Thursday, June 25, 2009

In the Pink

Today I was caught, mid mulch sling, in a beautiful, terrifying storm.
Right in the pink of it.
The kind of storm that makes me understand why people make gods of thunder and lightning. The thunder cracks so loud I can feel it in my chest, the lightning flashes so quickly and unpredictably that I half expect to be struck down at any moment.
The great maple trees swagger violently, gracefully, threatening to snap but swooping back up every time like a seiche.

Sitting on an old milk crate and leaning against a wheelbarrow in Carol H's garage, it smells just like Grandma Padalino's. I can think of no better place to watch this storm pass, dominating the landscape and humbling me yet again to the raw power of nature.

No one else is here, but these garage smells and summer smells and rain smells conjure up memories and I am not alone.

Thunder rumbles and cracks and rain beats all around me. I see flashes and the strong wind blows mist onto my perch in the garage.

And then the storm slips away with as little warning as it came. So too do my memories. I take up my wheelbarrow and roll back to the present.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Brainwashed

When parents send their children off to college, Mom and Dad hope they will return more cultivated, knowledgeable, and astute -- able to see issues from all points of view. But, according to Ben Shapiro, there's only one view allowed on most college campuses: a rabid brand of liberalism that must be swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Shapiro shows how the leftists who dominate the universities -- from the administration to the student government, from the professors to the student media -- use their power to mold impressionable minds

-From promotional website of Brainwashed


I have never been a very 'political' person. As a kid, politics was just something that was argued on the radio, cocky voices making fun of the other party. A voice to fall asleep to on long car rides, the words never registering in my head. But now I wonder, what were those voices saying to me all those years? Did I survive being brainwashed by Rush Limabugh for eighteen years, only to come to college to be brainwashed by my professors?

I don't think so. In fact, I feel every bit as 'knowledgeable and astute,' if not cultivated, as Ben Shapiro thinks parents hope for. I know that global warming is a serious issue not because I saw a raging liberal out throwing eggs at passing Hummers from the tress, but because I have worked through the science meticulously, read the papers, seen the studies. It really hurts to know that people would discredit science, sound science, on the basis of politics. Politics, known and even expected to be corrupt, distorting the truth on both sides.

Radicalism scares me, liberal and conservative, but conservative in particular because that is what I am blogging about. To take any stereotypical liberal ideal and view it as the enemy, as some kind of menace that will destroy America. For example, I was reading the book 'Taking America Back' by Joseph Farah a while back. He devoted a whole chapter to the hoax of organic gardening. He exposed to his readers that in order to fertilize organic crops, manure is used. That's POOP people! Poop on your food! So eat conventional food, fertilized with loads of nitrogen and phosphorus (strictly not poop fertilizer) that will run into our rivers and lakes and create huge algal blooms that will die off and eat up all of the oxygen and kill the fish. The choice is yours. Which is more of a menace to America's future?

What I have learned from college is to ask questions. To be wary of what I am told. To seek the truth in a objective manner, to use science and not politics to guide me. If that's brainwash, I'm glad my brain is so clean.