Oh, Evolution . . .

These days I try to dodge the topic of evolution vs. creation.  Years ago I used to try to start debates on it because I read up on it all the time, formed my one-sided opinion, and would head out into the world with guns loaded and ready.  Usually I’d get crushed by someone else who either knew more than me or was just a better arguer than I was.  In the last five years or so, however, I’ve learned just how important the whole topic is over all (not very) and kept my beliefs to myself.  Life as a Christian is supposed to be about living a changed life that pursues Jesus’s example and reaches those around you, not debating text books at PTA meetings, which only polarizes everyone.  As I’ve said so many times before, our purpose is not to make everything look Christian; our purpose is to lead people to Christ so hearts and lives are changed.  While I don’t believe in evolution at all, I don’t think Creationism or Intelligent Design (or whatever name it has now) should be taught in our schools anytime soon.  If it happened it will only serve to polarize people all the more, and while Creationist “activists” would no doubt cheer wildly at their victory, those strongly opposed would demonize Jesus in their hearts and minds all the more.  Then those people, whom Jesus loves dearly, would be that much closer to being lost forever.  Seems kind of counter-productive, doesn’t it?  Well, at least you can scoff more proudly at episodes of Nova.

Yet despite all of that, I’m still a critic of the way the scientific community treats evolution.  As I’m sure you know, the whole debate has gotten quite ridiculous over the last few years, and (at least from a Northwesterner’s perspective) the evolution side is winning the popular vote.  Darwin’s theory is held as fact more than ever before everywhere I look.  Those who still participate in the debate but side with evolution have seemed to claim victory, and it’s amusing to me when it’s not breaking my heart.  In my beloved Emerald City we have more cars with those “Darwin” fish on the back of them than the Mid-west has Wal-Marts.  It’s getting close to the point that those fish will be more associated with evolution than the original symbol will be associated with Christianity. I’ve even been treated to some tasteful bumper stickers; the one most prominent in my mind said, “We have the fossils. We win.”

So with my seemingly-unique approach to the whole debate, does my continued belief in the Genesis account exist only out of faith, or do I still see fundamental problems with the theory?  The answer is B.  An article I found this morning (which prompted me to write this blog, which is making me late to the gym, which considerably slows down my day) reminded me of one of my primary problems with the evolution perspective.

A few months back, a very in-tact fossil was revealed to the world (which had been discovered, I think, two years prior) and was being touted as the “missing link” between reptiles and mammals (again – I think that’s what they said it was), and the scientific community was saying things like, “It changes so many of our pre-conceived notions about our evolution!”

About a year or so ago, “Lucy” (the revolutionary find of bones from an ancient ape, or early human, depending on how you look at it) were making their “World Tour” and hung out in Seattle’s Pacific Science Center for a few months.  Radio advertisements for the exhibit mentioned how the discovery of Lucy “changed how we understand evolution!”

Something I read back in my days of unwisely starting arguments talked about how a guy was able to successfully create amino acids (which make up proteins) in a soup of what was then understood to be early-earth conditions.  A while after that revolutionary experiment, something was discovered (I honestly can’t tell you what it was) that COMPLETELY CHANGED what scientists believed made up the atmosphere of early earth, thus rendering his experiment completely useless.

And now, today, I find this article that mentions the discovery of some hands and feet that, YET AGAIN, “reverses the common wisdom of human evolution.”

I’m sure there are countless other examples out there of which I am unaware.  This is my main beef with the whole idea.  We started with Chuck’s observations on an island, suddenly science takes on his ideas as truth, then when they find something that doesn’t fit their previous equation, they re-write the equation but maintain the same solution.  Then something else is found and they re-write it again.  Then they figure something out that contradicts what they thought before, and they re-write it again.  I’m not so dense to the way the scientific method works to think that if you don’t get it right the first time that you must be wrong all together, but I do know that after re-writing everything several dozen times, at SOME POINT you, or someone else, needs to start asking some different questions.

Let me put it another way and conclude (because I’m REALLY running late to the gym, now).  How about a metaphor?  Fun!

