Smorgasbord
August 26th, 2004 by Mark
My blogging is following a similar pattern to all of the other times that I have tried to keep a blog. I have a few days where I’m really into it and I’m writing a lot. Then, I get to the point where I have a whole bunch of things to write about, but I never find the time to actually go ahead and write it out. This is the phase I’m in now. After this I’ll have a small resurgence in the frequency of my posts, and then it’ll all die out for a few months. It’s pretty sad actually. You’d think that I’d be able to write on some kind of a consistent basis.
I’m entirely addicted to the olympics. I’ll watch freaking anything. My favorite events are indoor volleyball, ping pong, long jump, high jump, and gymnastics in general. There’s something about volleyball that is really special. I played volleyball throughout most of high school. I think there are few sports that require as much teamwork as volleyball. It’s really impossible to get much of anything done by yourself in a volleyball game. Basketball, hockey, baseball, and soccer all make it atleast marginally possible to do something amazing entirely on your own. The only thing in volleyball that doesn’t depend on teamwork is the serve. Weight-lifting is on the olympics right now. These guys are lifting something like 530 pounds up over their heads. That’s just disturbing.
This post is only going to get longer. Now that I’m writing, I feel like I should write everything that I’ve been meaning to write. There are some people at work who have different political views than I do. That is to be expected. And, for the most part I can understand where they’re coming from. I just tend to disagree. One idea that I find it really hard to relate to is that the United States can’t do wrong. Now, in orer to make a judgement on anything, it is very important to maintain an air of impartiality. That is to say that you have to try and not see what it is your judging from any one side of the argument. If you can’t think about an action from an unbiased position, you should be wise enough to not draw any conclusions regarding its justness. Now, all of this is well and good, but it isn’t human nature. It’s in our nature to say, “Hey, whatever we do is good by virtue of us having done it.” In other words, “We wouldn’t do anything that isn’t right and just.” I think we all know that this isn’t the truth, but we’re only good at deciding that way after the fact. We can look back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and think, “Maybe we shouldn’t have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens while they were on their way to work and otherwise going about their daily lives. Maybe that wasn’t entirely necessary. And, even if it was what was required to stop the second world war, was stopping the second world war worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens?” We find it very hard to criticize actions that we take as a country while they are happening. I guess what I’m getting at here is that the situation that we find ourselves in right now is a whole lot more complicated than ‘good guys vs. bad guys’. I don’t want to come off as sympathizing with terrorists or anything like that. I want terrorists to be brought to justice just as much as the next guy, but I don’t think we should be entirely haphazard about actions that we take in the middle east. Going over there and waging wars could do more harm than good. I also don’t think we should be comparing our actions to the actions taken by our enemies. Do I think that the American citizens who were beheaded by terrorists would have much rather worn panties on their heads than been beheaded? Yeah. But, that doesn’t mean that we should be putting panties on people’s heads.
I really wish I started writing these things earlier in the night, or could just stick to one topic and finish it coherently without running into rants. It’s 1:30 and I have to get up at 7:00. I’m done writing for now.
