re: #21 engineer dog

they are working hard to breed them,
book hating, dog fighting, chock full of resentments,
impatiently slapping their palm with a blackjack,
upset because it’s not time yet to beat up the wog
just because, that’s all, just because

[[snip]]

but this is not that place, this is not that time,
the ideas that our country was founded on are not such fertile soil for hate
not that that stops some people

so little patches of hate weeds grow up, carefully tended and pumped full of artificial fertilizers,
watered by torrents of tough times, disappointments, things that hurt but have no explanations…

if we were able to know what the future holds for us, it would be unbearable
i don’t know if the weeds will grow over the garden
but it didn’t happen yet

Despite all that, I think the future we will in the end choose holds more good than bad. Weeds don’t get the industrial-strength fertilization and tending that the garden gets. Where is the cathedral from which this hate is preached? And yes, there is the odd mosque, but the truly rabid stuff is coming from holes-in-the-wall, not edifices for the ages.

Our leadership is better. I’ve been reading a history of the run-up to WW1, and the Kings, Kaisers, and Czars (really, it’s Tsars, but the spell checker has a snit when I spell it that way) are such clueless fops. Many of them are just flat stupid. They’d lose to Palin at tic-tac-toe. D U M B.

Our institutions are better. Provided we dodge the worst of the bullet of AGW, we won’t find ourselves in a spot where it’s impossible to get around major, desperate economic calamities, the sort that throw half the population out of work and starve a tenth of us.

Barring that kind of economic meltdown, there’s no starting point for the logic that since somebody has to die, it may as well be “them”. When most everybody has some sort of chance at a life, havoc doesn’t look very attractive.

This leaves us with nuisance-grade nihilists, not the sort that can ride a wave of brown-shirts or Red Banners or Green Banners or what have you into office.