LEAVE IT TO PEEVER

The law of diminishing humanity

— Bumper sticker of the week: Things to do today: Shave head, get tattoo, pierce nipples.

— Quotes of the week: A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.” Edward Abbey

“I bet, after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him father.” Will Rogers

— It’s bad, when you have to think about being a revolutionary in order to be a decent person.

—The killer in me is the killer in you: Violence is in all of us. We all carry a dark side. When we are engaged in war, it is all of us that are responsible, not just the chosen few. With each death, humanity becomes less than what it could have been. When we take an eye for an eye, we move away from the common-good, towards the common-bad. And before long, we accept the common-bad as okay, or something we can settle for. This is the law of diminishing humanity. We all take part in it. We are all responsible for it. We sit back and watch.

— “The history books say, ‘This great man gave us these rights.’ But if you look at what actually happened, the rights were won from below, and the ‘great man’ was dragged kicking and screaming into signing something.” Noam Chomsky

— Good luck is more than wishful thinking: I’ve heard people refer to wishing someone good luck as promoting the devil’s work. I assume a Baptist minister somewhere thought up this line of stupidity. I’ve spent some time with the Huichol Indians of Mexico. The Huichols are estimated to have been around for some 5,000 years. They wish each other good luck, which translates, “Have a good life. I hope things go well for you.” And, by the way, they have been noted to chase Baptist missionaries away.

— Why did Pella go to Macomb rather than Galesburg? Not one city councilman, or the mayor, will ask GREEDA that question. That’s one of our problems.

— If Bush wants to be known as anything other than a fool after his eight years of being President, here are some things he should get busy with:

1. Remove the salary limit for contributions to social security and eliminate, or lower, the payments to people with a high net worth. These two things alone would fix social security.

2. Set a time-table for getting us out of Iraq.

3. Adopt an energy policy that throws everything we got at ending our dependency on oil. Building more refineries and drilling for oil in the Arctic are not the answers. Those things become additional problems, not answers.

4. Get off of the “fear factor” and onto the “hope factor.”

5. Let religion alone. God can handle things without your help.

6. Let a woman’s right to choose alone.

7. Throw everything we got at education. Other countries are killing us. Our superiority in innovation, engineering, math, the sciences, will soon be gone. People are already going to India for medical care.

8. Endorse a universal health-care system.

9. Quit trying to dismantle the New Deal. We need a new, New Deal.

10. Dump Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Rice, Greenspan. These people are keeping you from becoming the human being we all swear you are.

— Speaking of Wal-Mart: We should all support a Costco Wholesale coming to town. They pay better and cover more of their employees with health insurance. Costco’s prices are a little higher, making them less popular. It is left to the consumer, do you want the lowest possible price, or do you want people in the community getting a better wage and decent benefits? It’s up to us. I say GREEDA should be courting Costco.

— I still can’t believe that George W. Won the election. I can’t find anyone who admits voting for him. Something’s not right. I’m trying to get over it because they call us whiners, but my doubt lingers on like a bad case of diarrhea.