Daddy on the Edge of the End of Bliss

I knew someone, years back, that wouldn't watch Braveheart. Too much violence. There were a whole host of movies - great movies, epic films, that were never to be viewed in her presence... because people got hurt in them. It upset her tender sensibilities to be exposed to such brutality, so she chose the path of blissful ignorance; the art of happily willful unknowing.

Barbara Bush, former first lady, said of her sons impending war in Iraq; "But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or that or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Again, blissful ignorance. If I don't know about it, or if I refuse to allow my mind to acknowledge it's reality, it's very presence in my universe - then, on some level, in some bizarre rationalization, it's not really happening. Not in a real, concrete way that I have to deal with, anyway.

How convenient.

Oops; there I go, throwing rocks in my glass yurt. Don't get me wrong - there are some things that Daddy is happy to be blissfully ignorant about. I love sausages, but do not ever need to watch them being made. I know that I was born, and therefore my parents must have engaged, at least once, in some activity that brought that whole event into being, but I do not EVER need to imagine what such an event might have entailed. Never. Ever.

Ever.

I also understand how sometimes this world makes you want to just stick your head in the sand. You figure that, even if the whole damn planet is going to hellinahandbasket, you'll just concern yourself with your little place in the universe - your little corner of the sky. Daddy was thinking that way for a while. Daddy was seriously thinking of going off the grid - unplugging - just dropping out of society, leaving the rest of the world to it's own devices.

For whatever reason though, I can't quite let go; can't bring myself to make that break with society. We're all here...for something. Whatever the reason for our existence, I have to believe that the end goal is to make things better. We are all in this together. All of us; each and every human who breathes air on the planet - we are all connected. When we help each other out, we help ourselves. When we lift each other up, we each are lifted as well.

Conversely, when we do harm, it benefits no one. When we destroy, we destroy ourselves in kind. And when we turn a blind eye, we practically invite the same to be done to us one day.

The following video is not easy to watch. This is why it needs to be watched. It is not, as they say, for the faint of heart. But then, neither is being a real, contributing member of the Human Race. Violence exists. Brutality exists. To put our heads in the sand and deny their existence is to give our tacit acceptance, and that is simply no longer acceptable. Please watch;




I'll Be There,

Daddy

Transgender Day of Remembrance - 2011

November 20th, 2011 marks the 13th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. For those that are not familiar, this is the day when people worldwide take a moment to remember their transgendered brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, lovers and friends whose lives have been suddenly terminated through acts of violence.

Watch;




The following was not written by me. It was written by a transgendered person who needs to be heard; who needs to be acknowledged. A person who is not wrong, but is instead all too right. Please...read on;


clamavi ad te
Written by little light

"Nearly half of living trans people–surviving trans people–have attempted suicide.
Nearly half of those of us who did not succeed in killing ourselves have tried.
Nearly a tenth of us will be murdered. Nearly half of us will be raped. Most of us will experience violence from loved ones and almost all of us will be denied homes and jobs. This is not hyperbole. These are the numbers as the world currently stands. But the most devastating one, as far as I am concerned, is that first one. Nearly half of the living have tried not to be. That is: let’s leave behind all the nearly. More than half of us have tried to end our own lives and many of us have succeeded. We are a heartbroken people.

This is not arbitrary. This is not a mistake. This is not for no reason. This is because we live in a world that has systematically forced into us the falsehood that we are unworthy of the basic consideration of humanity. This is because we–and we are a beautiful people, a powerful people, a beloved and phenomenal people–have been fed falsehood after falsehood until we were convinced that we were the problem, and not the campaign, from the institution on down to the individual, to erase, denigrate, break, and murder us. This is the failure state of the communities we live in: our families, our religious communities, our political leaders, our movements, our governments, our cultures. This is us–trans people–as a people–being forced to carry the weight of an entire world’s failure.
If we are so desperate to escape this world–if we see no other alternative, or worse, loathe ourselves so very much–it is because our communities have failed us. They can do better. We can do better. We deserve better. We are not so full of self-hate because something is wrong with us. We do not do such terrible violence to ourselves because that is what we deserve. We do not abdicate the belief in our own inherent dignity and worth lightly or easily. It is torn out of us, little by little, in daily, tiny murders. And every time we cringe and scrape and apologize for breathing, for taking up space, for speaking, for loving, every time we ask for forgiveness just for being what we are, every time we internalize story after story about how we are dead to our loved ones, ask to be brutalized, need to expect that what we are will merit every door closed in our faces, we are participating little by little in our own suicides.

