Just some thoughts

I don't have any one thing to write about today, just some thoughts. And yes, I had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Thanks for asking!

There's trouble for Mike Huckabee. There's something I think we all like about ol' Huck, but this isn't one of them. His record of paroling hardened criminals is coming back on him. Turns out, the guy who shot and killed four cops in Washington was out on the streets thanks to the former Arkansas governor. You might remember Huckabee getting some criticism during his Presidential run for his paroling penchant. While Huck is often mentioned as a Presidential contender for 2012, I can just see the opposition ads right now -- families of the four police officers, ominous music. This may just be enough to scare him away from another run.

And what do you think about the couple who snuck their way into the White House to a reception and dinner, shaking the President's hand, and rubbing shoulders with the administration's top people? While officials say this constitutes a major security breach, and I don't disagree, what strikes me is the insatiable need for media attention. Perhaps as a talk show host, I'm the pot calling the kettle black here, but these people aren't unlike the ballon boy's father. I don't remember their names, and I don't even care enough to look it up. People will do stupid things that will clearly get them into legal trouble for an oppportunity to be on a reality show, make money for an interview, or ink a lucrative book deal. It's sick.

On Tiger Woods. This has been one of the big stories from over the weekend. It's an overblown story. It appears he had a nasty fight with his wife, and crashed his Escalade into a tree and a fire hydrant. End of story. I'm not sure this warrants even the tiny bit of attention I've given it here.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Since this is going to be a short and, while I'm at work, very busy week, this will likely be my only post this week, so I wanted to reflect a little on Thanksgiving.

My wife is the eighth of ten kids. You can imagine with spouses and the average four or five kids for each family, our thanksgiving dinners feel more like church pot lucks. In fact, her side of the family has grown so large that we have to reserve a church in her home town, and put up the round tables and metal fold-out chairs to house and feed everyone.

While it loses a little intimacy and quaintness, it's actually quite nice to have a family Thanksgiving dinner in a church. The kids, both young and grown up, usually play a little basketball in the gym to work off the turkey, rolls, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. After the feast and basketball, I personally like to sneak off to the foyer and steal the couch for a quick afternoon nap. There's no competition for the bathroom, since there are plenty of those, and a church seems to have its own feel, conducive to emotions of gratitude.

I always enjoy the conversation and comeraderie with my siblings-in-law. While not all of my wife's family will make it, most live in the Idaho-Utah corridor, so there are plenty of people to talk with, inquire about, and learn from. I almost always leave the annual event having had great conversations about politics, sports, religion, and more.

While I could be wrong, I think Thanksgiving is the only major holiday dedicated to a human attribute all of us are able to experience. Of course it has historical roots in real events, but we've ended up calling it not "Pilgrim's Day" or "Harvest Day", but... Thanksgiving Day. When we have our familes -- extended, adopted, and immediate -- surrounding us, and we're partaking of thoughtfully-prepared food, symbolic of the bounty we enjoy, Thanksgiving Day is the perfect recipe for happiness.

I say we take a respite from the world's weight this week, and enjoy the lightness and reprieve of gratitude.

Am I crazy?

I am cautiously writing this, because I'm fearful of coming off a little crazy. Perhaps I'm a little too invested in worrying about my appearance, but my hope is that I can convey some feelings that are clear to me, but may be difficult to articulate.

The basic premise of my thoughts is that we have undergone some major psychological changes culturally and sociologically.

I was reading the national news this morning about the folks who are in panic over unemployment benefits running out in January if Congress doesn't act. My first thought -- which seemed odd at the time -- stirred a slight bit of humor in me. I thought of our nation's founding people. The pilgrims. The colonists. Even the early immigrants who came here with so little. I think they would read that AP story and chuckle -- or chagrin -- at how soft, dependent, and -- from their perspective -- pathetic we have become. Compared to them, we are helpless wussies.

We have gone from "I'm hungry... I better go shoot/plant/harvest something to eat." to "I'm hungry, who's going to feed me?" Of course, I'm not referring to just physical hunger. All our needs, and even some of our wants are provided, or subsidized, by others if we decide to go that route. We are rarely, if ever, encouraged to assess our own resources and then make a plan and muster the ambition to elevate our situation.

And it's not just the government. We have a media culture that dismisses the role of personal choice and responsibility in areas of honesty, sexuality, marital fidelity, and sobriety. We've all probably watched late night comedians who are cheered and applauded when making jokes about casual drug use and sexual promiscuity.

But I'm not really here to talk about moral decline and dependence on government services.

This is where you might think I'm crazy, but I think we are conditioned, whether by design or by default, to forget that we have the ability to make our own choices. It happens, of course, inside our brain. It takes effort to actually make a choice because it requires an authentic -- as opposed to automated -- thought.

