Tag Archives: philosophy

October 9, 2015 · 2:12 pm

Puzzle Fizzle

Puzzle Fizzle (a poem about pieces)

When life shatters into a potpourri of pieces,

One must pick up possibilities,

And puzzle them back together… into poetry.

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Yesterday was the bottom of the valley of a hard week.  I have to climb another mountain to get out.  And I can’t afford the psychiatrist I need because the health insurance we have gave us strict guidelines to follow for choosing one, and no one in our area fits their requirements.  My car is showing warning lights again, and I am afraid to take it in.  It runs fine.  But I don’t need that warning light giving any of the local mechanics the idea that they can charge me large fees for car parts and service hours when they might not actually be needed.  Money is running out and I do not have the good enough health required to get even a part time job.  I write a lot.  But my writing career at this point is an expense, not an income.  Many shattered pieces to this puzzle.  But I did finish the putting together of the latest grand Paffooney, the portrait of Mary and the Invisible Captain Dettbarn.

Mary and the Captain

So, how will I put everything back together?  My family depends on me doing so.  The old puzzle piecer must never give up and must always keep puzzling, fitting bizarre piece to jagged hole.  You may have noticed that this post is short of the 500-word goal, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have created two original pictures for this post.  And there is poetry pieced together by the penultimate alliteration of the proud letter “P”.

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October 6, 2015 · 1:51 pm

A Sense of Wonder

Flower val memeI have told you repeatedly (if you are foolish enough to read more of my blog than is probably healthy for normal people) that I am a pessimist.  Like Benjamin Franklin, I believe it is best to always prepare for the worst that can happen and actually expect it.  With current gun laws in this nation, and the way corrupt politicians and businessmen continue to profit off the suffering of the rest of us, and people’s basic selfishness and cruelty to others in word, thought, and deed, we rarely get a glimpse of anything but the worst of human nature.  We are never disappointed when we expect the worst to happen.  And yet, since I am never taken by surprise by bad things, only by unexpected good things, all that is surprising is wonderful and made up of very good things.  Human beings are capable of amazing goodness and works of wonder, not in spite of their many failings, but because of them.  The miracle of life is how the lowly worm turns into a beautiful butterfly.  How the tiny brown seed becomes the brightly colored blossom in a vast field of other flowers.

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When I tell others that I believe that people are basically good and that I believe all students can learn, I often get an argument.  Mass shooters like we had last week and wars and terrorists crop up by the multitudes in order to refute my belief.  People who think I am an atheist tell me i’m being a hypocrite to think we should operate our lives around facts and proof and then hold a difficult-to-prove belief like this.  Maybe it is an act of faith… but an act of faith that my theocratic friends call a belief in humanism, which they prefer to see as something from Satan.  Well, I do believe in God.  I just don’t believe in a god who waves a magic wand and intervenes.  I believe that God Jehovah (or possibly Allah or the godhead or whatever you want to name Him) made us like the flower seed, meant to grow and transform, and to be winnowed like grain by the winds and rains of life experience.  Not all flowers blossom.  But more of them do when you water and weed and nurture them.  And what is true for flowers is true for men and women.  What can I say more about human beings to convince you that I am not wrong to be in awe of them… even the weedy ones?  Probably nothing.  If you are not open to such ideas, you haven’t read this far.  But whether you read this far or not, I am fascinated by you, and will always want to know more.  And I am not going to start a new church or something.  I am merely going to continue to watch and to wonder.

Not Alone

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October 1, 2015 · 2:26 pm

The History of Government as I See It

Raygun RonnyIn the beginning, God made men naked and helpless.  He made women naked and in charge.  And then he tossed an apple to the women and said, “let there be evil and monsters and such.”  So, naked people began to huddle together in caves to get out of the storm.  They began to kill and eat other animals that didn’t eat them.  They began to wear the fur of whatever they killed and ate.  And then because Cain had a you-like-him-better-than-me fit, they began to kill (and hopefully not eat) each other.

