie Plame.). If you were a U.S. Attorney investigating Republican “super-lobbyists” like Jack Abramoff, you got dismissed (See Frederick A, Black.).

Clearly, the “my way or the highway” approach that Republicans passed off as a higher principle during their recent tenure evidenced an unsettling strain of Fascism, a la Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, et al. The problem is, too many folks in the Red tent still don’t see it for what it was. And this is where O’Brien could really help.

As a member of an American congress for “truth,” O’Brien could encourage her conservative cohorts to actively seek exactly that. If America is on the verge of being “overthrown,” it’s not happening at the hands of Muslim-Americans. It’s happening at the hands of the misguided conservatives and Republicans.

Muslim-Americans didn’t manipulate the conservative-leaning U. S. Supreme Court to abridge our electoral process. The Republicans did. And behind closed doors they’ll tell you the ends justified the means.

Muslim-Americans didn’t suspend habeas corpus, banish due process or trample over our 4th, 5th and 6th Ammendment rights. The Bush White House did, and it didn’t bother them one whit. As Bush himself put it, the U.S. Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper.”

Muslim-Americans didn’t push us into repeatedly violating our own laws against torture, much less Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Condi Rice did. And they’re still trying to justify it.

Muslim-Americans didn’t pat Big Oil or the Big 3 automakers on the back and say keep on cranking out those gas-guzzlers because the Carlisle Group goes on forever and the party never ends. Conservatives and Republicans did. And their unrepentant mantra is still “Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Muslim-Americans didn’t try to violate our separation between church and state, deny global warming, illegally wiretap our conversations, ban the teaching of evolution, vilify poor people, demonize gays, marginalize dissenting voices or deregulate our economy until it dove to lows we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. Republicans and conservatives accomplished these feats all the while dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ best.

If O’Brien is really an advocate of “truth,” I’d like her to think real hard and honestly answer the following question: If Muslim-Americans really wanted to overthrow or undermine the United States of America, is there any way they could possibly be as prolific in this task as conservatives, Republicans and Bush Administration were?

It was the sweltering summer of 2003. My friend Dan and I were exploring parts of Southeast Asia. The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic was winding down, but, in the last few months, a new strain had apparently emerged, characterized by fever, diarrhea, respiratory duress and a high fatality rate. Several folks in remote Cambodian villages had succumbed to the affliction, perishing in fits of coughing, choking and delirium. Locals were sacrificing pigs and chickens and standing up straw effigies near their hut doors to ward off menacing spirits. Dan and I were teasing the edges of a still unstable plague zone and we didn’t even know it.

In Thailand, SARS was never mentioned. We never even saw anyone in surgical masks. We didn’t realize it was still lingering in the region until we attempted to enter Cambodia. At the Poi Pet border crossing station, we flashed our passports and began the travel visa application process. We were the only visitors in the facility.

When we paid for our visas and exited the station, we were accosted by three machine gun-wielding representatives of the Cambodian military. In broken English, the shortest one explained that, due to the SARS outbreak, we would be required to submit to a supervised SARS quarantine. If we coughed or sneezed or exhibited any symptoms of pneumonic complication, we would be held pending further medical examination or turned away outright. Dan looked at me and shrugged.

The SARS quarantine staging area was simply twenty grimy, plastic lawn chairs tucked under a tarp at the rear of the station. We dropped our backpacks and grabbed chairs. The two silent machine gun-wielding soldiers monitored the process.

For the duration of the quarantine, Dan and I tried to remain solemn. A couple of times Dan began to betray the hint of a smile, but he wisely kept it under wraps. It’s exceedingly dangerous to scoff at, laugh about or appear amused by the crude customs or processes you encounter in the Third World. Especially when your immediate point of contact has an AK-47.

On the other side of the Cambodian border lay Typhoid, Hepatitis, Japanese Encephalitis, Malaria, AIDS, organ harvesters, human traffickers and the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims who lay slaughtered in the Killing Fields. It seemed ironic to me that the Cambodians could be worried about Dan and I bringing anything dangerous into their country. But we Yanks had secretly brought the Vietnam War there in late 60s and early 70s, and our bombing raids had probably killed as many Cambodians as the Khmer Rouge. We were lucky they even gave us travel visas.

When our twenty minutes were up and we had neither coughed nor sneezed or even cleared our throats, the shortest soldier returned and smiled. “Welcome to Cambodia,” he said. We loaded up our packs and crossed the border.

There was a 500-yard buffer zone between the border and the taxi station where an army of poor Cambodians had already begun to fight over who would transport us. Ahead and off to our right we saw a little girl in school uniform walking with a backpack over her shoulders. She was the only other person in the buffer zone.

She stopped suddenly and dropped her backpack. She unzipped the main compartment, removed a book, and then raised it over her head clutching one side with both hands. Then, swiftly, surely, she drove it toward the earth in a guillotine motion. When we edged closer to see what she was doing, she replaced the book in her backpack and picked up her victim with one hand. It was a 6-inch black scorpion. She placed it in her backpack and went on.

As Dan and I neared the taxi mob, the cacophony of broken English sales pitches became an unsettling din and the image of the girl holding up the scorpion gave me mild pause. The scorpion was a strange omen. Not the image I wanted to contemplate before I entered a nation still filled with millions of undetonated land mines, thousands of which would be lining both sides of the muddy red highway we would be taking to Siem Reap. One out of every 200 Cambodians was an amputee.

I still wanted to see the mysterious ruins of Angkor Wat, but there was a little less steam in my stride. Six-inch scorpions and six million land mines. SARS was the least of our worries.

“You know her and her parents will have that for dinner,” Dan said.

“Yeah,” I replied. And then the taxi throng was upon us.

It’s been a long road, but the most powerful moron in the history of the world has come full circle, and we got to watch the entire spectacle from a disenfranchised peanut gallery known as the middle class.

What’s funny about the whole fiasco is the vicious irony of it. When “W” originally ran for president, he went to great lengths to show us all he was a plain-spoken “regular guy.” And now, as his historic incompetence fritters away from the world stage, it is plain speaking regular guys and gals who are suffering the most. The country is polarized, demoralized, embarrassed and bitter and yet, even as Bush himself is the principal object of our glaring contempt, he still has the gall to laud his own hatchet job. “I have a great sense of accomplishment,” he says. “I am going home with my head held high.”

It makes you wonder what exactly it would take to make him bow his head in shame.

Would he have had to sit by while a major American city was destroyed by a hurricane and then, after the catastrophe, bungle the city’s recovery efforts? Would he have had to deceive millions of American families into sending their loved ones on fool’s errands for his buddies in Big Oil and his cronies in the military-industrial complex? Would he have had to turn hundreds if not thousands of American servicemen and women into war criminals by encouraging them to torture unarmed prisoners? Would he have had to bring this nation to its knees by leading it to the brink of financial disaster?

