WHERE’S THE SENSE... I don’t even try to understand quantum physics; Lady Ga Ga’s meat costume puzzles me totally; and I’m still trying to understand maybe seventy-five percent of what James Joyce obviously must have meant in Finnegan’s Wake or whatever it is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was trying to say in his Phenomenology of Spirit... I’m actually not bothered all that much by Lady Ga Ga’s fashion sense, and I admit I haven’t even tried to reread Finnegan’s Wake for at least thirty years, and I probably won’t get to it way down there on my bucket list for the next thirty.

But something happened today in Washington that puzzles the hell out of me. Actually, I think I understand it... It’s just that I don’t want to believe it. I was sure the end to the disgraceful policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would come today. For some of the same reasons that I am willing to excuse severely brain damaged folks from carrying out tasks involving high level cognitive skills, I don’t expect fundamentalist Christians locked in their medieval mindsets to understand the absurdity of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The people who believe they hear the voice of God telling them gays and lesbians are dangerous have enough problems sorting out what’s real and what isn’t; so I guess I’ll cut them some slack. It scares me though. Anybody who sees no problem with the policy would be comfortable with an American version of Sharia Law, and that is a problem for all of us.

But I’m not cutting the legislators who voted NO today any slack at all. I expect anybody elected to represent American Citizens in Congress to see immediately that continuing the policy in the military doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t feel like going into the reasons here, because it would be an insult to people who are reading this journal entry to assume they don’t understand. I believe you share the sense of shame I feel because we ask people to serve and defend our country but deny them the privilege of acknowledging who they are. I am embarrassed that they must live with the knowledge that many of the very people they serve consider them a risk to other personnel in the military. What nonsense!

What seems obvious is that Republican legislators are unwilling to do anything that might be seen as cooperating with President Obama. They desperately want him to fail. The couple of senators from Arkansas, the state where I was born, are simply suffering from a serious case of moral cowardice. They are afraid the heavy concentration of Fundamentalist Democrats in their state will vote them out of office if they take the right moral stand. So we are stuck at this moral intersection. Eventually we will get through it.I couldn't resist seeing something here besides a dent in a wall made by a car bumper.How can there be anything but hope in this flower!...And how can there be anything but reassurance in the unfolding of these fern fronds...