April 19 3:17am
As I start to write this, it is 2:15am on Monday morning. To all of you in the states (on the east coast anyways), it is 12:15pm meaning y’all probably just got home from church not too long ago. Hopefully it has been and will be a good Sunday for you, because I know that mine wasn’t disappointing. Casey, Troy, and I got up and went to church this morning. As weird as it sounds, we all get to bed at a pretty decent time here. Like before midnight decent time. I cannot think of the last time I was willingly in bed before midnight. It’s almost as if my body still isn’t adjusted to the time difference, which is not right considering I’ve been here for over two months now. And getting up is a lot easier than it is at home too. Getting up at 8:00am, well before I had my alarm set, is easier than getting up at 9:30 for church back home. Weird right?
After having just read that previous paragraph, one may wonder why I’m not in bed right now if going to bed before midnight is so easy. Well, I was in bed before midnight, but some wondering thoughts have kept me awake until now so I figured I’d make use of this tiny case of insomnia and put the time to good use. As I was saying, we went to church again today after not going for the last two weeks due to our New Zealand trip. It was good seeing everyone again, and they all seemed surprised to see us. One of the guys even said he thought we just stopped coming until we explained to him that we were out of town. After church, we finally went and played a game of “footie” with some of the guys afterwards. Footie is simply a game of rugby (using league rules) where you “touch” a person down instead of “holding” (tackling). They had been asking us since day one if we wanted to play with them but we had always had something planned for the afternoon. This morning, we decided that we were going to stay and play for once. I’m glad we finally went with them because it was fun. It was a little difficult to get the hang of (watching is ten times easier than having to play it) but I got the hang of it after a while. We were pretty beat after that (and it was 3:00 by now so we were pretty hungry) so we went back to our apartment and had a late lunch and then I took a nap for a while. When I got up, I made a marinade for some chicken I had pulled out of the freezer this morning that I plan on making for dinner Monday night. It worked out pretty well for me last time so I figured I’d give it a go again. The rest of the evening was pretty chill, I was planning on going into the city to get some night shots with my camera but I just didn’t feel up to it. Then, when I finally got to bed, I failed to fall asleep and now here I am.
I guess the reason my mind has been wondering is kind of a key part of this writing so maybe I should address it. When Casey and I were talking to this girl named Lexie after church, she asked us what we were planning on doing after we left Australia and then after we graduated. Casey pretty much has the next few years of his life mapped out for him, as he will graduate from VMI (the same school Fred went to) and then become a commissioned officer in the United States Navy. When she asked me, I honestly couldn’t think of what my plan was. I thought I had wanted to go to law school after I graduated, but over the past few weeks I’ve strayed from that mindset. And that question is still drawing a blank and it’s really rather frightening. I mean, I’m 20 years-old, soon to be 21, and I have no idea what I want to do after college. As I told Lexie, I've been interested in politics for a while and maybe want to start a career in the field, being a right-minded person who would fight for the rights of the people and tell the arm twisters and favour-pushers in Washington to take a hike. Seeing how the Obama administration pushed through health reform (with the aid of Reid and Pelosi) was deplorable and downright disgraceful. Recently, I’ve taken to reading my Public Administration textbook from last quarter for fun, and I just read an ethics article today that jumped out at me. It comes from the Volcker Commission and says,
“Ethical government means much more than laws. It is a spirit, an imbued code of conduct. It is a climate in which, from the highest to the lowest ranks of policy and decision-making officials, some conduct is instinctively sensed as correct and other conduct as beyond acceptance” (1989, p.1).
Now I don’t know about you, but when a legislator who is a pro-life Democrat stands against the bill one day, and then the next day, after being promised several $100,000+ grants for some small town airports, gives a “yes” vote when it really matters, is not acting in the most ethical manner. To take President Bush’s advice, “It’s not really very complicated. It’s a question of knowing right from wrong, avoiding conflicts of interest...” (Volcker Commission, 1989, p. 14). So could someone please explain to me the conflict of interest present in this predicament? Could it be that, instead of representing his people, Rep. Stupak sold his vote to Obama? Personally, I would say the answer is yes. While it could be said that Obama is a thug from the streets of Chicago, anyone with half a backbone should be able to stand up to the man when he comes along with a bag full of cash trying to squander votes for his prodigious healthcare overhaul that was sinking faster than the Titanic.
This doesn’t even come close to the partisan tactics Nancy Pelosi was set to employ in order to secure a “yea” vote coming out of the House. Watching as her political career was coming to an end right behind that of the healthcare bill, she was set to employ tactics that would let the House pass the Senate’s version of the bill, without actually taking a vote on it, and then voting on small parts of it at a later date. How can that even be considered democracy? The whole idea of the American system of government is to make sure that the people, or in our case the people we’ve elected, have a voice in what happens in this country. When you take votes away from the people we’ve entrusted to be our voice, what have you got left but a dictatorship? I didn’t mean for this to turn into a political rant, but whenever I look at the headlines on Drudge Report and everything is about the next corrupt/questionable act the current administration has taken, it at times makes me glad I’m not there to experience it first-hand. This country is changing and it’s not for the better. One thing people don’t seem to realize, is that back in the olden days when everything ran like a well oiled machine, family and religion were at the heart of the American way of life. Nowadays, you have people suing over the fact that their kid has to say the Pledge of Allegiance which includes the words “under God.” Maybe if we got ourselves back in that mindset where Sundays were for church, football, and summer afternoon picnics, we would find ourselves where we need to be in order to be a happy country where we can keep the door unlocked at night. I feel like these words have become the ramblings of a tired, aggravated person, but I think it’s something I needed to get out there, whether or not people agree with it. In closing, all I ask is that we as people look inside to determine what the right course of action is, which is probably outside of political circles and more church-based, and figure out how we can unify people again under a common goal, because when a country is unified, there is no stopping it and we can get back to the land of endless possibilities that was, and still is true to some extent.
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