My Liberal Diary

Day 157, My Liberal Diary
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day my wife, the right-wanger, and I were married back in 1990. We have had a wonderful adventure, travelled all over the world both working and playing, made friends in places where we didn't even know how to speak the language. We have shared happiness and grief, but we have never known despair. We have lived through hard and dangerous times but somehow, always managed to get through it together. I want to share a story about one of our adventures, or miss-adventures, depending on how you look at it.
We were in Marysville, Kentucky working on a salvage project in the Ohio River that began as a joint venture with some folks from Finland. After the easy money was taken from the project, I learned the hard way that the Finnish translation of "joint venture" is that I get stuck with all the bills and completing the project on my own while they ran back to Jacksonville and did the next project that I had lined up, behind my back. We were at the point where the only income from the project was from the sales of scrap iron that we recovered and scrap iron prices took a 200% dive, suddenly scrap that costed me $80.00 a ton to recover and process was now only bringing $49.00 a ton at the mill. I kept working through the winter and stock-piling metal as long as I could, hoping for an increase in prices but Christmas was coming and it did not look good for the home team. We hadn't been home in 11 months and all Jimi wanted for Christmas was to drive to Jacksonville and see her children. I spent all day loading a truck to drive to the mill in Cincinnati and planned to deliver it on Christmas Eve, then I would pay my crew and pick Jimi up and drive straight to Jax in time to spend Christmas day with family. It snowed all night and when I got to the truck, I had two flat tires. If you have never changed flats on an 18 wheeler in two feet of snow and mud, then you might not appreciate this much, but I managed to get the truck on the road and make it to the mill 10 minutes before they shut down for the holidays until after New Years. That was when they informed me that metal I been getting $160.00 a ton for was now only worth $49.00 a ton and after I paid my workers, I had exactly $10.00 left to my name, credit cards maxed, and no hope of any further income until after the first of the year.
Jimi was waiting with bags packed, when I returned after dark. She had given away all the perishables in the house, anticipating being gone for a week and we had basically nothing left to eat. When I came in, she stood and asked if I wanted a hot bath before we left and all I could do was tell her that I couldn't afford to drive to Jacksonville, that we had only $10.00 to live on for the next several days. She sat on the bed and I watched a single tear fall from her eye. I walked into the bathroom, shut the door and sat on the floor starring at the wall and feeling about as small and ashamed as I have ever felt. I put my head down and literally pulled my hair just to feel anything except the shame that I felt for letting her down.
She came into the bathroom and stood for a moment looking at me, then she walked over to me and took my hands and said something to me that still amazes me to this very day, decades later. She said," Mr. Wallace; I am sorry I let you see me cry, I am just a little disappointed that I am not going to see my children for Christmas. I want you to know something. I came up here with you because you said you were going to finish this project. I know sometimes thing don't work out just right but you have always done everything you ever told me you were going to do and if any other man had told me that, I would have know they were full of shit. You've done every damned one of them and if it takes everything we have to finish this, you are going to do it and I am going to be right here with you when you do. Now quit feeling sorry for yourself and get your ass up off that floor. We got to figure out just how we are going to survive for the next two weeks on $10.00."
We pawned our wedding rings to buy groceries and I sold my guitar. She never complained one time and we stayed together and finished that adventure but I would never have survived if she hadn't given me the most precious gift a man can own, his pride. Now you know the story and I would hope everyone could be so fortunate and loved.

 

Day 158, My Liberal Diary
Well until today, we lived in a quiet wooded neighborhood that was formerly an Army base. There was forest on either side of us and also around my bat-shit crazy mother in law's house. Today, I came home from work to find giant tree cutters clear cutting all the trees and now it is starting to look like I am about to reside in a god-damned sub-division with a fruit-cake within line of sight. I cannot begin to express how unhappy I am with this. We did contact the owner of the property being cut and are trying to purchase the wooded lots on either side of she who is short a few nail's house so that she can remain hidden in the woods. I do not have any idea where I will find the extra money but we'll figure something out. If it were not for having to remain in the proximity of MIL, I'd sell my house and build something absolutely in the middle of no-where, but I have to stay here until that old bat dies and I am sure she will out-live me. She is already showing the signs of a psychotic episode and it worsens with each tree that falls. I am betting that none of the wood from this forest will be used in the Great Mexican Wall, probably all be used making toilet paper to meet the demands of the full of shit folks around Washington. Now the surveyor says that two of my out-buildings may actually be partially on their property, so there's another unexpected expense.
I spend $1661.00 per month on health care insurance that was pretty good insurance when it costed me half as much but my physician has determined that I need a MRI tomorrow morning and I have to cough up $350.00 that my insurance would have paid with no questions before Obama Care screwed it all up. Maybe I'll luck up and they'll find that I have an aneurysm or something that will just knock me over dead before I have to deal with MIL without her trees. Someone needs to explain to me just how this works? If I drop my insurance and just pay the fine, will I be covered under Obama Care? I sure would rather pay an $800.00 annual fine than spend $19,932.00 a year for insurance that doesn't seem to pay much of anything.

 

Day 159, My Liberal Diary
It is raining again, damned republicans causing all this global warming and I can actually see the water rising in my lawn. I live only a few hundred feet from the Gulf of Mexico and as much rain as we've had, am seriously compiling a list of various animals I plan to carry aboard my 48' ketch. I am pretty sure the wiener dog, my golden retriever, and Maggie, my Doberman will be included. I imagine that several squirrels will stow-away since their woods have now been turned into rubble. A squirrel jumped atop my truck when I pulled into the driveway today, eating one of my scuppernong grapes. I suppose he couldn't find a decent tree. I definitely will not include mosquitoes, no-see-ums, wasps, chiggers, armadillos, moles, rats, or republicans this time, having learned from Noah's mistakes.
Some of the water may be from the burst pipe between the guest bathroom and the bathroom in the master bedroom. I wasn't aware of this leak until last night but apparently the right-wanger has known about it for a few day but was not wanting to tell me about it because I might try to fix it myself rather than calling a plumber. Silly girl, of course I fixed it. I will admit that in addition to the large hole I cut into the wet dry-wall, I did accidentally lean against the undamaged wall and there is now a second hole just about exactly the size of my head, shoulders, and upper torso but the hole on the other side of the wall in the master bathroom is considerably smaller.
I have never before seen such a jumbled bunch of pipes plumbing a house. The existing pipes look like they were installed by a couple of Bubbas well into the third six pack of Bush Bavarian. It only took three trips to Lowes to get the repairs made that at least will allow me to take a shower and flush a toilet. The holes in the wall are another matter. There is considerable water damage and I will leave the cavernous openings unattended for a few days to determine just exactly how much wall I will have to replace. I will set some live traps, just in case a squirrel or two sneaks by the doorway and takes up residence.

