I am a veracious reader of books, articles, and blogs. I love to soak up information. Through the broad medium of literature, I have found a great many people who inspire me. Some of them I could say I agree with and others I have nothing in common with at all. What inspires me about people I agree with is their dedication to their beliefs and their pursuit of the truth, whether in real life or inside their fiction. What inspires me about people I don't agree with is their dedication to their beliefs and their pursuit of the truth. Inspiration, for me, can come from unlikely and unsettling places. You'll notice some of these people are polar opposites. If you know me, you know my faith and my politics, so you can surmise who in the list I do and don't agree with on a personal level. Forget that for a second and try to understand why they are influential in a general sense....
Flannery O'Conner
CS Lewis
Donald Miller
Johnny Cash
Emma Goldman
Ernest Hemingway
Cormack MCarthy
David Foster Wallace
Stephen King
JRR Tolkien
Sylvia Plath
Micheal Crighton
Claudio Sanchez
Kim Neely
Mickey Spillane
Dee Brown
Ray Bradbury
Steve Earle
Tolstoy
Herman Melville
Jonathan Franzen
Karl Marx
Joseph Conrad
John Cheever
Friday, March 9, 2012
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
What Is A Libertarian?
I am often asked, based on my more political blog posts, what my exact political beliefs are. I am a Libertarian and VERY, VERY proud of it. But what, you ask, does that mean exactly?
To be Libertarian means quite literally to believe in liberty. I believe that, on the majority of issues, people have the right to make their own decisions, without a liberal "big government" or a conservative "moral government" to interfere.
What we as Libertarians hope to do is help individuals be just that, individual. That means taking the government out of most private decisions. (Like a lot of modern Libertarians, my only concession to this is abortion, which I am strongly against)
We want to abolish both halves of the welfare/warfare bureaucracy (privatizing real services) and liberate the 7/8ths of our wealth that's now soaked up by the costs of a bloated and ineffective government, to make us all richer and free.
We work to oppose tyranny everywhere, whether it's the typical variety fueled by greed and a lust for power or the more subtle, telling folks what's good for them work over.
We don't believe in legislating morality. Even as many of us are members of a faith (I myself am a devout Christian), we do not support a government that forces religious will upon its citizens. There are many reasons why we oppose this. It's dangerous and its not in the best interest of a free nation. People's personal decisions, whatever their outcome or consequence, are their own. We draw the line at any act that harms another human being.
All libertarians want to live in a society based (far more than ours now is) on free trade and mutual voluntary contract; the government's job would be strictly to referee, and use the absolute minimum of force necessary to keep the peace.
Libertarians concede that all human beings are entitled to equality before the law and fair treatment as individuals responsible their own actions. We strictly oppose racism, sexism, and sexual-preference bigotry, whether perpetrated by private individuals or by government. We reject any and all racial discrimination, whether in its ugly traditional forms or in its newer guises as Affirmative Action quotas and "diversity" rules. Yeah, that's right. We see it both ways.
We understand that bigotry will always have an unfortunate place in our world. The only decent laws are those that never mention the words "black" or "white"; "man" or "woman"; "gay" or "straight". Bigotry on all levels is the same as attacking ones religion. We oppose that with full belief.
We also believe the drug war is a major waste of your money..and ours. 85% of all crime is related to drugs. We believe in legalizing all drugs. It's controversial, but you would be surprised by the changes in crime level. The government has spent untold billions on anti-drug programs, many of them nothing more than propaganda with misinformation. Drugs are not good and most Libertarians are not users, but we respect the right of an individual to ingest what he or she desires without interference.
This is an extremely simplified explanation of my political party. We are very much in the middle of the two popular parties and widely misunderstood. But I promise you, we care about our country and her people more than you know. We believe in the Constitution as it was written. We believe YOU have the right to make more decisions concerning YOU than the so called government.
To be Libertarian means quite literally to believe in liberty. I believe that, on the majority of issues, people have the right to make their own decisions, without a liberal "big government" or a conservative "moral government" to interfere.
What we as Libertarians hope to do is help individuals be just that, individual. That means taking the government out of most private decisions. (Like a lot of modern Libertarians, my only concession to this is abortion, which I am strongly against)
We want to abolish both halves of the welfare/warfare bureaucracy (privatizing real services) and liberate the 7/8ths of our wealth that's now soaked up by the costs of a bloated and ineffective government, to make us all richer and free.
We work to oppose tyranny everywhere, whether it's the typical variety fueled by greed and a lust for power or the more subtle, telling folks what's good for them work over.
We don't believe in legislating morality. Even as many of us are members of a faith (I myself am a devout Christian), we do not support a government that forces religious will upon its citizens. There are many reasons why we oppose this. It's dangerous and its not in the best interest of a free nation. People's personal decisions, whatever their outcome or consequence, are their own. We draw the line at any act that harms another human being.
All libertarians want to live in a society based (far more than ours now is) on free trade and mutual voluntary contract; the government's job would be strictly to referee, and use the absolute minimum of force necessary to keep the peace.
