I’m downright ashamed to admit that when we moved, I completely forgot to re-register with the County Clerk to vote, so I am not registered to vote in Solano County. I may still be registered to vote in Yolo County; I’ll have to call the Yolo County Clerk and check with them.

This is very important to me. While I have very little faith in the competence of the people who claim to run our country, I believe it is of the utmost importance that every citizen of our nation actually gets out and votes. It is, after all, the very basis of what our country has been based on: the right to choose our own government, and to be governed wisely by the people that we choose.

On the other hand, those who know me probably won’t be surprised to learn that I am extremely cynical about the state of our political system. I used to be less so; but then Clinton was impeached, and I realized that within our system, partisan viewpoints are much more important than what is just and true. I frankly think that is a sorrowful state of affairs.

I don’t really know if either political party really knows what it’s talking about when it comes to domestic policies. Republicans seem to subscribe to a myth that if government funding for public programs is cut, then people will somehow generously give money to charity to make up for the decimated social programs (but let’s think about this: if you had five bucks more in your tax return, are you going to give it to a charity or buy yourself a burger?). Democrats, on the other hand, seem to subscribe to a myth which says that the government has some level of competency in distributing funds. Personally, I have a little bit more faith in the second myth, which is why I tend to vote Democrat, though I rarely register as Democrat OR Republican. On the whole, I find the party system rather absurd.

My cynicism has expanded of late. While I used to maintain some faith in the political processes in some other countries, I am now of the opinion that, in the face of all of the troubles in the world, there are people who simply don’t want solutions. For example: I honestly believe that neither Israeli Prime Minister Sharon nor Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat want a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. I base this on the observation that none of the proposed settlements have even been worthy of consideration in their estimation.

I don’t believe that the British or the northern Irish really want a solution to the problem of Northern Ireland. And I don’t believe that Colombia wants a solution to their troubles.

I certainly don’t believe that India and Pakistan want to settle their dispute.

I’m beginning to doubt that the government of the United States really wants a solution to terrorism. If we did, then I think we’d be focusing more energy on the conditions that foster the terrorist mindset than we actually do.

I guess I’m not entirely cynical. I do believe that there are people within the government who are honorable and courageous and unwilling to compromise their principles or their sound judgement for what’s popular and trendy. It’s possible that such people have even made it to the national level, though I think that such people are probably weeded out by the time they reach the state level. I believe that the last President with anything resembling honor, courage, or moral character was Jimmy Carter; too bad he was such a poor politician. I had some faith in Clinton’s ability to lead (I honestly don’t believe that his transgressions had any bearing on his leadership abilities), but I find President George W. Bush sadly lacking in character. I’ve been impressed with some of his domestic policies, but more impressed with his willingness to piss off the leadership of other nations to make himself look good at home.

I try to be optimistic about the future of humanity, but I’m finding that it’s more difficult to do that these days. The corporate world offers no refuge, of course (not that it ever did). The Enron scandal is only one sign of what I see as a deep-rooted and ultimately deadly trend within American business to sell out principles and honor in the name of a buck. I believe that companies which prostitute their technology to sell censorware to totalitarian governments such as China and Saudi Arabia represent the very worst in American business, and are a disgrace to our nation’s ideals and principles.

I am a very firm believer in principles and honor, and standing by them no matter what. I believe that, as a nation, we have improved in our ability to stand by the principles that we believe in, but I don’t believe that such ability has come from the top; it has come from the bottom, from activists and people willing to sacrifice everything but their integrity. And I believe that if our leaders had such integrity, we would be an even stronger nation and a stronger role model for the rest of the world. But as long as we insist on racial profiling in the name of "security"; as long as we believe that money is more important than true American values; and as long as we believe it’s okay to play fast and loose with international cooperation; then our integrity is not visible and we are not worthy of the principles and values we claim.

Whew. That’s quite a rant. Normally, I loathe talking politics, and will avoid the subject whenever it comes up in conversation; but I’ve been listening to the news and becoming more and more distressed over what I’ve been seeing, I’ve finally had to get it out of my system.

It’s out now. Thank goodness. Now I can get back to normal stuff.

But the point is: get out and vote.

I really believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt. I believe that people are generally good, that things are improving, and so on. I even believe that most people, even politicians, usually want to do the right thing. I don’t believe that the government is evil, or out to get us; I believe that the government is, on the whole, comprised of people who are just as human as I am and prone to some of the same fears, stupidities, vanities, and mistakes that I am prone to. I don’t believe that President Bush is evil or despotic, but I do believe that he’s a bit of a moron who has allowed his anxiousness to please his deep-pocket friends to override his common sense.

It was my optimism that took a bit of a blow today, though, when I saw the article at Yahoo! News that indicated that President Bush had signed an executive order which will allow the military to conduct trials of those accused of terrorism, instead of the civilian courts. I guess that it makes a certain amount of sense, if you decide that we are in a state of war with a generic class of people called "terrorists", but I honestly think that that’s stretching things a bit. I had always thought that war was declared on nations and states, not on ideologies (though I suppose all wars start in ideologies anyway).

I don’t believe that the government has been clamoring for years for an excuse to erode at our civil liberties; that sort of thinking I usually let the conspiracy nuts and militia goons handle. Personally, I think that the government would understand the value of controlled dissent in an oligarchy, just as in 1984 and Brave New World, rather than shut down all freedoms. No, what saddens me about this is that it’s more a sign of fear than anything else. The government is allowing its fear of further terrorist attacks to direct its actions in the "War on Terror". Between this and the announcement that attorney-client privilege between accused terrorists and their legal counsel has been suspended, one really has to wonder what will happen to ordinary citizens who for some reason or another find themselves accused of terrorism of any kind; and what constitutes terrorism in any case? I’m not extremist enough to believe that speaking out against the government’s actions in the "War on Terror" will itself constitute terrorism in the government’s eye (I’ve always been glad to live in a country where, despite its other faults, you can vote how you want without fear of being gunned down outside the polling booth). But I can’t help but worry how far things will go before it gets better. Even McCarthyism came to an end.