I am no longer interested in sweet words about this. We convince ourselves we are the problem because we are taught to do so, and we are all taught this, minute by minute, even those of us who mostly don’t believe it. We are reminded every hour how low and vile we are despite our best efforts. If you have for an instant believed that you are unworthy of love, that you are wrong, that you are anything less than a person, it is very simply because your community has failed you.
When you have been told you are less than human–less than sacred–less than beautiful–your community has failed you. When you believe it, it is because your community has failed you. I do not intend to mince words.

If you are out there believing that you are less than other people–that you are unworthy–that those who love you are settling, or tolerating, or deserve your apology–that those you love are not lucky to have your love–your community has failed you. Your family has failed you. Your faith, if you have one, has failed you. Your leaders have failed you. If you or the people around you are using words that make you feel like a thing; if you are frightened to have basic bodily functions in public; if you talk about yourself like a disease, not a person; if you see nothing ahead in your old age but the bleakness of despair, isolation, and abuse; if your youth is a never ending desperation to get out and away to somewhere you cannot trust exists; if you are quietly taking your bag out from under the seat another has taken from you and moving on instead of asserting yourself; if you are telling yourself it is excusable for other people, even loved ones, not to afford you the basic respect of your own name; if you are believing this is the best you can do, they have let you down.
You deserve better. Because you are not the problem. You are not broken. You are not worthless. You are not a problem and you are not a mistake.

We talk a lot about principles and rights, but I am not talking about rights and don’t want to. Rights are the purview of politics and I don’t want to talk politics. I don’t want to talk analysis or discourse or theory.
I want to talk morals. It is a moral issue that our community is full of despair and self-hatred and self-disgust. It is not a matter of rights. It is not a matter of laws or votes or commandments. It is a moral issue. It is a theological issue. It is an issue of fundamental, basic human-ness. And I think sometimes we, as a community, especially those of us so proud to be radicals, forget that sometimes we rush ahead of the community, the culture, the people to whom we are connected, and want to talk about our rights before we talk about what we deserve and why we deserve it. We want to talk about protecting our own before we give each other reason to believe we are worth protecting. We want to jump in with both feet and spread the word about what we ought to have in society without convincing our people that we are worthy of not just full participation in society, civil or social, but of love. Of beauty. Of truth. Of basic humanity. Of self-respect.

This is not about self-esteem. This is not about self-help. This is a moral issue. This is an issue of the basic liturgy of human interaction–because it is our daily rituals that define the four corners of the world and the arches of the sky, it is our stories that tell us how to recognize our own faces, and we have been denied our place in the human liturgy for far too long and it is long past time to erupt up from the landscape that conceals us and demand, not just our rights, but the basic essential core of worth and decency that makes us people and therefore worthy of rights in the first place. We have been denied this and we have been told we are the problem. Those of us who are political, like me, hear often about ourselves as a cause. Those of us who are academic, like me, hear often about ourselves as a concept. But we have gotten ahead of ourselves because too many of us–leave alone everyone else, us!–have not heard about ourselves as people. We have been excluded from our own landscape of story and ritual. We have been ejected from our own moral universe. We have been torn from our own regard. And we are killing ourselves by degrees because of it. At eight years old I put a kitchen knife to my chest and pushed, and it was only a miracle that caused me to falter and fail. That eight year old child was not the problem. I was not the problem. A world that taught me that I had no place in it, that taught me to look away from my own holy truth and afford myself not even a scrap of the respect I agreed all other people merited, that taught me that nothing done to me could be wrong because my own moral universe did not include me–that world was and is the problem.

