If anyone has been wondering why I haven’t posted on my own site for some time, I can’t really give you a reason. It’s been busy and such. And I really want to keep this blog for my better writing … some silly stuff is fine, but I don’t want this to be like myspace. This is a journal for things that really concern me.

Now here is something I *did* intially write on myspace but figured it’s better off here:

It’s been a mildly boring week. Everyone has been busy or whatnot, and it’s not that I lack ability with regards to occupying myself; but I do seek the necessary amount of downtime where I can sit down and have some insightful human interaction. After staring at a mirage of icons that is the interface of a personal computer I desire the opportunity to look in someone’s eyes and to know what their thoughts and feelings are.

So with this in mind I go into my room to find my phone with a missed call. Now unlike most of you, my phone’s area code is from the completely opposite side of the country … New York(315), so when I see a number that is unlabeled from Seattle (206) it’s more than likely that it’s someone I should talk to.

It turned out to be a representative from the Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement. How did that happen? Well a year ago I was not quite familiar with the sociopathic conspiracy theorists of the world. Lyndon LaDouche (yeah aren’t I the clever one? … not really) was a name I had never heard any conversation about, nor read about it (and I now know why, and it’s not the global conspiracy as they claim). Walking home from my friend Erin’s place in Capital Hill after a night of watching movies. I was quite tired, and I had more than likely fallen asleep watching some movie of Erin’s movies … She had to meet with her father for breakfast so I had to leave early at some godforsaken hour that nobody should be up … 8 AM I think.

I don’t recall how I had any sense of direction. All I remember is a misty grey blur; the seattle morning, and my legs rolling like wagon wheels as oppose to normal function … somehow Capital Hill transformed into Downtown Seattle. Next thing I know *POP* - “DO YOU WANT TO HELP ME CUT OFF DICK CHENEY’S BALLS?” an attractive girl shouts emerging from some god knows where. Having agreed with her interests, her clean smile, and my senses being dull I reply “uh ……… sure”. She blabbers on about something, but it’s totally incomprehensible and I then make out “if I get your number I can get in touch with you!”. It may border on the line of chauvinism but my urge to participate was increased tenfold … her cause was now my own. I signed her paper with my name and phone number and she offered me some literature. For a moment there it was genuinely interesting and legitimate … information on how Dick Cheney was corrupt is something I could buy into. Though, apparently … the nature of these people are similar to that of velociraptors. I should’ve been weary of the rest of her pack; out of the bush emerges another guy who wants to offer me a stack of magazines. I’m trying to be cordial, however mainly trying to establish what the hell is going on, and I end up, again … somehow … walking home with a stack of magazines. That was the end of that … I thought I would trash the magazines somewhere (I chose the lobby of my apartment building) and the experience would be over.

It was only the initiation of many subsequent phone calls over the past year. I can usually ignore these calls: answering and explaining that I can’t read their books because I my strenuous school workload (yeah, right) and that’s that. But if we introduce the factor of boredom as we had present today, we get something far different and interesting enough to write on the “internets”.

Now back to the phone call at hand. The representative tried to feed me the same cue-card talking points as I heard before with each impersonal call they have gifted me with. My boredom, growing skepticism of this group, and argumentative/interrogative nature then led me to break this pattern. There was point brought up about Howard Dean’s organization of democratic funding in the recent midterm elections. I’ll attempt to keep this somewhat brief as opposed to going off on a barrage of redundant details, but his point was that Howard Dean did not give funding to Democratic Candidates who needed it. I argued that “They won a considerable amount of positions across the country, had they not?” His answer was not to give a yes or no, just to move on with irrelevant points.

He enlightened me … telling me that I didn’t know what the LaRouche youth movement LYM) was about. I’ll admit that I don’t … but wikipedia mentions that they have been accused of cult-like tactics. Combining that with how they have treated me … that’s all I need to to know to call bullshit on them.

“LYM is one of the biggest intelligence agencies in the country, with almost as much funding and contacts as the CIA … we know what the public wants” he exclaims. Trying to rattle the the twig in his ‘cheeks’ I toss out that my belief is that the general public, is in my opinion more in line with moderate politicians than the viewpoints he is suggesting. I also may have pissed him off when I suggested that with the resources the LYM has that it might be more productive to put that money to the education of America’s youth so that they are more able to develop their own opinions. He tossed that off as an impossibility due to the conspiracies involving the collapse of the american economy.

The conversation’s pretty much ended with a discussion of trade. On another one of his tangents he blurted “free trade should be eliminated!” … and most of you know me well enough that I am not a capitalist and that I am very much for a wealth income redistribution. I also believe of working within the system we have, and that includes the free market … as a result I very much stress the need for cooperate responsibility and ethics. And it makes sense: if you keep the public happy they’ll buy more from you.

“Fair trade is all there needs to be!” he let lose from that northernmost rectum of his.

I proposed “wouldn’t a moderate position be best for the country? Wouldn’t the extremes of both free and fair trade be bad?”. His perception was that fair trade was perfect and that the influence of free trade is to be removed from government.

I then gave him a nice ramble “You can’t exclude any viewpoints from the political realm … it’s not the way the country works. No matter how much you dislike what someone is saying, you can’t stop them from saying that. For all you know those ideals mean the world to that person just as your own do. If you remove someone from a discussion it’s just going to breed an atmosphere of conflict, both sides become more polarized, and less willing to compromise. If you bring people in, I think they would be more willing to move away from their views to place of compromise …. it’s not easy but it’s the best way to go”.

“You can’t average all the extreme views into the equation! Would it be alright if Nazis had say in our government?” He says.

“That’s their right” I explain.

“It would bring racism into government!” He warns me.

“And there isn’t already?” I ask.

At this point I was giving up on him and it was a lot more talking than what I wanted to do. What I write here is actually a truncated version of our conversation. I brought up a lot more evidence that and caught him on few for nuggets of bull-poo. One of those nuggets being that somehow the representative-republic nature of our country disallows all voices from being involved in the public discourse of national well being.

I guess it just bothers me that people think that to change the country for the best certain voices must be eliminated & freedoms must be sacrificed. If we don’t have our freedoms do we even have the same country anymore?It’s easy to do that … it’s easy to use power to restrict people, but progress isn’t easy. Generations before us fought for the ideal of freedom in the face of death … we can’t expect anything easier. So I’ll stop ranting and leave you with two quotes; the more obvious Patrick Henry - “Give me liberty or give me death” and Janis Joplin - “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ lefft to lose … nothin … it ain’t nothin if aint free.”

Posted in Political |

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