In my opinion, Bush’s greatest accomplishment was an unintended one. I suggest that he single-handedly demolished all credibility for the arguments perpetually set forth supporting the darling of conservative socio-political theory in this country, Social Darwinism.

For decades now, Republicans and conservatives—even though they hypocritically reject Darwin’s evolutionary theories of human origins—have wholeheartedly accepted and championed the idea that human beings should compete in a struggle for existence in which natural selection results in “survival of the fittest.” Particularly in the marketplace. They adamantly proclaim that government should not meddle with human competition by regulating the economy or addressing social problems, and they justify the imbalances and inequality created by such a system by suggesting that some folks are just better fit to survive and/or excel than others. Put simply, their contention is that, regardless of field, citizens who are better-suited for success will reap their just rewards and folks who are less or ill-suited for achievement will have to settle for less.

When Katrina demolished New Orleans, many conservatives said it was just full of a bunch of lazy, welfare cases anyway and now they’re just looking for another handout to rebuild government housing—which they weren’t paying to inhabit in the first place. This perspective clearly hampered Republican efforts to address the catastrophe and there were obvious signs that they were in no hurry to rebuild a community that allowed so many folks they considered unworthy to continue to live on the government dole.

When less financially secure young men and women, who joined the military for help with college, were forced to go and fight our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and had their tours extended or multiplied or were stop-lossed or denied post-traumatic stress discharges, many conservatives simply shrugged their shoulders and said “tough luck, nobody made them sign up,” ignoring the fact that most recruits sprang from struggling, lower class families that obviously saw a stint in the military as their only hope for a college education.

And when the middle and lower classes began to founder on the rocks of unemployment, meager pay and the credit crunch, conservatives said that’s just how the proverbial cookie crumbles, suggesting that it’s no accident that these folks occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. As conservative talk-radio host Bill Cunningham specifically phrased it, “people are poor in America… not because they lack money; they’re poor because they lack values, morals and ethics.”

The problem with these rationales and, in fact, most justifications of Social Darwinism, is that they recklessly presuppose that this dubious artifice correctly and fairly posits the superior representatives of a given profession at the top of the food chain and the inferior ones at the bottom. The greatest evidence of the inanity of this supposition is obviously their outgoing, beloved liege, George W. Bush.

The Bush administration was a model of kakistocracy or government by the least fit. He didn’t ascend to the highest office in the nation by being smarter, wiser or even jokingly adept at inspiring, much less leading people. After coasting along via all the breaks and benefits of nepotistic wealth and political clout, he simply had the right name and presented the most convincing disingenuousness to the largest number of dupes in the land. Instead of natural selection, we got imbecilic insurrection. Instead of survival of the fittest, we got the calculated, methodical revival of an untalented, ignorant twit.

Clearly, the dirty little secret behind conservatives’ existential pseudo-meritocracy is that after they rise to the upper echelons of their farcical system, they have no intention of maintaining a level playing field, much less competing fairly. They put their little Bushies in the best private schools, get them wartime military deferments, place them in the top sororities and fraternities, ensure them all the best contacts and networking opportunities (regardless of their actual talent), afford them get-out-of-jail-free passes, “cush” jobs, no bid contracts, etc., etc., etc.

The entire process creates a cycle of unearned entitlement that simply allows each new generation of Bushies to bask in their family’s good fortune and tap dance into more high, undeserved offices until the entire arrangement is lucratively feudal for them and futile for us.

I was forty miles from the mainland. We had disembarked on a company-sponsored, 3-day fishing trip on an 85-foot boat out of Bilouxi, Mississipi. Once the main vessel dropped anchor, we were provided smaller skiffs to fish out of. On the morning of October 23rd, I wound up on a skiff by myself and got caught out in weather. High waves and rain fouled the skiff’s engine and then started to fill the craft with water. I tried bailing but was unsuccessful. I tried to get the motor to fire back up, but it wouldn’t engage. Next thing I knew, I was flailing in the Gulf.

It was windy and cold. The sky was gray and rainy. I clung to the hull of the skiff as best I could. The white-capping 3-5 foot swells battered me constantly, and every time I attempted to set myself in an upright position to survey my surroundings, I was swept away by waves and had to swim back to the hull.

After five hours adrift, my situation worsened considerably. I had resigned myself to a long haul, maybe clinging to the precarious hull overnight or a couple of days at most. But accidental seawater ingestion began to take its toll. I experienced diarrhea and vomiting. I started to dehydrate. The cold wind and water got worse and I became hypothermic. I kept thinking I’d see land or drift into a shipping lane, but there was nothing but waves.

I had two moments of profound discovery.

The first was my realization of the ocean’s indifference. There I was, off the grid, nary a technological umbilical for miles. For the first time in many years, I was definitively expelled from the seemingly constant comfort zone that most of rely on to exist. I was alone and practically helpless, and the ocean didn’t care. I was mundane flotsam, pointless and probably temporary. Nature was oblivious.

I was too cold and desperate to get very philosophical but, suffice it to say, I subsequently realized that I’d forgotten a few things about life while I was toiling and compromising to make a living.

The second profound moment I had was a Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman) revelation. As I lay sprawled across the hull, clinging as best I could, it occurred to me that I was worth more dead than alive. If I let go and just drifted off, abandoned my breath, and embraced the cold Gulf, my family stood to collect more insurance money than I could possibly earn or save even if I worked for the rest of my life. And this was before our economic recession or hints of a depression.

One high seas nap and my children’s college education would be covered. Our cars and house could be paid off. By leaving myself behind, my wife and kids could get ahead.

For better or worse, dumb brute instinct kicked in and I survived. About eight hours into the ordeal, an HH-65C Dolphin rescue helicopter from the Coast Guard in New Orleans fished me out of the drink. The Coasties swaddled me in blankets and told me that in another hour or so and I might have drifted into the Louisiana marshes where I could have walked out of the Gulf—if I could avoid the alligators.

At the hospital, between intravenous hydration and warming cloaks, a doctor told me that if my core temperature had dropped another degree or two, my whole body would have seized up.

Now that I’m back home, everybody reminds me how lucky I was and I guess they’re right. But as I go over the resultant $7,000.00 hospital bill and $1,200.00 ambulance invoice and prepare to do battle with my insurance company, Willy’s idea still doesn’t seem so bad. The grass is always greener, even in a graveyard.

There was a time in this country when, if you worked hard, you could probably get ahead and afford things, and be secure. Healthcare wasn’t a bankruptcy, and dying wasn’t a viable option.