So, the need for government came about as a matter of survival.  Cavemen put their thick heads together and decided that some guys were bigger and tougher and got more girls than the rest.  And some guys knew how to use their heads for something more than a place to keep their animal-skin hats.  So, when all the heads were put together, the smartest ones realized that if they made weapons for the big guys to kill other guys with more efficiently, then the big guys could protect all of “us” and kill all of “them” and we would all be safer and live better lives.  Of course, the big strong guys wanted to keep all the better girls and all the stuff they took from others, and they expected everyone they protected to give them more stuff.  Thus, taxes were born.  And when you had to count stuff and plan stuff and figure stuff out (like managing taxes and keeping track of who you need to hit because they haven’t paid) that task went to the scrawny guys with the big heads.  And so, Kings were born.  And queens were mostly the kings’ sisters, because, after all, the big guys still got all the best girls.  And as time went on, we had kings and their big guys and all the other “common” people.  But you couldn’t just kill (and hopefully not eat) all the “common” people, because they were useful too.  You could put them to work so they could pay more taxes and make more stuff for you and it made your life better if you had a lot of them working for you.  But some old king named Louie discovered you had to make the “common” people a little bit happy too because they outnumber you by a lot.  Unfortunately for Louie, he didn’t discover this until they cut his head off… some argument about eating cake or something.  So, some other smart guys with big heads got together and decided to make a new government.  It was really still the old government.  They just had the brilliant idea of re-naming everything and lying to the people.  Now, instead of kings and their big guys who got all the good girls, you had “elected representatives” who were actually the kings of old.  They just figured out how to lie to people and make them believe they worked for the “common man”.  And the big guys were re-named the “Military Industrial Complex”, or maybe it’s the Illuminati.  I’m not sure.  And then there’s a Pope, and possibly some alien beings from Roswell, and… okay, maybe I need to save the rest for the Tinfoil Hat Club when we meet every Wednesday evening and plot how we are going to “wake up, sheeple” and take over the world.  (Dues are fifty cents.  We are meeting again on Sunday because we think the world ends next Tuesday… or something.)

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September 25, 2015 · 2:07 pm

Weirdie Poetry

Mr. R RabbitThe Man Who Had Bird Knees

I once knew a man…

Who had knees…

That bent backwards, like a bird’s…

And this man…

Could only walk…

Like a limping, lame old duck.

The children all laughed…

And pointed at him…

When he passed them in the park…

And it made him smile…

And laugh to himself…

That his handicap made them happy.

Every single night…

He oiled his weary knees…

And tried to fight the pain…

And every single day…

He used his silly legs…

To do the Chicken Dance for kids.

And then there came a day…

When the bird legs came no more…

To be noticed by kids at the park…

And the parents all learned…

That the poor man had died…

And the whole world brought him flowers.

The next day in Heaven…

St. Peter saw a man…

Whose knees bent backwards like a bird’s…

And all of Heaven laughed…

As he did the Chicken Dance…

While angels clapped in Heaven.

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The thing I find to be most witlessly true about both poetry and life is that things can be funny, and make you laugh, and at the same time make you cry on the inside.  Humor is hard to write because it can be both happy and sad at the same exact moment.  How do you define that quality?  The bitter-sweet nature of nature?  That’s saying it in a way that is both contradictory and odd.  It can give you a wry smile at the same moment it both confounds and confuses you.  So better just to shrug your shoulders and tell yourself you know it when you see it… and this either is or isn’t it.  Sorry if I made you think too hard, cause I know that sometimes thinking hurts.

Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls

I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,

But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,

And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,

I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.

I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,

And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.

The water was clear and dark and black,

And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.

And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,

For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.

Kops

I apologize for inflicting poetry on you when you probably came here looking for goofy stuff to laugh at.  But my poetry is just like all my word-mangling and picture-crayoning.  It tends to be goofy and weird and walking a tightrope over a shark tank between chuckle-inducing and tear-jerking.  You probably can’t even tell which is the poetry and which are the burbled brain-farts of commentary that pad this thing out to five hundred words.  Four hundred and ninety six, actually.

mANDY

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September 2, 2015 · 2:23 pm

Matters of Religion

old mad gods

People around this country are busy expressing their religion.  They refuse to do their government clerical jobs and deny people marriage licenses.  They do it because of their beliefs.  They picket military funerals with signs about “God hates fags” (though I don’t see why the creator dislikes English cigarettes so much) because of their beliefs.  They refuse to bake wedding cakes because Christian fundamentalism has somehow become about who gets to eat your cooking.  They condemn parts of the Middle East and pray for war because there is religious head-chopping going on, and certain countries are not promising to give up their nuclear daydreams sincerely enough.  Expressing religious beliefs seems to be mostly about condemning stuff.  And, admittedly, some of it is bad stuff… like the head-chopping.  But is that what religion is for?