 

Day 160, My Liberal Diary
Plowed in some lime today and planted some late tomatoes. Guy Clark nailed it when has sang there ain't nothing like home grown tomatoes. I got to sing tomorrow. We have a show with the Port City Songwriters Association at the River Shack in Mobile. It's right under the Dog River Bridge and is a cool place to perform, especially when there are lots of boats and pretty girls wearing bathing suits there. The food and drinks are pretty good also but they can't compete with the ambiance. We have some really good writers that perform at these events and I am the sound technician, as well as being a performer. I set up a pair of Bose systems with Mackie monitors and try to make everyone sound as sweet as their songs deserve. When I perform, I never really know what to do. There isn't anyone to tweak my sound so what I start with is pretty much what you hear. I spend so much time in my studio with guitars, mandolins, dobro , strings, bass guitar, piano, organ, drums, that I hardly know what to play when I perform by myself with just my acoustic guitar. Sometime I bring a keyboard and play piano but that really is sort of a pain in the ass. I've been writing a lot of songs lately. I tend to turn to music when I get stressed. That has always been my catharsis, a way of dealing with things that I can't quite find the means to forget about. Song was the precursor to written language, traveling minstrels would wander from one village to the next, singing tales about battles won or lost. They would bring news of heroes, of villains, of death and sadness, of elation. This was the audio version of the news paper before fake news , MSNBC, CNN, and the Drudge Report. My songs tell stories too but only excerpts from a tale that you would have to have lived to truly understand. I had friends write to me and tell me how my songs bring tears to their eyes, as do some of my stories. This is a powerful statement and gives me great satisfaction, that I can reach something deeply emotional in my audience and make them feel. It seems so much like lethargy has taken control of our once great country. Music has mostly become just sort of a mechanized rhythm, something to distract, back-ground noise to dance and drink to. That's ok, I recognize that people sometimes need a distraction that makes them happy. I have no interest in providing that background noise. If I play, I want to play directly to your soul. I want to make you angry when you should feel anger, I want to make you feel compassionate, when kindness is needed, and I want you to feel outrage, when something is just wrong. The following was written by a dear friend as a tribute and I want to share it with you.

 

Day 161, My Liberal Diary
Well the rain held off and we had a pretty good turn-out for our show tonight. I never watched much television but I owe a great debt of enjoyment to the Dukes of Hazard for those Daisy Duke shorts! I am now over sixty years old and can unequivocally qualify as a dirty old man, maybe my eyes aren't quite as sharp as they were in my twenties but I am still pretty damned good at geometry.
We rescued most of our muscadine crop from marauding squirrels today. I have announced my intent to she who must be obeyed, that I am going to adopt an out-doors dog, a big one that eats squirrels. I think maybe a cross between one of those little Taco-Bell bug-eyed dogs and a Mastiff will do nicely. I imagine it will have eyes the size of saucers, be hairless, tremble like it has palsy, slobber on everything and poop like an elephant but those tree rats will think twice before feasting on my grapes, plums, pears and garden. She who must be obeyed, tends to turn dogs into house pets, despite my insistence that dog should live outside. That is why all three of our dogs are fat and can't imagine life without air conditioning and Dolby surround sound. I have a king-size bed but with all the right-wanger's defensive pillows, an over-weight wiener-dog and Maggie, there isn't much room left for me to actually sleep. I did finally convince Maggie that doing her toe-nails in bed was not acceptable dog behavior but I still can't convince the weiner-dog that he has to orient his elongated posture east and west rather than North and south, which occupies about as much bed space as I require to rest. Maggie never spends but about an hour or so in bed with us, she likes to spoon next to me and lay her head on my shoulder until I go to sleep, then she'll get up and go lie on the floor next to the bed unless I have a dream or something that makes her think I might need further protection.
My outside dog will be as ugly as I can find but fast, sneaky, and very carnivorous. I want it to smell so bad that she who must be obeyed will never be tempted to let it come inside to watch television with her, even if the Dukes of Hazard reruns are on. It will constantly have squirrel flatulence. If it is hairless, I will have large scarey tattoos of werewolf zombies chewing the heads off screaming squirrels put on both sides in vivid color and get it one of those spike collars. I might even attach a rattle to it's tail so the squirrels think they may have encountered some kind of mutant four-legged slobbering snake. I will name it Hillary.

 

Day 162, My Liberal Diary.
The company that employs me as a commercial diving operations manager, is about to go tits up if we don't start getting some serious income producing jobs. Most of our income derives from the Gulf oil patch, and the oil patch has been dead for nearly a decade. Fracking oil recovery seems to be a lot cheaper than off-shore drilling so there is no shortage of oil, just a shortage of work for those of us in the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico. I literally know of hundreds of excellent professional commercial divers that are now asking folks if they would like fries with that order. This is a shame because I have worked with these people hundreds of feet below the ocean in total darkness performing tasks that would be a challenge to even the most skilled persons on shore in dry weather, daylight, and a support crew standing alongside to lend a hand. This is a dangerous profession and its quickly weeds out those that can't do the work and get back to dry with all their fingers and toes. We work in the dark, weightless,alongside things can can eat us for lunch and people wonder why we aren't intimidated by most things that send others speed dialing their attorney. It is difficult to imagine being intimidated by something as mundane as a human when you earn you living in an alien environment with creatures around you that have no interest in you whatsoever except will you make a nice dinner. We just got a purchase order from an industrial client for work to their raw water intakes and this project would allow us to continue operations for several more months but today, they called and delayed the project for another month. I earn a subsistence salary when we are not actively engaged in a project with nothing left over for emergency expenses. When we are active on a project, my income increases dramatically. I no longer spend much time on the dumb end of a dive umbilical, preferring to leave that to the younger guys. I will have to reduce our labor force and more men that have faced danger every day will be greeting you at Walmart or asking if you want to try the new triple-decker ranger burger and fries combo. I am sixty-one years old and have never been without job, have never drawn unemployment, welfare,or social security. I have worked for everything I own, for every cent I earn. I have never asked anyone for help or assistance. I have always managed to turn a dire situation into something productive and will do so if I find myself unemployed in a week or two. They have cut down most of the woodland surrounding my estate and there are herds of homeless squirrels, raccoons, and other wildlife looking for a place to live. Would you like fries with that possum burger?