Imagine walking by a table at work and seeing a piece of chocolate cake. Almost automatically you pick it up and you eat it. One might say you made the choice to eat the cake, but you really didn't. In fact, you failed to make a choice. You resorted to default, easy, reactive influences. And then the fat chocolate cake eater blames Betty Crocker for getting diabetes and three sets of love handles.

It's possible to make the choice to eat the cake -- but it requires counting the cost of doing so -- the calories, the sugar high, etc. And of course, choosing to not eat the cake is the hard and probably best choice of all.

So how does this apply to our society and culture? I think we are too often mindlessly eating the chocolate cake. We do it when we apply for credit cards. We do it when we buy a home that's bigger than our salary can handle. We do it when we bail out of our marriage when times get rough. So often we simply don't make a choice and instead mindlessly follow the reactive route.

One of my children is learning to play the electric guitar. He was showing me how he could play jingle bells, yet was struggling to get through it. Every time his finger missed a string or fret, he yelled at his little sister who was chattering away like she always does. In his mind, it was her fault he kept messing up. What my son failed to realize is that he, in a very real way, gave his power up. It may not be easy to take responsibility, but when giving it up, it's important to count the cost.

While taking responsibility, fully embracing the individual power to make choices, it may be excruciating. But we've forgotten that it's not impossible.

The name is Bond...Failed Bond

A friend texted me the results of the District 91 $84.5 Million bond election last night.

With all due respect to those supporting the bond, I was far more elated than I expected. I must have been more emotionally invested in this one than I thought, because I was nearly giddy.

Keep in mind, I don't live in District 91, and don't really have an obvious stake in the outcome of the election.

But here's why I think I had a surge of "Yes!" when I found out the bond failed.

First, let me say that I am an unapologetic school election reform advocate. I think school elections are a sham for a whole bunch of reasons:

1. They do not fall under the purview of the Secretary of State. Every public election in Idaho should be overseen by a "disinterested" party. The school officials have a vested interest in the outcome, so why should they be running their own elections?

2. Because there is no outside observer, school districts resort to some shifty tactics to better their chances. I received two calls about activity that I believe borders on electioneering, if not rigging. One was about his elementary school holding a student music program from 6:30 to 8:00pm -- the last ninety minutes of yesterday's election. How convenient. The second was from a patron who was appalled at the glossy architectural renderings of the district's proposed schools inside the polling place. Would the schools give equal access to the opposition to hold activities and display their printed materials? Not likely.

3. Elections are held at the very location that stands to benefit from passage. What would happen if a polling place was set up at GOP headquarters in a partisan election? We all know the answer to that, and we all understand why that's not acceptable. So where do we hold them? How about the post office, or city hall, or the library? Even hotel conference rooms have served as perfectly good polling places. The county courthouse. The police station. The airport. The senior citizen center, or legion hall. We have plenty of neutral locations for a vote. Let's get them out of the schools.

4. Thanks to legislative action earlier this year, this concern is almost moot, but why have schools been able to set their own election days? Yesterday's vote is a perfect example. While I understand 6,000 votes is a pretty decent voter turnout, holding it two weeks earlier on the regular election day would have guaranteed even more voter participation.

Add to these reasons the unusually prompt enforcement by the City of Idaho Falls in removing signs opposed to the bond in the public right-of-way, and I'm happy to see that the underdogs prevailed.

With all of these factors playing in District 91's favor, fifty-six per cent seems pretty anemic.

I suppose part of my unexpected elation over yesterday's bond failure came about because the outcome is another reminder that people don't like education officials' insatiable appetites for public money. Among the patrons with whom I associate, administrators throughout education have wandered into that realm where yesterday's wants have so easily morphed into today's needs. Perhaps one of my callers said it best yesterday when he described his change of mind upon hearing the "need" for the schools to have air conditioning in a climate that necessitates it only a few weeks out of the school year.

I strongly believe every parent wants the best education for their children, and when arguments are reduced to a supposition that those who vote against a bond or a levy don't care about education, it's sad, simplistic, and unproductive.

Hopefully the architects of this failed bond will go back to the drawing board and come back with a plan that is more innovative, exciting, and palatable to the taxpaying patrons in District 91.

The Nanny Has Arrived

In many instances it's for good reason that we try to keep a semblance of separateness between politics and religion in American life. My gut tells me that excessive involvement by either side into the other, would serve as a corrupting influence. The same gut tells me, however, that severing one completely from the other makes just as little sense.

On many issues both politics and religion overlap. Treating our fellow man with compassion and kindness. Finding the right mix of justice and mercy for those who have committed unacceptable acts. And, of course, helping people to become self-sufficient.

At the core, however, of both politics and religion, is the issue of freedom.

