Jon Ferguson

Actually the thing that got me most was when a nice lady in the crowd very politely asked the candidates what they were going to do about all the guns that were killing so many people in the streets of America. GUNS! What are you going to do about all the guns, gentlemen? The answer: NOTHING! Both candidates just babbled about enforcing the laws that already exist. Neither candidate said one single solitary word about making these guns illegal to have and or illegal to carry around. What I want to know is: Why didn’t one of them have the gonads to look the world in the eye and say, "We are supposed to be a nation founded on Christian principles. Christianity – last I heard – is supposed to be based on the life of a guy named Jesus Christ. So let me ask you this: Would Jesus have carried a gun? Never! Would Jesus want anybody else to have a gun? Of course not! Did Jesus’s Father, God, inspire the Second Amendment? No. Did circumstances in America in 1776 inspire it? Absolutely. So let’s get real people. Neither God nor His Son had anything to do with allowing Americans to carry guns. It was the world in 1776. But it’s a different world today everybody. Drugs that used to be legal are illegal today. Guns should go the same route. Speeding on roads is illegal because it is dangerous. Guns should be illegal because they are dangerous. Some of you say, "but guns are fun to shoot for sport." Driving a car too fast can be fun too. So can doing a little crack cocaine. "But we need guns to protect ourselves!" you shout. I shout back that the best protection for everybody would be NO GUNS, just like the safest roads are roads with nobody speeding on them. Guns should be banned just like speeding cars are banned. Of course the problem is much deeper than just the guns. Of course it’s about gun lobbies and gun makers who want to stuff more and more money into their already bulging pockets. And of course much of the problems come from the horrible ghettos – ghettos that are the result of a nation that started with European people buying and selling African people. And of course our lousy schools need to be fixed and all the rest. But let’s stop putting guns in people’s hands. Now. How many more people need to be murdered before we as a nation - as an intelligent people - ban guns?"

But of course neither Obama nor Romney could say this. Because if they did they’d lose votes. That’s the whole problem. They’re not leading; they’re following. That’s why the stupid boat just keeps floating down the same stupid stream. There’s no pilot to turn it around, to get it to change course. The politicians just try to please the masses and the masses are stupid. They believe in stupid shit like God protecting America more than the rest of the world. Stupid shit like God inspired the Constitution and God guaranteed that everybody could have a gun, including semi-automatic-mow-down-everybody-in-a-movie-theater machine guns. Stupid shit like man has free will but the rest of existence doesn’t. Stupid shit like thinking a movie is "good" because millions of people go see it. Might that be more of a reason it’s "bad"? Stupid shit like worshipping football stars and Hollywood actors more than poets and nurses and garbage collectors. Stupid shit like love is supposed to last forever. Stupid shit like sex offenders are criminals instead of sick poor frustrated hormonally charged creatures who maybe cannot be cured. But it is surely not their fault. So who’s fault is it? That’s it: it’s nobody’s fault. The fault is with the nature of the beast. The nature of nature. Nature is not good and pure and friendly and kind. Nature is nature. There are sunsets and there are volcanos. There are butterflies and there are rattlesnakes. There are Einsteins and there are Hitlers. There are deserts and there are oceans. There are flowers and there are thunderbolts…

That was Daddy talking. Maybe I’m a little biased, but I think he is right. There is so much stupid shit out there. There’s a lot of good shit too. Like I said, I’m going to start trying to ignore the bad shit, to live in a different world.

I watched the debate. Can we blame Obama and Romney? Not really. They’re just trying to win a stupid boxing match. I just wish that once - just once – some politicians would stop boxing and start leading, show that they had some real vision, that they could look down the road fifty years or a hundred years or a thousand years and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, what we are today must be changed, must be got rid of. We are not the culmination of evolution. We must advance. We must move forward. We must create a new way of loving life and feeling the great miracle of being alive, the great miracle that anything exists at all. People are not good or bad, moral or immoral, no more than butterflies or rattlesnakes are. People are what they are. We must try to take the human race to a higher level. Of course people are influenced by the environment they live in. So we must make that environment a better place, a better place to make better people. We must start with less stupid brainless violence on TV and in cinemas. We must start with fewer guns in people’s pockets. We must create a maximum of interesting jobs to keep people occupied. Maybe that’s the most important thing: keeping people active and occupied. As we do this, we must remember the United States of America was built on the destruction of another nation, a beautiful nation that perhaps respected "life" much more than we do today. The Sioux, the Navaho, the Apaches, the Cherokees, the Seminoles…all the great so-called misnomered"Indians" were here long before we got here. (How long? We have no idea…There is so much we don’t know.) We killed many of them and stole their land. We pushed them to the coldest, hottest, wettest, driest parts of the country. Did we create a better world than they had? I don’t know. Who is to be the judge? Every judge will judge from his or her perspective. In any case, we are where we are today. We must take our world to a higher level. We must eliminate stupid shit. Can we? Are we up to it? That is our challenge.