The more I hear and read the less I understand.

[blues90]

I don't get the entire issue why same sex marriage is forbidden unless the people who are against it are so afraid they will be infected in some insane way so they just want it to go away.

I don't get the racial issue simply because I never looked at people because of skin color and being white there are whites that scare the hell out of me, some really freaky people.

All of these political issues out there and we can't even get on the same page when everyone is involved if this country goes down the drain , why can't people see this as the reality it is. I doubt if these same people would divide themselves if they were on a sinking ship and this is what we are on.

Man is his own worst enemy with his prejudice and altered belief systems that all bundled up becomes will full ignorance and no body wins.

I have trouble even thinking about any of it anymore and I have no way to divert this wave of madness.

I pick up my guitar and after 45 years of playing the damn thing just the feel of the neck and strings brings back times gone by in an instant , more so than listening to an older song on the radio brings you right back to a day in the past and just how you felt and the smell of the air. So now that has became a battle of depression and it was my only escape.

I hate to even turn on the radio , I've become gun shy with the fear of hearing yet another tale of horror that will get released into my brain to think about. We seem to be over informed yet under informed all at the same time and it all depends on what you feel you believe or hope to believe and just how strong your sense of humanity is. I have never become de-sensitized to horror.

You hear about violence in old movies when someone was shot but it was a bang and puff of smoke , someone grabbed their chest and fell to the ground, now it's a high tech way of making the scene real in every way possible.

Rant over , perhaps I'm losing my mind or it has left me.

[Warpy]

1. I find my escape in cooking and fibre arts

but I get what you mean by that guitar. My own guitar playing career was cut short by arthritis.

I don't much like the world the way it has been since Reagan turned the government into an institution dedicated to making war against people who work for a living here and abroad.

So it's a good thing it's all falling apart. I'm not desensitized to horror. I just know what kind of world this is and how bad it is likely to get before our leaders are motivated to make it any better.

I know what it's going to take to make the rich let go of Empire and try to make their own country better.

[blues90]

6. I had a few other hobbies as well but they too died alone the way

I was lucky during the 70's and 80's because I was always able to find work and we just had enough to get by which was fine. I worked steady from 1966 until 2004 then 11 months went by and I worked another 4 1/2 months now I have had a few sort of jobs that evaporated.

I never thought the auto repair trade would die off as it has , seemed like a secure sort of job. I saw signs of change coming but never enough to really take notice to it.

I'm not used to not working and being on disability just brings the horror all home for me. I well know I am far from alone and always think about all the people who have lost their jobs and know what they are going through mentally.

It;s the how bad it's going to get that worries me as it does so many others. I do know it can't keep going as it has been. The shame is this all could have been avoided.

[Warpy]

8. Auto repair will pick up

because people are going to try to get as many miles out of a paid off car as they possibly can, even if it's a gas guzzler they can barely afford to feed because the price of a new car is simply out of reach.

If you're on disability, at least you have some money coming in.

I'm dependent on interest and dividends, and we all know how those will be doing. I might have to go for early social security.

[HillbillyBob]

10. I am in a similar position, I was first an air traffic controller..during ronnyraygun

While I was in the navy , got outted then tossed. Then could not get a civilian air traffic controller job because of my Administrative under Honorable Conditions discharge.
I went into construction , heavy industrial electrician for years, then when that kind of slowed down, went into sales, and maintenance, all the while I had part time jobs in restaurants and bars since I lived in 'right to be fired for any or now cause at all' states.
In 90 I got sick so I worked only part time for years then in 92 started getting sick and only able to work part time at all and was homeless off and on for several years. I landed up on disability in 96, since I was only working part time my earlier higher wages from when I worked 2 and 3 jobs did not count. It has been a struggle and learning to do without every since. I have a partner who has a decent job, he took a 45% pay cut because of outsourcing in 2002. We now live on less than half what we did in 2000.
We scrimped and paid every thing we owed off and bought a farm(us and the bank, fixed rate for half of what we qualified for). Now we live out in the woods, we anticipated the economy sice we had an early taste of it. At the time I got sick of hearing that I was doom and gloom for predicting this mess and advising friends to get ride of debt and brace for it gracie.
At least we are in a beautiful place in the world, and we can grow food. We hopefully won't get overrun by the homeless and hungry that did not prepare. Its not like we are survivalists, we are trying to get our food gardening skills and land up to the task of feeding not only us, but others such as family and neighbors. Though around here almost everyone has a garden.
Im learning how to can and dry food. I have had to make do for so long that I don't know any different. Its not so much a hardship as it gets a bit old to need something and it is jst not affordable.
And like others on here I think it is going to get very much worse out there.

