I was killing time yesterday and accidently turned the TV to the 'Shopping Channel". That is the strangest damn show I have ever seen. It is like watching beings that you are fairly sure are from your Galaxy, but you just can't figure out which planet.

Two absolutely air-headed women spent nearly 15 minutes describing the wonders of a wind chime....15 minutes! I have never seen anything quite like it, they just jabbered on forever telling every minute detail of this thing, as if Wind Chimes had just been invented and this was the first working model. It was kind of like the first proto-human trying to describe 'fire' to his cave-mates.

Then they had callers, poor miserable wretches that spent much of their free time waiting for some product to be announced just so they could call up an buy the damn thing.

I thought to myself, this is quite possibly the most rampant obscenity of consumerism I have ever seen.

Pathetic...and sad. I got these visions of these lonely smucks sitting in their mobile homes, surrounded by boxes of unopened goodies purchased on credit, bill collectors who know them by their first names, and statues of deer stiffly poised on their front lawn backlit by cut metal outlines of a grandmother bending over. Oh, and an inflatable flamingo...
====================

Talked with a a young kid today. Graduated High School yesterday. Plans on entering the U.S. Navy because they will pay for college. He and his family cannot afford the staggering cost of education in this country. So he must enter the military.

Military is not bad. Sometimes the the training is even useful in the civilian world. You do learn to work with a wide variety of people, you learn to push yourself, you learn discipline, responsibility. Sometimes you get to travel to foreign lands and kill people.

I think that young, hard working, honest kids that join the military are the cream of the crop in many ways. These are the kids that you want to join your society and you want to be successful so that they can raise other hard working, honest kids. And Military service gives you a perspective that can be invaluble, learning other cultures and other ways of living.

What puzzles me though is why we in America refuse to provide education for our children. Why is that? We are spending over $1 BILLION dollars per day in Afganistan and Iraq and yet we cannot seem to find out way clear to provide a college education and training to our next generation?

If you look at American priorities, it is obviously more important to kill other people and steal their natural resources, then it is to educate our own people.

Americans, if you consider how we spend out tax dollars, prefer to kill, maim, destroy, rather than gain knowledge and wisdom. And they call this, 'civilization'?

This country could easily afford to provide free education to every single Child in this country. Zero through Graduate School. The fact that we don't is symptomatic of the rot that invests this country...the rot of profit over people...the rot of the bottom line and short term gain being more desirable than a knowledgeable citizenry and an intelligent culture.