Hello Friends;
I have been thinking again. Sorry. I try not to let it happen too often since the results are usually comic or tragic, but every now and again, like an old Ford diesel left too long in the weeds, the machinations of my mind are prompted to move again, rust and weeds grinding into the dirt below. What comes from the screeching and noise is rarely impressive, often only half developed - I guess the glow plugs aren't all working. But, up from the sludge and grime of my clogged mind floats another's words, I forget who, who lamented the continuing plight of the efforts to control the basic and relatively uncontrollable.
Man is who he is, and as I think back on history it seems we have this constant struggle, at least as records show it, to seek to take what is alive and free and somehow shape it into images and actions of our own design. I think of it as controlling what should be uncontrolled. Some have said that religion is the practice of a select few dictating to the masses that which they may and may not do yet hypocritically living by other rules. I guess I have a hope that what is done at face value is, well, basically genuine. But, they say that the priesthood is of the oldest of professions, matched only by the prostitute and the politician. Seems somehow appropriate, and yet is there nothing more to our existence than what we see here and now?
I think of the article I read on Scottie's blog about the so-called Romeo laws and relate them to a book I was just reading about the Feudal ages - you know, castles and King Arther and stuff. Most specifically: is it all that unreasonable to think that kids in their teens are going to want to have sex? In fact, can we not almost presume it? They say that from historical norms, Mary, mother of Jesus, was likely about 14, maybe less, when she was gifted of child. Good thing we didn't have today's laws back then, God would have been in jail! And yet, what was acceptable in that time, what was even acceptable to God if the story be believed, is now a horrible thing? Immoral? Destructive?
I recall when my grandmother was failing in her health. She had come to a point where she wasn't wanting to eat anymore and in pain. She went from the typical American overweight to someone gaunt and looking starved. My thoughts at the time were to give her a joint. How simple? It would help with the pain, give her the munchies! Only downside is the new need to buy Dorritos in a flavor grandmothers would like. But, alas, no. The doctors were free to give her morphine derivatives, put her in a bed and ignore her, but to put a bit of weed in her toast and butter would have drawn the feds down upon everyone's head.
I guess I don't have such a great idea on how to fix any of this, except to say that we have lost something wonderful and majestic in life: freedom. Like that movie with Mel Gibson, where the State had taken his family, his land, his wife and finally locked him up, put him on a table, and taken the very skin and manhood, his dying words, perhaps a bit dramatic, were "Freedom".
Why must we be so tightly controlled? Why must those in power be so fearful of everyone else? Why must we say things like "Gay Rights", or "Women's Rights". Where would anyone declare that a "War on Family Values" must be answered with criminalization and prisons? How is it that we can live in the land of the free and have no wings?
