Month: August 2013

Thanksgiving Workers (written Nov. 21st, 2012)

On By Swarn GillIn CommentaryLeave a comment

I don’t really understand this hostility to people having to work on Thanksgiving for numerous reasons.  First we have very few holidays in this country compared to many other countries.  Businesses on average give less holiday time to their workers.  Studies show that this does not make us more productive.  A rested, lower stressed employee is one that actually works more efficiently.

More importantly though there seems to be some sort of implication that people who don’t want to work on Thanksgiving are lazy .  Isn’t it possible they don’t want to work on Thanksgiving because they would like one day where they can be with their family, to celebrate with a warm home cooked meal and be thankful for the blessings they have in life.  Doesn’t Thanksgiving have value as a holiday?  And what does it say about our society when we devalue a holiday?  Is it okay to tell those who work in the retail industry that our right to consume is more important than your right to have family values?  We’ve already over-commercialized Christmas, so should we say goodbye to Thanksgiving too?  There are other ways stores could compete for business than opening earlier and earlier every year.  Many workers may have believed when they took the job that they would get at least certain days off, it’s not realistic to expect them to just go get another job.  Shouldn’t corporations have a responsibility to respect the people’s values about tradition and family?  Should we let their desire for profit dictate what our values should be?

Let’s face it.  It’s not like retail is essential services.  Things could not be open on Thanksgiving and we’d get by quite easily.  The meme I’ve seen put up that tries to deride Wal-Mart workers for complaining simply because the military have to work through holidays to me is the most troubling.  It represents reasoning by false analogy.  First, I don’t want our military to work during holidays either, and I’m sure they don’t either.  They wish they could be with their families, just as I am sure their families wish they were there for the holidays.  If they truly are fighting for our freedoms should we as a society say that Thanksgiving doesn’t really matter so that when they do return home, the very values they served to protect are washed away by consumerism?  Perhaps more importantly if you wish to tell retail employees to stop complaining and work because the military do (as well as other emergency services, like police, nurses, firefighters, doctors, etc) do you plan on honoring those people in the same way.  As you claw your way through crowds to buy items you don’t really need were you planning on thanking that Wal-Mart employee for working on a holiday so you can get the items you want and save a little money?  I doubt anybody thanks them for their service.    Are retail employees for corporations some sort of low paid underclass who are only there to serve our needs as consumers?  It feels very much like that is the case.  The corporation is already disrespecting their values and so it hurts to see so many others disrespecting their values also.  And at what point can we start supporting them?  When stores open Thanksgiving at 6 pm?  4 pm?

There are more important things in this world than money and material goods.  And we have many days in the year to make money and spend it, so what’s wrong with keeping the spirit of a few days a year alive to celebrate friends, family, and have rest?

It was a dream (written on Nov. 20th, 2012)

On By Swarn GillIn Prose and Poetry8 Comments

It was a dream.  It was a moment.  And in that moment I held the consciousness in my head of every human being on the planet.

I was all ages. Spanning those whose eyes opened for the first time, to those whose eyes were about to close forever.  I felt a continuum of ages, of people born at about half a second apart.  There was confusion, as infants tried to make sense of their very existence for the first time, shapes were new, and the world a symphony of strange shapes overlapping and fused together.  I laughed as child-like innocence surged through me and simple things were so joyful, like seeing an elephant for the first time.  I felt strange as my body changed, as innocence slowly melted away leaving the thoughts both vigorous and also filled with doubt and fear.  A sense that I was close to having to go forth into the world and leave all I’d known behind, not having the slightest idea how to do it, but feeling like I had to pretend that I did, not even aware of the mistakes I might make.  I felt the hope and strength of one who is beginning their journey as an individual in this world, and from looking forward I felt my head slowly turning and turning to looking back, longer, farther, and deeper.  Smiling at little things that used to seem so big, but now bouncing off of me, understanding the process of change over a length of time that young cannot conceive.  Feeling comforted by having wisdom from a life of mistakes and successes, trials and errors.