 

Day 163, My Liberal Diary
Memory is such a precious thing. I have problems with short-term memory, might forget your name or that we are supposed to wash the dogs next week end but I can remember eating my first shrimp when I was three at a Christmas party given by my father's employer, Piggly Wiggly Corp., in Jackson, Tennessee at the New Southern Hotel Banquet Room. There was this huge cut glass bowl filled with chilled, peeled shrimps and I ate them until I almost burst. I remember the sweet peppery taste like it was yesterday. The other children were gathered around a fat bearded Santa Claus, getting free Slinkys to play with but I stayed with the shrimps and sixty years later, shrimps are still my favorite food. I moved to the Gulf of Mexico because shrimps are abundant and cheap here. I remember my telephone number from when I was a child, my grand parents's phone number, the numbers of my Uncles and Aunts but I can't remember which doctor I had an appointment with yesterday. I actually went to the wrong one and had to reschedule both appointments.
I remember a lot of things that no longer exist. Telephone party lines, where you shared a line between several house-holds and had to check to make sure one of your neighbors were not on the phone before you could make a call. tools and equipment that were designed and built to last a life-time rather than having to be replaced every couple of years so people could be employed making them. Policemen that dressed like policemen instead of Rambo and would come knock on your door, if they had business with you, rather than dressing like ninja and throwing flash-band grenades through your window before assaulting you to serve a warrant for unpaid parking tickets.I remember when a time when it was safe to play outside until after dark. I remember when honor was more important than convenience.
I know that I had a point to this a few moments ago, but I can't for the life of me, remember what it was...

 

Day 164, My Liberal Diary
I am one of those people that always sees his cup as half full. So many folks insist it is half empty and that has defined the difference between an optimist and a pessimist but I have another view-point. My cup is always half full but I am a realist rather than an optimist because I recognize that sometimes, it is half full of shit. I wish it could always be half filled with happiness, shrimps, or money, but reality always sticks it's muddy hands into the batter and it makes me question some of the chocolate chips in that cookie.
I found a fine prime rib roast on sale at the local market but they only had one left by the time I got there and it was too small to bake rare and have guests for dinner so the right-wanger and I will have it grilled with new potatoes and roasted corn. I get to cook because she broke her toe this morning. I know that hurts. Her great toe is twice it's normal size and I will splint it after dinner so that she can sleep with her foot under the blankets tonight. She would not have broken her toe if the news-paper delivery person wasn't so damned lazy. She likes to work the sudoku and cross-word puzzles each morning with her coffee. For the first several years we resided here at Snake Haven, the news paper delivery woman had it in our driveway every day of the week no later than 05:30. Then the paper decided they could only afford to print on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, rather than daily. This may have been because of rising costs of ink and paper and a decrease in print advertising but I suspect that it has more to do with just not really having any news to report. There are only so many ways you can call Trump an idiot or Obama, a Messiah and let's face it, Hillary just isn't news worthy. Anyway, when they started only printing the paper three days a week, the delivery woman decided she needed a better job and is now greeting people at Walmart. Her replacement is a sloth and never awakens before 9:00-10:00 a.m. or so and if he delivers the paper at all, usually manages to toss it into a puddle of water or a bush filled with angry homeless squirrels. I thought he might be a republican but he is an African-American, so that isn't likely; He must have heard that my wife, the right-wanger with a broken toe, is. Anyway, she refuses to cancel the paper, for some unexplained reason and insists on driving to the local market and buying one as soon as I leave for work, then he delivers the one we pay him for by lunch usually and we get this big stack of redundant news papers that nobody reads but the cross-word puzzles are completed on half of them. This morning, the right-wanger tripped while exiting the store with her news paper and a quart of oil for her car and she broke her toe. A nice African-American man helped her and even put the quart of oil into her car for her and told her that she really should go to the doctor but she said she had to get home to work the cross-word puzzle, then she left her news paper lying on the ground at the store but fortunately, by the time she got home, the other paper was there and hadn't had time to be chewed up by angry rodents enough to ruin the sudoku and crossword.

 