The Paffooney I am using today is called “One Day the Old Mad Gods Will Be Made Whole Again” which is a nutcake picture created during my grad student years in response to the basic undercurrent of fear that underlies most of Christianity.  I think I may have written it wrong, though.  It used to be about “fear”, and today it has become about “FEAR!”

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

People turn to religion primarily because they fear death.  Christianity promises an ever-lasting immortal life, either in Heaven (Which I have my doubts you will ever find on a map) or (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses in my family believe) on a Paradise Earth.  To never die you are expected to follow a secret formula, or somehow cast a magic spell that will guarantee that even if you are killed, you will never die.  If you knock on enough doors to share the “Good News of Christ’s ransom sacrifice” you will be resurrected to everlasting life.  If you “Love what is good and hate what is bad”, you will claim a spot in Heaven.  But you can’t earn this undeserved kindness.  God gave his only son to die on the cross so that everyone else might live.  …But not sinners.  Not people who do not get the formula right… or do not express the right views… or say the wrong thing.  What the… Heck?

It is not a logical construct.  Elders among the Jehovah’s Witnesses explain to me that is all about belief.  You have to express belief through action.  And where belief conflicts with science or logic, you must prefer belief.

So, the man puts his hand down in an old aquarium full of rattlesnakes, and God is supposed to protect him.  But if the man gets bitten and dies, well, he must’ve been a sinner or needing to be punished.  Hellfire for all eternity… you can’t beat fundamental Christianity on the matter of punishment for sins.

If you have gotten this far through my essay without throwing up your hands and consigning my sinful soul to the darkest pit of hell to burn for eternity, then you have probably concluded that I am just another old philosophical atheist spouting semi-logical nonsense about why there is no God.  And you would be dead wrong.  There is a God.  I talk to him daily.  He helped me write this post.  I am a Christian existentialist.  I believe there is a God, and he can be found in the Bible at First John 4:8.  “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.”  I don’t believe in everlasting life.  I believe I am a part of the whole.  I believe in love, because loving my fellow man is part of loving myself.  I would willingly lay down my life to save another, out of love, because that other person and I are one.  And when they bury me to become worm food and fertilizer, I won’t be feeling the pain and confusion and fear anymore, but I will still be part of the whole.  And the whole is God.

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August 24, 2015 · 12:39 pm

Lying as a Form of Social Responsibility

Mark Twain had a lot to say about lying.  Like in this quote from Following the Equator ; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar; “There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Mark Twain

Now, I would have to agree with the Biblical admonition against lying to get the people you dislike thrown into prison or beheaded.  I am especially concerned with some of the false witness pooping out of the mouths of some presidential candidates that would like us to believe their anti-science, anti-climate change, and anti-immigration lies would make good laws for our country.  If they go with Donald Trump’s idea of taking away birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, then my three children will lose their citizenship and could be deported from the only country they have lived in.  After all, after twenty years of marriage and applications and legal fees and enough frustration to make her give up on the whole idea, my wife is still not an American citizen.  She is from the Philippines, and Filipinos are one of the main groups that politicians site as reason for taking automatic citizenship away from foreign-born marriage mates back in the 1980’s.  And if we truly believe that climate change is a hoax and disproven by having Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe bring a snowball into the senate chamber, I believe we are all going to fry in Venus-like atmospheric conditions (Venus is 400 degrees Centigrade on the surface due to rampant greenhouse gasses like those emitted by the factories of Senator Inhofe’s primary campaign donors).  Some lies have fatal consequences, (and also, apparently, got Senator Inhofe the chairmanship of the Senate Science Committee).