It seems a shame and a disgrace that if you have health insurance, it probably doesn’t cover much. And if you can afford life insurance, the best way to come out ahead on the investment is to die prematurely.

It’s almost funny. While you’re alive the insurance companies want you treated as little as possible until you’re dying. Then they want you to live long enough to no longer afford your life insurance.

It’s been two months since I was brought back ashore and I still second-guess my survival. I’m still adrift and swimming. We all are. And there doesn’t seem to be any land in sight.

It’s a stupendous claim that’s easy to dismiss, especially without careful consideration.

It’s controversial. It’s spiritually and biologically blasphemous. It cuts to the metaphysical quick.

It’s such an abrupt statement that it seems like an attack; but it’s not. It’s simply the ultimate reality check.

In the grand scheme of things, we may be specks of dust gravitationally attached to a spinning pebble that’s flying through the universe at approximately 16,000 mph, surrounded by billions of other speeding, spinning pebbles powdered with trillions of other specks of space dust. Cosmically speaking, everything we do may be futile.

Making matters worse, our smallish, brief existences are regimented by petty, slavish vocational requirements, ludicrous societal expectations and frivolous material wants. Instead of living, we are preoccupied with “making” a living. Instead of making sure we have what we need, we obsess over getting what we want. Instead of being ourselves, we resign ourselves to being who we’re expected be.

Clearly, ours is what Socrates condemned as the unexamined life—and our political, religious and economic institutions are ill-fated, designed to ensure that things stay that way. Camus simply pointed out the obvious.

Much of our existence is absurd. Too much of it runs contrariwise to our own innate wisdom and natural integrity. We are asked to accept and resign ourselves to travesties and incongruities that every cell of our being cries out against, but we ignore our internal unrest and assume our ignorance is simply a fundamental step towards growing up, gaining maturity and mustering prudence. The utter inanity of our surrender is what makes things absurd, and this absurdity is what begs Camus’ heretical question. It doesn’t matter if we despise his claim or resent the resultant query. Once the proposition of life or death is boiled down to a simple value judgment, we are compelled weigh in.

Obviously, most of us weigh in affirmatively, quickly finding ways to justify our lives. Many rationales may be shallow or contrived, but they’re safe and sustainable and they allow us to function as conventionally productive individuals.

On an individual level, then, our answer to Camus’ question is a resounding “Yes.” Life is worth living. We teach it, we preach it and we cling to it. We live our lives as if there’s more to us than meets the eye, as if there’s a reason we’re here, as if we have something to contribute. We affirm our lives every day, from the minute we get out of bed to the moment we fall asleep.

Unfortunately, even as we individually clamor to proclaim that life is worth living, we collectively indicate the opposite.

Collectively, we live self-destructively as if life is not worth living, much less preserving. We poison and pollute our natural habitat for the sake of mass production and steeper profit margins. We squander our natural resources to maintain cultures of indulgence and material extravagance. We base our politics on greed and brutishness. We base our economics on carbon-based fuels and war-mongering. We mortgage our future well-being for instant gratifications, short-term gains and perpetual modes of entertainment, leisure and general escapism.

Surely, if we collectively believed life was worth living, we’d be interested in conserving and protecting our natural resources for future generations. Surely, if we collectively believed life was worth living, we wouldn’t allow our political representatives to obstruct progress on climate talks, emissions reductions and renewable energy. Surely, if we collectively believed life was worth living, we’d be more committed to getting to the bottom of extraordinary renditions, outed CIA agents, destroyed interrogation tapes, nonexistent WMDs, Abu Graib, Guantanamo, Blackwater, etc.

Surely, if we collectively believed life was worth living, the ruling economic elite wouldn’t be permitted to reduce the middle and lower classes to Capitalism-sanctioned wage slaves. Surely, if we collectively believed life was worth living, we wouldn’t have a healthcare system based on exclusion instead of inclusion. Surely, if we believed life was worth living, purchasing power wouldn’t be prized over conscience and the dollar wouldn’t be mightier than the pen. Surely, if we collectively believed life was worth living, we wouldn’t live as though we were specks of dust with no hope of making a difference.

Surely, if we believed life was worth living, we’d live more deliberately, more accountably, more responsibly.

Surely, if we believed life was worth living, we’d live a life more worthwhile instead of living so selfishly, cynically and fatalistically.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t trust a biblical literalist, much less an admitted Creationist to arrange my children’s sock drawer, much less instruct, presume to choose who instructs or definitively decide what gets instructed to my children in a public school setting, much less a science classroom. And Mrs. Dunbar — a conservative zealot who is so thoroughly brainwashed that she (according to her own website) believes that her role on the Board of Education includes ferreting out nefarious “socialist” and “humanist” agendas — has absolutely no business proposing or voting on anyone’s intellectual future, let alone our children’s.

To date, a State Board of Education committee recommended a “change” in our public school curriculum that allows for an examination of the “strengths and limitations” of the theory of evolution in regards to the instruction of biology and science. This is simply the first step towards allowing Christian Creationist operatives to insert their mythology into public school curricula — it has nothing to do with real science or the instruction thereof. But for the sake of argument, let’s settle this once and for all.

It’s really simple. Like most scientific theories, evolution is based on and bolstered by the scientific method.

Formulate a question. Research and observe. Form a hypothesis. Perform an experiment. Collect and analyze data. Interpret data and draw conclusions. Reproduce and verify data. Publish your findings. The scientific method is universal and inviolate. Every serious branch of science has roots in it. Any conclusions arrived at by the scientific method are open to all takers. They can be tested, disputed, challenged and/or refuted if demonstrable, empirical evidence suggests a claim or theory is flawed or unsound.

The theory of evolution is the scientific heavyweight of explanations for humanity’s origins because it’s the most challenged, tested, supported and applied theory that anyone anywhere has ever come up with on the subject. Evolutionary principles are the foundation on which the studies of biology, botany, zoology, pathology, medicine, etc. are established. Without them, you, me and the esteemed members of our State Board of Education would still be having our blood drawn by leeches when we paid a visit to their local physician.

Creationist narratives for human evolution are based on faith instead of science and hold up only to adherents of said faith whom invariably claim their beliefs require no scientific evidence or demonstrable proofs. And there’s just one enormous, unavoidable problem with that: in any legitimate forum devoted to the origin of our species, the line for proponents of Creationist narratives starts at the back door and winds around the planet. Who decides who’s right?