If for a moment in your life you have spent a breath or a thought hating yourself, looking on yourself with disgust and contempt, it is because people have let you down, and those people were wrong. You deserve not to submit to them. You were never the problem. If for a moment you thought your family, your friends, your lovers, needed to compromise to love you, thought they could do better and have a real person instead, it is because your community has let you down, from the top to the bottom.
If our leaders cannot tell us this–if we as leaders cannot tell each other this–we are fundamentally and profoundly abdicating our responsibility to our people, who are crying out for justice. If you run a church or a support group or a political faction or a newsletter or a website. If you speak to our people in public, if you guide young people or those just discovering themselves, if you are entrusted with the responsibility to guide any of us, and you do not make it clear that we are whole, we are real, we are worthy, we are beautiful? You are letting us down and you can do better. You can do better than letting that lie go unchallenged. Our people are hungry for the truth. We are starving. If you deny them that food, if you feed them garbage instead, it is on you.
This is not politics, or theory. It is a moral issue. We are under the arch of the same sky, and yet we are denied the sight of it, leave alone the hope that we might be virtuous enough to share in holding it up.

We are not the problem. We are not broken. We are not dirty. Wrong is not our name. We are not wrong. It is long past time to recognize that though we may lose much from truth-telling, when it all burns away, everything that is left is true.
Do not trust me because some great Word is in me. Trust yourself and the Word in you. Trust that you are brim-full of truth. Trust that there is a mighty and lie-less core within you that from birth has told you that you are full of what is good, and trust that the fact you cannot hear it ringing out over your landscape is because it has been buried by other people in a landfill of falsehood.
The fact that you can doubt the truth within yourself is because your community has let you down. And we can do better. We deserve better. We are better than that. We are not wrong.

I do not intend to mince words. Whatever there is in you that tells you that you are not worth loving, not worth living, not worth fighting for: burn it. Burn it down and dig for the truth underneath. Dig down through the ashes of all those lies until you hit bedrock and then, pushing off from it, rise up. We walk in places much too dark and terrible to deny ourselves this. In a world that sanctions and blockades our sources of spiritual nourishment, we carry too much already to weaken ourselves by collaborating with this enforced and unjust impoverishment. We deserve to rise up, and, even if only in ourselves, nurture revolution.

We are real people, beautiful people, and we deserve families, communities, movements, and cultures that honor us. I think we can have them. I believe we can make them. We are part of this human family, worthy, complete, pure, and mighty. And we ought to be able to say this out loud and to ourselves until we know that it is true.

Welcome to church. "

God Bless and Amen,

Daddy

Daddy on the Edge of Celluloid Heroes

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

~Andy Warhol

In the film "Grand Canyon", Steve Martin says to Kevin Kline; “That’s part of your problem, you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.”

True Dat.

They say that those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it. As we watch the world teeter over the third rail of a worldwide Depression, Daddy can't help but agree with that statement as well. But this post is not about history...this post is about the movies.

When reality gets to be too much, we seek solace in darkened theaters, where we watch the larger than life perform larger than life feats. Everything is just...better in the movies. They do things better, they definitely say things better...maybe if life were scripted, had multiple re-takes and a multi-million dollar budget, it would be better too.

But maybe movie heroes aren't larger than life; maybe, instead, it's that life has somehow gotten smaller. I don't know about you, but lately Daddy has felt more than a little restricted and constricted by a hamfisted system that stirs fears about inflation, stagflation, deflation, while all the while Wall Street fat cats demand de-regulation. Tiny people having tiny arguments about tiny things, while Rome burns. That's sad. That's small.

Somehow though, we can manage to leave all that puny pettiness at the theater lobby doors. When we see our better angels take shape on the screen, and say the words and do the deeds that inspire us to be better people, we don't sneer at them and mutter "Damned Socialist". Was Mr. Smith a Socialist? Was Rocky Balboa? Did Neo and Trinity stand with the 99%? Damned skippy.

Need a break from the idiocy spewing from the word-holes of our elected officials? Here; cleanse your palate. Watch this -



(Y'know, I've watched that clip about ten times while writing this post, and it still gets to me...every time.)