Day 165, My Liberal Diary
My wife, the right-wanger, has OCD, COPD, steel pins in her neck and a broken great toe. Because of her difficulty in breathing and a neck that didn't heal properly after being broken while we were in Honduras raising a sunken dredge, we can't do a lot of the things we used to do like panning for gold in the mountains or riding horses through the jungle or camping or even long road trips. We compensate and I amuse us by moving things around, maybe leaving a cabinet door ajar, making a wall hanging picture sightly askew, or sliding a rug an inch one way or another, then I will sit and watch until she notices and gets up to put it back it it's proper perspective and I will grin in silent amusement. Now she has a broken toe and it hurts her to walk. I can't stand to see her in pain so now I am checking pictures to make sure they are straight, trying to remember which direction I might have moved a rug, if the salt shaker is on the correct side of the pepper shaker...I don't want to watch her limping around putting anything back into it's proper place. All of the puppies play the in and out game all day and I put them outside and told them they better not come back to the door for at least thirty minutes. Go chase squirrels, drink pond water, find a turtle or a garden snake to play with, bark at cats but don't come back here barking at the door in two minutes because you miss your air conditioner. One minute later, all three of them are standing at the patio doors starring back inside woefully and my wife is afraid to get up and let them in because I was a bit adamant about them staying outside for at least a half hour so naturally I let them back in and I blame it all on Native Americans.
Saturday afternoon matinees were all about cowboys fighting hordes of indians, not native Americans, I mean scalping, arrow shooting, bury them in the sand with nothing but their heads sticking out for the buzzards to eat, injuns! Then we would play cowboys and indians, build fortresses to defend from them, wear war paint made from clay or poke berry juice, make breech cloths out of towels, bandannas with chicken feathers stuck in them, make bows and arrows out of limbs and twine and have epic battles with imaginary cowboys (ok, maybe sometime we were the cowboys because the only good injun was a dead one). When we were playing indians, we didn't ride the plains killing the noble buffalo or greet pilgrims with platters of turkeys and sweet potato pies, we sneaked up on the bastards and scalped them or roasted them tied to a stake with huge mounds of sticks piled around their feet. By the time I was six, I could treat an imaginary gunshot or arrow wound with as much skill as John Wayne and I could kill a thousand indians while defending the tree house. Sometimes we let our sisters play too but they had to either be nurses to tend the wounded cowboys or they could be indians because they could braid their hair and wear war paint stolen from Mom's make-up table. Also, they couldn't shoot an arrow worth a shit or throw a tomahawk (they throw like girls). I decided that today, I would spend Saturday afternoon with the right-wanger, watching old cowboy and indian movies....I looked through 284 cable channels, netflix, red box, a collection of nearly seven hundred DVDs stowed in catalogs beneath the living room coffee table, youtube, and have discovered that political correctness has removed every single copy of any movies about marauding redskins, gone forever into the black hole that swallowed Amos and Andy. Since becoming a liberal, I can sort of understand why Amos and Andy had to go, at least I could until the Jeffersons started moving on up but come on, John Wayne fighting off a million red skins to save his daughter? Or Danial Boone defending the settlement from hordes of scalping Apaches? It's no damned wonder dogs won't stay outside to play, they have air conditioning and bowls with food in them because the lazy kids don't realize there are hordes of marauding injuns just waiting outside for them to play with so they stay inside playing video games while their dogs come to think there is nothing interesting outside. We didn't think about insulting anyone by playing cowboys and indians, we never even thought about dressing in sheets and hanging the colored kids that played along with us, they made some of the best injuns! And Soldiers and Muslims just doesn't have the same appeal as cowboys and indians. I can't even imagine my grand kids outside playing an afternoon game of migrant farm workers and Native Americans.

 

Day 166, My Liberal Diary
WTF? Trump didn't apologize for white people quickly enough after some rednecks that were pissed off over folks trying to erase their Southern Heritage made almost as much of an ass of themselves as urban negroes do every time a cops shoots a crack dealer? I do not condone racial violence of any type but we seem to excuse it every time angry black folks burn down a city because they are pissed off about something. If we insist on destroying monuments that have commemorated the Confederacy in the South, how is that any different than if they insisted we destroy Statues of Malcom X or Martin Luther King? Apples and Oranges, you say? Then you don't know shit from Shinolla. OK, so some of us are offended by these "monuments to Slavery"; bull shit. This is just an excuse to start something that is gonna get a lot of people hurt while we liberals sit in our self-righteous recliners watching people bleed on CNN and saying "I told you so". Pick a fight we can win and nobody gets killed, please. There are federal laws against "Hate" crimes but we have to be fair with these, it is just as much a hate crime when a gang of looting angry blacks drags an old white man out of his car for driving down the wrong street, and beats him to death as it is when a gang of Kluckers hangs one of them from a burning cross and this happens a hell of a lot more often and I have yet to hear anyone mention "Hate Crime" when it was blacks doing the killing. It is all about hate and hate works both directions. You want equality? I want equality. Think of Justice, blind-folded and holding a balance beam scale. What that scale represents is equality. What it weighs is right here and now, not next week, not 150 years ago, not even a year ago; right fucking now! The past cannot be weighed. We cannot take back history, nor can we change it; It happened. We cannot extrapolate the weight of white guilt or the sins of our grand-fathers and place it on the balance beam any longer, what is just is. We have to start as equals now and at every moment, that's just the way equality works. Racism isn't the end all, it isn't even the demon that we liberals paint it to be. It is just ignorance and we feed it rather than trying to deal with it in an intelligent manner. Anger feeds anger. I get so fed up with people that will take down a Statue of Robert E. Lee or erect a statue of Rosa Parks on land that our ancestors used genocide to steal from native Americans while pretending to believe it is about being racially insensitive. Some of my heritage is Southern, some is Native American and I don't mind being called an Indian. I'll say it, each and every one of you white or black, go back to Europe or Africa and give my ancestors their land back and leave the statues; they are nice to look at and remind us of the awful things you people did to us.

 

