Friday, January 22, 2010

I Hate Civil Wars!!

I hate civil wars. They are so messy and chaotic and nobody ever follows the rules.

It’s like..if company comes..in the form of some foreign aggressor or some foreign country that just happens to be irritating, people pull out the rule book and at least pretend to abide by a few rules like..not to shoot babies until they learn to crawl and not to burn down old peoples’ homes until you wake them up and unhook their oxygen and that sort of stuff.

But civil wars are all in the family. And you know we’re never polite to our families!

I remember our first civil war..well not actually, as I am not reeaaly that old, but I’ve read about it. Most people call it the Revolutionary War but if ever a war was misnamed that one was. It was Civil War sure enough.

Brother against brother, father against son and wife’s family against husband..well you get my drift. Not much different from a lot of Thanksgiving celebrations except a lot of stuff got burned up ..or down..and a lot of people got crippled up or killed off. After the dust settled, the losers, them being the “Tories” who couldn’t quit thinking of themselves as Englishmen, were set on the road A.S.A.P. or sooner! They either shipped quick as scat back to England or tramped off to Canada.

Their “holdings”, which meant their homes, land, and anything but the clothes on their backs lose enough to stick in a tow sack, were confiscated by the winners.

The reason this ever came to my attention was because almost all of my ancestors were there at the time. Several Lewis’s, a Lamb, several McDonalds and a few Allens lived to draw government money or get free land in Kentucky.

The Lewis’s for the most part, having at the time been here for a more than a hundred years already, had enough smart to pick the winning side right off the bat. I don’t know of any specific Tory Lamb’s or Allens but I know for sure the McDonalds tried to hedge their bets by some going one way and some another.

It’s just a trick of fateful geneology that I wound up here in the U.S. and not freezing my bum off in Ontario or some other Canadian city. Not to say I’m not freezing my bum off here in North Missouri, but I have hopes that the weather will turn by April whereas Toronto and Ontario and those other places stay cold a lot longer.

That in itself would set me to hollering “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” up and down the road.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Congratulations to All Independents!!

It seems the Independents are now in the drivers seat when it comes to directing our government. Good luck to them.

To me Independents are really not for much of anything..neither fish nor fowl; flying or swimming, as the case may be, with whatever wind or tide that passes their door on any given day.

It's hard to have a high regard for them. In conversation I have found them to pour out the latest radio talk show format and opinion or that of their favorite TV Evangelist or whatever the neighbor told them or whatever their particular industry house organ published that week. Often with radio listeners it is really funny to listen to because their indignation..and there is always a LOT of indignation..rises at the precise point of the subject that was voiced in the latest radio thingy.

It's like they wake up every four years or so and say "I'm agin it!!". How can we ever get anywhere this way?