Evolutionists have given the world a giant, incomplete puzzle, already in its frame, and titled it, “How We Came to Be.”  When you ask about the many parts that are missing, they calmly tell you, “We haven’t found those parts yet, but when we do, they’ll fit perfectly.”  Well, then they find some more parts, but it turns out they don’t fit perfectly.  Therefore, they take down the frame, re-arrange a large portion of the puzzle to make the new parts fit, then put it back up and tell us it’s the same picture.  As they find more and more pieces, they keep re-arranging different sections of the puzzle, but all the while maintaining that the “whole picture” is unchanged.  How many times can you do that until you begin to question if you’re going about putting it together the wrong way in the first place?  I’m putting my money on “many more times,” and I think that’s sad.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091001/ap_on_sc/us_sci_before_lucy

 

Pedro the ______

This morning I was visiting with my friend Luke Gray.  True to form, Mr. Gray plays a plethora (defined correctly but intended facetiously) of songs by a mass of indie artists throughout our many conversation topics.  Eventually he puts on the newest album by some guy named David Bazan (whose name I totally recognized . . . a little), and proceeded to talk about this guy’s collapse of faith.  And by “faith” I do mean of the Christian type.  Luke addressed this guy interchangeably with Pedro the Lion (who I DO know), so I was finally able to put together that Bazan is the guy who was to Pedro what Chris Carrabba is to Dashboard.  More or less.

I have heard a lot of Pedro over the years, and while I honestly have never cared too much for his music (to be fair, I never sat down to give it much of a chance, either), I was always impressed with his lyrics; they’re poetry without a doubt.  Another aspect I did enjoy about Pedro was the fact that he was a Christian and sang about the deeper aspects of faith, and carried an honesty with him as he pursued Jesus in his day-to-day life.  But for all that I liked about his transparency in his songs, something always worried me about him.  I’ve had a similar feeling of unsettled-ness with others before, and I think it comes from seeing someone who is clearly talented and intelligent and I fear that something, at some point, will convince them to try to make it on their own abilities.  Well . . . that’s not exactly it.  It’s kind of hard to put that “fear” into words, really, but maybe you know what I’m talking about.

It seems that whatever those  fears were, they were justified, as Bazan has declared himself agnostic, and leaves little to doubt that fact in the lyrics of his latest album, Curse Your Branches.  While it certainly saddens me to see a person of a once-strong faith renounce all they had held dear, it frustrates me that I so easily see the flaws in logic that Bazan is now holding as his new truth.  Every issue that Bazan addresses in the lyrics (from what I heard and Luke discussed with me) are a problem of a person trying to make sense of God.  That is the starting point of so many arguments against what Christianity teaches–using human logic and human values to assess the decisions that God makes.  What really gets to me the most is that many people with this approach think that they’re opening new ground and asking the though questions, when in reality they’re usually just taking western, 21st century values and using that to judge what, as a Christian believes, God has said or done.  I see it all the time.  It’s very prevalent in the Seattle area, where I live, and it’s worth noting that this is where Bazan lives, too.

The best example of this from what I heard is the last lines from the album-ender, “In Stitches.”

When Job asked you the question/you responded, “Who are you/to challenge your creator?”/Well, if that one part is true/it makes you sound defensive/like you had not thought it through/enough to have an answer/like you might have bit off /more than you could chew

That’s fair enough, right?  Job was a really good guy, from what we’re told, and he suffered immensely.  When he finally got the stones to demand a reason from God, The Almighty put him in his place.  By today’s standards, Job deserves an answer, but for some reason God thinks he doesn’t need to justify himself to him.  What a prick.