The Bantu tribes of central Africa believe a god named Bumba regurgitated the sun, moon, stars, and human beings after a bad tummy-ache. The Scandinavian creation narrative maintains that humans descended from frost giants which emerged from the dripping underarm sweat of an evil ogre named Ymir. Persian Zoroastrians held that the first humans grew out of a rhubarb plant. The ancient Chinese believed that the goddess Numa shaped humans out of mud from the Yellow River because she was lonely. The Japanese creation narrative suggests that a goddess named Izanami and a god named Izanagi created the first Earthen land mass by stirring the ocean with a bejeweled spear until it curdled. Inuit Eskimos believe the world was formed by a raven.

It doesn’t matter to me if you and I are actually descended from vomit, sweaty armpits, rhubarbs, curdled ocean, mud or dust; until such claims can be reasonably traced, observed, tested and verified they do not constitute “science” and therefore do not belong in a “science” curriculum.

I have no problem with my kids being taught Creationist narratives because each one has its own cultural richness and contains clues to each people’s prehistoric, oral traditions. Its fascinating, profound stuff, but the tales themselves fall under the heading of anthropology, not science (or biology). And until these narratives can be scientifically validated, it should never be otherwise.

In the Christian creation narrative, after God reportedly created Adam, he is said to have explicitly instructed “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of Knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it: for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (italics mine).

Adam ate of this tree and did not die. God was wrong.

Regarding the eminence of evolution in our public schools, so are many of his current followers.

I have to admit that it had been awhile. At first, I didn’t think I would remember the all the words; but I made it through.

Unfortunately, while saying the pledge, I had a troubling revelation.

The pledge was an empty promise. It spoke of ideals and rights that America doesn’t represent. It affirmed lofty notions and high principles that we don’t even try to live up to.

The original Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. A Baptist minister and Christian Socialist, Bellamy had originally considered using the words “equality” and “fraternity” in the salute, but deemed them too controversial because so many factions in our “indivisible” nation opposed equal rights for women and African-Americans. And, though Bellamy was a minister, the early versions of the pledge were secular and did not include the words “under God.” The phrase mandating that we prostrate ourselves and our nation before a Judeo-Christian deity wasn’t introduced until June 14, 1954.

In its current form, the Pledge of Allegiance has been amended four times. It was originally composed with prevailing winds in mind and similarly revised along the way. As I recited the pledge on Veteran’s Day, it occurred to me that it’s time for another revision.

For starters, we don’t constitute one nation united under God any more than we comprise one nation united under a red, white and blue barber pole. Beyond that, the term “divisible” far more accurately describes us than its exalted counterpart “indivisible.” And all the “liberty and justice for all” malarkey—we shouldn’t even go there.

Saying the Pledge of Allegiance always sounds nice, but reality doesn’t rest in a cadence. It exists in our efforts to fulfill the ideals that the pledge affirms. If we’re not working towards the fruition of those noble goals, the pledge is meaningless. And if any of us are disqualified or denied his or her right to pursue those ideals, our meritorious oath is hollow.

Here in Texas, the ignoble 2005 “Marriage Amendment” to the state constitution, which forbade the recognition of same-sex couples and prohibited any branch of government from offering them relationship-based benefits, denied a viable, productive segment of our community the application to and enjoyment of some very basic tenets of “liberty” and “justice.” And the recent repeal of Proposition 8 in California was another glaring travesty. To grant our friends and neighbors a right and then take it away via mob rule clearly evidences the fact that we are perpetually “divisible,” especially in regards to sexual orientation.

Ultimately, our so-called ideals of “liberty” and “justice” and “indivisibility” are simply PR myths we like to trumpet and parade around about for the sake of appearances. When it comes to truly establishing and maintaining such aims, we fall woefully short.

But we could fix a lot of this mess by revising the last line of the pledge. If it read “one heterosexual nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all straight people,” it would obviously allow us to seem less counterfeit.

A gay family friend of mine serves in the U.S. Military. I often wonder how he feels risking his life, serving his country, knowing that his neighbors back home shun him–but doing his duty anyway.

Could there be any better way to demonstrate our appreciation for his service than granting him the same rights and privileges that all Americans are supposed to enjoy? Why should he be asked to fight for ideals that don’t apply to him? Why does he put his life on the line for a bunch of hypocrites?

The U.S. Military’s current policy on homosexuality is “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” If it isn’t brought up, the brass doesn’t have to address it.

Perhaps the same principle should be exercised regarding the pledge. It we don’t recite this flawed oath, then we don’t have to delude ourselves or lie to the victims of our charade.

A week ago, my 10-year-old daughter related the new joke going around her elementary school: What’s the difference between Obama and Simba? Simba is an African lion and Obama is a lyin’ African.

And the day after the election, in a high school lunch-line, a kid standing behind my 15-year-old son appeared to be sulking. A teenage girl asked him what was wrong. “There’s a Nigger in the White House now,” he said. “Yeah, I know,” the girl replied. “I don’t like him either.”

As a parent of mixed-race children, I obviously find the ignorance inherent in these sentiments offensive. But I am not upset with the children who parrot them. I’m unhappy with their parents.

Teenagers are not genetically predisposed to call African-Americans “niggers.“ That kind of prejudice starts at home. Ten-year-olds don’t independently question Barrack Obama’s integrity or sit up thinking of ways to mock half of his ethnicity. It’s something they get from mom or dad as he or she relates a joke from work. And young middle school students don’t instinctively suspect Obama is a Muslim or a terrorist; this kind of obtuseness starts at the parental level.

The “trickle-down” approach to economics may have been proven to be to a terrible blunder of late, but the moniker itself is solid. It’s simply misapplied.

Wealth doesn’t trickle down. Ignorance does.

If a child’s parents are members of the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation or are simply active, vocal racists, chances are that child will also pursue repugnant ideologies or discriminate against ethnic minorities. If a child’s father hangs out on street corners holding up signs that say “God Hates Fags,“ the chances of that child someday becoming a homophobic bumpkin who is afraid of gay marriage increase exponentially.

If mom and dad are shallow, xenophobic Neocons who mock anyone whom they’re instructed to feel threatened by or disagree with, little Timmy is much more inclined to mock or denigrate anyone he is instructed to feel threatened by or disagree with.

To an absurd, sinister degree, racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and insensitivity are passed down thru too many families in this country, from the grandparents to the parents and from the parents to the kids, like precious family heirlooms.

Hence, ignorance and cruelty continually dim our collective future by trickling down from generation to generation, miring us in an unsavory wealth of malevolence and woe.

I think the American poet Anne Sexton put it best when she wrote “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.”

If you’re so eat up with hate and fear that you can’t abide the skin color or free will or liberty of others because your fascist, close-minded daddy and/or mommy or “good” book told you so, fine. But keep it to yourself.

