Just my opinion...

One of my favorite comedians is Dana Gould.  I’ve always found him particularly funny with an ability to capture an idea almost poetically.  Recently he’s done some political commentary and has appeared on “Real Time with Bill Mahr“.  In a bit he did for the show, he covered some health care town halls.  He made an observation that I’ve been trying to put into words for a while.  When asked about an under-class in the United States he remarked that what he saw was a permanent “anger-class”.  Most of the members of the anger-class are what he then referred to as “conservative fundamentalists” who believed that President Ronald Reagan was a political diety and that everything that fell out of President Reagan’s mouth was their gospel.  Anytime our country deviates from this gospel they go ape-shit.  (To be clear, I don’t mean these people.)  Since Reagan’s utopia doesn’t coincide with reality, our country continues to move away from the Reagan years, so the anger-class is destined to just get more pissed off.  Most will probably carry that anger until the end of their lives.

Since the election of President Obama the anger-class has been in an snot-bubble-crying fit of rage.  Their current gripe is that he’s tyring to reform health care.  Most of them go on and on about how specifics of this plan are affronts to freedom and liberty.  Worse is that profit would be removed from the health care system.  This is how the right has beaten health care reform as well – the argument that everything should be for profit.  I disagree but my voice is pretty small.

The observation I’ve made is that the anger-class is orders of magnitude more upset since this last election than any other post-election reaction I know of.  I didn’t like President Clinton but after he was elected, I calmed down and got back to my life in like an hour.  I really didn’t like President George W. Bush but I went on with my life…  Twice.  The anger-class is still chest pounding and foot stomping all over the country nearly 9 months after he took office.  Not just that typical political commentary and disagreement but a vitriolic language normally reserved for personal hatred.  It appears that it’s getting worse not better.  I desperately hope that I’m wrong but given the mentality of some of the grass-roots base of the now decimated “right” I fear an attempt on the president’s life at some point in his term.  Again, I want to be wrong but folks the anger-class is accelerating the rhetoric and whipping that still disappointed base into a frenzy.

I wish there was something that could be said to calm them down.  I now find myself in the position of having lots of friends who I know for a fact are reasonable folks but are in the anger-class now.  How they got sucked into it is beyond me.  I overhear their conversations and read their articles and I know that I can’t engage them in conversation on an intellectual level about the topics because what I’m hearing is anger and rage.  I’ve attempted to engage a couple of them once or twice only to get shouted down.

I’m not sure why I felt compelled to write this down…  Maybe I’m hoping some of my conservative friends will see it and understand why I won’t talk with them about anything more substantive than the weather lately.

And honestly, I don’t know why they’re so worried.  Democrats have control of the House and the Senate with a Democratic President and they still can’t pass anything.  The Democrats are pussies.  Until the anger-class realizes this, I’m providing them the following quick link.

I know I have a readership of almost 2 people and that they waited eagerly to hear my prolific wisdom, so I must apologize for my lack of regular posting.  It’s pretty clear I maintain this blog for me and me only.  I didn’t do it for a following – most of what I write is for an audience of one…  Me.

If you do actually read my blog let me tell you what’s new.  I’m still turning the functional programming crank and trying to learn the discipline.  I’ve also picked up several new topics to understand as well with Power Shell, Oslo, M, and Python (actually IronPython).  Unity and Enterprise Library 4.1 have moved back up the must learn list as well.  I’ve also been playing with the Visual Studio 2008 SDK.

At work we’re also trying to establish our build environment and I spent a bit of time writing a “best practices” sort of document for arranging the code repository, directory structure, operating system environment set up, and organization of Visual Studio solutions and projects to fit into it all.  I’ve considered generalizing that document and posting it here as I’m a little tired of creating project specific implementations of it.  This effort forced me to hand off the DSL project to a co-worker, so he got to have all the Oslo and M-grammar fun.

I’ve learned a lot of pretty cool new things and would love to sit down and write something meaningful on each and every topic.  Unfortunately, it seems all I have time for is a post explaining why I haven’t.  If you’ll hang with me, I promise I’ll fix that situation as soon as I can.