But not all lies are bad lies.  Twain also says; “In all lies there is wheat among the chaff…”
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

And; “The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.”
– “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”

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So I have actually started to think that the lies not forbidden by the Bible because of their fatal consequences are actually all good things, and not bad.  Yesterday in a post about talking to stupid people, I suggested that you should tell them lies about how you care about them and want the best for them, and you should lie about it so hard that you believe in the lies yourself.  After all, story-tellers like me tell nothing but lies.  My made-up stories are based on real events and people, and reveal real perceived truths about life, but they are basically nothing but lies.  This essay is a lie.  I was brought up in Iowa to be truthful and always tell the truth… and that was repeatedly reinforced by religious training from every church I ever attended.  And yet, the more I tried to tell the truth, the more I realized that I could never say anything that was not a lie.  Think about it, what is there in all the factual things that you know that you can actually prove is true?  “I think, therefore I am,” (a quote from Rene Descartes) is the only thing anyone has ever said that I can prove by my own perceptions.  Every scientific theory is constantly reviewed for lies and untruth and inaccuracy so that they can be revised for something better that is also not ultimately provably true in every detail.  It is entirely possible that everything else truly is a lie, and then the whole universe, science, physics, logic, and everything is basically untrue.

So, what do I do?   Anything I say is a lie.  Some of the lies are hurtful, even deadly.  So I have to be careful about those lies.  I should fight against those lies.  But the lies that make our existence in life meaningful and full of hope and mystery…  I have to let those lies live, and even learn to do them artfully.

“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.”
– Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.

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August 23, 2015 · 7:13 pm

How to Reason With Stupid People

Okay, I know… I keep promising that I will never resort to insult humor, and then I go and write mean-spirited stuff about Donald Trump and other Republicans.   But I need to point out that as a middle school English teacher for 24 of my 31 teaching years, I had to talk to a lot of stupid.  And I am not being mean when I say that.  Unformed, immature minds are full of misinformation and wrong-way pig-headedness.  Those are both synonyms of “stupid”, aren’t they?  And I have the further disadvantage of being a freakishly high level of smart.  I have a lot of experience dealing with stupid.

HarkerAnd it often begins with, “Well, I know you are very, very smart, but I have common sense!”  That’s how the argument started this morning with my beloved wife.  When we are wrestling with financial and health and family problems, we always start with the assumption that I am completely wrong and headed for disaster.  An acceptable compromise is when the two of us talk it out for an hour, with me listening and agreeing and her laying on me a thick layer of sometimes-aromatic common-sense solutions.  We reach a compromise, by which we mean I accept that she is right and I am wrong.  And then we talk about the yes-buts.  “Yes, but have you thought about the consequences of that expense when it comes to the APR on your credit cards?”   “Yes, but if you talk to your boss that way, would she consider firing you?”  “Yes, but if you give that prized possession to our son as a gift of love, will he be resentful if you take it away again as a punishment for a minor error?”  Sometimes the common sense people have to be gently reminded that their simple solution might need to be looked at from the back side as well.  (Don’t get me wrong.  I am not calling my wife “stupid” here.  She is not.  And I am not looking to make a fatal mistake in my blog.)

witch of creek valley

It helps when talking and reasoning with stupid people that they know you really love and respect them.  When I have to talk politics with my more Republican relatives, well, I have to be very reasonable and polite.  Some of them are clinging to toxic candidates that, if they elect them, are going to do the exact opposite of what is good for people in their socio-economic group.  Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are intentionally playing on the fears and prejudices of people that are thinking with their “lizard brain” instead of their higher-level thinking functions.  It helps them to see that you care enough to explain things like “socialism” and “labor unions” and “taxes” in simple terms that help them to grasp that there is a good side to those things as well as a bad.

Cool School Blue

A large part of the lives of stupid people is the pain and uncertainty that being a part of humanity brings to them.  So many of them have no idea of the value of what they do and who they are.  They are so caught up in the pain of being themselves that they never realize how much the world around them appreciates and loves them.  They don’t understand that being stupid is the common condition of mankind, and just because they are not as smart as God himself, it doesn’t make them bad.  Sometimes the only way to talk to stupid people is to stop thinking of them as stupid, and reassure them that you love them and you will do everything you can to help them.  If you say it and mean it, they will not be stupid people any more.