Day 166, My Liberal Diary
I just watched President Trump being grilled by an amazingly rude and presumptuous gathering of our liberal news media over his statement about the racially charged violence in Charlottesville and was astounded at the persistence of ignorance that we showed him. It almost makes me ashamed to be a liberal. We want to presume that a gathering of Nazi Racists sat around with torches and a permit to legally and peacefully protest the destruction of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a confederate general from the war between the states, until one of them showed his true colors as a racist white supremacist and drove his automobile into a peaceful crowd of counter-protestors on the left and just side of destroying history that offends some of us. What came out and the news media tried to ignore, is that these peaceful counter-protestors had no permit to disrupt the people from ALL WALKS OF LIFE, not just neo-nazi, racist, white supremacists, but people just like you and me that happen to disagree that it is acceptable to destroy legacy and heritage to appease political correctness. Most of them were ordinary good people legally gathered to show their protest of a part of their heritage being destroyed in the name of political correctness. Make no mistake about it, that is ALL this bullshit is about. Now we didn't get a knee-jerk, kiss-ass immediate statement from the President to appease the outraged left, but rather, a considered statement after enough time has elapsed to aquire a few inconvenient FACTS, before shooting off his mouth and some of these FACTS don't jib with the shit most of us liberally minded folks are spouting. For example, why should we have any rights to attack a gathering of people that legally got together to stand for what they believe in? Sure, there were some racists there, there were some neo-nazi too, some KKK, but like it or not, they have exactly as much right as you to peacefully assemble and speak freely. They have exactly the same rights as BLM/ANTIFA. They have exactly the same rights. Another right they have is to defend themselves when attacked and the single most inconvenient FACT that we seem to be ignoring, is that our peaceful counter-protest wasn't. There is video, lots of video, showing our peaceful counter-protestors shouting, calling people names, throwing objects at the people that were legally assembled to speak their opinion, and even crowds of our peaceful illegally gathered counter-protestors rushing folks with clubs and beating them. What surprises me isn't that a dumb-ass nazi white supremacist lost it and murdered a girl and injured several others with his automobile, but that some legally upstanding citizen of Charlottesville didn't draw his legally concealed firearm and shoot some of these "peaceful" counter protestors attacking them with clubs and even an improvised flame-thrower (got the video of a black man spraying fire from an aresol can into a crowd of people). I keep warning my fellow liberals that eventually folks will fight back and they are better armed and much more adept at using them but we keep trampling their rights in the name of progress and calling them vile names and inciting anger and wrath in otherwise ordinary good people and sooner or later, they will hand us our liberal asses, collectively on a platter. I condemn the idiot that killed that girl. I support the people that were legally gathered to stand up for their rights whether it offends some of us or not and that includes the KKK, and any other organization that supports what ever they want to support. I condemn those that deliberately incited violence by trying to block that freedom. Liberty is a two edged sword and it will cut both ways. If we ever hope to make any progress, then we are going to have to recognize that even those of absolute opinion polarity, have rights too. I will physically fight anyone that wants to challenge that right and that especially includes not so peaceful counter-protestors. If this protest to remove statues of confederates had been here in my home town, I would have been there alongside them protesting the destruction of heritage, no different than standing vigil outside a library to prevent over-zealous folks from burning books. I would not have been there as a racist, klansman, a nazi, but I would have been there as a Southern patriot that is against tearing down historical monuments, including those of MLK or Rosa Parks, Nathan Bedford Forrest or Robert E. Lee. If I am attacked by a loud, angry mob, even if they are fellow liberals, I will not hesitate to defend my life with lethal force, you can count on that, and I will have absolutely no regard for your color or progressiveness.

 

Day 167, My Liberal Diary
To my fellow citizens, I wish you health and good fortune. I stand with a strong belief in your right to peaceful assembly and your right to freely say what is on your mind, even if I am diametrically opposed to your opinion. I will not call you names or denigrate you and I will not affect violence upon you. I will gladly sit down and share a cup of coffee and discuss the differences in our opinions and see where there is some compromise, if possible and agree to disagree if there is no possible compromise. I will support what I believe in, even if it offends you and I will fight for your rights to your opinion, even if it offends me. If you are truly offended by what many of us believe to be a part of our Southern Heritage because it represents a war fought for slavery but you can't discuss even one actual battle or event of that war, then you are not angry about history, you are just pissed off because someone else convinced you that was the way to be. I will not support the tearing down of monuments commemorating the defeated South any more than I would support allowing someone to select books from the library to burn because it might offend someone.
I do not support these monuments as a racist statement, nor a celebration of a defeat of a part of our nation that was trying to preserve slavery. Neither do I celebrate statues of Vernon Dahmer as a martyr in the struggle for racial equality, although he was and deserves celebration as such. I do have an appreciation of the reminders of those that gave their lives for what they believed in. I have been labeled a racist and a nazi by many because I am a moderate liberal and will not stand for intimidation, name calling, or disrespect for my fellow man. Can't you understand that inciting violence is pushing many moderates towards the right? You elected Trump by trying to force Clinton on us, I voted for him solely in opposition to Clinton and do not apologize for it. Do I think he is a good President? Not so much, but I do believe he is doing less harm to our Liberties than Clinton would have. I did not care for Obama either, but he was my elected President and I did not abuse him with words or deeds. Was it because he was black? Nope, I would much rather have had Condelessa Rice or Ben Carson or Allen West as President and I am pretty sure they all are black. Do I think they would have made a better President than Trump or Clinton? You bet I do. When we start tearing down Civil War Monuments because some are offended, how long before we take the crosses down in Arlington Cemetery because some Atheist is offended? When do we take down statues of Jefferson, he was a slave owner. When do we tear down the Viet Nam Memorial Wall in D.C., look at what we did to those folks. A reminder that Europeans and Blacks (re: Buffalo Soldiers) basically committed genocide to steal this nation from Native Americans and there has been no-one demand that we get our asses off private property and go back to Europe or Africa. The Chinese were brought here as slave labor too, but we don't see them burning down cities over a statue commemorating the Trans-continental Rail Road. We have a means of deciding how our nation is ran, it is called an ELECTION. The way it works is that we vote for what we want and if we get defeated, we re-group and better present our case for the next election. We are pushing the middle of our constituency to the other side by our deliberate acts of aggression; that basically defines ignorance. I am a peaceful man, fully capable of engaging in intelligent debate but if I am pushed, I will push back, if attacked, I will retaliate. I have spent most of my adult life working in disaster relief, mostly in third-world countries that were predominately Black or Hispanic. I have lived through racial violence and suffered as a result of it. I have been a casualty of racial crime and violence here at home and in foreign nations., but I have never lost my faith in the basic goodness of man until now.

