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Wed.May.11.2005

1:05 am EDT        59°F (15°C) in Monroe, MI

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This time, I am motivated to write after hearing and seeing a couple different examples of government run amok. I will start with what happened roughly four hours ago as I was driving through the butthole of Ohio, also known as the city of Dayton.

I had passed the downtown area heading north on Interstate 75, and had just rounded the infamously dangerous 45-mph curve at the northbound State Route 4 exit, when I saw what appeared (from a good distance) to be an Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) truck on the left shoulder, and a Dayton police officer on the right, both displaying flashing lights. I began to move to the center lane (of the three) to leave myself a full lane's clear width around both vehicles, when I saw that the Dayton cop wasn't on the shoulder; he had (almost suicidally) moved off the shoulder to block the two right-hand lanes! No signage of any kind was present to indicate that lanes were blocked; this idiot cop just moved in to block the lanes when he found a tiny opening in the traffic flow. Frankly, he's lucky that truck brake systems have improved dramatically in the past 30 years; in an old truck, I probably would have made roadkill of his dumb ass.

What really gets me is that so many states are passing all kinds of laws that basically say that the individual motorist bears total responsibility for any accidents involving highway workers or law enforcement, regardless of the actions of said people. The state of Illinois, for example, will fine you a whopping $10,000 and throw your ass in prison for 14 years if you hit and kill a highway worker — even if he literally jumped right out in front of you! Many states, including Ohio, have well-intentioned laws instructing motorists to move over one lane when law enforcement is present on the shoulder — and I took action to comply with this law — but I'm sorry, these laws don't absolve law enforcement of their responsibility to behave in a manner that ensures the safety of all motorists. If Officer Joe Blow blocks two lanes of 60-mph traffic, with absolutely ZERO prior warning, and gets hit and killed, it's mostly his own damn fault.

Now if "RIGHT TWO LANES CLOSED ½ MILE" signs are present, it's a whole other ball of wax, and the responsible motorist should be tried for vehicular homicide; but law enforcement, a "limb" on the executive "branch" of government, still doesn't have absolute power. In a true democracy — which is something we are losing more and more with each passing day of this 43rd Reich — law enforcement and the rest of the executive branch is reined in by the legislative and judicial branches.

It sickens me to have to admit that this next story comes from my home state of Michigan. Recently, an idiot high-school student in the town of Howell, about a half-hour east of the state capital of Lansing, painted some message (I'm not clear exactly what it said) that involved an openly gay student's name and the word "faggot" on a rock outside the school. A few days later, four other students painted over this message of bigotry, and included the word "love" in their re-painting job. So who do you think has been suspended by the school for all of this? If you guessed the four students who had the courage to paint the truth, you would be correct. (Your prize will be non-tangible and will lack monetary value. )

Under the "religious" Reich that controls our country these days, the Constitution and its guarantee of free speech are but a memory. Apparently the rights enumerated in the Constitution are only intended to be granted to well-to-do white male adult heterosexual faggot-hating nigger-hating woman-abusing environment- destroying Southern Baptists, and anybody who would dare to suggest otherwise is an "activist liberal judge" who "legislates from the bench." You want to see judicial activism and legislation from the bench? Just wait until the courts are stacked with these wackos, and watch them destroy America — preferably from Canada or Europe.

On the one hand, I hate to even get into serious political discussions anymore — the direction this country is headed in is just far too depressing — but on the other, I am goddamn sick and fucking tired of this right-wing agenda of lies, destruction, and death. I wouldn't do it or directly advocate it, as that would be a good way to get my ass thrown in jail by the 43rd Reich, but the United States of America would be far better off if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, John Negroponte, Condoleezza Rice, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Bill Frist, Antonin Scalia, Phyllis Schlafly, Alan Keyes, Rick Santorum, Wayne Allard, and Marilyn Musgrave were all executed, and then had their corpses dragged through the streets, urinated and defecated upon, beaten with sticks, and eventually even rejected by animals as unfit for consumption, finally left to rot in the same way that all of their brains did years ago.

It may come too late for me (who knows if I'll live to be 85), but in another 60 years, the world will commemorate the downfall of the so-called "religious right" and pay tribute to all of the gay people, women, non-"Christians," and champions of equality and freedom who will have suffered and died because of its pure evil — in exactly the same way we currently memorialize the six million-plus Jews and gay people who were exterminated by Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. We obviously didn't learn from history between 1920 and 1945, and it appears, as the old adage goes, that we will be doomed to repeat it.

I should make one thing crystal-clear, lest the radicals seek to paint me as being a hell-bound secular atheist. I am not anti-Christ, but I am anti-"Christians." That is to say that, unlike them, I actually believe in Jesus' perfect example of compassion and love that He so eloquently stated in the Golden Rule, and that I ought to emulate and defend that in any way I can, in a humble yet firm manner. I know that Jesus' message contained absolutely no hints of the "us vs. them" mentality that so many people who falsely claim to follow Him use to demonize whoever they don't like (or are afraid of being). I believe that, for those people who have it, faith should be a source of positive energy for the world, and not something you use to make yourself feel better than somebody else (i.e., "I thank God for making me straight, and not one of those satanic faggots"). Finally, I firmly believe that hypocrisy (such as that displayed by many so-called "Christians") is the greatest evil facing today's world — and if "fundamentalists" actually bothered to read the Bible, they'd see in Matthew 23 that Jesus agrees with me, not them. Despite the claims of Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, and other "fundamentalists," the only true way into heaven is not through being a member of their denomination, but by following the example of Christ.