Today, I met with the pastor at our church. She and I both agreed that a religious faith (or any mode of thinking, for that matter) just isn’t worth the neurons it’s thought with if it can’t stand up to doubt and questioning and incorporate new challenges. I feel that the same thing applies to principles and values, especially at a national level. If our national ideals of democracy and civil liberties can’t weather the crisis that we’re currently facing, then how important are they really?

Indeed, it seems to me that it’s in crises like these that we need to hang on to our national ideals the most. Not only do we need to stay united as a nation, but we need to stand more firmly than ever behind the values for which our nation stands.

Or is that simply too much to ask for?

On another note, I discovered that some unsavory characters had signed up on my notify list for no other reason than to get new e-mail addresses to send spam to. I’ve unsubscribed any e-mail addresses that looked suspicious to me, but the damage has already been done. If you were subscribed, and you’re one of the Good Guys, my apologies! Sign up again! But the list is restricted now to those who are willing to submit a first and last name.

I saw on MSNBC.com that the first wave of U. S. strikes against the Taliban have begun this morning. The Taliban has moved 8,000 to 10,000 to the Afghan borders to defend itself. We have somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000 troops in the region — nothing like the huge buildup we had in the region in 1991 in preparation for a war against Iraq, but enough to significantly outnumber what the Taliban can bring to bear. And while the Taliban may possess U. S. trained guerillas, they also have thousands upon thousands of empovershed citizens who don’t really give a damn one way or the other since they haven’t really eaten in decades. I don’t have a doubt that we’ll win some sort of victory. I just hope that it isn’t at the cost of thousands of innocent lives.

This is just the beginning, of course. If we go back to my old analogy of terrorists being like ants, then this is just like the first stage in the battle: spraying Raid on the first colony you find, for example. This isn’t going to be a "media-friendly" war, where you can send reporters in to the battle scenes, since the strikes will probably be quick and surgical when the "nests" are found. So, just like in the Gulf War, we’ll have to rely on official military briefings for news of what’s happening.

I’ve been paying attention to the conspiracy theorists, some of whom believe that the attack on September 11th was orchestrated by the Bush Administration to shore up a sagging presidency and a weakening economy. It didn’t work for Bush Sr., of course; winning a decisive victory in Iraq gave him the highest approval rating of any president in U. S. history, but that didn’t stop him from losing to Bill Clinton in the presidential elections just a few months later. And Bush, Jr., has years to make mistakes; no, this sort of orchestration would have been better done towards the end of his presidency (and much as I dislike Bush, I doubt that he would sink so low as to engineer the deaths of nearly six thousand people on American soil just to make himself look good; the chances of being found out are too great and if he ever is found out then what happened to Nixon would pale in comparison to what would happen if Bush were found out; Bush may be a moron but he isn’t evil).

I worry about "safe" wars. We saw during World War Two, with the Holocaust, just how low humanity is capable of sinking (and I think it should be mentioned that Hitler and his crew, who were white, engineered millions upon millions of deaths of innocents, far more than extremist Muslim terrorists ever have), and we saw more of it during the Vietnam War. If the media is removed from the battlefields, will we forget that war his its horrors and its villainy and evil, since we’ll never see them? I hope not.

In one of my favorite episodes of the original Star Trek television series, "The Armageddon Factor", two planets have waged a war against each other for centuries. Their war has become "clean" and "sanitized", and computers do all of the fighting. When the computers inform the population that a bomb has struck a city, all of the people in that city go to extermination chambers to be killed cleanly. Captain Kirk destroys the computers that wage this virtual war; when asked, "What are you doing?" by the outraged leaders of the two worlds, he tells them, "I’ve made war what it’s supposed to be for you: dirty, evil, horrific. Now maybe you’ll finally make peace."

I’m worried about the innocent people of Afghanistan whose only crime was to be forced into a totalitarian regime that doesn’t care about them; I’m worried about how such sanitized conflict as this one is liable to be will affect our country’s moral fiber. On the other hand, I’m encouraged by how far out of their way the government and the media in our country seem to be going to make it clear that it’s terrorists who are the enemy here, not Islám; President Bush has visited mosques, television commercials present Arab Americans prominently, at least one interfaith ceremony involving Congress featured a Muslim Imam praying for peace. The terrorists who struck on September 11 represent traditional Islám no more than Fred Phelps or Jerry Falwell represent traditional Christianity.

I am an optimist. I believe with at least a big chunk of my heart, if not all of it, that humanity has progressed morally over the centuries. I believe that the age of the "Big Wars" has passed, that we’ll probably never see another massive large-scale combat like World Wars I or II. I believe that there will one day be world peace, but that it may be, literally, a thousand years before it is achieved.

I hope more than anything that our country has learned from its mistakes in the past with regards to this sort of thing. We have a history of going in, supporting rebels and freedom fighters, then leaving them in the lurch and having them come back years later to bite us in the rear out of bitterness and fury. Witness Saddam Hussein. Witness Osama bin Laden. Heck, witness Germany (I’ve heard more than one historian claim that if Germany had not been so crippled by the peace treaties that ended the First World War, then the Second World War would probably have never happened). This will probably be the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; I really hope that we’re willing to stick around afterwards and help clean up our own mess for a change.

It’s good to see that my old feelings about politicians in general were justified all along.

Just remember: If God had wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates. Sheesh.