I was able to understand all cultures.  Truly understand. Recognizing what it means to be born in a completely different place, with a different history and a different outlook on the world.  Some differences were subtle, others were grand.  In that one consciousness I saw a fountain of masks pouring past.  Masks not to mark superficiality, but rather a surface that made one look different and that upon deeper reflection still had the same wants and desires as every human on the planet.  Wanting to love and be loved, wanting to be accepted, wanting to take care of our families and friends, wanting to exert its presence in a massive world with a limitless sky.  I saw the many paths for achieving these aims, and that in the end all paths led to the same destination.

I felt all emotions.  Could this happen even all in a moment? It felt like longer.  And yet emotion is very much in the moment.  I felt extremes of courage and fear.  Sometimes it was irrational, a headlong courage that defied explanation, a fear that was only shadow and neither reasonable or real. I felt rational courage too. A surety of knowledge and experience that gave one for at least that moment a feeling of triumph of overcoming adversity with absolute competence.  And there was great “rational fear” too.  The fear that comes from helplessness.  The fear that comes from experiencing great pain and knowing how easily it can come again.  The fear of a child about to beaten by a father, the fear of one about to be killed for the color of his skin, the fear of eternal punishment from a god, the fear of hunger as crops wither and die, the fear of suffering as one watches love dies.  I felt the extremes of light and dark.  It was the power of love in the light leading to generosity, compassion, and selflessness.  I felt the depth of hate in the dark leading to greed, oppression, and violence.  This too had an irrationality and rationality to it.  For some these qualities were taught, a product of growing up in an environment where only these extremes were experienced. For some there was no explanation.  Malice had simply always been with them for no reason they could discern.  For some, despite being born in the dark, they clawed their way out into the sun.  And for all those extremes there were billions of points in between; A continuum of mixtures of love and hate, courage and fear, swirling around in my mind.  They were not contradicting but competing.  At the very center of this swirl was an endless turning that was indifference.  Invisible and empty, indifference turned without ever a hope of moving or touching the world.

And I was every person.  I was an expert on many things.  The many things that I knew revealed truths, and also revealed fallacies.  Yet many times, even the two most contradictory ideas were still held to be true in that consciousness.  But I saw how it all made sense.  How perceptions of experiences taught truths and those varied by the billions of different combinations of experiences we all face every day.  This was caused by our handicaps and strengths, our pain and our elation. I was also every identity and profession: A doctor, a janitor, a teacher, a manager, an assembly line worker, a prostitute, a child laborer.  I was heterosexual, a homosexual, a transsexual, a woman and a man.  I was every race, and every religion.  I was both loved and hated for who I am.  I was a saint, I was a sinner, a hero, a rapist, a giver of life, and a taker.  I felt pride and shame, joy and regret.

The great unity of billions of voices ended and the silence shook me from unconsciousness.  And when I awoke I lay for hours trying to the fathom the possibilities that I had dreamed.  I contemplated billions of identities, feelings, histories, and truths.  Eventually my mind melted away the endless details and I realized that much suffering in the world was caused by a few, and that humanity was for the most part good.  I realized that I was truly everybody.  That there is at least one thing I share in common with all people.  That even if I hadn’t acted on darkness I occasionally had dark thoughts.  That if even if I hadn’t acted on the love, I had at least felt it.  I wander and have purpose.  I knew many things, but did not know even more.  I am alive in both time and space, and that what makes up my body has always existed and will always exist.  And that what makes every moment special in my current form is that I get to be aware of my existence as well as others. I am in a continuum of life that is not only Earthly but universal and that I will never be alone.  I was humble and at peace.  And then as I dressed I had the inescapable urge to share

What is Love? (written Nov. 12th, 2012)

On By Swarn GillIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

Humanity has been trying to define this since the first musicians and poets, perhaps even earlier.  So I figured I might as well take my shot at it.