Daddy had many, many cinematic role models in his life, from Pale Rider to Han Solo, Batman to Braveheart, Superman to Schindler - the movies led by example, showing their audiences what true potential realized could look like.

I know, I know...it's make believe...fiction. People aren't really like that...things aren't realllly like that. It's just fantasy.

And yet, Oskar Schindler - real life hero. William Wallace - flesh and blood, just like you and I. Maybe that's a part of it as well - maybe movies don't just show us what we could be - sometimes they remind us of what our ancestors were capable of, what superhuman feats they accomplished to get us where we are today.


As I said, I've had many movie heroes, but honestly - Charlie Chaplin was never one of them.

Until now.

Over seventy years ago, Chaplin made a film called "The Great Dictator", in which he gave one of the greatest speeches I have ever heard. Special thanks to The Lakey Sisters, who uploaded this video to their YouTube channel, and I assume are responsible for editing the amazing visuals and music (song - Window by the Album Leaf). It's a speech that, seven decades later, is as relevant as when it was first heard...maybe even more so.

Today, thousands of Americans are moving their money out of major financial institutions as a protest of the current system and an insistence for real, formative change. Today, throngs of American citizens still stand strong in Zucotti Park as the 99%, and have inspired similar actions throughout the country...and the world. Tonight is Guy Fawkes night. Say what you will about Guy Fawkes - vilify him as a terrorist who tried to destroy a King; celebrate him as a freedom fighter trying to take down a corrupt government - either way you look at it, it's been 406 years since the Gunpowder Plot, and we're still talking about the dude today.

Daddy is dedicating this vid to the 99%, and to everyone who attempts, in any way, to be larger than life.





The Kingdom of God is within us. Our Better Angels are waiting.

Time to be Larger Than Life,

Daddy

Daddy on the Edge of "Like"

Okay, this will have to be a quick post. Daddy has decreed that the bedrooms of Daddy's daughters have reached Defcon 2 in terms of their complete disorganization and just plain mess, and therefore must be thoroughly sorted and sterilized. This means, of course, that the act of "helping them", my sudden damsels in distress, will take up most of my day, but I wanted to say something before I go, and that is this;

The new facebook is not the Devil.

Here are a few possible candidates for the devil;

Any of these guys - you want to tell me they got triple 6's etched in their skulls, I'm with you. I don't trust any of 'em - especially the big, dopey one (and the purple dinosaur creeps me out, too.)

But there's one guy that's been getting a lot of heat lately, and I think we really need to state for the record that he, in fact, is not the Devil.

This is Mark Zuckerberg, the big brain behind Facebook. Facebook is that social networking site that, since it's inception, has been completely free to it's users. It is that internet hub that has reconnected countless multitudes of people, made daily personal contact with friends easier than ever, and allowed even a forgetful social misfit like Daddy to "remember" everyone's birthday. When a child went missing recently in our area, it was through Facebook that we put the word out and received updates and the news that he had been found. When natural disasters strike in other parts of the country, or the world, it is through Facebook that I communicate with my friends and loved ones, ensuring that they are okay. Two years ago, when Daddy hisself was lying in a hospital bed, warm wishes, thoughts and prayers came to me through my Facebook feed, and it did my heart a world of good.

Speaking of doing good, while it's easy to vilify this kid for (gasp!) trying to make his product better, let's take a quick look at what else he's done lately.

That was last year. Here's a little something that he's done recently;



Yeah, okay but....he's messing with my feed!! I can't find my recent stories! I'm going to Google Plus!"

I've heard stuff like that from a lot of my friends lately. Admittedly, I was a little put off when I first saw the changes; it's like someone rearranged the furniture in your house while you were sleeping, and now you're running into everything. But, after you wake up, find your coffee maker and have your morning joe, you might start to look around your redesigned digs and realized that the new way has a lot going for it. Daddy recently took on the new role of "early adopter", something that I am usually severely averse to - but I was curious. So I grabbed the developers app for the new Facebook profile page and dove into the future.

And the future looks cool.