No offense, but the world would be a better place if the chains for which you are a part of are broken. And if you’ll stop stuffing your children like Thanksgiving turkeys with your paranoia and prejudices, they might grow up with minds of their own, figuring out things for themselves.

Trust me, as a fellow parent–for my kids and yours–life is too short for them to spend years trying to transcend what we’ve done to them.

It’s worth a try, right? Who knows? Unencumbered by our historical flaws and cultural failings, they might even be president someday.

McCain often refers to himself as a “change” candidate, but his convention and subsequent campaign are obviously fashioned after the unrepentant wiles of Bush’s “Boy Wonder,” Karl Rove. Instead of attacking Barack Obama on the issues or his record, the Neocon spin machine is snidely ridiculing his background and personal style. It’s clear they want to depict him as a suspicious, menacing “other” rather than a fellow American or another rational human being with different political beliefs. It is not their intent to constructively highlight policy differences or divergent political agendas. Their goal is to create fear and contempt in their constituents, so much so that it bleeds over into the ranks of undecided voters and the resultant hysteria transforms the political process into an ideological witch hunt.

Every time a presidential election cycle comes around these days, Republicans portray Democrats as godless, immoral and unpatriotic. Conservative blowhards like Rush Limbaugh disingenuously blast away at Democratic authenticity. Evangelical fear-mongers question and besmirch Democratic morality and motives. And propagandist scamps like Rove circulate fabricated dark secrets that hint at Democratic evils and general depravity (ask McCain; when he was running against Bush, the whispers concerned an illegitimate African-American love child in South Carolina). The result is a spurious, wholesale denigration of Democratic candidates that leaves a large percentage of the American populace believing that if they don’t vote Republican, God will abandon us, Satan will be nominated to the Supreme Court and Al Qaeda or Iran or Russia or China will be handed the proverbial keys to the kingdom.

In this same vein, the Republican convention clearly laid the groundwork for vilifying Barrack Obama, and, as I watched, I kept waiting for Jim Adkisson to take the stage.

Perhaps you don’t remember him.

Adkisson was the out-of-work, Tennessee truck-driver who recently decided “liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country.” On July 28th, he walked into his former church (which he also felt had gotten too liberal) and started shooting folks who were gathered there for a children’s musical. Two people were killed and six others were wounded. A longtime acquaintance later said Adkisson hated “blacks, gays and anyone different from him.”

I sincerely doubt Adkisson came to hate liberals (et al) all by his lonesome while he was driving the byways and back roads of the American hinterland. In fact, if you retrieved his keys and went by the Knoxville Police impound and started up his truck, I bet you’d find his radio is still tuned to a channel that features the vitriol of hateful conservative talk show hosts.

Adkisson was hardly a lone gunman. He clearly had folks like Limbaugh and Glen Beck and Karl Rove whispering in his ear. And if you listen, you can still hear them: Obama is different… Obama wants us to lose the war… Obama is the Antichrist… Obama called Sarah Palin a pig… Obama wants kindergarten kids to be taught sex education…

When you characterize your opponent(s) as depraved, treacherous, evil and perverse, he becomes an enemy instead of an opponent. He becomes dangerous and destructive instead of just disagreeable or dissident. This is the essence of Neocon politics. Once they convince their constituents that Democrats and liberals are diabolic and life, liberty and way-of life-threatening, it makes them easier to condemn, slander, sabotage, character-assassinate and ultimately—in Adkisson’s case—murder. It’s a Nazi tactic that Neocons ought be ashamed of, but they feel the ends (eight years of almost absolute, unaccountable power) justify the means.

Their entire modus operandi is based on the blatantly cynical supposition that the American public is perpetually irrational and the best way to get elected is to stoke our irrational fears and prejudices.

The bad news is it’s worked for at least two election cycles. The good news is the routine is starting to wear thin.

Eventually folks will get weary of the Neocons crying wolf, or Muslim or Antichrist. Let’s just hope it’s sooner rather than later.

He looked at me like I pulled a vacuous, parental crutch out of my ear rather than making an intelligent comment. And of course he was right.

First, wanting to do something or wear something or join in something that most of the other kids are doing, wearing or joining is not as dangerous or life-threatening as jumping off a bridge. Second, how many of us really want our kids to be different than the rest?

Don’t answer that question before really thinking about it. Let’s be honest. How many of us really want our kids to be different?

If you have even half-objectively surveyed the surrounding offices or cubicles at work lately you know the answer, but you don’t want to admit it. Go ahead. Tell the truth. How much upward mobility do nonconformists enjoy at your place of business? What’s their employment expectancy?

They don’t spend enough time yucking it up on the golf course or posing at Starbucks. They’re not reverent or obsequious enough to grovel or flatter their way into the big promotions. They don’t worry enough about vanquishing the next guy (or gal) much less screwing over the easy marks.

Make no mistake. Conformity is a control mechanism that keeps the United Corporations of America sputtering along, unhealthy of course, but productive enough to keep the shareholders comfy. We may not he headed in the right direction, but our lemming-esque locomotion is a marvel of multi-media-induced coordination, social engineering and perpetual, material-assuaged surrender.

We pay lots of lip service to daring to be different and not caring what other people think, but when it comes right down to it, we‘re despicable hypocrites. If we don’t look the right way and say the right things, the wretchedly superficial social circles we covet entry into are inevitably closed to us. If we don’t go along to get along, vocational success eludes our grasp. If we don’t parrot the proper patriotic slogans and dimly accept all those maliciously crafted and incessantly repeated talking points, we’re deemed suspicious or subversive and dismissed by the hapless majority who believe they’re in the know. Heck, if we didn’t vote for Bush a few years back, we were practically traitors.

This is the world we live in. “Jumping off a bridge” used to be considered aberrant behavior, but now it’s the norm. Metaphorically speaking, we jump off bridges every day, because it’s exactly what everyone else is doing, it’s what’s expected of us and we don’t have the courage to deviate from the norm.

If you don’t want your kids jumping off bridges like everyone else, lead by example. Stop agreeing when you disagree. Stop acquiescing when you’re right and they’re wrong. Stop cowering before corrupt or illegitimate powers. Stop trusting news sources that bank on you being an ignorant, manipulable cretin. Stop giving credence to dissenting “authorities” propped up by gainful factions with ulterior motives. Stop simply believing what you want to believe and spend some time discerning what’s believable. Stop preferring short-term gratification to long-term health and sustenance. And stop letting yourself off easy.

We achieved the current catalogue of impending dooms as a reckless species, a careless people and as irresponsible individuals. To thwart our societal plunge, the buck has to stop with you, every one you know and every one you ever knew. Everyone everywhere.