My central thesis is that love is too narrowly defined by society and as a result we don’t experience as much love as we are capable.  I am of the opinion that no feeling of love should be discounted and that love when it happens is always a good thing.  I am normally one that approaches everything from academic standpoint, but I am going to try and keep most that out here, because my opinions are a product of both what I have read, but also from experience.  And ultimately, regardless of what we might learn academically about love, much of the views we form about love does seem to be experiential.

So perhaps to start, we should look at what we love.  I feel that love deepens in accordance with the complexity and changeability of what we love.  Which is why loving another human being is the most satisfying, but also the most difficult and sometimes rather perilous.    I feel that this is one of the reasons why people find it easier to show love towards pets, because they are relatively simplistic in comparison to humans, and are less likely to change in personality.  Provided you show love and care they will give back that love in care.  In many ways I feel this is the attraction of God as well.  However a religion defines God, God while perhaps quite complex is also unchanging and I think many people find this appealing.

In the realm of other humans, we feel love towards family, we feel love towards friends and lovers.  As a quick academic aside there is an evolutionary reason for feeling love towards family (genetic interest), love towards friends (reciprocal  altruism) and love towards those we have sexual relationships with (both genetic interest combined with reciprocal altruism for the purposes of helping offspring survive).    But putting this aside, I believe that we categorize love we feel towards different people, but I would see the feeling of love is often indistinguishable only the way that express that love is different.  This is for obvious reasons and that is important, but in general I feel that when we over categorize love and in essence try to define it under narrow criteria we lose some of its value and joy.  For instance we accept the fact that if we have a second child that we can love that new child as much as the first.  You can love your mother just as much as your father or one cousin just as much as another.  And this would be true for friends also.  Now obviously all these people are slightly different and so how you express and show that love towards them or the reasons why you love them will be different.

What we don’t accept is that when you fall in love with someone, that you can’t fall in love with someone else and still feel the same love you felt for another person.  There is some logic to this of course.  Part of this has to do with the act of “falling in love”.  Falling in love is quite the emotional roller coaster.  The physiological changes are immense, and anybody who has had that to happen will know that they are literally not in their right mind for a good period of time. There is a reason for the expression “love is blind”.  The act of falling in love often defies reason, which makes it more wonderful because that sort of loss of control is so intense and so unique that it makes the experience very spiritual.  This is probably a good thing again from an academic standpoint because you want the experience to feel very significant since the care of offspring is a long term commitment. (And yes I know that we don’t have to create offspring, but that is the evolutionary goal of all life of which we are included).   The key is that intense feeling of being “in love” fades, which is not to say that love gets worse, but the way it feels simply changes.  You get your sanity back. J  That feeling is not supposed to last 20 years and probably not even 10 years.  The point I’m trying to make here is that nature has not prescribed how many times we are supposed to fall in love, only that we will fall in love, possibly multiple times.  This feeling cannot be control, you do not choose who you fall in love with, it just happens.  Just because you are already with someone doesn’t mean it can’t happen again.  I feel that we as a society we find it easy to condemn that person and this is wrong.  However, I think also if you are with somebody already and you fall in love with someone else, we too often tie more meaning to that than there really is.  We can turn our lives upset down, and leave the person we are with for what we think of greener pastures, only to find ourselves, after the “falling in love” feeling fades to the same problems we had before.

I truly believe that our ability to feel love is unlimited, but what we are limited by is energy and time.  This is the only limit that can be fairly placed on love.  In life we must make choices.  Perhaps not about who we love more, but who we expend more of our time and resources on in expressing that love.  The amount of love you can show one child if you only have one, as opposed to 3 children is clearly more, even if you feel the same love for all your children.  We often regret most not being able to express love in proportion to our feelings.  And this can be a sad truth in life.