“And that is all I have to say about that…”  -Forrest Gump

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August 16, 2015 · 2:04 pm

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Still being under the weather and filled with sinus head-pain, I decided to go back to a subject I love so much that the post will simply write itself.  You know I love Norman Rockwell and his art, and I fervently believe that kind of mass media oil-painting does not put him in a lesser category than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Raphael or any other painter with a ninja turtle namesake.   He is a genius, and though he is not a realist in so many ways, his work is more truthful than practically any other kind of painting.  If you are taken by surprise and didn’t know I had this passionate obsession, maybe you should go back and look at this post;   Norman Rockwell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell.  His name is Amos Sewell.

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Sewell was an amateur tennis player who was talented enough to win tournaments.  He was an employee of Wells Fargo who was headed towards anything but an art career until he decided to make a leap of faith in 1930.  He started as an illustrator for Street and Smith pulp fiction, and soon caught the notice of the big-time magazine markets for his art.  He published art for Saturday Evening Post,   Country Gentlemen Magazine, and Women’s Day.

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Like Rockwell, he was able to find the funny in everyday scenes, like the dance party to the right.  That young man at center stage is trying so hard not to step on the feet of the red-headed girl, that you want to laugh, but can’t because it’s obvious how embarrassed he would be, and the charm of the picture leads you to shun the thought of interrupting.  The scene is so real the boy would hear you laughing as you looked at the Post cover.

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More expert on this kind of art than I am is the Facebook site that I first got turned on to Sewell by.  Children in Art History

They can also be found on WordPress.  Children in Art History (WordPress)

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There is no doubt that Amos Sewell belongs in the same pantheon of artists as Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, or Paul Detlafsen.  They are all artists who achieve in their work exactly what I have always striven for.  I want to be able to hold the mirror up to our world the way they did.  I want to capture both the fantasy and the reality in the subject of everyday family life.  I also want to share this work with you because I cannot stand the idea that such artistic ambrosia could one day be forgotten in archives where no one ever looks at it and feels the message in their heart.

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July 25, 2015 · 1:56 pm

Life is Surreal

I have told you before that I am a seriously committed surrealist.  Not in the sense of “committed to an institution” sort of committed, but seriously committed.  All cartoonists are by nature surrealists.  Bill Watterson created Calvin and Hobbes around the idea that a toy tiger can come to life in the evil imagination of a child.  Jim Davis created Garfield around a seriously self-absorbed and greedy talking cat.  Elsie Segar created Popeye about a one-eyed sailor who drank from a magic pool to gain invincibility and maintains it with iron-fortified cans of spinach.  To be a surrealist, you must put unlikely things together to make something fantastically super-real… so unreal it seems flawlessly real… er, how do you actually define surrealism without resorting to the dictionary definition about “juxtaposing severely mismatched items created with photo-realism”?

flying car

Surrealism is actually more real than realism.  If you simply take a photograph of your picture idea, a picture of a birthday cake or a picture of a clown or a picture of your favorite bicycle’s back wheel, you are not showing the reality of life.  You are only taking a photograph of a thing.  You cannot get more than the physical, objective reality of that thing captured on photographic paper… or in a digital image (I am learning not to be a dinosaur even though I am old).  Reality is so much more than that.  It is the feeling, the evocation, the nuance, the… stuffy stuff-ness of stuff… and an infinity of other things that make reality seem real.

Take for a moment the whole notion of flying cars.  I am trying to create a hero-worship colored-pencil Paffooney about Astroboy riding in a flying car.  I am still puzzling out how I am going to make this scene look like the car is flying by juxtaposing something.  (By “juxtaposing something”, I, of course, simply mean putting one thing next to another thing… but it is important for artists to use hundred-dollar art words wherever possible to prove that they are serious artists) (I, of course, am actually making fun of my own stuffy stuff-ness in that last parenthetic expression.) (Maybe juxtaposing parenthetic expressions with the phrase “I, of course,” in all three of them is a kind of surrealism?)

So, why am I taking on this silly topic right now?  Right now I am a working artist in the midst of making art.  I am not just a cartoonist… I also write novels… silly young adult novels about voodoo men and snow babies and incompetent alien invasions and fairies successfully invading a middle school in Iowa.   I am suffering from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor… so I could drop dead of a heart attack or stroke any second… I may not finish most of the artwork I am now working on… and I am blogging…   I need a lot more silly topics like this to fill 500 words a day for every day of 2015.  I am writing this down in a published blog on WordPress because I need to put all my thinking down in a crystallized form to preserve it in case the opportunity to do so suddenly ceases.  And all of that muddle of meaning is so surreal it hurts.  I could do a better job than this of summing up and pulling it all together in a tighter package, but it is all about the messy business of surrealism, after all… another way of saying… “It’s about life.” 

