A Hunting I Will Go....

There is a certain amount of inner peace that comes with ignoring the world around you. Truth be told, given the state of the world, it’s easy to allow one’s pessimism to override any desire to raise a ruckus.

We live in a country which while supposedly at war, doesn’t seem to understand that we are actually at war. Unless you count Paris Hilton’s latest skankery being bumped from the first five minutes of the newscast in favor of conflicting accounts of who is winning the war, the only people making sacrifices are the soldiers fighting the war and their families.

We’ve been spared, by our leadership most glaringly, and by ourselves most disappointingly, from having made any serious sacrifices. Sure, you might have decided to forego work for a day to protest, but it hardly compares to donating silk undergarments to be made into parachutes.

Mind you, we’ve also abdicated responsibility for the aftereffects of the war. The Republican leadership who sent our best and brightest in harm’s way has failed them miserably on their return to stateside, beaten and battered.

The Democrats and their ilk have used their supposed support for the troops as political leverage to stop the war, ignoring as they are like to do, any responsibility to fix the problem which their repeated claims of support have laid at their feet.

And most of you? Well, so far as I can tell, most of you, including me, have expressed a little outrage, then gone back to watching Simon Cowell rip on people who at least had the courage to follow some glimmer of hope.

As horribly disastrous as the preceding is, it only scratches the surface.

The country is in a slide towards the bloat of overfed and intrusive government, something we will pay for, dearly. Scary not just because we are abdicating our freedom and individuality to the machine (poorly built and self perpetuating as it is), but also because the federal government has proven itself incompetent, if not mildly retarded, in its handling of matters from healthcare, to taxes, to immigration.

New Orleans bears the scars of bureaucratic and federal incompetence, and even when the states have decided to assert a measure of constitutional independence, the federal govt. simply ignores it.

Meanwhile instead of focusing on the war on terror, domestic threats such as MS-13, Earth First, or transnational crime cartels, our Justice Department is devoting more and more resources to obscenity, because a few gang bangs are much more dangerous than a few gang bangers.

The victim-classes demand our system take intent into account when punishing people for crimes against said special interest groups, yet routinely ignores intent when someone says something deemed unacceptable.

There is also the War on Drugs. How is that war going, you ask? Well, in Seattle’s Pioneer Square anything you want is available from any of the numerous denizens of the city’s streets and alleyways. It’s easier to get an eightball in downtown Seattle than it is a decent parking spot on Friday night. I wouldn’t say we’re losing the war on drugs, lest Sean Hannity claim I’m a traitorous hippie who wants children to do drugs (just like Scott Pollard), but we are going to find some euphemism for “failing consistently and spectacularly over an extended period of time.”

All of which is not to say I would want to be anywhere else in the world right now, except perhaps Vanuatu, mai tai in hand, island girl in a grass skirt gently swaying in time with the gentle strains of a ukulele. No, the United States despite its problems, still beats pretty much everywhere else in the world.

The Venezuelans, under the direction of El Comandante, or some other appropriately douchebag-ish, pseudo-revolutionary title, are slowly backsliding into socialism. Way to go Hugo, I’m glad somebody has the nerve to remind the rest of the world what a miserable failure state-sponsored wealth redistribution is. Your peoples’ sacrifice is for a good cause.

The French are busy trying to avert more riots, the likes of which we saw last year when all the socialist tripe in the country proved to do not much else for the poor except piss them off.

Mexico still has the chance of becoming the world’s first wholly co-opted narco-state, where the drug gangs are at least as powerful as the people trying to stop them.

The middle east is, well, the Middle East. Millenia of ethnic, religious and otherwise unremarkable stupidity continue to drive everybody in the region to massive amounts of violence with little regard for the consequences.

What’s left of eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics are now half crook, half govt., if not entirely crook in some places. Mother Russia is now so dangerous, she doesn’t mind publicly and provocatively killing anybody who pisses her off as a warning to the rest.

Oh, and the Janjaweed are still murdering, raping and maiming thousands of people in Sudan.

And that’s just the stuff I came up with without trying.

Given all of that, it would be it would be perfectly understandable to mumble “F&%k it,” and go back to arguing about whether CSI: Paducah is one too many.

The world is a nasty place, and most of you seem to be making it worse. What follows in the months and years to come is my attempt to fix a little piece of it. Even if it makes my head hurt.