Time to alienate some people
Two things: war and cats.
Listen, there’s plenty about this administration that brings out the libertarian in me. Ashcroft, the Communications Decency Act, the Patriot Act . . . a free and secure society does not need these things. And I will admit that the relentless drumbeat against Iraq has lacked specificity — we know they’ve done wrong things, but you’ll just have to wait and see what they are. But here’s the thing:
Good people fought long and hard to rid a scourge from this earth, many of them the same kinds of people who are protesting today. They went to every corner of the earth, worked with people of all races and languages, and to every one of them they promised one thing: “You will not die from smallpox. Your children will not die from smallpox. No one will die from smallpox.” They did not qualify that promise by saying, “Unless some madman decides to use it as a weapon, and we decide that we need to talk about it until he unleashes it.” War is awful and I don’t want it, but we’ve been using the talking weapons against Iraq for many years now without much success (and with appeasers in this country decrying our inhumanity, because the lightweight sanctions we’ve imposed only hurt the innocent. From which the only conclusion possible is that we should do nothing, which is absurd.) I’m personally of the belief that anyone who is working to bring smallpox back to the world should not be allowed to live. Period. Whatever it takes to get to that point is what it takes. Threatening Iraq with a good talking-to isn’t going to get us there.
Okay, now to tick off the other half of my readers. I’ve been scanning a lot of blogs lately, and many of them feature a fair amount of personal information about the blogger. That’s nice, that’s part of the point, and it’s enjoyable. But I keep running across people who call their cats their “kids”. Cats are wonderful, I love them, I wish my allergies allowed me to have one. Love dogs, too. Don’t happen to believe you need to pick one over the other. But for people who think having pets is just like having children: get over yourself. It’s not. This is why: I last had a cat when I was 15. It was a beautiful tortoiseshell, affectionate but independent, and it lived mostly outdoors. It was run over while playing in a pile of leaves, and it died. I was very upset for a while. Then I got over it. That’s why cats are not kids.
Zoiks! I promise, I’ll be nicer next time.