This article is for all those idiots who think that gays and lesbians make unfit parents. It illustrates just what a great job the state and heterosexuals are doing with the tax dollars they steal out of our pockets.
After reading Donald Rumsfeld’s war-on-terror memo, I can only say that I’m glad there’s at least one man in the Bush administration who has his feet firmly planted in reality. He clearly understands that any war on terror must get to the root of the problem or we will continue to spend billions fighting fires while never understanding what is causing them.
Rumsfeld understands that the way to win a battle is to think, while the rest of the administration believes we should pray and pretend that reality is something other than what it is.
This is a guest posting that I did for SoloLiving:
My thanks to Nicole for letting me post here.
I’ve spent most of my adult life living alone and have so many thoughts about it that I wasn’t sure what specifically to write about. I lived in San Francisco for 23 years and recently moved to the Seattle area where I now live alone on almost 2 acres of land.
Reading posts on this blog and also living in such solitude has reminded me the many trips that my friends and I made to West Virginia during the late 60’s and early 70’s. We were in late high school and early college at this time and one of our group, Hugh, would organize weekend trips to his father’s cabin in West Virginia. Hugh’s dad and mom really didn’t like each other and lived on separate floors in their home in suburban Washington, DC. His father loved to go up to their tiny cabin in West Virginia whenever he could and often took a bunch of us up there with him. They eventually divorced and his dad moved up to the cabin permanently where he has lived alone for many years on five acres of land.
Hugh’s dad was a friendly sort and got to know all the locals up there in the mountains. When we would go up there, he would pile us all in the back of the pickup truck and meet the locals. My most vivid memories are of two older folks who lived by themselves. Virginia, was an elderly woman who lived on a big piece of land in a real house as opposed to a cabin. The whole lot of us, maybe seven or eight where sitting around the kitchen table enjoying some fresh apple pie that Virginia had made for us when one of my female friends spotted a shotgun leaning up against the corner and went over to pick it up. “Don’t touch that, sweetie. It’s loaded,” Virginia said harshly. Then she added, “I didn’t mean to scream at you, but I know you weren’t raised around guns and I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.” Then she explained how she kept the shotgun loaded to protect herself and wouldn’t hesitate to use it if she felt threatened.
Then there was John, who lived high up on a hill, in a very rustic two-room cabin with an outhouse. John was huge, weighing about 300 pounds I suspect. He invited us all up to his place one morning and made us blueberry pancakes on the woodburning stove. After eating, we took turns using the outhouse. He was strong as an ox and I remember how he challenged me to pick up an anvil in his yard and move it. Of course, I couldn’t make it budge, but John, who was probably in his 50’s at the time, curled his forearms under the anvil and picked it up without much effort.
What I remember most about those people was their generousity and their self-reliance. They were friends and helped each other out when needed, but always returned to the solitude of their own places which were miles apart. For us suburban kids, raised in relative affluence and going to good schools, there was something remarkable about their strength. They did not possess the sense of entitlement so commonplace today, and didn’t need TVs, radios, movies, museums and sports bars to keep themselves entertained. Their lives, the beauty of their unspoiled surroundings, their friendships, local gossip, and the daily struggle to survive against the elements, provided plenty of entertainment. They were poor by our standards but seemed rich in ways that we could never imagine.
Where I live, many of the people live on acerage, too, but they have, money, trust funds, and the latest model SUVs. The kids go to the best schools and our property taxes reflect that. They talk about community, especially when trying to fund some new entitlement on the ballot, but somehow don’t seem to know what real community is. Being gay and childless, I’m just glad that I have a lot of trees between me and them. I’ve seen things they’ll never know and a kind of self-reliance that they could never muster. They are rich, but seem so poor, always needing some external event to feel connected or entertained. They are addicted to social contact.
When things seem too isolated for me here, I think about Herman, and John and Virginia, who at the time I knew them where older than I am now. They’re probably dead now. In a few years, I’ll be as old as they were and probably still living solo. I’ll remember them.
Another young person, in this case a 20-year-old woman, lost here life in a car crash which may have been the result of a college hazing ritual involving students from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. On the subject of hazing in general, school officials told a different story from some of the students:
Richard Hage, Plymouth’s vice president for student affairs, told CNN on Friday that “hazing at this level is not common at all” at the university, which has about 4,300 full-time students and is nestled in the foothills of the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire.
Some students, however, said hazing at Plymouth is widespread and often brutal.
“I had a guy who lived in my hall that would come back with black eyes,” said senior Rachel Lastoff.
Hazing is like a primitive tribal ritual that demands self-abuse and humiliation (and possibly death) in exchange for belonging to a group. You know, like the military.