[madokie]

2. On the political issue remember what President Obama said to the republicons

you can not listen to rush limbaugh and expect to get things done around here, paraphazing. rush and his ilk are only here to confuse the issue. :hi:

But to address your concerns. You are fine these are trying times for all of us no matter our age.

[Bluzmann57]

3. Fear. Plain and simple

You got it right. The way I look at it, as long as you aren't sleeping with my wife, I don't care who you are sleeping with. But a lot of people just can't, or won't grasp that concept. And as far as race, there are good and bad people of all races. Again, that's the way it goes.
Your user name, Blues90 is a good one. See, in Da Blues, there is no color, except maybe green as in money. That's what Blues artists would like and the ones I know don't care about race. Just making money off the music they love. Sorry about straying off topic a bit, but it's just something I wanted to say.

[harun]

4. It has only been forbidden for, oh, the last 10,000 years or so. Is that really

so difficult to wrap your head around?

[Greyhound]

11. If you bothered to learn anything besides the lies fed to you by your church, you

would know that that is simply not true.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

5. I don't listen to the radio

or watch TV (except for Law & Order and that's to watch a friend). What I do is walk each day, wondering at the beauty of nature before me, listen to music I like--much of it brand new by folks who've been performing for years (like Jerry Yester). I meditate each morning, do Qi Gong, and go to work for a non profit health foundation that I really believe in. I pick up my guitar and strum out old songs and new tunes and smile.

I guess what I'm trying to say is we choose the perimeters of our world. We choose what we focus on. I've found that shutting out the electronic chatter of "news" and focusing more on the here and now has helped greatly.

[oldtime dfl_er]

7. My nephew was telling me

last night that Quentin Tarantino's newest movie is going to be some kind of slaughter fest. He was laughing and saying it was going to be "awesome". When did i get to the age where I think that's abominable? Because I do.

[HillbillyBob]

9. Being gay I have seen so many couples where one dies and the other

gets tossed out without even his clothes, Not even titles, deeds, wills will protect you.
As to that meme that its been outlawed for ever is a LIE, the Catholic church had single sex holy unions up to the 15 century it was after Protestantism that it became such anathema.
I am sick unto death of the rpig evilgelical LIES.
I aint molesting kids, or animals, in fact we rescue animals that have been abused and neglected. More 'straight' men molest children than gays on the order of 98% and those are usually members of their own family.

It pisses me off to now f in end that you assholes are so holier than thou about my bedroom, You dont know what goes on in there..likely less than in yours as the religious zealots I have known are kinkier than any gay person ,what with the diapers and hos and god knows what.
Im sick of the MSM putting up people from the riechwing think tanks as if they were actually intellectual enough to figure out the difference between liberal and conservative they have been liberally stealing our rights our tax $ on and on.
Thats my rant for today. I could go on and on.
I have had some good kreestians try to burn a cross on my yard, some the same kreestians tried to corner me into marriage with their 13 year old retarded daughter to save me from the seein of humasekssuality.

They allow people like Ann Coulter run their hateful spite but there is so very little truth in the so called news.

