A man after my own heart

"All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half."

–H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Breathing Space", The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1924 Aug 4. Reprinted in A Carnival of Buncombe.

Cynicism

Do you know how discouraging it is to find so many, most, adults looking at the world through more narrow, cynical, small-minded lenses?

It's overwhelmingly discouraging.

Cynicism is disappointment with a reality that doesn't live up to our higher expectations.

But sadder than that original disappointment is our complicity and more helpless and hopeless hanging onto that cynicism as a function of a world that doesn't always live up to our expectations, and, even more sadly, is generally created by our own cynicism.

Psychologists call it self-fulfilling prophecy.

I just call it damned foolishness.

Either way, the world is a shitty mess for it all.

Thank goodness for country music:).

Love,
Ben

On being right

Gates in Baghdad defends war assessments

I am becoming convinced reading Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's comments in this A.P. article that if 5 million Iraqis had to die so that liberals in the West could be right that there is no hope in Iraq, then they would be just fine with that. I know liberals want to save Iraqi and American lives just like everyone else. But I have to say that the persistent cynicism parading as "being in touch with reality" is getting wearisome when it means perpetually betting against an effort that is a noble one - helping Iraqis and their goverment to secure a democratic path forward -if we wouldn't constantly be trying to prove just how dumb George Bush is and just how smart all the rest of us are.

Personally, I don't care about being right about something like this that much. I'd rather be wrong and have this thing work out.

But I guess it's just Pollyanna to hope for anything to be successful, these days, isn't it? Unless it happens under a Democratic President and Congress, I suppose.

You got to hand it to Democrats, don't you. All they think about is the Iraqis.

Why is it so easy for us to constantly argue and defend for why we're right about everything and so hard for us to pull together to root for a decent cause even if we have disagreements about how it got started?

Are the days of an America that can come together around common goals behind us? Are the days of America even having common goals, so lost are we in our persistent snarking about which one of us or which group or which ideology has all the answers, something that we can't imagine happening without something as horrible as Adolph Hitler or Japanese Imperialism threatening our homeland?

And if that's the case, who would want to be right about that? Who would want to be right that no decent cause can ever be achieved unless people of your own ideological umbrella make the call? Who would want to be so blind as to put ideology or any group affiliation above doing the decent thing?

I wouldn't want to be right that badly.

How sad for us that so many of us do.

Love,
Ben