Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness

I am headed back to Ottowa. In January. Dang! I am freezing my buns off in Tampa, and now I am headed up where they grow tundra. Which is a shame, because I really loved Ottowa when I visited there...IN THE SPRING!!

I suspected as soon as that fool terrorist snuck stuff on a plane in his drawers that I would probably be getting busier than I already was going to be. Then they started debating the technology that would screen for that, the technology that I have been training operators on for 2 years now, and I was pretty sure that I was fixing to travel a lot. Then the President and others started saying, "get those machines in the airports, now." I smiled, because I knew what that meant. Today I got the call. I had been off of vacation only a few hours. "Can you get on a plane right away. We need to train up a mess of screeners." Yes, of course I can.

I feel just a little bit of pride here, if you will pardon me the emotion. I mean, we all shook our heads and allowed as how it was a real shame that the world is so full of such hateful zealots. And that is true. But at least I am able to go from town to town, putting into place the screener skills that may help to catch the next hateful zealot before he boards the plane. Seriously, we can't expect the successfully smuggled aboard explosives to misfire forever. So far we have been lucky.

OK, the following was the original blog. But I got distracted, then sidetracked, and eventually lost the point I was ponderously moving towards. So this is how far I got before the old timer's disease kicked in:

Don't know why he wasn't more tolerant. It was in him, it just wouldn't come out. I would sit quietly and listen to him speak, although it wasn't speaking so much as ranting. Or not even that, because it was not at all impassioned. When it comes right down to it, I suppose it was just rambling, even though it was coherent and had a point. No matter how preposterous that point might be.

There must have been some method to his madness. He was consistent in his opinions. But no matter his measured tone or his clever phrasing, there was always a trace of bile that lingered in the air well after the words had echoed away. While it was a torturous path getting there, his judgements were swift and precise, requiring only the suspension of your disbelief in order to see the light. His light.

I often wondered how one could remain so focused. I would tug on that thread, fascinated as I watched the unraveling. On the one hand, you can look at the facts. On the other hand, you can ponder the dictates of common sense. Or, on the third hand, you could just hate anything you did not agree with right out of existence. After all, the ends justifies the means, right?

I have long thought that the majority of Americans are decent and thoughtful. I have some difficulty reconciling that with the representative government that they often choose to elect, but despite that I stick to my presumption that by and large most of us want to do the right things for the right reasons. Most of us have a concept of "the greater good", do we not? I cannot understand, nor do I choose to find acceptable, the notion that you being against whatever the other guy is for, and being against it only because he is for it, is in any way standing for something. It is not a principle and it is not defensable. If you disagree with him, be intellectually honest enough to have a reason why. And, if it not asking too much, possibly have an alternative to offer.

Like the pundit wrote a few years ago concerning his party's image. "The problem is that everyone knows what we are against. But nobody knows what we are for." Yep.

Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance, out
Ramblin' Ed