On the other hand, he did advocate killing innocent people, and helped plan to kill innocent people, and, even according to his own son Omar, was kind of a dick. My own sort of evil nature tells me that people like that don’t deserve to live. Heck, I even think that sometimes about some asshole blowing by me at 90 miles an hour in their BMWs, so I think it is a poor basis for how to feel about the situation. I feel sure our personal morality is not to be found in the easiest of our emotions, and revenge is a very easy emotion indeed.

I came of age in the 1990s, and for most people of my own age, 9/11 was an important and memorable and horrifying day. But I think even more formative than that was the Challenger disaster. It was fourth or fifth grade, and the teacher had wheeled a television into our room. Every school age child in America was watching when it happened. Everyone was excited, and then everyone was scared. For many, it was our first taste of observable and certain death, and it was affecting. There was no one to demonize exactly. Just accidents and randomness and the risk of death faced by some people doing something pretty death-defying every time they strapped themselves in.

And I imagine, for someone in the early twenties, 9/11 is much the same event. Horrifyingly visible disaster and every authority figure saying it was Osama who did it, and needing to go to war because of it. Osama looms fairly large in their psyche as a boogeyman, and someone to be feared every day. I’m sure they heard that all through school. 9/11 happened at a very impressionable age for them. A time of life where you believe what your parents and teachers and the president says, because they are the authority, and all knowledge and morality comes from authority figures at that age.

I think this is a big reason behind the street celebrations on Sunday night. Especially on college campus’ across the nation, the students of America poured out and cheered because Freddy Krueger had finally met his end. To someone older, it seems weird and out of place, but I’m sure to a twenty year old, their psychic boogeyman has been destroyed and the relief was incredible.

For someone my age, 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum, but as a result of a century old problem that is the middle east. It happened as a result of foreign policy decisions in the western world, and as a means for fairly powerless people to get our attention. I was old enough to know that things happen for a reason, and that there is a lot of gray area when it comes to foreign policy. That terrorists can also be insurgents, or freedom fighters, or guerillas, or opposition parties, or even just disgruntled middle-class white guys. But that sort of talk doesn’t make sense to a 10 year old. It is easier to just point at someone and say “bad” and leave it at that.

From an American government perspective, I think Obama felt that he needed a victory, or that maybe just the American people needed a victory of some sort. Since 9/11, we have bogged ourselves down in now three sort of useless wars, with no clear objectives, an no real exit strategies.Osama killed ~3K of our people through his underlings, but we’ve sent over 6K of our people to their death in response, not to mention the hundred thousand dead Iraqis and Afghanis. Someone hit us with a rock and we responded with a bullet. And my religious faith doesn’t allow me to believe that an American person is worth more than a person of another country. An American jeweler is not worth more than an Iraqi one, like a jeweler who was killed today in Najaf in gunfire.

But the American people are weary of these wars where people keep dying and bad things keep happening, and where we can’t afford to fill our gas tanks or get enough jobs. I think the government felt that we needed something to feel better about, and it certainly seems to have worked.

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Nobody knows how to respond to these people adequately. This week, Obama released his full, long-form birth certificate, caving to the demands of birthers, who insist that the president is not a U.S. citizen, and therefore ineligible to be the president. It was a silly move on the administration’s part, because it acknowledges their concerns which are not likely to go away no matter what sort of evidence is released. Obama could release a photo of his mom and dad leaving a Hawaii hospital, signed and dated by the attending physician, recently discovered in a time capsule vault buried in the volcanic soil of Hawaii, and it would not matter.

The birthers are not looking for evidence. They are just raising questions. It is their purpose. They do not want answers, simply distraction. If Obama had a been a lecherous old scoundrel like Bill Clinton, we would just be hearing about his sexual partners, but he is either too discreet, or too committed to Michelle for anyone to have turned up that dirt. The point is, and the wealthy people who fund the birther controversy know this, is that if you say something over and over again, and deny all evidence to the contrary, you create a distraction for the American people, a certain segment of whom are just going to believe things if they heard them on Sean Hannity. And you create a distraction for the president who has to respond, and for the nut-jobs in Congress who try to curry favor by bringing these things up as issues. And for the governor’s and state congress people, who have to pass extra laws to determine the legitimacy of a candidates citizenship, in order for him to be placed on the ballot in the future.

The point is that the birthers cater to a rabidly racist lot, and those who say birther things that aren’t racist, are just using the zeitgeist to further some personal, political agenda. Obama is not a white guy, and that’s his first problem to many people, and probably his only real problem to most of the birthers. If he were some “obviously” white guy with white parents and maybe a southern accent, none of this would ever have come up. It didn’t for Clinton, but he had enough other distraction worthy skeleton’s in his closet. I’m sure Sue Tibbs, the aged, white Republican representative from Tulsa probably harbors fears of a black man in her house, so despite her protestations that her bill to require certified proof of citizenship in Oklahoma elections has nothing to do with Obama, the fact that he is in the White House is probably a bit too much for her psyche to handle.

