Things That Skitter Across My Mind

It's not the pain that bothers me...

...it's the hurtiness. Pain I can handle. Hurtiness sucks. Pain is when you kick the bathtub and break your toe. Hurtiness is when you trim your toenail too short (thus causing hurtiness). Pain is when you need stitches. Hurtiness happens when you rip the band-aid off your hairy leg.

Pain is 33 people dead in Virginia. Hurtiness is three days of 24-hour news coverage. We all know what happened. Let these folks grieve in peace.

Pain is going to war and seeing widows and fatherless children and veterans missing limbs, screaming in their sleep. Hurtiness is finding out later that the government lied. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq wasn't involved with al-Queda after all, and our leaders knew it.

Pain is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales using his high office as a political battering ram, firing people for not being "true Bushies." Hurtiness is Gonzales lying about it later, and Bush politico Carl Rove ordering possible evidence destroyed. There's more illegality here than meets the eye. The Hatch Act is involved, too.

Pain is a shrinking paycheck compounded by increasing bills. Hurtiness is finding out that the rich are getting richer. Did you know Halliburton gave Vice President Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney $24 million, then moved to Dubai? Why did they move their headquarters out of the United States? How patriotic is that? On the same thought, why is the Bush family buying land in Paraguay, a South American nation that recently voted to ignore the International Criminal Court? Why would he want to move to a nation that won't extradite anyone to the United States?

Pain is Don Imus saying racist things on the radio. Hurtiness is the network firing him only after sponsors started pulling their money out. (If the network cared about morals they would have dealt with Mr. Imus promptly and not waited a week to see what "public reaction" was going to be. Did Mr. Imus deserve to be fired? Not if this was his first offense. It wasn't.)

Pain is what is happening around us. Hurtiness is the lies and misinformation we're being fed. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton lied and was held accountable and was made to squirm for his misdeed. When do we hold the current administration accountable? If President George Walker Bush and his advisor Carl Rove won't put their hand on a Bible and tell us what's going on, they must be hiding something, and I don't like that.