INTERESTING TIMES

The sirens blared for a minute yesterday morning, still tested monthly on the first Wednesday of the month.  My mother has no idea what to do if they go off.  She says she supposes she'd turn on the radio and wait for instructions.  I remember when there was a real feeling of fear, here.  We thought we'd be the first ones to get bombed.  This town was built in the 1940's to support the production of the atomic bombs and other secrets.  Whoever names the city calls it "Secret City" now---it used to be the "Atomic City" but I guess that's not such a popular name these days.

The scientists who work at the labs don't live in Oak Ridge anymore.  I used to think of Oak Ridge as a pocket of international PhD's who were above the southern morass.  Educated and openminded.  That is no longer true.  The road between the plants and West Knoxville has many more lanes, and at rush hour you can see where the lab personnel are going.  My friends tell me that Oak Ridge is become more like the rest of east Tennessee, that is, less educated and more religious and patriotic.

Patriotic externally at least.  On my mother's block most houses have a flag or some sort of "God Bless America" display going on.  My mother has an American flag hanging on her front gate, and there's one in the window of her neighbor's house, and one on the porch of the neighbor across the street.  My father, in another neighborhood, also has one up.  I don't know what exactly all these flags mean.  I think that if you do not display your patriotism, you are suspect of being a terrorist.  I also suspect that the flags declare gun ownership, because the second amendment is enshrined here.  Certainly one would be foolish to threaten anyone, because stickers on vehicles declare that their guns will only be removed from cold dead hands, or that the guns will be smoking hot and out of ammo.  Hanging a flag is in a sense cammo for my relatives who are not so well armed.

Religiousness is endemic here.  Christianity, to be specific.  My mother says Baptists are the dominant sect but the Catholics and Methodists have churches near here and active communities.  I walked by the Methodist church this morning, taking the dog out, and noticed that they have a "First Steps" program for "child development".  Every church has some program for the little ones.  It occurs to me to wonder, does anyone attempt to teach the little ones skepticism and critical thinking?  Are the children getting properly socialized, or dogmatized?  Probably some of each, I suspect.

Oak Ridge is overwhelmingly white.  I did run across a Hispanic mother and her two children waiting for the bus.  She kept them far away from my mother's dog.  And I have seen a few blacks here and there.  The talker who used to work at the gym who now hangs out by the door at Panera to keep social.  He doesn't know when to say goodbye.  Another nonwhite is my mother's old friend Dimitri who is Middle Eastern, and walks everywhere, picking up trash and coins from the sidewalks.  He was an engineer at the plant, has plenty of money in the bank, but lives in a tiny apartment and does not own a car.  I would like to talk to him.  I haven't seen a single native since I've been here, that is, aside from white eyes who were born here like myself.

Just yesterday I finally stopped ignoring the Middle East and looked up a few things. Like who is Shia and who is Sunni. And who has nukes and where. And what exactly an Islamist is. It was....a useful exercise. Anyone else out there taking an interest in this juncture of history? I'm ready to be educated.

It just seems to me, after one *ok a fraction of one* day of looking into it, that the majority Sunnis in most of the Middle East have been supremely frustrated trying to deal with their less conservative, more secular Shia neighbors. And it seems clear to me that America has at least attempted to enact a separation of church and state, even though those words do not appear in the constitution. It was in the First Amendment to the US Constitution that Congress was to "make no law respecting respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". As wikipedia points out, lots of nations have this idea in their code, and there is a great range of shades of gray in its execution. Here in America we do fairly well, but nowhere near a perfect score. For one thing, the constitution has no control over the states and what local laws might be passed. Which may be how we have gigantic crosses along Interstate 5 in Washington State. Not so different from other places, where religion is supposed to guide personal and political life. Here we seem only able to elect Christian presidents. We like to think that we are above it, but we are surely not.

So I know I am rambling and I will call it quits. If you have an opinion about what is the crux of what is going on--in Syria, Turkey, Kurdistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia or any other involved party, feel free to comment and tell me! I'm building a mind map.

**Created Syria tag.

I didn't know she was this bad.... but apparently the social conservatives really like her.

If you read here then you heard about Rand Paul's media disaster. Now is it Sharron Angle's turn. She had a website in which she called for the dissolution of many popular parts of our government including the Department of Education. Then she won the Republican primary in Nevada. The night after she won her entire website had been pulled, but the record of her positions is ubiquitous. And even though I can grasp at the rationale behind the desire to shrink government so radically, I cannot get any of my liberal friends to even think about how it could work out. They just say she's nuts and she has no chance. I don't know anything about this woman but I'm pretty sure she's not as astute as Rand Paul, and he got injured pretty badly by the media slams on his positions. The tea party is fueled by the anger and frustration of people who are out of work while banks are bailed out. Within the tea party there is no agreement on a platform. The tea party is not even a party. The republicans are attempting to tame the tea party candidates that win public elections, to maintain their half of the chokehold on our government. I just wish that the tea party candidates made more sense. Many of them seem to be more charismatic than they are educated. I am sympathetic to libertarian principles and agreed that we need radical change. I wish that the conceptual divides were not so large, or that we were less prone to declaring each other insane. We are all crazy; the differences lie merely in the intensity and timing of our disconnection from reality. And in my view, our entire culture is mad. Bonkers. We are collectively off our rocker. The left and the right are shooting nonsense messages at each other at increasing speed. So I suppose it's no surprise that we are having cultural siezures.