If you show a literal creationist a fossil record, or carbon dating, or sedimentary layers or what have you, they will begin from a position of not believing you and tell you how the evidence is flawed, because they don’t believe in evidence first. They believe in faith in the Bible first, and any evidence that fits that is ok. They would have been on the side of the Catholics disparaging Galileo for repositioning the earth in the cosmic map. But don’t bother arguing with them, because you will never convince them otherwise.

If you show a climate-change denier the evidence of 1,000 scientists demonstrating increasing global temperatures, or increased CO2, or the record from the ice cores, they will also begin from a position of not believing you and tell you how the evidence is flawed, because they don’t believe in evidence first. They believe in the free market. They believe in unimpeded economic growth. They believe in short term gains over long term prudence. And again, don’t bother arguing with them, because you will never convince them either.

We should also be clear that all of these positions are not invented and held by individual people, and have grown to be major issues through some sort of organic process. Birthers, literal creationists, and climate-change deniers are all funded by giant business concerns and far-right think tanks, who donate million’s of dollars to these organization, each of who’s purpose is to deny, deny, deny. If your conversation does not begin with fact and reason, but rather with money-fueled blind faith, on what basis can you have a conversation?

In part, this is what makes the administration, evolutionists, and climate scientists so cute. They keep appealing to reason when talking to unreasonable people. I think we should talk about something else.

Don Quixote: Dost not see? A monstrous giant of infamous repute whom I intend to encounter.
Sancho Panza: It’s a windmill.
Don Quixote: A giant. Canst thou not see the four great arms whirling at his back?
Sancho Panza: A giant?
Don Quixote: Exactly.

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In Interstate terms (and I’m just guessing here), there are at least seven of these signs on the major highways (I’m welcome to someone correcting me). There are probably various others on non-Interstate, yet still major state routes, such as OH-50, OH-33, OH-35, etc., not to mention the National road (40). For the sake of argument, let us assume that there are 20 of these signs, which I think is probably conservative.

So a new governor takes office and the order goes out to change the signs. Does the governor’s office do this? Or more likely, it is one of those automatic, administrative things that no one has thought about for years. Maybe encoded in the Ohio Administrative Code. Anyway. The order goes out to the state printing service. Or maybe we have outsourced that to private interests already, and they proceed to print up these giant magnetic stickers to be placed on the metal signs throughout the state. Then they are delivered to various road crews in various counties, who proceed to dispatch guys to take take down the magnetic stickers of the old guy and put up the new ones. Now, anyone who drives into Ohio is sure to know who runs the joint.

I don’t know how much this costs. I doubt many people do. There are material costs, driving costs, labor costs, disposal costs, etc. In the near term, I’m sure these costs wouldn’t save the state budget, or even a particular school district, such as the Oregon school district outside of Toledo, who are facing a loss of up to $3M in operating budget over the next two years if Kasich’s budget passes. The point is not that eliminating changing the names on signs is going to save gobs and gobs of money, but rather, how many little things that we do add up to a huge amount of waste?

Of course, there is something to be said that it is a waste of time to go after pennies when there are people dealing in dollars. But to that I say that we are almost powerless to effect that sort of change, because we the people are not a giant business interest, and giant business interests are the only thing that affect elections in our country. Even you and a thousand other people can’t cobble together the same political clout that a poorly-positioned lobbyist with a wad of Franklin’s has, so why do we keep running up against that same wall? I don’t know the right answer, but maybe we can work on finding the areas that we can change and going after those, instead of breaking our backs trying to solve unsolvable problems. Maybe having Welcome to Ohio signs without our governor’s name on it will only save a couple of grand every six years, but if we find enough of those areas, they can add up to real savings.

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And let us be clear, it is anti-working class legislation. Governor John Kasich of Ohio this week argued that because (in his opinion) Bob Evan’s workers had “shabby benefits”, it only made sense that Ohio public employees pay more for their healthcare and pension. He said, “…it’s fairness.” It is just about fairness, brethren and sistren. It isn’t fair for some people to have better benefits than other people, so we should strip down the benefits of those that have better to bring them more in line with the people that have worse.

This is some sort of bizarro-world, looking-glass capitalism going on here. I’m sure if you asked Mr. Kasich (or the Koch brothers, or Scott Walker), he would argue for the importance of the free market in setting prices and wages, and would be forced to admit Bob Evan’s retirement and health benefits packages were probably exactly where Bob Evan’s wants them to be in terms of costs and also retaining the right people for the employment they have available. If another corporation can offer better compensation and benefits at lower cost, and thereby attract better employees and more loyalty, than that is just how the system works.

