It's All In How You Look At It

I don't look at the gay marriage thing as a case of me trying to dominate them, it's more of a case of them trying to dominate me. I'm not trying to prevent them from getting married in their own hearts, they are trying to force me and my state to recognize their fake marriage as a valid legal thing, in spite, or maybe because, of the fact that me and my state voted to specifically not do that. I have given this some thought since last we discussed it, and I think the reason why I'm against gay marriage is because gay marriage and regular marriage are not the same thing, and they're trying to establish that they are the same thing. It's like when Bob Dylan started playing rock music. I'm not against people liking rock music, but Dylan became famous by passing himself off as a folk singer. Then, when he was securely established, he revealed that he was really a rock singer at heart. I've tried to explain this to some of the younger Dylan fans, and they don't seem to recognize the difference between rock music and folk music, it's all the same to them. I blame Dylan himself for this. Before he corrupted the genres, everybody knew the difference between rock music and folk music, and the two distinctly different cultures that they represented, and now they don't.

I've reconsidered my offer to trade you Southern Michigan for outstate Illinois, because they are not really the same thing either. You can still have our big cities, though, for free. In the case of Detroit, we might even be persuaded to pay you to take it off our hands, which would be cheaper than bailing it out like our RINO governor wants to do. I don't think you would really be happy with our "lonely spaces", so we'll just keep them. As far as you invading us, I'm not too worried about that because you guys don't have any guns and we've got lots. How would you even get up here anyway? There are no trains or busses that come here anymore. There's an airport, but it's 20 miles away, which is a long walk for a city slicker, especially with the mosquitos in the summer and the snow in the winter.

I suppose you're right that I am more loyal to abstract concepts than I am to people, except that some of those concepts aren't so abstract. Take the country, for instance. The way I see it, the country is the land and, to a lesser degree, the people who live on the land. If the people who live on the land don't value and respect the land, then I don't value and respect them either. Of course some of the people value and respect the land, and I have no problem with them. The thing is, the land was here before the people were here, and it will still be here after the people are gone, so the land is more important than the people. It's the same with the company, except that the company has a mission, to make money by selling a useful product that people want to have. The company also consists of people, with varying degrees of loyalty to the mission. For me, the mission comes first, and the people come right after that, providing that they support the mission as I do. If they don't support the mission, they are just in the way.

 That's not the reason I didn't go to college. Well, maybe that was in the back of my mind, but that was not the main reason. The main reason was that I didn't want to prolong my adolescent state of dependency any longer than necessary. Today, I might reconsider because it's really hard to find a decent job anymore, even with a college degree. In those days, there were plenty of jobs and, while they didn't pay as much as the executive positions, they paid enough to decently live on, which was good enough for me.

Interesting that you went to college to get away from your parents, yet you were still dependent on them for financial support. In a manner of speaking, you would have gotten farther away from them if you had just moved across the street and gotten a job at, say, Central Steel and Wire. They paid pretty good money, enough that you could have paid your own rent and went to school part time if you wanted to. I didn't have a problem with my parents, except that they wanted to live in Chicago and I didn't. I suppose they would have liked to keep me dependent for awhile longer, most parents do, but that was the least of my concerns. I also was tired of the whole school scene. I wanted to do something real before they dropped the Bomb on us or I died of old age at 30. If I knew that I was going to live this long I might have looked at things differently. Then again, maybe not, there's no telling now.