Love is beautiful.  Love inspires.  Love gives strength.  Love helps you grow and learn.  Love makes us better.  Even if we have limited time and energy, we should try to never be jealous when someone we love feels more love in their heart for more in this world.  Love is a good thing, and often means the most when you love without having a good reason to.  Love also happens rarely, which makes it special when it happens to you, and it should always be cherished.

Perhaps the only thing that all love has in common is that it hurts when one is rejected: whether it is a friend, a parent, a child, a lover.  We might feel that hurt in different ways, but it all has the power to give us sleepless nights, sobbing, stress, and depression.  So maybe Haddaway had it right all along in answering the question.

What is love?

Baby don’t hurt me, no more.

 

But isn’t this also what makes love beautiful?  If love was so certain I truly feel that the joy would not be as a great.   Choose to feel the joy, and life will always feel full.  I am thankful for all those in this world who have touched my heart and soul.  I promise to keep reminding you of how thankful I am for that, and hope I can touch your heart and soul in return.

Sorry FOX News (written Nov. 8th, 2012)

On By Swarn GillIn CommentaryLeave a comment

I’ve gotten quite used to the narrative at FOX News and don’t usually have much more to say than what Jon Stewart usually already says, but the comments that were made by Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and other pundits  after Obama’s victory was called enraged me a little more than usual.  Specifically I am referring to the comments that “50% just wants free stuff from Obama”, “This is no longer the traditional America”, “I can’t believe 50% of the country wants more debt”, “Minorities took this election away from Republicans”.  I might not have these quotes quite right, but let’s deal with them.

The idea that there is 50% of the nation who doesn’t work hard, who wants entitlements, is simply not true.  There is a percentage of people who take advantage of the system, there is no question.  Is there not a similar percentage of rich people who take advantage of the system as well? There are cheaters in every system and there is no way to prevent that.  This mythical 50% of the population (47% according to Romney) is supposed to be all voting democratic handing the election to them.  This has never been proven to be true.  The south which has the greatest poverty also tends to be extremely red. While urban welfare recipients might be voting blue, there is no question that there are plenty of rural welfare recipients who are voting red.  In general urban dwellers vote blue anyway. Perhaps because they are exposed to the diversity of human life more.  Perhaps it has nothing to do with welfare at all.  It certainly doesn’t in the South.  If you have been to impoverished areas in the south, these people are extremely conservative and so there is certainly a large proportion of people at or below the poverty voting Republican.

In terms of the comment about debt, the assertion that all of us are happy about the debt and thus voted for Obama is ridiculous.  Though FOX you would like to believe that the memories of all of us are short, perhaps more people than you want realize that while Republicans were in power, fiscal responsibility was not your hallmark.  New York City was attacked by terrorists, FEMA was a disaster during a disaster, and the economy crashed.  The rate at which people went on welfare increased more rapidly in the last year of Bush’s presidency, just as the rate in which unemployment increased was also more rapid during this same time, than when Obama has been president.  And when I say rate I am talking about calculating the change and dividing it by the time.  The actual meaningful way to compare trends.  Under Bush our deficit (the yearly debt) went from being in the black to being massively in the red.  And while Obama hasn’t reduced the deficit as much as he should have he has not increased it as much as Republicans.  So perhaps there is a reason why many don’t believe that Republicans are anymore money conscious than the democrats.

The comment about minorities is perhaps the most insulting, especially since white America are all descendent from different European nations who all came here to escape persecution or poverty for a better life.  The fact that many of us happened to have fair skin only binds us together now.  But many European groups didn’t get along at one point either.  It is also insulting since we brought all the African-Americans here to be our slaves.  And now they have the gall to complain that they have somehow ruined America by voting for the democratic party.  And when it comes to the African-American population, most of that population lives in red states.  Seven out of the top 10 states in African-American population are red states.  So even if all those African-Americans were voting democratic, it doesn’t make a difference in the electoral college numbers.  Perhaps we should look at hispanic populations which is the biggest minority in the U.S.  And while Florida and California are huge and it looks like Florida will fall to Obama again.  Texas and Arizona are no slouches to the Republican electoral college count.  But, for argument’s sake, let’s say they did win Obama the election.  Then shouldn’t the party of “personal responsibility” as they claim to be perhaps look inward and ask the question “What are we doing to alienate a large portion of the American population”.  Vast millions of people who love this country as much as anybody else.  Because right now it just sounds like you are asking them to be white, to cast aside the fact that the world is a diverse place.  In order to make society work we have to learn how to deal with diversity and not dismiss it.