Except we all know that the capitalist shell game does not care about individual people, unless those individual people are giant corporations (who by the way, under the law, are people). Bob Evan’s (and pretty much most every other company) will always seek the highest profits first, which means that they will always seek to pay the absolute minimum that they can in compensation in benefits, while still being able to retain the employment that they want.

I mean, what if Kasich had chosen Wal-Mart to pick on. Most Wal-Mart employees make little better than minimum wage, and as of a few years ago, many had to go on state subsidized Medicaid for healthcare because Wal-Mart did not offer them benefits and they simply did not make enough to afford healthcare otherwise. Mr. Kasich, Wal-Mart offers shoddy benefits as well. Maybe the state employees should bump down to that level, you know, just to be fair to the 51,360 Wal-Mart employees in the state? You know, because we should always be shooting for that lowest common denominator.

But Mr. Kasich knows, and I know, that the point is not fairness (shocker!!). The point is chipping away at solidarity, and finding ways for more of people’s income to flow directly toward corporations. The point is to eventually move people away from conservative retirement options like pensions into riskier (and therefore more lucrative to Wall Street) options like 401K’s. You know, let the people be able to mess with their money. They will be more likely to choose a more volatile mix for their funds, and therefore, more likely to lose it when the market crashes again.

There is a class war going on in this country. The rich and powerful are fighting it, but they don’t want you to think it is happening. They are attacking before dawn, under the cover of darkness, and get awfully mad when you say it looks like a class war. they call that irresponsible or unhelpful. All they are trying to do is make things fair, they say, bring costs into line, save something for the future. Keep in mind, dear reader, that men like Mr. Kasich, Scott Walker, and a whole host of other leaders in this country, care an awful lot about making sure the poor are equally and fairly poor across the board.

Looking-glass capitalism says things like, we need to reduce benefits to make things fair along the lowest strata of society, but a rich person is just a rugged individualist who has managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They deserve all the money that we can hand them. But these big government programs that help poor and disabled people, these unions of working-class people who have negotiated their benefits together, these things are unfair and need to be changed. It is unfair to tax a billionaire who can pay for his health care out of pocket, and it is unfair to help pay for benefits for people who cannot afford to pay a dime. Looking-glass capitalism says, “Screw actual market dynamics, lets just take from the poor to give to the rich.”

And it was ever thus, so fight the fuck back, because that is the only reason we ever got benefits in the first place. It was the impetus behind our revolution against England, and it will be our impetus in the coming class wars. You can sit back and let them take and take and take and harvest mortgage off the future of your grandchildren, or you can get mad now and see where that gets you. Find a better definition of fair. Elect a governor who wants to bring everyone up to a certain level, not one that wants to make sure people are brought down to a certain level. Tell the government to readjust their priorities, raise taxes on the wealthy and do something to remove the noose of healthcare costs from around the neck of the American people, before our country is driven into the ground. Tell the government that they aren’t going to find those solutions by nickel-and-diming poor people, but by reducing the income disparity to more manageable levels. Find a way to fight back before you lose it all to some rich fuck in a McMansion in the suburbs.

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I don’t give a shit, because all our little red and blue recycling bins, the green trucks that pick up our recyclables and confess us of the sins of our consumerism, your conscientious washing and sorting, none of that matters. I am so sorry that your efforts are in vain, but you and I are not going to save the world. We are going to burn up long before any of that matters.

It is like putting a finger bandage on a gunshot wound. Read any reputable, peer-reviewed climate scientist, and they give us maybe 100 years before sea-level rise and weather changes will make life very difficult if not impossible in many parts of the world. Some believe that the accelerating changes in world weather are not isolated circumstances, but indicative of the first salvo of violent weather patterns that will increase throughout the next century.

So we try to be better stewards of the environment (when it doesn’t interfere with our consumer impulses), and we teach our children the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra in all our children’s programming, and these are all good things to do, because stewardship was one of the very basic evolutionary messages that was lost when we moved from an agrarian to an industrial society. But it does not resolve the issue that world governments are doing very little to change the things that are actually going to screw us over, like real factory emissions controls. The U.S. government keeps thumbing its collective nose at any real change, because it is not worth the pain for them politically to make any real change, and let’s face it, all those old, rich, white, fucks will be dead before it affects any of them, so what do they care.

So stop recycling. Find a U.S. congressperson and pile up your coffee grounds and used diapers and banana peels and dirty tissues and recyclables in front of their house and demand action on climate change. And not nominal, bullshit, masturbatory change, but actual, real fucking change that reduces emissions globally, so that maybe our children can have at least as nice an environment as we do, and maybe nicer.

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