That's the new Facebook Timeline. It takes some getting used to, but Daddy thinks it's pretty awesome.

Change...is inevitable. In most of our lives, we want change - we're always looking for the next, the better, the more advanced...and that is as it should be. The more we learn, the more we grow...the more we grow, the more we change. And that's...okay.

I started this talking about daughters, so I'll end in a similar vein. Here's another Daddy on the Edge with his daughter. The video made Daddy cry a little, and that too, is a change...for the better.

See you on Facebook,

Daddy

Daddy on the Edge of a Venti Bold idea

If you know anything about Daddy, you know that Daddy has a strong, mildly unnatural, almost romantic bond with his Starbucks coffee. It puts the Ying in my Yang, it is the jen nais to my se quoi. It had me at "Hello"...my Starbucks...completes me.

I didn't know much from Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks; I probably knew as much about him as Snoop Dogg knows about his weed dealer - the man puts out good product, aight? As long as I get my daily fix, everybody's happy - I don't need to know from the corporate infrastructure.

Turns out though, this Howard Schultz is a pretty impressive guy. Not because of his coffee company, as huge as that is. So, what makes him so impressive? This...

August 15, 2011

Dear Fellow Concerned Americans:

Our country is better than this.

Over the last few weeks and months, our national elected officials from both parties have failed to lead. They have chosen to put partisan and ideological purity over the well-being of the people. They have undermined the full faith and credit of the United States. They have stirred up fears about our economic prospects without doing anything to truly address those fears. They have spent a resource even more precious than the dollar: our collective confidence in each other, in the future, and in our ability to solve problems together.

As leaders in business, we have watched all this unfold, first with frustration and then with dismay. Like so many of our employees and customers, we are gravely concerned about the current situation. Today, with both humility and urgency, we propose to do something about it.

First, we aim to push our elected leaders to face the nation's long-term fiscal challenges with civility, honesty, and a willingness to sacrifice their own re-election. This means not kicking the can anymore. It means reaching a deal on debt, revenue, and spending long before the deadline arrives this fall. It means considering all options, from entitlement programs to taxes.

This is what so many common-sense Americans want. That is why we today pledge to withhold any further campaign contributions to the President and all members of Congress until a fair, bipartisan deal is reached that sets our nation on stronger long-term fiscal footing. And we invite leaders of businesses – indeed, all concerned Americans – to join us in this pledge.

We also believe in leading by positive example. And we believe that while the long-term fiscal challenge is serious, even more painful to millions of Americans today is the immediate crisis of jobs. Tens of millions are unemployed and underemployed. Right now our economy is frozen in a cycle of fear and uncertainty. Companies are afraid to hire. Consumers are afraid to spend. Banks are afraid to lend. Record levels of cash are piling up in corporate treasuries, idling. That cash is not being used to expand operations, train new workers, underwrite new ventures, or spark innovation.

The only way to break this cycle of fear is to break it. The only way to get the country’s economic circulatory system flowing again is to start pumping lifeblood through it. That is why we today issue a second pledge. Our companies are going to hire. We are going to accelerate growth, employment, and investment in jobs.

We do this because we want to set in motion an upward spiral of confidence. We are not waiting for government to create an incentive program or a stimulus. We are not waiting for economic indicators to tell us it’s safe to act. We are hiring more people now. We invite leaders of businesses across the country to join us in this pledge as well – and to bring their stakeholders into the effort. Confidence is contagious. The best thing we can do now is to spread it.

This is a time for citizenship, not partisanship. It is a time for action. We don't pretend that our two pledges are quick fixes. We just believe that in this moment of great uncertainty, the government needs discipline, the people need jobs – and leaders need to lead.

Our country is better than this. Let’s get things moving now.

Respectfully,

Howard Schultz

Take the Pledge
Clicking on the "TAKE THE PLEDGE" button will take you to the Facebook page of "Upward Spiral 2011", a platform the Schultz has created for action inspired by the letter. As of this blog post, there have been 209 pledges to withhold campaign contributions and 43 pledges to hire. This is how it's done, people. When the game is rigged, refuse to play...and take your money off the table.