Libertarians concede that all human beings are entitled to equality before the law and fair treatment as individuals responsible their own actions. We strictly oppose racism, sexism, and sexual-preference bigotry, whether perpetrated by private individuals or by government. We reject any and all racial discrimination, whether in its ugly traditional forms or in its newer guises as Affirmative Action quotas and "diversity" rules. Yeah, that's right. We see it both ways.
We understand that bigotry will always have an unfortunate place in our world. The only decent laws are those that never mention the words "black" or "white"; "man" or "woman"; "gay" or "straight". Bigotry on all levels is the same as attacking ones religion. We oppose that with full belief.
We also believe the drug war is a major waste of your money..and ours. 85% of all crime is related to drugs. We believe in legalizing all drugs. It's controversial, but you would be surprised by the changes in crime level. The government has spent untold billions on anti-drug programs, many of them nothing more than propaganda with misinformation. Drugs are not good and most Libertarians are not users, but we respect the right of an individual to ingest what he or she desires without interference.
This is an extremely simplified explanation of my political party. We are very much in the middle of the two popular parties and widely misunderstood. But I promise you, we care about our country and her people more than you know. We believe in the Constitution as it was written. We believe YOU have the right to make more decisions concerning YOU than the so called government.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
The Sopranos.....Contrasting Elements
I fight as a viewer to be engaged with the material a writer presents on television. I wrestle with logic and with plausibility, even though I'm perfectly aware that television is escapism. I, like many opinionated viewers, enjoy a healthy dose of reality inside the realm of whatever show I watch. That's why my list of favorite shows all qualify as having some very basic, realistic elements inside of their fabric.
Television, like the movies, is about distorted reality, its about epic happenings. That's why we tune in week in and week out, to find some adventure lacking in our own American lives. Some shows are better than others at effectively blurring the lines. Those are the shows that can place grounded characters in larger than life situations. My all time favorite show did just that.
The Sopranos ended its six season run over five years ago. To this day, it has meant more to me as a cinematic achievement than any other program...OR film...that I have ever seen. It's hold on me, enthralling in depth and substance, was uncommon. Rarely did I take such ownership in a television show, in a cast of characters. There was something uniquely pivotal about the show, about its depiction of these terrible, awful people who all seemed to be one decision away from the bottom of a river.
The magic of the Sopranos, the magic of David Chase, was that common, law abiding Americans with no desire to commit a crime of any nature, were enthralled by a drama that dealt with a man who spent most of his waking hours doing just that. The embodiment of human sin, of flesh and blood, Tony Sopranos heavy set figure cast a new kind of shadow on the formulaic world of tv drama.
At first, we thought of The Sopranos as a show about bad guys, nothing more than a really engrossing gangster drama. What I came to understand is that it was never about bad guys or good guys. It was about people, real people, people who made some very distinct and morally reprehensible decisions in life and yet, at the core, were all about family. No other drama had ever contrasted two opposing elements so adeptly. For as often as you hated Tony Soprano, wanted his blood on the wall, almost as often you felt he had a heart, that part of him could have been a legitimate citizen. That's the beauty of The Sopranos.
It's not about rooting for a good guy or a bad guy. It's about watching the morality play of one mans life and the various negative and occasionally positive effects it has on those around him. That is how it must be viewed. Too long had audiences been force fed all too black and white stories of good vs evil. As much as we'd like it to be that simple, it really isn't. There is evil in the best of us and there is good is the worst of us.
What The Sopranos did, at least for me, was put this hard truth on display, allowing audiences to judge and sympathize accordingly. There is no denying the level of depravity these characters exuded. But, there is also no denying that none of them, with the exception of one Phil Leotardo, was heartless. That, in a nutshell, is why we love the dichotomy.
Television, like the movies, is about distorted reality, its about epic happenings. That's why we tune in week in and week out, to find some adventure lacking in our own American lives. Some shows are better than others at effectively blurring the lines. Those are the shows that can place grounded characters in larger than life situations. My all time favorite show did just that.
The Sopranos ended its six season run over five years ago. To this day, it has meant more to me as a cinematic achievement than any other program...OR film...that I have ever seen. It's hold on me, enthralling in depth and substance, was uncommon. Rarely did I take such ownership in a television show, in a cast of characters. There was something uniquely pivotal about the show, about its depiction of these terrible, awful people who all seemed to be one decision away from the bottom of a river.
The magic of the Sopranos, the magic of David Chase, was that common, law abiding Americans with no desire to commit a crime of any nature, were enthralled by a drama that dealt with a man who spent most of his waking hours doing just that. The embodiment of human sin, of flesh and blood, Tony Sopranos heavy set figure cast a new kind of shadow on the formulaic world of tv drama.
At first, we thought of The Sopranos as a show about bad guys, nothing more than a really engrossing gangster drama. What I came to understand is that it was never about bad guys or good guys. It was about people, real people, people who made some very distinct and morally reprehensible decisions in life and yet, at the core, were all about family. No other drama had ever contrasted two opposing elements so adeptly. For as often as you hated Tony Soprano, wanted his blood on the wall, almost as often you felt he had a heart, that part of him could have been a legitimate citizen. That's the beauty of The Sopranos.
