Baby Steps and The Big Picture

Which Harry Potter Character Are You?
	You are Fred and George. You're a joker at heart, but when push comes to shove, you know what's important.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

I polished off some more of HP&TDH last night... and I'm still not finished. Most of the chapter I read involved Harry peering into something called the "Pensieve" and seeing a lifetime of someone's recollections in there (I won't tell you who but let's put it this way... somebody else died last night).

So a lot more was revealed and much of it clarifies a lot of other stuff and it's the kind of stuff that makes kids feel like shit when they find out there ain't no Sanity Clause or Ether Bunny.

And then I fell asleep.

So I'm kinda hoping to finish it off tonight (yeah, yeah, you've heard all this before).

It won't be giving away much to say that Harry is finding out "stuff" and that stuff is all part of seeing "The Big Picture." He's lost his innocence and is beginning to see life in shades of gray. Few, indeed, were those who were pure as snow or as black as night in his make-believe world. Sometimes things had to happen for the greater good, and it was a tough call, sometimes, to decide who lived and who died in the process.

The progression in the books was logical. They've gone from naivete to cynicism.

It happens to all of us. It happened to me (and far later in life than the Merry Band of Hogwartians experienced it).

This year, for example, I've had to face some hard realities about my so-called friends in public office. In order to get elected candidates on both sides of the aisle feel as though they have to kiss fundamental ass, left and right. It's tough being a centrist in a divided nation.

It's tougher being a dove in a nation of chicken-hawks, most of whom never had a gun pointing back at them when they were out hunting, or had a "Bear" (Tupelov) circling overhead while serving on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean during the heighth of the Cold War.

We are not a nation "at" war. We are a nation which needs war. We need it to feed and justify the existence of our humongous defense establishment. The Super Secret Spy programs exist solely for the purpose of justifying their own existence. Hence "data mining" or looking at billions of phone calls and e-mails (and probably blogs like this one) looking for any hint of subversive tendencies (they'll find plenty here).

There's no long-term strategic need for us to be in the Middle East. Nobody there is crying out for America (or western Europe) to save them from themselves. I've known this ever since I saw "Lawrence of Arabia" at the age of 14 and had it all explained for me in the last 15 minutes of that movie wherein Prince Faisal sells out the rest of the Middle East to the English in exchange for Saudi Arabia. When it got too hot for the Brits to handle after WWII, they dumped it on us.

We could've gotten off of oil a long time ago except for one thing. American Corporate Greed which is, was and always will be the driving factor in ALL American policy, foreign and domestic.

And if you think otherwise, then it's time for you to quit taking baby steps and to start looking at The Big Picture.