So on my flight from Albuquerque to Denver a week and a half ago, I was 95% eavesdropping and 5% contributing to a conversation going on across the aisle. The main contributor was an engineer type guy who has been working on breaking (mostly speed) records in vehicles fed with alternative fuels like biodiesel which from what he told me is recycled oil from fast food deep fat fryers. I guess this is for some new television show on TLC or Discovery. He was sitting closest to me and on the other side of him was this pint-sized woman from Georgia who was loud and rather um . . . DUMB. The talk turned to politics as the guy complained that people were always asking him about his political beliefs and he stated that he really didn’t feel strongly either way, but was just out there having fun. The woman proceeded to explain that she thought politics were dumb and that she really didn’t see what relevance they had to her life.

So, I happened to be reading Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken and was kind of fired up. I wanted to shake that woman a little and the guy too. I’m like a born-again liberal. It’s really a bit scary. I just cannot understand how someone could be so blind to force of politics which influences just about every aspect of our lives from the educational options we have to the health care we receive to the air we breathe. I can understand not caring simply because you feel you have no power in the situation and the effort to care just isn’t worth it, but actually denying the role of politics in our lives? I don’t understand.

This brings me to another concern I have had lately. Bush seems all too willing to bring his religious beliefs and try to make them policy which I always believed was just unconstitutional and actually un-American, though conservatives don’t seem to see it that way. This kind of infringement frightens me and not just for me as I am rather ambiguous and apathetic in my worshipping these days. I am mostly concerned about the fringe type people like my oldest sister who happens to be a Jehovah’s Witness and my other relatives who are Wesleyan Methodists and are ultra conservative. So as a faithful Witness, my sister does not vote because the Witnesses are not to take part in government, but they can work for the government. I don’t quite understand the reasoning. Anyway, it frightens me that our president has been able to bring his religious beliefs (and I believe he belongs to the Assemblies of God Church—fundamentalist and evangelical) and actually use them to try and change the constitution and who knows what else he might try to change? I suppose I might be catastrophizing a bit, but what if he wanted to make legislation that somehow infringed on the rights of these fringe religious groups? The ones who blindly support him or the ones who have blindly disengaged themselves might be the ones most affected. I suppose there is no clear way to completely divorce politics from religion, but I believe the founders of this country expected us to try.

Love to all.