woo birthday

Haha thanks guys! I guess it was a decent birthday. No party or anything but I went to a concert and did a bunch of random stuff.

veritas vos liberabit

So this is the first post for my personal blog, my other blog being Sundrenched. I use that one to talk about music, so I'll use this one just to ramble about everything else. Today's first topic will deal with outrages and indignities.

People who talk to me on a regular basis probably know that I'm often disgusted by things I read about, especially things like political scandals and the like. I've been thinking about why even though so many things are exposed, scandals continue to happen. I felt like eventually people would become smart enough and the government good enough that we would eliminate nonsense or at least reduce it to a very small scale. However, I've come to the conclusion that this probably won't happen, it's unrealistic, and the best we can achieve is a balance.

Without getting too far into my thoughts (I'll probably end up with evolutionary theory), I'll just say that people aren't all the same. We don't all want the same thing, we don't have identical intelligences (contrary to what egalitarians would want you to believe), and we certainly aren't perfect. We are still unfortunately somewhat bound by evolution (damn!) to forward our own agenda. This is why this political nonsense happens. We are by nature still somewhat aggressive.

This really agitated me when I watched it yesterday. I do not know where these misconceptions arise, but I'm tempted (as are most people when shown something like this) to blame it on the other side, in this case being conservatives. Mind you, I know that such a generalization is highly unfair, and may arise just as much from rumors gone bad as from some scheming ultracon who has no morals (anyone thinking Karl Rove?) and does not represent the general group, but something deep inside me wants to attribute this to the other side nonetheless. It's painful to watch rallies where Obama is labeled as an "Arab", a "terrorist", and the best McCain can do is say that Obama is not an Arab, no, he is a "good family man". Are Arabs not good family men? I don't know where these things start, but some people do take advantage of the less knowledgeable. It's a fact.

And that whole last paragraph was just an example. What I'm trying to convey is not specific to this campaign, not specific to race issues, and not specific to a party. It's simply because that is what I am familiar with since I am liberal. Conservatives have lots of good examples of their own.

So if we can't get rid of this forever, what is the best we can do? I try to be a realist, though deep inside I still dream that we could all get along. I think the best we can do is what we try to do now. We alert the world to what is going on, and when enough people are outraged by something, it gets fixed. We repeat this process, repairing wrongs one by one. And though we can't achieve perfection, we still strive for it.

Meh just had to get some thoughts out on that.