Voodoo Val cover7snowbabiesAGaltorr PrimexvxDonner n Silkie

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July 16, 2015 · 3:16 pm

An Anatomy of an Angry Argument (The Stars ‘n’ Bars Controversy)

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I get a little tired of friends, family, and especially online acquaintances calling me a liberal and meaning it as a severe antonym of a compliment.   They are basically conservative by nature and they are trying to hurt my feelings by calling me liberal.  (Or “libtard” or “libturd” or “liberaloon”)  They don’t like my fact-based arguments and strike out at me from the deepest depths of their deeply-held-and-so-long-stored-in-the-same-barrel-that-it-fermented set of conservative beliefs.  Often they pull potentially intoxicating talking points out of the well of watching Fox News and expect me to drink it… even though I know it has intentionally been laced with poison.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag.  It was a part of the Civil War that fascinates me and still stands for the brave regiments of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg who marched into a hail of cannonball-laced death to prove once and for all that an entire way of life can be destroyed on the battlefield.  It was a terrible tragedy and those men paid the ultimate price for being on the wrong side of that argument.  I believe we should honor them and reconcile ourselves with what  remains of them.  They are indeed still out there.  But we do not have to honor the thing they were fighting for and ended up losing.  Slavery is inherently unjust and evil.  And the racism that is its aftertaste is just as despicable.  It is understandable that in that long gone culture it was normal to view black skin as the sign of an inferior creature.  They treated slaves as working farm animals, like oxen or donkeys.  It is the way they thought of those… actually people… whom they failed to accept as fellow human beings.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag.  But I am upset at the most common uses of it.  Klansmen use it as a symbol of their race-hatred.  They fly it at their protest marches along with the Nazi swastika.  The flag at the South Carolina capitol building went up during the equal rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s as a defiance of the entire movement.  I am not offended by the flag, but I do not like when it is used as a symbol of redneck America believing they’re better than blacks and Hispanics because their skin is white, and that their conservative white values are superior to the values of Jews, liberals, and intellectuals.  I don’t like being told that their heart-felt hate trumps my nerd-boy thinking-too-much.  I don’t like the way they believe they win the argument by shouting at me in a louder voice than I am capable of shouting back.  (Watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox News and see if he doesn’t do exactly that.)  I don’t like the way they don’t listen to me in the same way that I try hard to listen to them.

People I care about and even love in Iowa are posting things on Facebook about liberals attacking the Confederate flag, and how terrible it is that liberals are trying to take away “our heritage”.  But wait a minute… At the Battle of Shiloh in Missouri, the 5th Iowa Infantry Regiment and the Iowa 13th were embroiled in the Hornets’ Nest, the intense fight all along the “sunken road” that ultimately tipped the horrible battle in favor of the Union.  Iowans were shooting at the Confederate flag.  Many of them were killed by it.  How can that flag possibly be “our heritage“?

I believe the rebel flag is not an appropriate symbol to be used in government buildings or 4th of July parades.  It is a symbol of more than one thing… and some of those things are terrible things.  I am not advocating making the flag illegal in the U.S.  But, consider, the Nazi flag is illegal in Germany.  It is the flag of a defeated rebellion against our government, fought for the purpose of defending the institution of slavery.  Why are my conservative Iowegian friends supporting such a flag?

And I refuse to be insulted by being called a liberal.  Conservative doesn’t mean “good” while liberal means “bad”.  Conservative means wanting to preserve the good things about the past and not change them without good reason.  Liberal means wanting to change things for the better.  I used to be a conservative.  I am only comfortable being a liberal now because conservative powers are trying to protect things that have to change because they are hurting us.  I love all people in general… and I don’t want to see them hurt by their government or their society.  So, if you feel the need to argue in the comments… or if you feel you have to call me a libturd… feel free to do so. But please don’t call me a libturd in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!!!

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