Take the Pledge. Be part of the solution. And order me a Venti.

Daddy

Daddy on the Edge of Rediscovering Daddy

Daddy forgets a lot of things.

Birthdays, where I left tools, whether or not I closed the garage door before I left the house (and then I have to drive back and check - it's been closed...every time), but lately, I managed to forget something pretty frigging major -

I forgot who I was.

The reason behind this amnesia was the last house I worked on. It's been called The Pit, My Little Crack house, Casa del Fakakte - It was The House That Ate My Soul. What started out as "a little paint and cleanup" turned into a major re-build, and every day there was more and more found that needed to be rebuilt. As the job grew, it got hungrier...and angrier...at me. First it came for my optimism. I always try to see the glass as half full as opposed to half empty. The House took my glass and shattered it on it's crumbling rubble foundation. Then it came for my physical strength, my self esteem and my sanity. It filled my every day and invaded my dreams on a regular basis.

I became a machine - working 7 days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day, dealing with new, ridiculous, often ludicrous circumstances on an almost daily basis. Work was all there was. Work. Deadline. Code. The Domino Effect of lining up all the different trades in order so that they can all get their work done. Over the last three months, waking up at 3am to a brain that was already thinking at eight miles a minute was a nightly occurrence. Wake up at 3am, assess how fast my heart was beating, followed by focused breathing and prayer to slow it down, then toss, turn, drift in and out of semi-sleep, focus on breathing some more, and then give up and get up at about 5:30. This was my every day.

And it sucked. Boy oh boy, did it suck.

You know those times on Star Trek, where the shit has hit the fan so bad during battle that they divert all available power to the shields? The only thing they don't take power from is life support. That's how the job was - divert every part of yourself to the job, stopping only long enough to feed yourself, sleep and hose yourself off on occasion. Every day, bit by bit, things start to slide. The things that make you "You", fall by the wayside. Writing this blog, spending time with my family, volunteer work, performing on stage, my physical health - all of those things took a back seat. Now, you can do that for a couple of weeks, maybe even a couple of months without too much damage. But this was months, and months...and months - and that can fuck with who you are on a basic level.

It's basically done now - ironically, I'm now at the "paint and cleanup" stage - and not a moment too soon. This job has had a detrimental effect on me, and I need to heal - spiritually, mentally and physically. This is a part of that healing - writing this blog. "Daddy on the Edge" was one of the casualties of this job, and I am trying to breathe life back into it slowly. I want to thank all of you who have kept reading - especially those of you who I don't know personally. ;)

I also want to thank those of you who read my alter ego's work in the Nyack-Piermont Patch. If you are unfamiliar, this is the place where Daddy lets his parental, less acerbic, G-rated prose roam free. If you haven't already, you can check out my latest article here.

Another part of Daddy that had nearly been lost forever was the performing side. Regular readers of this blog will remember back in April, I devoted a week of this blog to "Haywire", an original web series created by Scott Klein. Klein took the "Best Suspense Feature" award in 2009 at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival for his feature film, "Cry" and has brought that same sense of suspense to Haywire. Daddy managed to snag a regular role on the series, and it was one of the few things that kept me sane over the past year. Web series episodes are generally about ten minutes in length. You can watch nearly the entire first season of Haywire (previews included) in less than an hour and a half, and it's definitely worth watching. You can view the series on Koldcast TV by clicking here or, for those having technical trouble with Koldcast, you can view Haywire's YouTube channel here.

These are a few of my favorite things. These are a few of the things that make Daddy, "Daddy". Daddy wants to stick around here for a long, long time and that's where y'all can really help me out. It has been determined that I need a new line of work. If you like any or all of the links above, sharing them, "liking" them, tweeting, favoriting, commenting, hitting the "Google Plus One", forwarding them - doing anything that you can do to help spread the word and popularity of these projects might actually enable me to make some real money off these gigs and quit my day job. And that, my friends, would be a lifesaver.