Conformity is the currency of dilapidation. It compromises every aspect of our politics, our lifestyles, our worship and our wellbeing. If, as Einstein put it, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” then conformity is at least a little psychotic if not outright insane.

Isn’t it time we acknowledged our psychosis and dealt with it?

Untuck your shirt. Defy instead of defer. Speak truth to panderers.

Until we stop jumping off bridges, our advice to our children is just effective reverse psychology. And the last thing we should be able to stomach is them ending up like us.

What’s suspicious about Obama’s response is that it trusts the American people to ponder those other factors. Obama could come right out and enumerate them, and John McCain and even General David Petraeus would have egg on their faces. The other factors are not a secret; they’re simply embarrassing because they expose the success of the surge to ridicule and pessimism.

I commend Obama for taking the high ground, but there’s not enough room for all of us in the thin air, and I think it’s time we spoke frankly about the Bush Administration’s most effective secret weapon.

All you need to know about the “surge” is that it should have been called the “splurge.” Sure, we sent 30,000 extra troops to Iraq, but during the first six months of the operation, violence went up, not down. As Retired Army Colonel Douglas McGregor put it, “Up until that point, the surge was simply providing more targets for the insurgents to shoot at.”

Under extreme pressure to produce results and fill less body bags, General Petraeus cut deals with armies of enemy combatants. These deals, now part of what is referred to as the Concerned Local Citizens program, simply pay insurgents to become temporary allies of the U. S. military. Approximately 70,000 former enemy combatants are now paid to play nice and all it costs us is $700,000 a day.

That’s right. For $255 million a year, 70,000 IED-planting, sniper-firing, roadside-booby-trapping insurgents will be our friends and the death toll will drop and we can pat ourselves on the back because the “surge” is working or at least paying off in better press.

Curiously, conservatives, Republicans and Neocons are notorious for their contempt and opposition towards hand-outs. As they strut around golf courses and hunting lodges, martinis in hand, they grandly extol the merits of pulling one’s self up by his or her own bootstraps. These days, however, they’re polishing the boots of our heretofore enemies in Iraq and giving them per diem hand-outs so we can look like we’re no longer fumbling over our own bootstraps.

Now I’m usually loath to get behind any conservative, Republican or Neocon ideas, but I like this one. It’s an excellent flip-flop. In fact, I recommend we apply it to more of our problems.

So far this year, our federal, state and local governments have spent $56 billion on the War on Drugs and arrested just over one million drug law offenders. That amounts to $56,000 per offender, not including long-term incarceration costs. Why not pay offenders to clean up and stand on the sidelines? A few years of college and a pimpin’ ride with 20’ titanium rims would cost less than fifty-six large. And our courtrooms would be less log-jammed and our prisons would be less overcrowded.

Instead of vilifying, chasing down and prosecuting illegal aliens, why not just pay them to stay home? Mexicans abroad sent $23 billion home in 2006 and even with the housing market slump and the American economy flailing, they’ll probably send at least $15 billion home this year. I say double their 2006 homeward remittances and start mailing checks to their residences in Mexico. It would be cheaper than trying to catch and prosecute them or station troops on our border or build border walls, right?

Each Iraqi insurgent we’re paying off will receive a $3,640 this year (plus bragging and thumbing-his-nose-at-the-U.S. rights). That’s six times more than each of us received in George W. Bush’s measly economic stimulus package. And it doesn’t even account for our higher cost of living expenses or inflation. I think we’re being ripped off.

We’re stateside “Concerned Local Citizens” and if President Bush and John McCain want us to keep voting Republican, pledging allegiance to Exxon Mobile and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and condemning homosexuality and comparing Obama with Nazis, they better ante up.

Lots of folks in this country say that money is what makes the world go round. The Bush Administration is clearly proof of that, but they’re thinking too small. It’s time to spread the wealth. If we’re gonna pretend to be happy and sit idly by while they continue to screw everything up, the least they could do is compensate us accordingly.

It’s the smart play. And it’ll make their war against us go much more smoothly.

He and his girlfriend bought helium tanks and forty-five weather balloons. They attached the balloons to a patio chair and filled them with helium. He packed a CB radio, sandwiches, drinks, a camera, a parachute and a pellet gun (which he intended to use to lower himself by shooting the balloons one-by-one). He expected to ascend to 100 feet and fly a little piece of the sky before coming down.

When Walters launched his lawn chair on July 2, 1982, the makeshift craft wildly exceeded expectations. Within seconds he was a UFO hovering at height of 16,000 feet. From his home in San Pedro, California he drifted several miles into controlled airspace near Long Beach Airport. He used his CB to alert air traffic controllers.

After forty-five minutes aloft, Walters began shooting the balloons and descending slowly. Near the ground, his dangling balloon cables got caught in a power line and caused a 20-minute blackout in the area. When he touched down, he was immediately arrested by Long Beach police officers and a regional FAA Safety Inspector was reported to have said “We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed.”

When a reporter asked Walters why he did it, he said “A man can’t just sit around.”

Whenever I feel aggrieved by “standard operating procedures” or the typical pencil-neck rigamarole, I fondly recall Walters’ feat.

Was it prudent or practical? Definitely not.

Was it ill-advised? Perhaps.

But that’s the genius of it.

I’m tired of being consistent and reliable. I’m sick of being steady, solid and stable—i.e., predictable, sedimentary and dull. Half the time I don’t recognize myself. I’m hardly sentient. I travel hither and thither vaguely aware and vaguely interested, like a doomed automaton, and I know it wasn’t always so.

What kind of life is it that we’ve built for ourselves that metaphysical inaction maintains a prominent role in our daily go of it? Is a culture that virtually commands we surrender to conformity, conservatism and cowering worth preserving? What happened to us?

Our better-adjusted friends and relatives will dismissively say we just “grew” up. But is that what it’s really all about?

Over the last couple of decades, one of my dad’s friends has repeatedly imparted an adage regarding this issue. He says if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart; but if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.

I resent it every time I hear it. He states it like an unapproachable truism. I think it’s a ridiculous cop-out.

If I’m not officially old, I’m on the cusp of being old and it seems to me that middle age and Golden-Year conservatism is not the product of brain presence (or prowess). No offense, but I think it’s the result of stagnation, habit-clinging and general disengagement.

Obviously, most young people have more energy, resilience and gumption than we thirty- and forty-somethings. But that’s no excuse. They’re less informed and less experienced. We don’t abandon progressive movements and liberal principles because conservative ideology makes more sense to us. Our better angels simply run out of steam.

We give up on youth and youthful visions because we become complacent and lazy. We’re bought off through our own indulgences and brought down by our own resignation. Then, instead of being critical of ourselves, we become critics of who we were, attempting to rationalize and justify what we’ve become.

