I almost gave today a miss. It would have been easy; I'm tired; what's one day? I'll make it up tomorrow. I am tired. For the past week, I've been waking up at 5 and going to bed early in the evening, close to 9. That seems crazy to someone used to staying awake most nights until 11 or 12. But I'm hoping aligning myself more with the sun will help with seasonal depression this year. And I like having that time in the morning to myself, while the rest of the family sleeps. Unfortunately the four year old seems to want to be on the same schedule as me. So that sweet hour of solitude is more like fifteen minutes of nervous alone time. And these are the joys of fatherhood.
I would trade it. Fatherhood is joyful. You can't really appreciate the development of another human being until you see it, up close, on a day to day basis; seeing the sudden light in their eyes as a task that heretofore was beyond their grasp suddenly comes easily; watching them discover the world and struggle to describe, to narrate their experiences into a coherent whole. It's really amazing.
One of my Facebook friends posted an image macro about no one can know the root causes of someone's antisocial behavior--that outside influences are a thing, yo! (Am I the only person getting tired of internet lingo like "such and such are a thing now"?). I didn't care much for it. Yes, outside influences are a thing, but they are not an excuse. No one is responsible for your behavior but you. Just because someone cut you off in traffic does not excuse you being rude to your wife when you get home. A life of poverty may be sad, but it still does not justify theft.
On that note, you ever noticed that someone who is trying to "fight the system" or "get back at society" usually winds up not harming society, but individuals? That's because "society" doesn't exist-not in a manifest way. Individuals do.
By the same token, you ever heard some activist proclaim we need this or that social program to help alleviate the "failures of capitalism"? It seems to have escaped their notice that the natural state of man isn't abundance. It's poverty. Not just any sort of poverty, but dirty,disease ridden, desperate poverty without recourse. That many of us do not live in just abject circumstances is the success of capitalism. That the distance between individuals from that life of misery is somewhat closer for some than others is an irrelevancy.
I'm pretty sure this upcoming "net neutrality" legislation is just going to get the government more involved with our lives. Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. Companies could potentially do something that we think might be bad, even though they haven't yet done this thing and haven't shown any inclination to do so, so we need government to intervene preemptively to stop this notional harm that internet companies might cause, someday, if they get around to it. Instead we'll have the government causing ten times more harm right now.
And lastly, the internet decided to go into an uproar because the chief scientist of the Rosetta mission to land a probe on a comet wore a shirt that hurt somebody in their nono place. Advance the cause of humanity by landing a space probe on a thimble of rock hundreds of thousands of miles away? Less important than the social statement ones sartorial choices make.
There it is, my first political post. It probably won't be my last. Hopefully in future they'll be more than just notes on the passing scene. Since it appears I've had at least a couple people hit my blog other than myself, my apologies for the rather stream of consciousness manner of this particular post. I'll try to be more coherent in future. Thanks for stopping by.
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