Finally…”traditional America”.  I don’t know what that means.  Is that the America that had slavery?  Is that the America that didn’t allow women to vote?  Is that the America who allowed segregation?  The countries that hold on to tradition for too long are the countries that flourish with extremism.  They are the countries that house terrorists.  They are the countries who oppress their people.  When I think of countries that are mired in tradition I think of Saudia Arabia, Pakistan,  and Iran, and whole host of other countries that are in the process of changing, but all too slowly from a human rights standpoint.  FOX News the world changes.  Over time the world has become more peaceful, more humane, and more secular.  This is reality.  The less you choose to accept the, the more your party will fail.  Maybe more Americans than you realize, recognize the importance of separation of church and state and that you can still maintain your beliefs even when your government does not purport one belief system over another.  Maybe there is no war on Christmas.  People just realize that the reason that Christmas is special is because it is a time spent with family, a time of giving, a time of seeing smiles when you make gingerbread cookies for your kids.  The essence of good values of community, friendship and love remain, only the context has changed.  Maybe there are many people who recognize that while they still may be against abortion but realize that the best way to achieve less abortions is not through restictive laws or forcing your system of beliefs upon others, but to provide affordable health care for mothers, to provide women with birth control, and to give them a good education on all of these issues.  Maybe there are many Americans who realize that a functioning society is one in which the people remain as free as possible to make personal decisions especially when those decisions have no bearing on your own life or beliefs.  Perhaps people are confused as to how a party that claims they value life can be for the death penalty and support war.

So FOX News and the Republican Party (they are the same), the reasons why you lost are because of you.  I suggest that before the next election you find out what America actually is not just what you want it still to be.  I suggest you learn about history, not just your own, but world history.  Understand the process of change, progress, humanity, instead of selectively reporting the history that supports your views.  Most importantly I suggest you get on board with science.  The process of investigating things based on evidence.  So that even when you arrive at conclusions you constantly test those conclusions for their validity in an ever changing world.  You have to learn to adapt.  You have to learn how to integrate personal responsibility into a world that every day is different from yesterday.

Thoughts of music after a wonderful concert (written Sep. 19th, 2012)

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, PhilosophyLeave a comment

I really need to get to more concerts.  I realized last night what the difference is between listening to the music on your iPod or CD player.  The quality is usually better from the studio, but what you don’t get to see is the faces of the musicians as they play their music.  Stage AE in Pittsburgh was a wonderful venue.  Even though you had to stand there were no bad spots.  There couldn’t have been more than 1000 people there and we were standing only 20 ft away from the performers.  You could see their facial expressions, you could see their hands move, their feet move.

Art comes in a number of forms but for me music and dance are different because they allow us to see the expression through the human form which I find to be ultimately more inspiring somehow.  I’m sure a lover of other art forms such a paintings, or sculpture would say that they love to see the expression captured in a stationary object that seems to come alive as a result of the artists expression.  I suppose these things come down to preference.  For me the connection between movement and music and then music to poetry stimulates my soul and intellect in a way that I cannot fully explain.

