Getting Started

What does this say about the world when someone like me is even blogging? I mean, I enjoy working and playing online and sometimes even talking to others and reading other people's thoughts, but for me to get on and start talking?? What is the world coming to??

That's probably my greatest concern. As I age and as my kids come of age, I keep wondering what kind of world I am turning over to them. First off, the world around them seems much more dangerous and challenging than when I was growing up. There are so many more ways to get into trouble it seems. There are so many more things available to them, which is a double edged sword as some of them are wonderous, some of them are very dangerous. My daughter can chat online with some kid in Canada and not run up the phone bill or have to mail letters back and forth. But is it really some kid in Canada or some nutjob pervert down the street? You teach them and hope they make the right choices and even then, things can go wrong.

And yet that doesn't concern me as much as 3 other things I see. First is the amount of debt our country is continually adding to. Someday this will eventually have to be paid. And that will probably fall on them, or their kids or even grandkids. The second thing is the way the Fed, Wall Street, and the government as a whole keeps trying to prevent the economy from going through it's normal cycles. The economy has always gone up and down, and every time the Fed intervenes, every time Wall Street invents some new investment that no one really understands, and every time the government then bails out the fools who risk too much on what they don't know, the economy is prevented from taking it's normal course. You keep it going up and up and up and eventually no matter what you do it comes down, but it comes down much much harder. Which we may be seeing now. And we get further in debt when the Fed guarantees the foolishness of Bear Stearns (BSC began yesterday at 57 and finished at 30, wish I had shorted that one) and the "Economic Stimulus" the Pres is giving us puts another 150 billion onto the national debt. Don't get me wrong, I am always pleased to get a tax refund, but you better find a way to take that amount out of the budget. Third and last is the amount of interference in everyday life that all levels of government seem to be getting into. It gets so bad that you cannot cut down a tree in your yard without the permission of the city, you have to jump through hoops so that your kids can attend the school down the road from you, and you cannot gamble online (legally) from the privacy of your own home. But then you have idiots in the government who will do whatever they want to get around the rules they pass and expect us to uphold.

I guess to finish up, I'm getting damned tired of seeing the government try to run my life, the courts not upholding the constitution but feeling they need to make their own laws, the people appointed and elected to make life a little better for everyone taking advantage of their position and influence to try to line their own pockets (check out this article about the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections: http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/local/article414941.ece) and slip through loopholes in the laws they enact, and yet bail out the rich and the powerful when they screw up. You try to teach your kids right from wrong, that they need to help others but take responsibility for their actions, and hold them to standards but then they look at the world around them and see their own government teaching just the opposite. They see that freedom of speech only applies to non-offensive speech (unless you are a minority of some kind, then by all means offend whoever you please), that owning a handgun is the province of the police and criminals only, and that the courts can interpret the law how they please. How do you combat that?