Larry Walters didn’t give up so easy. Instead of sitting around and settling in for the long, cozy mediocrity that awaits most of us, he reached for something radical and way-out. This is what’s missing from the American Dream today. Even if we secure the means or possess the wherewithal to do something special or heroic or inspiring, we almost invariably fritter it away on paths or projects of less resistance and more traditional scale.

Electing a black man to the highest political office in the galaxy is a fine start, but we all have a long way to go. And it doesn’t take much to put us on the right track. It’s simply a matter of building something or planting something or stepping forward or refusing to step back or speaking out or taking a chance.

Where we’re at isn’t all there is; it’s just what we’ve brought ourselves to. It could change overnight if we improvised and stopped sitting around.

He attacked Genovese on the sidewalk, stabbing her repeatedly. She screamed “Oh my God! He stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”

A neighbor turned on his exterior lights and shouted at Mosley, and Mosley fled. But when hey saw no help was coming, he returned.

Genovese had made it to someone’s doorstep, but Mosley caught her and stabbed her again. Genovese screamed she was dying and neighborhood lights came on again, forcing Mosley to flee once more.

By 3:25 AM, Genovese had made it to the rear of her apartment building and entered through an unlocked door. Once inside, she collapsed. Mosely followed her in and found her unconscious. He raped her, took her money and stabbed her one final time.

At 3:50 AM, Karl Ross, one of the thirty-seven witnesses to Genovese’s attack and murder, finally called 911. When the police arrived, Genovese was already dead. When asked why he waited so long to report the crime, Ross said “I didn’t want to get involved.”

On June 4, 2008, Angel Arce Torres was struck by a hit-and-run driver and thrown down in the middle of a busy Hartford, Connecticut street. Pedestrian witnesses and onlookers simply gawked and walked on. One driver paused briefly and drove off. A man on a scooter circled the victim and then zipped away. Finally, a police cruiser, responding to an unrelated call, spotted Torres in the street and stopped to help.

Bryant Hayre, a witness to the incident, said he didn’t feel comfortable with helping Angel Torres because he was uncounscious and bleeding. Torres’ hit-and-run assailant has yet to be apprehended. Doctors say he will never return home from the hospital because he can’t breathe without a respirator.

It’s easy to condemn the witnesses who were slow to respond to Kitty Genovese’s attack. And we’re all disgusted with the callousness of the passersby who left Angel Torres lying in the street. Fellow human beings were in distress and folks like Ross and Hayre couldn’t be bothered. Crimes were committed under their noses and their responses were odious.

It’s easy to feel indignant and cast aspersions at Ross and Hayre; they’re easy targets. But while we publicly stone conspicuous perpetrators of indifference and dereliction, the bulk of the guilty escape without notice.

At this exact moment in our planet’s history, the most diabolical crimes against nature and humanity are being methodically committed at a horrifying rate and we couldn’t care less. We “don’t want to get involved” or “don’t feel comfortable” making a stand.

The shameful, willful destruction of our ecosystems and the contamination of our oceans, our air, our atmosphere, our soils, our forests and our water sources are being carried out at this very instant. The polar ice caps are almost history. Coral reefs are dying. Plant life is retreating uphill. Animal life is being sequestered and extinguished. Storm systems are growing in force and frequency. Lands are being decimated by drought and pestilence. And we—key witnesses to these cataclysmic events—are oblivious. All we’re concerned about is the price of gas.

Every day we haplessly feed the hand that bites us. Instead of dropping bombs on desert zealots in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be demolishing coal-fired power plants and oil refineries. Instead of fighting a war on drugs, we should be fighting against greed and capitalism run amok. Instead of building border walls, we should be building green coalitions, neighborhood agricultural co-ops and affordable solar energy applications. Instead of allowing big oil and gas conglomerates to reap obscene profits, we should be garnishing their revenues to redress past environmental misdeeds and fund ocean “dead zone” reclamations, safe renewable energy campaigns and wide-scale wildlife conservation.

The signs of criminal environmental calamities are all around us, but apathy, ignorance and complacence keep us actively inert, perpetually heedless and chronically unbothered by our role in the devastation.

In this regard are we any better than Ross or Hayre?

In the end, weren’t they both accomplices? In the grand scheme of things, aren’t we?

It’s only June and the Vatican has had a busy year. On March 10th, it added seven additional deadly sins to the original seven. To the list of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, we are now expected to avoid pollution, genetic engineering, obscene riches, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and social injustice.

On May 13, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit Director of the Vatican Observatory, said that rejecting the possibility of life on other planets would essentially put limits on God’s creativity. And on May 30, the Vatican drew a line in the sand regarding gender and the Catholic priesthood. Apparently a woman can be a president or a prime minister, but not a priest or pope. Any woman attempting to do so will be excommunicated.

Is it just me, or is the agenda of His new Holiness characterized by some serious holey-ness?

Making pollution a deadly sin is a fine idea, but environmentalists have long argued that deforestation, air pollution, global warming and tainted water supplies are all symptoms of overpopulation. Last time I checked, the Catholic Church frowned on birth control and, as previously noted, declared abortion a deadly sin. Obviously, then, the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control contributes to pollution. But it also fosters social injustice. The more scarce land and natural resources become, the more simple, decent and underrepresented folks (i.e., indigenous groups) are marginalized and disenfranchised. No one knows this better than the Vatican; Catholics demonstrated such tactics again and again in their conquest of Central and South America.

Making obscene wealth a deadly sin is curious because “greed” already capably designates this vein of immorality. The Vatican’s intent wasn’t to create a double-whammy. It obviously wanted to wink at capitalism by creating precedents of “good” greed and “bad” greed. Making “greed in moderation” permissible allows the church to finally expand Matthew’s (Matthew 19:12) problematic needle eye enough for camels and wealthy folks to squeeze through en route to heaven. This watering down of the Word is obviously great news for the “haves” and the “have-mores,” but it highlights one of the glaring paradoxes of Catholicism. How can the Supreme Pontiff preach against obscene wealth when the church itself is obscenely wealthy?

Research suggests that the Vatican is a larger landowner than any organization or government in the world with visible title to over $300 billion of property (churches, schools, hospitals, etc.) and around $3 trillion in investments concealed by hundreds of complex networks controlling thousands of trusts and front companies. Surely, any serious Christian would have better luck finding the Ark of the Covenant than getting the Catholic Church to release its financial records, so does the Vatican have any business formally listing much less addressing obscene wealth as a deadly transgression?

Making pedophilia a deadly sin is a good idea, but isn’t the Catholic Church’s condemnation of pedophilia akin to the Bush Administration’s renunciation of torture? Does anyone really believe either will ever completely extricate themselves from past modus operandi?