Both the opening band and the main attraction were wonderful last night, but in completely different ways.  Half Moon Run was the opening band.  From their first chord you could tell that these were musicians, serious about their music, hell bent on finding a way to express their souls through the medium of music.  By looking at them you could see how lost in their music they were.  It was as though they didn’t think of as an audience but simply a group of friends they had over to their house for intimate gathering.  One of those parties where maybe there is some sort of fire, good conversation, and some good wine, and then as the evening draws late somebody picks up a guitar, sits down at a set of drums, and then you hear the voices singing in harmony, with feeling, and with soul and you know your conversation is over and that you have to listen.  It all feels intimate and you feel closer to the person you are standing next to.  I tend to be drawn to bands with good harmonies and their harmonies, live I might add, were flawless.  Good harmony turns the voice into an additional instrument.  It tells the audience we may be 3 individuals, but at this moment in the song we are one, what we have to say or what we have to express is a collective and it is beautiful and you really have to hear it.  And you have no choice but to agree.  These guys were fantastic.  So good you hope they don’t become famous because I know I’ll have to see them again, and I’d hate to have to be so far away from them because they are beautiful to watch.

If Half Moon Run was the end of an evening, the main attraction, Metric, was like dawning of a new day.  Full of energy.  A force that propelled you to move and yet at the same time you knew it was exactly what you wanted to do.  Metric uses synths a lot, and for a lot of people this is often turns people off, but synths have come a long way since the 80’s and make no mistake the members of Metric are artists when it comes to making music.  Their set was much more of a show, a performance.  The knew the audience, they loved the audience and their music was a spectacle for all the senses.  Emily Haines is an excellent lyricist.  Her words are expressive and her voice makes her ideas soar.  Their music itself is not as strong as Half Moon Run but it’s not trying to be.  Everything about their music is genuine, the band is their music and that’s really the most important thing you can ask for from a musician.  You may not like it, but they are creating what they want to create which is why their music is not “pop” music.  And if you pay attention you can see that it is more complex than your average pop song.  Emily Haines in my age and the energy she brings to the stage heartens me that age does not matter because when there is music you can be young, or really be any age you want.

The important thing is to engage yourself in music.  If you can’t make music yourself, go see someone play.  Solo or in a band.  Get as close as you possibly can to them so that you can excite more than just your ears.  Wonderful musicians are incredible to watch.  Music is a great way to lose yourself for awhile and just immerse yourself in beauty.

Thoughts on September 11th (written September 11th, 2012)

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Philosophy1 Comment

September 11th, 2001 was certainly the most horrific disaster to happen in a country I was living in, and it is hard to forget the memories from that day as you watched footage of people crying, hearing stories of people having to make choices between being engulfed in flames or jumping out the window of a high office floor in the world trade center, or a stewardess on a plane saying goodbye to a loved one over the phone before the plane went down.  And we remember the strength of all those people who responded not only that day, but in the clean up afterwards.  A strength that not many of us perhaps have.  Not even knowing how their health would be impacted years later.

I see many people posting “never forget”, but the truth is people will forget.  Perhaps not those who lived through it, but human civilization will go on and in 70 or 80 years September 11th will be but a historic event in which nobody was even alive for.  In my lifetime I have seen the change in attitude in remembrance towards WWII.  Twenty years ago there were many WWII veterans left alive and that direct link to a war in which countless people died allowed our solemn feelings to remain strong, but now it too has become an unconnected historic event.  We know the loss of life was great, but other than that, few of us can really understand what it was like, and there are few left who we can even talk to share with us their memory.