 

Day 168, My Liberal Diary
Have you ever felt fear? I don't mean walk up on a snake fear or snarling dog fear, or is there somebody down there fear: even when attacked by a grizzly bear, you can curl into a ball and play dead and stand a chance of not being killed. I am talking about fear with a capitol F when you know there is absolutely nothing you can do to change, alter or even affect the course of events that are happening? I have been shot at, robbed at gun point, beaten and cut with knives by a gang intent on killing me. I have been in automobile accidents, been struck by lightning, rode out hurricanes on a shanty-boat, been attacked by real pirates and I have worked in extremely dangerous environments, including hot war zones, on more occasions than I can remember. At one time, I believed that looking back towards surface while working underwater, to see a swarm of aggressive sharks circling was fear. I suppose these things are fear but they no longer define fear to me. I now believe this feeling to be nothing more than a genetic fight or fight reflex that protects us all because when I finally learned about Fear, everything else just couldn't meet the standard.
In the Summer and Fall of 2001, I was in Trinidad aboard the Lana Rose anchored adjacent to Sealots, the largest ghetto in Port of Spain. We had raised a damaged barge from a reef in Nevis and towed it upside-down to Trinidad to make extensive repairs. Trinidad is populated about half and half with East Indians and Negroes and they do not much care for one another. A local slum-lord, Terry Hogan, lived in a Mad Max Fortress built from derelict ship parts and owned most of the shanties in Sealots. He provided our "security" and labor force to do the needed repairs, receiving a portion of each man's daily pay for allowing them to work. 90% of my labor force were black but I had a few Indians that were specialist I had hired because of their skilled trade. Frequently, my Indian employees would be severely beaten or assaulted because they refused to pay their wages to Hogan. This was a constant source of apprehension but just a minor roll in this story so I will not elaborate. All of our wages and expenses were paid weekly on Wednesdays in cash that I had wired weekly from the States and converted to TT currency at an exchange of 7.5 to 1. I had nominally 40 locals employed full-time on this project so I am talking about a large shopping bag of money every Tuesday I had to pick up, transit through one of the most dangerous impoverished neighborhoods in the western world to distribute to people that had an annual income supporting their entire families less than the value of the Tag Heur watch I wore on my wrist. I had been here working on this project for three months and the day to day stress had become almost mundane until the morning of September 11.
Every stone cast into the sea will create ripples. Tuesday, September 11, 2001 began like every other morning. I would have my coffee on the aft deck of the Lana, watch the amazing equatorial sun rise over the surreal calm sea filled with hundreds of derelict ships as far as the eye can see. I always began my morning with a phone call to my wife, back aboard the shanty-boat where we lived on the Saint Johns River in Florida. She is a morning person too, so we would watch the sun rise together a thousand eight hundred and seventy-six miles apart. My work force would soon begin arriving and we would have a meeting to discuss the days events and plan the work to be done until darkness shut us down. We would then gather in a circle and hold hands and offer a prayer before beginning the day's tasks. This was a habit established by my predecessor, SK, as a means of holding down the racial violence between the Blacks and the Indians. SK was a devout Christian from Saint Kitts and he always wrote a message of brotherhood upon the daily planning board every morning and prayed with his crew for peace and understanding before beginning the hard word under the tropical sun.I am not a Christian, but I saw the value of maintaining peace so continued this practice.
I was walking the deck, stamping out fires and checking for needed supplies and materials for the day's work when at 8:45, my cell rang. I answered to hear my wife, in obvious distress, saying we were under attack, that someone was firing missiles at New York City, then silence. I tried to call back but all international circuits were down. I rushed into the Lana and switched the satellite television to CNN just in time to watch the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. I used the Sat-phone to call home and we watched CNN together until the building collapsed before my eyes and I knew our world had forever changed. While trying to decide what was going on. I broke the connection and tried to reach my Company office in Ft. Lauderdale but lost the Sat signal before I could reach them. I began taking inventory to determine how long we could subsist without support from the States. There was enough provisions for maybe sixty days but fuel levels were not adequate to reach any U.S. Territory, even if I drained all the fuel from welding machines, the crane, and all deck equipment we wouldn't be able to make Puerto Rico by at least several hundred miles. I had maybe five thousand dollars in U.S. currency in my office safe and my Amex Platinum card. This might purchase enough fuel to make it Puerto Rico so I called our agent and asked about purchasing fuel but was told that we would have to pay TT, credit cards were not working because all lines of communication with them was down and they would not accept U.S. currency because the local news was reporting that Wall Street was going to collapse and they didn't want to chance getting stuck with useless paper. I called the Western Union Office to find that my weekly wire transfer had arrived just prior to the plane crash and I would be able to make my payroll because they could convert the transfer into TT for me for a price. Our agent called me back and offered to exchange TT for my U.S. currency at a 1 to 1 exchange rate, being prepared to take the risk himself on speculation but I declined his offer.I drove into Port of Spain and picked up what was to be my last wired funds for nearly two months and once back to the Lana, paid my workers off and dismissed all further work until things could be normalized. This single event placed a target on my back that would remain for weeks while the news flowing into Trinidad was sensationalized beyond what I imagined was really going on in the States. I kept a skeletal crew aboard to guard against piracy and looting. Our sole armament was a flare pistol with six rounds, a machete, and a .45-70 line launching gun that fired blanks to propel a brass rod with a line attached to grounded ships so they could pull a tow-line aboard. We welded interior bolts to the hatches and companionways on the inside to prevent forced entrance to the Lana and carried all the cutting torches from the work area and stored them below decks.It was at this point that the stress level introduced the second element into the Fear equation that I had never known about; the unknown. Cell and satellite communications were down completely, we could still receive television stations from local sources but the news we were getting could not be verified by any reliable means. Our internet connections were too slow to allow web browsing but we could use the single-side band radio to gather some news from the States, when the weather conditions were right. They had suspended all flights into the States so flying home wasn't an option. Apparently Congress had passed some new Law in record time, called the "Patriot" Act and there were only limited means of entry into the United States and only then under the eyes of heavily armed soldiers stationed at key air ports. Apparently we were now at war with a concept rather than an enemy that had international borders and a standing army.
Weeks went by with no contact or news from my wife until finally one morning while on my watch, my cell rang and looked down to see my home number displayed. I was so excited and answered immediately expecting to hear my wife's voice but what I heard was a voice I did not recognize saying "Darrell, this is Dave..." then the connection broke.
I know a bunch of Daves but not one that would have any reason to call me from my home telephone while I was on a job over-seas. I tried repeatedly to call back, imagining that something awful had happened to my wife but all circuits were still down and there was no getting a call through so I tried the Sat-phone with the same results, then drove to Port of Spain to try several attempts from a land-line. Now the third component of Fear has reared it's ugly head, fangs bared and closing around my pounding heart. Returning to the Lana, I kept trying to reach home, to reach anyone that I knew that might possibly check on my wife and let me know and every moment that passed raised my blood pressure higher and higher. What could have happened? I knew I couldn't return to the States regardless but this unknown danger was sending terror through my soul because there was absolutely nothing I could do to affect the problem, good, bad, or indifferent. It was totally beyond my reach to have any consequence and the most precious thing in my life might be dead, injured, or needing my help and I am stuck on a freaking boat surrounded by impoverished miscreants, one thousand eight hundred seventy-six miles away.
I climbed the mast to have the best possible reception and ran an extension cord up to keep my phone charged and repeatedly hit redial on everyone that I could think of that could tell me what was going on. I sat there all day and night until exactly midnight when my call was answered and I heard my wife's voice for the first time in nearly six weeks. She was so excited to hear me and gushed with happiness and chatter and I couldn't breath. She asked me what was wrong and I choked, trying to tell her. I took several moment before I could even speak and when I did, it was with tears of relief flowing down my sunburned salt-encrusted face. She had no idea who had called me or why, she missed me. There was nothing to worry about, just take care of yourself, you are in a very dangerous place and they will not let you return until they get security issues normalized. I did not sleep at all that night. I sat and reviewed my emotions with what objectivity I could and realized that I had been ever so fortunate because I had never truly known fear. I thought I had but what I had thought was fear was always related to personal survival and always there was some means of action that would allow me to affect the out-come. i realize, for the very first time, that true Fear was hiding what you care most about in your life in total darkness, knowing that it was being attacked by demons that you were powerless to confront, engage, or even wave at from across the bridge. This day became the most terrifying and defining day of my life and I realized just how fortunate I had been to have lived as much of my life in total ignorance of it's existence.
It was months before I was able to return to my home and when I got there, it was so different from the land I had left. For weeks, I refused to answer telephone calls from my employer, refusing to be sent back to another foriegn land and be away from my home and family until finally, my wife sat beside me and told me that regardless of where I was, what was coming down the pipes would eventually hit regardless and it would make no difference where we were when it hits, we are going to splashed by the ripples.I answered my phone at 3:00 the next morning and by daylight, was on a plane to the Dominican Republic for another salvage project.
I have hoped and prayed that I never experience that fear again, but I can now feel it creeping up on us in the dark. Newton proved that for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction and this cannot be argued. There is a force within our nation that is determined to polarize the population, spreading hatred and dissension through-out and sylligistically using just enough truth to incite violence in the name of justice. Good people are being labelled Nazi and Racist for not agreeing with the present HG Wells version of social engineering and forced to stand with truly evil and ignorant racist and Nazi just because we disagree with the present politically correct and extremely violent groups of politicos determined to erase history and rewrite a more PC version.