It's not about rooting for a good guy or a bad guy. It's about watching the morality play of one mans life and the various negative and occasionally positive effects it has on those around him. That is how it must be viewed. Too long had audiences been force fed all too black and white stories of good vs evil. As much as we'd like it to be that simple, it really isn't. There is evil in the best of us and there is good is the worst of us.
What The Sopranos did, at least for me, was put this hard truth on display, allowing audiences to judge and sympathize accordingly. There is no denying the level of depravity these characters exuded. But, there is also no denying that none of them, with the exception of one Phil Leotardo, was heartless. That, in a nutshell, is why we love the dichotomy.
The Toughest Decisions....
I have been seeking the best vantage point for my entire young life, a place from which to survey my existence in the most logical and orderly fashion. Sometimes, whether I know it or not, I stand in a position of question, of where the road leads next. You walk many a road in your life, variations of the same basic scenery, the turns and occasional bumps articulated to the precise moment in time you are passing through, transcendental blues intact. The mask I wear these days is not quite one of Irish fatalism. I'm not that brave. It's one of decisive rumination, of changing tides and open doors. It fits, if only for a moment, so that I may see where I tread just a trite more carefully. Soon, it will come off..and I can breathe again.
For the last six months, I have been planning the next stage of my life. It has been interesting, exhausting, awkward and intensely motivating. I have spent more time in conversation with myself than ever before, more time in deep, concentrated thought than I have ever, in my life, wanted to. Change is something we all find to be both tempting and horrifying, at once because it carries a promise of new beginnings and, at the same time, means leaving certain things behind. I have always been a proponent of change if it means possibilities arise different from the ones already available.
In my case, and the case of a coincidental number of good friends, it seems such a change has come along, different for each of us but holding in its core a unifying idea...that nothing can ever be the same. That scared me. Sameness equals comfort...comfort equals lack of worry..and lack of worry equals I'm enjoying my life with no barriers. This is isn't a change of comfort. It's a change of necessity, a change of pace, of direction. It's everything I truly desire and yet its only a migratory step in the right direction.
That first step puts me at odds with everything I have ever known, all the familiarity in the world. It means, for once, I am, in many ways, on my own. I'm not alone in the physical sense or really the emotional sense. I get married, happily and ecstatically, in a little over two months. But in my soul, where these decisions are forged like steel, there is a rebel heart, a man apart from all that has sheltered him. In that way, I am on my own, my own judge, my own worst enemy. It's all a big mess of titles I can carry under the "OWN" banner.
And damn it, its hard. It's harder than I think anyone could imagine to make these decisions, to suddenly take the risks to get to where I want to be in life. And there's nothing pretentious, selfish or egotistical about it....nothing. If I don't make this change, face these hurdles, my career ambitions, life goals and dreams stagnate. Then I am left, for the rest of my waking days, with what could have been. That's totally unacceptable to me.
I want something very badly. I feel, with no airs about it, that I have a talent worth fighting for. And, for all the risks and potholes and the ever annoying "what ifs", I can honestly say I am confident in my heart and soul that I won't regret where the road leads. So, with some vagueness to my post, I say, soon the West stands a chance of being won...and this pathetic redneck is considering his method of take down.
For the last six months, I have been planning the next stage of my life. It has been interesting, exhausting, awkward and intensely motivating. I have spent more time in conversation with myself than ever before, more time in deep, concentrated thought than I have ever, in my life, wanted to. Change is something we all find to be both tempting and horrifying, at once because it carries a promise of new beginnings and, at the same time, means leaving certain things behind. I have always been a proponent of change if it means possibilities arise different from the ones already available.
In my case, and the case of a coincidental number of good friends, it seems such a change has come along, different for each of us but holding in its core a unifying idea...that nothing can ever be the same. That scared me. Sameness equals comfort...comfort equals lack of worry..and lack of worry equals I'm enjoying my life with no barriers. This is isn't a change of comfort. It's a change of necessity, a change of pace, of direction. It's everything I truly desire and yet its only a migratory step in the right direction.
That first step puts me at odds with everything I have ever known, all the familiarity in the world. It means, for once, I am, in many ways, on my own. I'm not alone in the physical sense or really the emotional sense. I get married, happily and ecstatically, in a little over two months. But in my soul, where these decisions are forged like steel, there is a rebel heart, a man apart from all that has sheltered him. In that way, I am on my own, my own judge, my own worst enemy. It's all a big mess of titles I can carry under the "OWN" banner.
And damn it, its hard. It's harder than I think anyone could imagine to make these decisions, to suddenly take the risks to get to where I want to be in life. And there's nothing pretentious, selfish or egotistical about it....nothing. If I don't make this change, face these hurdles, my career ambitions, life goals and dreams stagnate. Then I am left, for the rest of my waking days, with what could have been. That's totally unacceptable to me.
I want something very badly. I feel, with no airs about it, that I have a talent worth fighting for. And, for all the risks and potholes and the ever annoying "what ifs", I can honestly say I am confident in my heart and soul that I won't regret where the road leads. So, with some vagueness to my post, I say, soon the West stands a chance of being won...and this pathetic redneck is considering his method of take down.
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