So what can we remember from great wars or great tragedies that can benefit humanity in the long run?  I believe at its heart September 11th is an example of the dangers of extremism.  The terrorists who hijacked the plane were all rich Saudi’s who flourished in an area where poverty was great, education is not equal, government is corrupt, and separation of church and state is not prevalent.  In these conditions extremism and indoctrination take a foothold and are hard to get rid of. The terrorists of 9/11 were all firm in their belief that they were doing God’s work.  And that belief led them on a course to cause great destruction. If wars and tragedies like 9/11 are to be prevented it seems that answer lies in raising all people up so that there is equality, so that there is the opportunity for self-determination and personal success.  A man will believe in any cause if he feels that that cause has a chance to feed his family.  He may also believe in that cause if his life is too difficult and all he can hope for is some afterlife prescribed by the culture he grows up in.  I believe if we wish to stamp out extremism and leave it on the margins we must focus on helping our fellow human obtain earthly rewards not otherworldly ones.  We must raise him up through compassion and education and we must show that compassion equally regardless of their religion or geographic region.  Just like good parents treat their children equally regardless of whether their interests are similar to the parents, we must also try our bests to help those in need with that same kind of love and care.  Extremism has no reason to flourish in such an environment.

As we move forward I believe it is important as a country to develop foreign policy that is inclusive and not divisive.  We must continue to make sure everyone has basic human rights even if they subscribe to a different religion or are being oppressed by a country that is our ally.  Despite the fact that I disagreed with going into Iraq I actually do agree with the idea of trying to help rebuild that country despite how much it has cost us.  This is a lesson that was learned from WWII.  After WWI the world left Germany a destroyed place, forbid them to form a military and the poverty there was great.  Thus it was not surprising that someone like Hitler would be able to take over.  A person who would clearly be seen as a mad man in any other society that had a high standard of living and greater economic equality amongst the people. And in general we have been doing this as a world, and hey it’s been almost 70 years and no world war…that has to mean something.

Peace be with you on this day, especially to those families that were directly affected by this horrible tragedy.

My lonely views on politics in this country (written Jan. 31, 2012)

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, PhilosophyLeave a comment

Republicans:  I agree the national debt needs to be decreased and that government spending is high, and the answer to fiscal responsibility is not always in raising taxes.  I would love someone to come into the government and truly make things run more efficiently.  However there are some things that cannot win me over.  You cannot just cut government spending indiscriminately without evaluating the worth of that program.  You cannot make religious beliefs part of government policy.  You cannot tell me that a woman does not have the right to choose what to do to her body. You cannot tell me that sexual orientation disqualifies a person from civil rights that everybody else enjoys.  You cannot tell me that all people are poor because they are lazy.  You cannot tell me that the government is pure evil for wanting taxes and yet corporations have our best interest at heart.  You cannot tell me to ignore scientific evidence or tell me that education is of diminished value and that teachers don’t deserve the pay they have.  You cannot tell me that the death penalty is humane and lowers the rate of violent crime, when numerous developed countries that don’t have the death penalty have much lower rates of murders.

Democrats:  You cannot whine about the world being against you.  You had the majority for 2 years and you failed to take a stand on important issues that you claimed you believed in like closing Guantanamo, and tougher stands on climate change.  You need to have definitive plans of action, and you need to act on them.  You need to make government programs run better and more efficiently before you start adding a whole bunch of new ones.  You need to make me believe that you have convictions about what you say you believe in, over worrying about losing your job.  Show some backbone.

Both:  You cannot spin statistics about the economy, jobs or welfare to make it look like one party’s fault.  This insults my intelligence, and if you’re intelligent enough to know what you are doing, then shame on you.  You should be teaching instead of deceiving.

People:  There are real problems in this country.  If you had plenty of jobs and opportunities as you did in America’s past, perhaps many other issues would fall by the wayside.  There are greedy politicians and corruption in government, as there are in big business and corporations.  No side is completely innocent and it is our job to not just believe what they feed us.  Get smarter and learn how to understand the information that is out there.  Many of you, poor or wealthy do work hard: continue to do so.  There is value in it, regardless about whether it feels like it’s paying off.  You gain self-respect by doing as much as you can to better yourself and survive on your own.  When you can, help those in need (time or money), whether you give that help here or around the world.  Extreme wealth, when kept to oneself does little to increase happiness in this world.  Regardless of what you believe in, your existence in this world is limited so if you have the means make your mark by showing the world the size of your heart, not the size of your bank account or home.