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Strange straw poll from Iowa
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by The Alchemist, Unknown News
March 28, 2006
How long, O Lord, how long? How long must we endure this vapidity turned ugly? Must every one of us be subjected to American Idolatry? When, O when will someone (go, Cindy Sheehan!) stand up and say the unvarnished truth, that this “war” is BULLSHIT.
Here in Iowa, we have the unique position of being a “testing” ground for politicos. Every four years, the lean-eyed hungry pollsters descend upon us like leeches in a frog-pond, and every damn iron worker, farmer, and convenience store clerk is besieged with marketeers, now clutching Blackberries, all intensely interested in the minutiae of our political leanings. Ahem.
As a full time resident, I occasionally pose my own “straw polls” at that most egalitarian of American institutions, the local tavern. My local bar is not a pretentious place, but we get a good mix of blue collar folk, with the occasional tie-wearer wandering in to see what all the fuss is about. Generally the fuss is about the Hawkeyes (sniff -- half a second! Sheesh!), or about ordering another beer from one of the lovely, busty beermaids (yes, we do grow them healthy here in the heartland -- but I digress).
The other afternoon, after work, I was relaxing with my usual pint of Guinness and posing the following question to my fellow imbibers. They were tolerant, and used to my occasional tangential ramblings, and mostly cooperative. The question went thusly:
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Suppose you knew a man with a large family, who had a successful small business, and netted about $100,000 per year.
Suppose also that this man spent $52,000 of that money on guns, ammo, rocket launchers, with an eye to totally dominating his neighbors with threat (and use!) of force.
What would you call that person?
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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Suppose you knew a man with a large family, who had a successful small business, and netted about $100,000 per year. Suppose also that this man spent $52,000 of that money on guns, ammo, rocket launchers, with an eye to totally dominating his neighbors with threat (and use!) of force. What would you call that person?
Though the answers varied (I got at least one “a patriot”), the general consensus was that this fictional character was fundamentally flawed in some way, either unintentionally (sick, deluded, etc.) or intentional (a criminal, thug, etc.).
Yet approximately 52% of our federal budget goes to feed our insanely bloated and misanthropic military. Chew on that for a minute. It is truly sick.
The same fictional “man” spends just a couple hundred bucks on his kids schooling. By the way, I got these (approximate) numbers from an excellent link recently posted on Unknown News. If the math is off, the fault is mine, not DeviantArt's.
Every time I get my paycheck, I feel sick that my money is being seized (yes, seized!) to perform torture and murder of innocents (I guess it’s ok -- they’re brown, and on the other side of the world). How many of us would voluntarily choose to spend half of our budgets on munitions and bloodletting? This is not a sane choice!
Sigh. How long, O Lord, how long must we endure this madness?
© by the author.
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