a long post, but keep with me...
at phil's request:
so it was my birthday last friday (the 28th of jan.). hurray. obviously i didn't care that much about it. heh. just kind of hung out with some people and then went to lunch with my parents the following day. twas fun, though nothing i wouldn't normally do. heh. don't worry about getting me a belated b-day gift or anything... unless you're a girl... who's attractive... and wants to give me something 'special'... something that wouldn't cost you any money at all... something that would make me very happy... something that we both could enjoy a great deal...
...yeah, something like a flower you pick from your neighbor's yard. see, doesn't cost a thing go give a great gift!
i think i've contracted some type of really rare disease or something; i can't seem to stop sleeping these days. i'm not staying up any later than normal, but i'm having a very hard time getting up in the morning. i always wake up hours later than i mean to (though i mean to wake up hours before class, so i still make my lectures. luckily). it's getting very agrivating though. the other day i had a human genetics test. i wanted to get up a little early and do some last minute reviewing before it, but i didn't wake up until 12 minutes before it started. needless to say, i made great haste over to the greene building. took the test and i think i did decently, but still: sucks. i guess i need to start going to sleep ealier, so that when i oversleep i'll technically get up on time. oh well... there goes my fun.
an invitation:
like it says in my profile at the moment, i'd like to try to camp out for NIN tickets for trent's upcoming tour. if want to join me in this endeavor, feel free. dunno where or when yet (as the dates for his stops around this area have not been posted yet). anyway, just give me a heads up.
so, uh, i just watched the state of the union adress. (i stopped blogging to go watch it and now i'm finishing) i think i'll just talk about some of the highlights. i'm just approximating the quotes here, so don't take them as written in stone, but i wrote them down as best i could while watching.
"The United States has no right to impose its form of government upon other peoples of the world."
uh, mr. president... there's something i need to tell you about what your administration has been doing. it might surprising, i know, but i feel that you must know...
"The force of human freedom will overcome the problems of blah blah blah..."
first off: what the hell does that even mean? seriously, the "force of human freedom." what IS that?
secondly: even if that made sense it still doesn't really
mean anything. i understand the need for meaningless, patriotic bullshit in a speech and all... but seriously, that was used in the "real" portion of his address.
thirdly: that phrase just bugs the hell out of me.
"The most important freedom (or maybe he said 'thing') that we can pass on to future generations is the freedom from fear."
the MOST important thing eh? reallllllly? hmmm... i dunno, but i think I and perhaps a few other (intelligent) people may have something to say about that. too bad those intelligent people are the minority in this country. i literally gasped when i heard this. it's like an open invitation to strip REAL rights away in order to provide for the 'safety' of the nation. BULLSHIT i say. how about
freedom of speech? hmmm, i think we might need to work on that one a little more than the uh, freedom from fear which i believe is gauranteed in the 1 and a half-th amendment. or maybe i just made that up. i've seen many polls in which the majority of responders declared that it was a-ok with them if they lost a little freedom for a little more security. that scares me. they say we're fighting the terrorists but, my friend, if that is truly the case for the majority of america... well then the terrorists have already won. hardcore style.
just think about that phrase and the orwellian implications it carries... "freedom from fear"... makes you wanna cry doesn't it?
that's about it for pseudo-quotes, but another thing that came to my attention during the course of the address: the word freedom doesn't actually have a meaning anymore. it's just a buzz word for the administration. nearly every point the president made used the word freedom, often in a very awkward way. freedom no longer means freedom, it means something else. i'm not sure what that something else is, but it frightens me...
bush also re-confirmed his commitment to a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
god damn, he is one COMPASSIONATE conservative, just like he always told us he was... (but that's a different rant...) anyway, this is bullshit. i don't care if you don't believe in gay marriage or not, that's not the issue at stake here. the issue is what exactly he is going to do about gay marriage. bush, at many points in his speech, talked about freedom and equal protection for all, regardless of race or background. apparently sexual orientation doesn't count. they'll burn in hell anyway right? at least that's what bush seems to imply. even then though, bush's hypocrisy isn't fully the point.
YOU CAN'T CREATE A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT THAT LIMITS THE RIGHTS OF THE CITIZENRY AND ACTUALLY GOES SO FAR AS TO CREATE A SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN. to do so is to spit on the constitution and all it stands for. then tear it up. then burn it. then urinate on the ashes. there has only been one other freedom-limiting amendment to the constitution in u.s. history: prohibition... and we all know how well that worked out. if, in the "dictionary" of america one type of person is literally defined as less of a person with fewer rights than others then there will truly be a second-class citizen in this country. a citizen who is looked down upon by the rest of the country. a citizen who is viewed as inherently bad by not just his fellow citizens, but by the official governing body of the nation.
now, i would hope... i would hope and i would pray to god that you, person who is reading this, regardless of whether your best friend is gay or you wish that all homosexuals would drop off of the face of the planet, can recognize that all of this is fundamentally bad. if your religious ideals tell you to ostracize homosexual people, well then just leave it at that. let god sort it out, it's not our place to condemn people to hell, whether in the afterlife, or here on earth. if you say you truly believe in freedom (whatever that means...) you have to recognize that keeping one group of people down is wrong. although the analogy is extreme and al lipscomb got in some trouble for a similar comparison, i will say this: i remember a country that set aside a group of its citizenry and officially declared them to be less human than the rest of their people. those second class citizens: jews. that country i'm referencing: nazi germany. while our situation isn't nearly as bad, the same principles still apply. it just can't be done.
also, for the record, and since i am discussing the topic, i'm cool with gay people. they don't bother me one bit. but once again, that's not really what i was talking about.
anyway... that's about all the ranting i can do in this post, though i have more to rant about...
sometimes i think about getting into politics to try to fix a little of this shit. then i remember that i don't want to. oh well... so much for achieving a utopia in our time...