Thanks for being a part of my world,

Daddy

Daddy on the Edge of The Future

Okay, maybe not the definitive future, but one possible future...a brighter day, if you will. A better tomorrow, if you'll allow. Kyle Reese said, "The future is not yet set". John Connor sent a message to his mother saying that, "There is no fate but what we make."
Am I quoting the Terminator films? Hell, yes. Daddy is a time travel junkie and those lines soothe me like the warm hum of a Flux Capacitor when you hit 88 miles per hour.

But I digress. My point is that the future as it stands right now looks like a cross between morose and downright terrifying. Lately, I have watched my government representatives just completely and utterly trash everything good about our country in some ridiculous, childish attempt to please all of the people all of the time. And they all say, they ALL SAY, THEY ALL F*CKING SAY that they're doing the will of the American People. Well folks, that is a pile of bullshit and you know it. The American People didn't want our countries credit rating slashed, anymore than we want our own personal credit ratings messed with. The American People don't want you to gut Social Security and Medicare - we want everyone to pay their fair share. And please, please, PLEASE don't tell me that the mega rich are "job creators" and therefore should continue to get tax breaks. These millionaires have had these tax breaks in place since, what - 2003??? Based on your "job creator" mantra, unemployment should be at about 2%, what with all these rich folks getting to keep all that tax revenue for all those years and doing all that hiring. But that's not what's happening, is it? Seriously, Washington - how fucking stupid do you think we are? Tax breaks made things WORSE, not better. Highest prosperity in my lifetime has been in the Reagan and Clinton years, when tax rates were at their HIGHEST for the wealthiest Americans. I don't know what makes me want to throw up more - that you really think we're stupid enough to believe that nonsense, or that it seems like y'all are starting to believe it as well.

By and large, it would appear that our elected officials are more than willing to throw this country under the bus for money, or approval, or to have everyone like them. The US Government, with a few exceptions, has turned into the cast of High School Musical. (and yes - Eric Cantor is Sharpay).

That's not the movie I want to see. And I'm really not grooving too much on the President's portrayal of Gandhi, either. I'm sorry, but Obama the Peacemaker, Obama as King Solomon, Obama as the Great Uniter just ain't working out...for the majority of Americans, anyway. It's working out great for the Republicans, since they hold their breath until he gives them everything that they want and then he thanks them for "reaching across the aisle in the spirit of bipartisanship". Nope, not the movie I wanted to see, and not the role I wanted to see him in. Y'know how I'd love to see our current President? A little something like this;

That's the shit. The verse even works referencing the Republicans. But that ain't gonna happen; I wish it would, but it won't. Our current President is just too cool to lose his shit - it seems to be easier to just give the country away to the Koch Brothers. So, the Tea Party still runs the asylum, the debt ceiling gets held hostage, and the people who put the batshit in batshit crazy are all fighting to be the Republicans main squeeze in the 2012's.

Well, Daddy is sick and tired of it. Frankly, I've got enough to deal with without having to worry about Standard and Poors ratings or the fact that a potential Presidential nominee can work a corn dog like Jenna Jameson. So, rather than wait around seeing how this low budget Greek tragedy is gonna play itself out, Daddy is going to attempt to influence the outcome. Life Coach and motivational speaker Tony Robbins says that everything is a cause set in motion. Getting up and going to work is a cause set in motion. Not getting up and going to work is a cause set in

motion. Everything you do or don't do can have a great influence over your life and the lives of those around you. He also says that thoughts become words, words become deeds, and deeds become results, but you have to see it through.

So, I've been having this thought lately, and after putting it through the Google, it seems like others are having it as well, so it's already got some energy behind it. I, and others like me, remember when we used to have people in charge that could actually have balls AND make sense at the same time. Like this guy;

Yeah, that's the stuff. Now, check out this guy;

Wow. That guy just gave me...hmmm, what's the word? Oh, yeah....

HOPE.

Business as usual just ain't gonna cut it anymore, my friends. That's why Daddy is changing his party affiliation to Independent and is ready to throw his support 100% behind this ticket, as soon as they agree to make it a reality;

It's time...for some real Change.

Let's do this, guys.

Keep Hope Alive,

Daddy