In my particular faith, we call it agency, the belief that God gave us a brain with its mix of reason, emotion, conscience, and faith to make decisions about our behavior that can lead us to the highest levels of independence, or, into prisons both real and figurative. While I believe that our level of "reward" is more complex than God simply keeping a tally of behaviors, we largely create the lives we have.

It is my strong belief that God wired us to have freedom, knowing that we don't really succeed unless we really could have failed. It's vitally important to us spiritually to be able to choose between hurting others or being compassionate, loving or hating, intoxication or soberness, diligence or laziness, education or ignorance. The world is before us, as are its myriad paths, and we can make powerful choices that have lasting consequences on us both spritually and practically.

It is this God-given yearning for freedom that was manifested secularly when our Founders defiantly signed the Declaration of Independence, then a few years later drafted our Constitution, and set up our representative republic which guarantees certain individual rights. Among those rights, as we all know, are life, liberty, and the right to pursue our chosen level of happiness. Add to those general rights the more specific liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights -- and we still have a fairly short but powerful list of Constitution-granted liberty.

We have entered a new phase in our nation's governance, the effort now being to re-wire the human essence to yearn, not for freedom, but for a nanny. When anyone enters our lives and justifies our failures, it feels good. It feels good to be rescued. But it's not who we are. We are wired to sweat. We are wired to earn. We are wired to dream, to work, and to achieve. At our core, we are wired to be free to do all of these things.

When politicians threaten jail time for not buying health insurance, we've been robbed of our freedom. More subtly, when government takes from one group of people to help another group of people buy cars and homes, we've had a little more of our freedom stolen away.

I believe that when those who want to be nannied out-number those who want to be free, socialism begins in earnest, and at first appears to be a smashing success. But over time the dwindling number of producers can no longer sustain the voracious appetites of those who no longer want, but demand, to be nannied, and the whole unsustainable system will collapse.

Never forget that the more decisions that government is making, the fewer you are. Let's not let our freedom erode anymore.

Rough Play? More Like Assault...

I think this girl should be thrown out of soccer for good...

Insane Clown Posse

The fans/admirers/followers/defenders/disciples/groupies -- whatever you want to call them -- of Insane Clown Posse protesting ICP's concert cancellation on the steps of City Hall have gotten plenty of coverage the last 24 hours. All the TV stations, and the Post Register were there.

This is America and I applaud them for being concerned enough to take time out of (what I'm sure are) their busy and productive schedules to make their voices heard. Not only did they spend time protesting, they clearly spent some important time -- away from raking leaves in grandma's yard and raising money for cancer patients -- to paint their faces up like clowns. I've always believed that nothing creates a sense of credibility like a big ugly clown face.

On KIDK's report with Danica Lawrence, she interviewed one of the Juggaloes who coolly puffed his cigarrette before answering her question, then went on to say that ICP is actually protesting all the things they seem to be praising and graphically portraying in their music. That's a novel approach to protesting. It never has crossed my meager mind that to fight such ills as gang rape, murder, and bestiality -- we ought to describe them, in detail, glowingly. Hmm, I'll have to think about that one. Maybe it would make more sense to me if I made myself look like Ronald McDonald.

As I've reluctantly glanced over the controversial lyrics of Insane Clown Posse, here are some gems (edited):

This one is from the poetically titled "Guts on the Ceiling":
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I'll never be one to boast
But there's my tongue hanging off the lightpost
Cuz my head exploded
And my brains unloaded
All over this beautiful city
Teeth and bones to the nitty gritty
There's my eyeball stuck to the wall
Right next to my splattered jaw
I don't dig this game
Chasing my brains all through the sewer drains
My head's all over the block
Cuz I done went lunatick-tock tick-tock
Come on, dawg, what's wrong with my head?
It blew apart but I still ain't dead
I get no respect

And how about these lines from "Thrill of the Kill":
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Sweatin' and my chest is burnin' like I'm on fire
So much pressure in my head I could blow air in through a car tire
I'm about to burst pop shatter explode
And everybody's pokin'sticks at me like they wanna splat me

No one sees me when I creep I stay behind s**t
Check for open windows I scale across and climb s**t
Get inside and choke an old lady in her Craftmatic
And like fresh oxygen to an asthmatic I get a thrill

And -- by the way -- I specifically picked the least profane verses to share.... If you want to find the plethora of lyrics with all the "F" and "B" and "S" and "C" words you can find them yourself.

One last point -- perhaps minus the previous sarcasm. Is ICP the cause of many ills? Or is it simply a symtom of some very deep underlying problems. The youth are painting their faces like clowns! They're not only listening to graphic descriptions of humanity's worst behaviors, they are defending them.

Sometimes people cry for help in strange ways. Perhaps this is one of them.

Why in the world would anyone be drawn to this?

That's really what we need to figure out.