January 24, 2004

• Security?  Bah, humbug!

  
  

   I’ve been thinking about the State of the Union Address lately.  What a lame, lying, self-serving crock of manure THAT is.  And that reminds me of a still bigger crock, the Homeland Security Act. The Homeland Security Act is a sick pathetic joke, a thinly-veiled attempt by the unelected president curently infesting the Oval Office and his rich over-grown frat-boy cronies to strip us of still more of our civil rights.  The name itself is a lie, and a BIG lie at that.  Security!  I snort in disgust.  Does no one, besides a few  gun-toting left-wing loonies like myself and a few others, realize  that there is no such thing as  material security, really, that there never was, and that there never will be.  At best, security is a state of mind.  It is not, nor can it be, a state of being. Think a minute.  There are precious few domesticated primates on this planet more expertly and zealously protected than the President of the United Snakes.  Still, presidents do get shot.  Even now, in the post 9/11 hysteria, any courageous patriot who is willing to lay down his life could bring down the perfidious Dubya.  It would take patience and planning and cunning, but it could be done.

  
  

  And what of us lesser mortals?  No matter how rich or heavily insured or walled-up we may be, our domicile could be flattened by a tornado (they don’t just pick on us trailer trash, you know) or a hurricane, or an earthquake.  Or a bloody meteorite, for that matter.  And most of us leave our abodes and travel on the highways and byways, where we could be shot by a sniper, or smushed by a semi piloted by an impaired driver, or simply have some drunk in an SUV run head-on into us.  Security?  Sure. Yeah. Right.

  
  

  Back in the halcyon days of my youth, when I was a heel-rocking, change-jingling, designer-suited pencil-neck political diplo-dink, I didn’t realize this.  In my slumber, disturbed only by occasional flashbacks to the 60s (I even got clean for Gene!), I equated security with my health insurance and the steadily-mounting numbers on my paystub twice a month that represented the number of bucks in my retirement account.  Well, those days and that insurance and those bucks are long gone, boys and girls, and guess what?  I’m still here, and healthier and feistier than ever.   Okay, maybe a tad creaky  and occasionally pain-racked, but still and all, feisty enough for an old fart.

  
  

  Still, illusions die hard.  My sweety gets a nice feeling of security when she contemplates the woodpile in our front yard.  To her, it means she won’t be freezing to death any time soon.  I can relate to that.  With me, it’s our pantry. (And our arsenal, but being Alaskans, that sorta goes without saying.)  With seven mammals sharing a single-wide, we don’t have a lot of closet space.  We don’t have real extensive wardrobes anyway, and often wear the same clothes days or weeks or months at a time.  But boy do we have a pantry.

  
  

  It’s not quite a walk-in, although a reasonable-size person could step inside, without shutting the door anyway.  And it’s full to the gunnels.  We have roughly 17 boxes of cereal–everything from generic frosted mini-wheats for the young one here to supposedly-healthful flaked  amaranth  (which tastes darn near as good as the box it comes in). We have dozens of kinds of soups, everything from cream of celery (for making tuna hot dish ) to fancy Progresso beef and mushroom. My sweety eschews refined wheat, as the stuff is way bad for her, and does her own baking with stuff like tapioca flour and brown rice flour and almond meal flour. We have all those and more.  Plus there’s all manner of stuff to drink–demon rum has no place in this place, but we have sparkling apple cider and grapefruit juice (ruby red and regular), and Lipton tea and plain green tea and green tea with mate and a baker’s dozen or so of various and sundry herbal teas. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

  
  

   I love the pantry, and the cats like it, too, since there is a hole in the wall between it and the hall so they can get through without having to jump the fence that keeps the dog in the front of the trailer.

  
  

  In my childhood, I went hungry more than once–I won’t be doing that again, not any time soon.  But still, this pantry mania is all about  material stuff, stuff that can burn or rot or decay, stuff that can be lost or strayed or stolen.  The primates in this pack realize that real security–or as real as it gets on this plane–comes from Spirit.

  
  

  I’m not talking religion here, or belief. We have transcended those things. I am talking about the sure and certain knowledge that the creator and sustainer of our local universe will indeed sustain us.  I am talking about the adamantine surety that comes from knowing that we have always had everything we need, and will always have everything we need.  There’s security!

  
  

  Tom Ridge, eat your little heart out!  And go away and leave us the hell alone.

  • 12:09 am
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