[Greyhound]

12. It is up to us, my friend.

I was bored the other day and found that some old TV shows from the 70s are available on-line, in watching one it occurred to me that the third generation is being born right now that has no experience with America as it was. It is up to us, the old farts, to tell them how perverted America has become.

IIRC from our previous conversations, I'm a bit younger than you so you have a better perspective of recent history than I, but a majority of people around today have only the propaganda of the media with to view our former lives.

Maybe that is what we're hanging around for.

[blues90]

13. perhaps , but they have the internet if they want to know

history and just how we arrived here and the many mistakes we made as well as allowed.

I thought finally we had learned from Vietnam and from the horror that was and from the murders of JFK and MLK, RFK and Malcolm X.

Then there was this shift , a sudden shift to the British band invasion . Not that I didn't like the music but I did think it was strange and odd timing , suddenly there is the distraction people needed. Then the music became a counter culture to wage against the war machine.

Now when HWB finally stepped out of the darkness suddenly we were watching live real time war on CNN and I could not believe we were there once again.

I saw an older fellow on book TV who owns a large book store in NY , can't recall his name but he wrote Terms of Endearment and he was talking about how books are becoming a thing of the past and was sad about it but at the same time he could see how it was change and how it may have it's good points. I suppose it's all about being able to adapt and now to adapt faster than ever before. Things have really sped up in the last 10 years.

I miss the past and I don't look forward to whatever the future holds, at least from what I've seen what the direction of the future has been.

Does the man control the machine to make the job easier or does the machine now control the man to make the man obsolete?

[HillbillyBob]

14. Sorry I went off. that 10,000 years bs fried my tired over extended brain

overloaded and went into explode mode. I have also watched our country become some insane place over the last 30 years. Were up is down and wrong is right and the religious right make over freedom in their warped and fevered imagination sets the tone for 'civil' discourse.
The lies I hear everywhere about everything. It is like our entire civilisation has gone down the Rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland.
I had to go take care of other responsibilities for awhile or I would have edit/added to my little rant.
I feel like the 'state' can call me a terrorist at anytime.
We spoke out about how the 2000 election was stolen then dealt with the buscho NSA tapping our phone, making obscene threatening phone calls and even searching our home with out warrant.
That our country is no longer the place of freedom from bully search and seizure that I grew up in and took an oath to serve and protect the constitution.
You see the night of the 2000 election my partner and I witnessed our ballots being taken from our polling place by the boxful and being dumped into truck mounted shredders.
That has nothing to do with us being gay or straight, it has to do with right and very wrong.
There was even a Fox news truck there taping, the tape was cast on the local Fort Lauderdale Miami station. ONCE never to be seen again ,when I tried to get a copy or get at it that was when the phone calls and emails started that we had better stfu or else.
This went on low grade until after 2004 culminating in a search of our house after we had moved out of Broward county to NC.

[blues90]

15. No problem at all .

It's all screwed up and they have anyone paying attention wondering what is what and if up is down. They did this with that insane patriot act where were we told we had to give up a certain amount of our rights in order to be safe.

Well they never stopped stripping away our rights and it is far through the looking glass and that glass is so thick that vision is even blured and distorted.
Alice in Wonderland pales compared to this madness.

I guess live and let live is not even in the language and never was.

I was not put on this earth to judge people for their personal life this is so insane especially when one looks at all the madness and horrors of wars and murder and killing that goes on which is the heart of the madness and then people still insist on telling others who are doing no harm living their lives what they can and cannot do and then add the patch of judgement on them as is that even means a damn thing in conparision.

I just wonder when these sorts of people are on their death bed if they take the bit of time they have left and look back and really see how crazy they have been all their lives and how they wasted it on judging and telling others how to live and to do it their way.

It's like these abortion protestors which always seem to be the men, they judge yet they do not offer any solutions or help for the unborn just their belief system, once the child is born then they walk away as if they have closed some gap between them and some god.

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

16. On the bright side, that's usually a sign of enlightenment.