 

Day 169, My Liberal Diary
si vis pacem, para bellum, Literally translates to "If you want peace, prepare for war". This is the salutation that I use every day to close my diary. It is also a reminder of what can so easily happen when history is ignored. Many of my fellow liberals are aggressively antagonizing what , given the results of the last election, is a Majority of the American people. Yes, most or at least a very large percentage, are white people. That sort of makes sense, if you look at the racial demographics of our nation and see that white people are in a majority even if you include liberals too. That's the beauty of our Republic though, even the minorities are strongly represented and apparently the only real thing that seems to be pulling us apart rather than together, is a very loud and angry group that is openly determined to tear our country apart and rebuild it, rather than using the system that has stood us for well over two centuries. Yes, a very small percentage of those white people are racists. Nobody is denying that. The vast majority of white people cannot be grouped with that bunch just because some of their ideologue are common. That would be like saying that everyone that rents a Ryder truck is a domestic terrorist just because one was used in the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing.
It is only human nature, when pushed, to push back.
I want to talk about war for a minute. War is never about Freedom or Liberty. It is about money and power, nothing else. World War ll history is taught in an abridged manner that implies we fought because Hitler was running amok exterminating Jews but they never mention the fact that we didn't even discover the death concentration camps until the end of the war and was pretty much just an extension of World War l. History is not taught that if Hitler had not nationalized and taken over ITT, we probably never would have entered the European war at all, but too many big money people here had their fortunes at risk. Viet Nam has never been explained to me, we made up some boogabear about communists and sent troops to a little Asian province most had never even heard of, after creating a false-flag attack on a U.S. Navy vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin and I can't for the life of me, figure out what that was about except that we needed a war to stir the economy and rile the hippies up. The wars over in the middle East have usually been about oil but shale oil production has pretty much rendered them inconsequential so now, we just go all over shooting at people that are pissed off because we don't pay the high oil prices they have gotten used to so they blame it on god and try to kill us and we call them terrorists and build airports and infrastructure in third world countries so we can kill them easier.
We fought the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 for Freedom from Britain. We fought the War between the States for Freedom from the industrialized North. Yes, that is what it was about but they don't teach that, preferring a much more simplistic version where it was all about abolishing the evil institute of slavery and that is sort of true too, except that they don't tell you that Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation only freed the slave in the 13 States that succeeded the Union. They forget to mention that they continued to hold slave auctions within sight of the White House right on up until the end of the War. They never mention that ALL the rest of the States that were not in the Confederacy still legally owned people as servants. They do not mention that slaves were used to carry supplies, bury their dead, or as conscripted cannon-fodder. Yes, the South's prime motive was the preservation of slavery but the real reason for the war was simply money. The South's economy was based on agriculture rather than manufacturing and couldn't maintain their economy without cheap farm labor and this was well before the days of Massey-Ferguson and Mexican migrant labor. No other war fought by our nations since has had anything remotely to do with freedom of any type but the flag-waving slogan still stirs up a sense of patriotism and sends our kids off to foreign lands to kill people, thank you for your service, and the profiteers still spend billions convincing us it is about protecting our Liberty but ever mentioning the profits they will make at the expense of those of us that are paying for it. My point is that war is never noble. Yes, great sacrifices are made, acts of heroism are done, often at the costs of life or limb. But ask any combat veteran what he is really fighting for after the first shot is fired and you'll learn the truth. They are fighting for their brother standing beside them in the mud. If he falls on a grenade, it doesn't have shit to do with yours or my Liberty, it only has to do with giving his life to protect the brothers in arms next to him. Most of the people doing the actual fighting in the War Between the States did not own slaves and had never owned slaves, they were subsistence farmers, lumbermen, store-keepers, not plantation owners. They had jobs working right along side slaves too, not as Massa, not as Mr. over-seer, but as labor. Wagons carrying cotton to the mills, loading steam boats, shoeing mules and horses, making garden hoes and axes, the idea that they were all former masters of a plantation ran by hundreds of prime field-hands is absurd, but the pressure of the plantation no longer being able to produce cotton would put them out of work too so OK, i'll fight, beats starving. War has never been glorious. It has always been viewed from the perspective of the victor but even then, the people that suffered most are neglected. And nobody even considers that the origins of racial antipathy in the South has as much to do with the cruelty of the "Reconstruction" Era as it does racism. I blame Isaac Newton for discovering that for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.