As far as God’s creativity goes, if ET isn’t an unnatural creation that threatens the moral and philosophical pillars of the church, then neither is Ellen DeGeneres, Boy George or Richard Simmons. The most awe-inspiring expanse in the entire Vatican City is the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel where a homosexual named Michelangelo created his greatest masterpiece, The Last Judgment. How could centuries of priests and popes worship and pray in this transcendent space and still continue to reserve the divine spark of God for heterosexuals, relegating homosexuals to sub-humanity and social exile?

And how is it that the Vatican sees fit to threaten female candidates to the priesthood with excommunication when the Catholic Church has for decades harbored and, in many cases, protected pedophiles within their ranks of which very few (if any) were ever excommunicated for their sins—sins which the church now deems deadly? Why are women considered such a threat? Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II after her death. How is it that women can be candidates for sainthood but not priesthood?

As long as the leadership of the Catholic Church is rabidly patriarchal, the acknowledged lay small-mindedly heterosexual and the Vatican’s commitment to its own tenets pitifully lax, Catholics should be fearful of judgment, not hypocritically passing it.

Besides being completely unsuspecting, Heston was also obviously slowed by advanced age and diminished wit. Moore posed as a NRA aficionado and then confronted him asininely, injudiciously exploiting his waning capacity for philosophical discourse.

Trapped and unable to defend himself, Heston patted Moore’s shoulder and trudged pitifully away. Moore may have scored some zingers for gun control, but he also came off looking like a discourteous bully.

I know that as a septuagenarian, Heston was a yahoo who haughtily claimed that firearm control proponents would have to pry his guns from his cold dead hands. And I realize he obtusely stumped for global warming contrarians. In his old age, he may often have been on the wrong side of things. But he deserved better than Moore’s attack to be the last thing we remember of him on the big screen.

In the final measure of things, Heston was not just a simple conservative. His deeds and works spoke otherwise and, perhaps more than even he himself even realized, he could be inspiringly progressive.

For the “I Like Ike” generation, Heston was Moses, Ben-Hur and El Cid. Giants of historical legend and social tradition. He visually codified conventional courage, greatness and nobility. But (though many of his obituaries failed to mention it) there was a whole other side to his career. My generation recognized Heston in all his classical icon roles, but what he inspired us most with was his equally formidable 1970s sci-fi anti-hero legacy.

In perhaps the greatest and most evocative individual trifecta of radicalism in motion picture history, Heston challenged us politically, racially and environmentally. In 1968, he played Astronaut Taylor in Planet of the Apes. The movie began with his Hamlet-like monologue: “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glory of paradox—who sent me to the stars—still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor’s children starving?” His answer comes at the end of the film perhaps as astoundingly and memorably as any film sequence ever recorded. Riding on horseback away from the “Planet of the Apes,” Astronaut Taylor finds the Statue of Liberty shorn from its base, its torso half-buried on a beach. “Oh my god,” he says. “We finally really did it.” It’s a stark warning, an omen and a terrifying prophecy.

In 1971, Heston played Robert Neville, the last man on earth in Omega Man. The film warns of the dangers of biological and nuclear war, but the most subversive aspect of the narrative is Neville’s interracial relationship with the only adult female survivor, Lisa, a tough-talking a black woman played by Rosalind Cash (who he hand-picked for the role). In a year that saw race riots in Brooklyn, a Black Panther attack of a police station in San Francisco, racially-motivated murders in Mississipi and racially-motivated firebombings in North Carolina, watching Hollywood’s iconographic representation of Moses, Ben-Hur and El Cid become smitten with, kiss and eventually make love to a black woman was radical and unsettling.

Though the first glimpse that many men of the era had of a naked woman may been from tribal Africa spreads in National Geographic, to see a black woman nude, afro-ed and black-sploitation statuesque on the same screen with God’s right-hand man was a shock for whites and blacks alike. And though it may not seem like a big deal now, few Tinseltown A-listers would have taken such a role at the time.

In 1973, Heston followed up with a stark portrayal of a NYC detective named Robert Thorn in Soylent Green. The world was portrayed as a post-apocalyptic dystopia where women are referred to as “furniture,” people are starving in the streets and the political-industrial complex sponsors voluntary suicide. Thorn inadvertently discovers that the new, life-sustaining “miracle food of high energy plankton, gathered from the oceans of the world” is actually dead humans harvested from state-sanctioned suicide facilities, then recycled and processed into “Soylent Green”–an endlessly renewable food source. The final scene, though perhaps less visually astonishing as that of Planet of the Apes, is equally chilling, ominous and prescient.

For many Gen Xers, Heston put science fiction, social accountability, environmentalism and racial diversity on the map. Our formative years were filled with premieres and matinees of his sci-fi staples because we only had four or five TV channels watch and movies like Planet of the Apes, Omega Man and Soylent Green played over and over again.

Heston was a towering figure, whose very stature legitimized new political stances and cultural concerns. Even in 1990, when he stood up on Saturday Night Live and personally read a 1978 letter he wrote berating the show for being repulsive, “violent, gut-churning nausea,” he had so much profound screen “cred” I couldn’t help but respect his opinion even though I wildly disagreed with him. He’d done too much to shape my perspective on humanity and our prospects for the future.

Sure, I ignored Heston’s conservative activism for the last decade or so, but he was never far from my mind. The characters he played and the movies he was in introduced haunting implications. He was more rich and complex than the turns he took in his declining years; even as his political stances became sedimentary and outdated, his sci-fi legacy remained as relevant as ever.

Now, as oil prices fly through the roof and we still wage war against our brothers, deprive our neighbor’s children of food and stand idly by while genocides are still conducted in different places around the globe, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll really finally do it. As dead zones increase in our oceans and bees disappear from our food chain, I wonder when we’ll be forced to develop our own Soylent Green and what ingredients it’ll be comprised of. As thousands of animal and plant species disappear each passing decade and the earth’s ice caps melt and the holes in the ozone grow I think of Edgar G. Robinson’s character’s ongoing claim to Heston’s Thorn in Soylent Green: “There was a world once,” he says. “I was there. I can prove it.”

And I am harked back to Rosalind Cash’s shrugging observation to Heston in Omega Man: “Sorry the world didn’t make it.”

Will their words be my words as a grandparent or great-grandparent?

In the 1950s, Heston affirmed our beliefs by bolstering them with a face for our classical heroes. In the 1970s, he challenged us with new expressions and a new kind of hero, inspiring a whole generation to strive towards reform and circumvent our approaching perils.

Flaws and all, Heston was legend and he remains a cultural force we’d be remiss to forget or ever ignore.