The Age of Aquarius

"We must stay true to the old ways, tradition, and hold back the tide of progress."

On the contrary, let us do away with the old ways, the days of Hate and Disagreement.  Let us herald in Harmony and Understanding, Sympathy and Trust.  Let us be led into no more Falsehoods or Derisions.  Each of us living golden dreams of visions, mystic revelations, allowing everyone the mind's true liberation...

By that I mean that each of us should be granted a renewed sense of freedom and liberty by truly embracing what these words mean.  We should begin to truly hold a solemn duty to the Health and Security of one another.  There are individuals aplenty in this world, without proper food, clothes, shelter, or health care.  This new age affords us the opportunity to accept new levels of equality and security for all.  This is our future.  We need but step forward and embrace it.

Let us end the old world's grasp on our society.  Let us loose the chains of traditional oppression.  Let us embrace the idea of better days through better ways.  Let us shed these skins of old and become a new version of ourselves.  

Our time to become more is now.

"It is not about guns, it is about the COMPLETE lack of Health (mental) Care, in this country!"

The SOURCE of the Violence

"Guns don't kill people, people, kill people."

As a born and bred Texan, I am a liberal who believes in a strong second amendment.  I have owned, bought, and sold arms both with and without background checks through the "gun show loophole."  Basically, it is perfectly legal to buy and gun from a private citizen, sans a background check.  I have done so maybe half a dozen times, for weapons that held high capacity clips, capable of 'assaulting & defending' any given position.  I also equipped these weapons with long and short range capabilities.  Never have I used ANY of them to cause harm to another's life, liberty, property, or pursuit of happiness.

If you made "guns" illegal, I would likely expand my collection of blades and sling shots.  I would spend time learning the trade of knife and sword making, and how to launch deadly projectiles.  My point here is that there are many ways to cause harm to human homeostasis.  What we are NOT talking about right now, is the SOURCE for these violent outbursts toward society!?

So, are there 'commonalities' between these whackos?  I use that as a strictly clinical term, but I guess a more accurate term would be anti-social or psychotic bi-polar blah blah blah.  In any case they were disturbed, NOT normal, outcasts of the social order, people who found themselves on the outside looking in.  Now, while we have all felt that way, most of us don't take an uzi to school and begin to mow people down.

Rather than turn our high schools into the TSA airport, we must begin to ask ourselves if it is worth the risk to continue to build, bolster, and beautify this "have's and have not's" mentality.  We've got to embrace a more inclusive attitude, period.  We've got to reach out to one another.  We've got to see and identify social misfits and give them a path to normality.  Even the last and least among us needs to feel as though they have worth herein.  This has to become the conversation...

But We Are Morally Right

"We are right, we don't have to change, we have to change their minds, back."

I hope conservatives go right back to these old ways, and continue to lose elections.  Times, they are a changing.  Liberals now need to embrace the fact that conservatives were wrong, and that they need to change.  It was once not morally wrong to allow a woman out at night un-escorted, in some countries it still is.

We should step boldly into the future and embrace equal rights for all, fully and willingly.  Traditionalism belongs in yesterday, and is but the anchor holding us back.  One must wonder why some cling so mightily to the past?  So Leviticus says men laying with men is bad, but it says the same thing about eating shellfish.

There are groups of protesters harassing the family of fallen troops over homosexuality, but how many placard pacers do you see pivoting about pork partakers?  It is in the same book, why aren't both rules of equal weight and value?  Do you remember the last time you left the corners of your field for the weird?

These books are thousands of years old.  Trying to legislate them into today's society is beyond unreasonable.  Claiming some moral high ground based on some interpretation of a text more than a century old would be a subjective endeavor, if ever there was one.  However, the greater sin against civility and the future is to apply text millennia old to today...

The world around us changes, and if we can not change to adapt to it, we will perish.  Languish not in the mores of yesterday, but look to the liberation and equality for all, in spite of the past.  Embrace tomorrow and we will all be better for it.

Don't Harsh the Mello

"States will face stiff penalties from federal authorities over their outright legalization of marijuana."

Why on Earth would the federal government, this executive branch, want in any way to punish the very liberals that re-elected him?  These are not violent criminals, these are modern adults who accept the reality that most people smoke weed, or knows someone who does.  They are far less violent and as long as they have coffee far more productive alcoholics, and far less dangerous on the road.

Both of these steps took the initial pre-requisite actions, by going through the 'medical provision' initiatives, while other states languish under ignorant and arcane law.  Marijuana is a medicine.  It may not be pretty, but facts are facts, people get relief from pain, nausea, and spasms from its consumption.  Threatening people with federal prosecution for providing medicine to sick people is NUTS.

The prohibition of alcohol did not keep people from consuming it, it only made a bunch of really bad people really rich.  Why in the world would we want to continue to miss out on the tax revenue, and instead pass that along to criminals.  Then at the same time turn around and PAY to jail non-violent offenders.

Spending money punishing people for taking an herb that hurts no one, and helps the patient, rather than making money from a legitimate marketplace good just seems wrong-headed.

Come on President Obama, you've inhaled, you KNOW this stuff isn't the demon weed straight from hell.  Marijuana is medicine, tax it, and allow people to live their lives without fear of federal prosecution.