M Y O B

“He got a sweet gift of gab, he got a harmonious tongue,

He knows every song of love that ever has been sung.

Good intentions can be evil,

Both hands can be full of grease.

You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.”

Man of Peace. RDylan, 1983

There is something very strange going on. Reasonable and credible behaviors have been abandoned. Common sense departed some time ago. But there is even something a bit more insidious in the works.

Eight years ago 19 or 20 young Muslim men, bent on making quite the statement to the world, commandeered four domestic airline flights and headed to predetermined targets. They were very successful. But we have made them successful beyond their wildest fundamentalist dreams. We are in the process of bankrupting our nation as a consequence of their dirty deeds and our lack of discipline. The latter is our doing; not theirs.

A new president, clearly shocked to his core by their acts and surrounded with older fellows who seemingly were just waiting for a reason and a cause, unleashed the military on several targets at what now can only be deemed to be an unneeded cost in strong young American lives and without regard to any cost/benefits/necessity/reasonable expectation analysis.

Even worse in dollar cost, the bureaucracies with their special self serving agendas rallied the legislatures in Washington and their state capitols to spend money no one had on many unneeded projects, bureaucracies and safeguards. The result is that one cannot enter a public building unimpeded or a stadium without rules, process and screening. Airports have become exaggerated shakedowns and exercises in intimidation for normal folk while politicians, bureaucrats and the well-to-do fly out of private terminals. Any and everywhere a taxpaying citizen looks, there are police cars with shaded, closed windows occupied by gun carrying bureaucrats dressed in swat outfits and other para military attire that is reminiscent of Star War storm troopers. It is every law abiding citizen’s nightmare of a police state gone wild. Americans are now subject to more police agencies, more cameras, more restrictions on their movements, more electronic invasion of privacy, more trumped up press conferences of plots thwarted and more intimidation and hassle than any developed country in the world. American children cannot be children without facing zero tolerance policies that would shame the Soviet nomenklatura.  Why?  Why do these people always pick on the easiest targets, the law abiders, the meek?  Are they so insecure that they need the illusory feedback of intimidating the complicit?  Or do they just like the power, the pay and the pensions?

Now others from afar with their agendas send messages and honorariums to an unproven, untested and unaccomplished president? What message is behind their entreaties and awards? Don't follow the military? Follow the beliefs of some Norwegian legislators? Turn our affairs over to world bodies? Retreat? It may be good time for America to take a self imposed “time out.” Our efforts to solve others problems are proven unproductive and replete with unintended consequences.

We are a country of exceptional but brief history and wisdom. We are most certainly capable of finding trusted allies and capable of correcting our sins and errors. There are fundamentals we can trust. It is time to tell others to mind their business and time for us to get about minding ours.