 

Day 170, My Liberal Diary
Winston Smith? The Ministry of Truth might be here any minute with their double-speak. We gonna erase everything that offends anyone and pretend if it happened at all, it was done by terrorists and flush it and all the rest of their shit right down the memory hole. We gonna rebuild this brave new world into a place where all men can live in peace and harmony with free stuff and a new car, and if you don't like it, we gonna kill you.
Every day that passes seems like it fell from the pages of Orwell's 1949 book, "1984". When it got combined with the sky falling this morning when the sun went out and the messiah returning for baptist retribution, I decided to just stay indoors and try to teach myself how to ignore history, it don't matter no more. I am going to sacrifice elocution and diction in the name of political correctness and sit here and conversate with you racists nazis. Listen up, you got to go. We ain't putting up with your shit no more! If you got one of them racist monuments in your yard, we gonna set the grass on fire, you know what I mean? Robert E. Lee and all them lawn jockeys belong with that statue of Saddam Komeini Ben Laden. I'm goon give you rednecks some wisdom from the immortal words of Malcolm X:
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
And if these words from Malcolm don't get you then maybe this will:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

 

Day 171, My Liberal Diary
Today, I am thankful for the sun shine. After the sun disappeared yesterday, I did not know for certain that it would be returned, having assumed the Republicans may have pulled another fast-one and sold it to China to pay interest on the national debt. All three of my puppies were very needy yesterday. I sense that they suspected the same thing. I dreamed that I got sprayed in the face with pepper-spray by a psychotic woman that was upset because I played four songs and and told two short stories while performing somewhere, I think it was a church. Now I am on constant, though somewhat clandestine, watch for psychotic women and each woman that I come into contact with, I carefully watch to see any signs of aggression or pique and I watch their hands and head, the eyes can lie to you but head and hands always tell of an impending attack.
I have been having some seriously vivid dreams lately. I dreamed I was walking down a dirt road and came across an old friend, Dave was holding his guitar and said to me "Come sit under this oak tree in the shade and play a little music with me" I still remember Dave's smile; he always made me feel glad to see him and he was a fine musician and songwriter. Dave has been dead a while now, he ran his car into an oak, maybe 30 years ago. I had worked most of the evening on a new song and when I played it back, said to myself that it sounded like something Dave would have written and I felt good about that. Maybe there is an after-life and music is perpetual and can be written or influenced from beyond the grave? Many people seem to believe in eternity but they have mixed that up with some pretty outlandish religious ideologue like hell-fire and streets with gold paving. I sort of get the threat of hell thing but there are so many better paving materials than a soft extremely conductive metal. If I am to believe in perpetual life, then let it be music. The haunt of melody and refrain. Let lyrics anthem the memory and timbre stir the motion. For those that need eternal damnation, let them always hear hip-hop or rap.

 

There's several songs in this thread like, Take your flag and shove it !

 

Day 172, My Liberal Diary
My wife, the right-wanger, is in full-blown hurricane mode and hasn't left the weather channel for more than a trip to the bathroom in two days. She has some compulsion to watch as disaster unfolds, being constantly aware of the category, wind speed, storm surge and if a meteorologist named Jim something is there, she knows it is gonna be a bad one. It doesn't matter that the storm is in West Texas and we are in East Alabama. She hasn't gone out shopping for batteries or bottled water and plywood, we have them already because we both have ridden more than our share of hurricanes out.
We were living on our shanty-boat on the East coast years ago when Hurricane Charlie came in and she insisted on staying aboard with me and our Golden Retriever, Beau, to guard our vessel during the storm.I wanted them to ride the storm out in the concrete bath-house at the marina but she can be very determined. About midnight, the cleats that secured our dock lines began ripping off in the 100 mph wind.. We were both wearing life jackets. If the lines completely parted, our home would break into splinters on the concrete pier just across from us and it would be at least a mile in the water before we could reach an area without a seawall, where we might climb to shore. I had her bring my pistol and she asked why in the world I wanted a pistol if we had to swim. I told her that if we had to swim, I was going to kill Beau. She was appalled at the thought. I explained that if we had to take to the water, she would likely drown trying to save our pet. I loved that old dog but I knew he would drown before he could reach an area where he could exit the water and I also knew that Jimi would die trying desperately to save him. Fortunately, someone came down the dock and was able to pass us additional lines. I swam beneath the shanty-boat and tied the lines around the pontoons and we were able to save our home. Less than two weeks later, we found ourselves in yet another hurricane, Hurricane Francis. This time, she decided to take her dog to the concrete bath-house at the marina and leave me to guard our boat by myself. I suppose she learned that being a pragmatist is sometimes a difficult choice.