Bummer!

I don't know about the rest of my "reactionary allies", but I don't have any legislative bills on my agenda that I want to "push through". As far as I'm concerned, there are too many laws in this country already. If I was a member of congress, the only bills that I would sponsor would be bills to repeal laws, not make new ones.

I don't know if the War on Poverty did any good or not. All I know is that I keep reading newspaper columns, most of them written by liberals, complaining that poverty is worse in this country now than it ever was. If, after 50 years of giving our money away, the problem is worse instead of better, what are the chances that giving even more of our money away will help? Somebody famous once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results each time. That doesn't mean that I have a better idea to offer, it just means that I don't think the current idea has worked, and that doing more of it isn't likely to work any better.

"The culture of dependency", you've got that right, but I don't know what to do about it either. When I was a kid I couldn't wait to grow up and become as independent as I could. Of course, nobody is completely independent, but it seems like a lot of people today aren't even trying. For the record, I'm against all this "trickle down" stuff too.

I'm sorry, but my heart isn't in this discussion tonight. I'm still recovering from a bad experience that I had deer hunting yesterday. I shot a deer that ran off into the swamp and I was not able to find it after almost three hours of intensive effort. The forensic evidence at the scene suggests that the wound was superficial and that the deer will probably recover, which makes me feel a little better about it, but not much. I took a questionable shot, and I knew better, but I did it anyway. This would be excusable if I was a rookie kid on his first hunting trip, but I'm not. What can I say? I fucked up pure and simple. What's done is done and can't be undone, and there's no use dwelling on it. Hopefully, both the deer and I will recover from this, but not tonight.

Another thing that's got me bummed is the weather. We didn't get it nearly as bad here as many other places, I hear that six people died in Illinois alone. We had a tornado touch down about 80 miles south of us, but damage from that was minimal. I haven't heard of any significant damage in our neighborhood, and our power didn't go out. Bad weather in November is nothing unusual around here anyway, but it still blows.