Now, if I challenged my old boss on something seemingly unfair and he responded with, “Who are you to challenge the president of this company?,” then, yes, that would seem as if he wasn’t prepared to be questioned and played the “I’m more important than you” card to get out of it.  However, this is not one human being talking to another human being.  This is the being whose existence means we exist, the one to whom the question “is he real?” is laughable because he defines reality, and he is talking to something HE MADE.  Furthermore, not only is this thing with which he is speaking something he made, but it is something that is evil (yes, EVIL–despite Job’s righteousness, he was not without sin, and no amount of being good justifies you before God), and the very fact that there is any conversation at all is a demonstration of love and grace. Luke’s approach was a little less heady but possibly more profound:  it’s like a child speaking with its parent.  The child, as long as it is a child, will never understand its parents’ decisions regarding them.

Other places in this album, Bazan demands the option to say, “I don’t know.”  I find it curious that he could not do that with coming to terms with not understanding some things God does.

Many more things about Bazan came up in my conversation, many of them from the album to which we were listening, and many more from articles and the like which Luke recalled.  All of them broke my heart.  But I cannot walk away from a blog like this and only lament over how sad it is to see someone so talented lose their faith–that would be kind of pointless.  Instead, I think it’s worth taking the time to realize how thankful I am that-

1) I’m in an environment like the one I have; one in which a structure of believers exists around me who are honest with each other about questions and doubts, but always are willing to trust God first, and are there as long as long as I’m willing to go to them and listen to them; and
2) God has given me the ability to have faith and trust him.  When I see something I don’t like, or when something happens that seems unfair, I’m always able to fall back on the idea that he really does know better than I do, and I am able to let him handle it.

In conclusion, I just want to say that I hope that someday God calls him back, and gives him the faith that he seemed to try to obtain on his own for so long.

 

Nine thoughts on 9. Sort of.

Over a month ago I stumbled across a trailer for an animated movie which would come out in September.  It caught my attention up-front with its original premise, but REALLY sucked me in when “Welcome Home” by Coheed & Cambria started playing.  Check this out:

So now I’ve seen it.  And since I have seen it, I want to discuss it.  Also, I like lists in blogs.  The name of this movie is a number, so that works out perfectly, wouldn’t you say?  So here we are — Nine thoughts that I have relating to or inspired by the movie 9.

1. I think Elijah Wood is awesome.  Seriously.  I think it’d be cool if he and I bumped into each other one day in some yet-unknown circumstance that would require us to get to know each other.  Then we’d be buds and he’d meet all my friends and we’d just hang out and do cool things like I would with any other friends, except this friend is Elijah Wood; but I don’t let that influence me because, you know, he’s just a friend, and I’m cool like that.  I’d get a call someday, “Hey, man, it’s Elijah.  What you up to tonight?”  But that would be awkward because then what if I wanted to have a Lord of the Rings marathon?  I would invite him, no question, but would he come?  And if he did, would he tell us all kinds of cool things about filming the movie, or would it just feel really weird with Frodo sitting there saying nothing at all?  I may never know.
2. I commented that this movie has an impressive cast at one point.  Soon after I realized that by “impressive cast,” I meant that I recognized most of the names.
3. The concept of this movie deserves something WAY bigger than an 80 minute film.  Here is an entire world that was destroyed by technology that is now only inhabited by nine little dolls and a robot.  There is so much room for stuff there!  I get not pursuing a franchise with it (and appreciate that), but a two-film or three-film story arc could have really worked here.  Or, at the very least, a two to a two-and-a-half hour movie.
4. I really hate the way movies sometimes rush through exposition.  For anyone with a brain, the exposition is where the movie really lies!  This is my main beef with Michael Bay movies – somewhere (waaaaaaay down there), there is a story, but he refuses to tell it.  9 did this to a degree (though nowhere near Bay’s offenses).  As I sat in that crappy theater, I was completely sucked in by this neat concept of a story, but it seemed to jump from one big, defining event to the next very quickly.  That bugs me.  That’s how cartoons in the 80’s told stories in 25 minute episodes.  Slow down, please! Anyone who would sit and complain that the movie is taking too long doesn’t deserve to be there!
5. It did have quick-fixes to very big problems. (Spoiler alert).  I can appreciate the ways in which the assassin robots are taken out, but they’re all taken out in sequence like mini-bosses in a video game.  The threats don’t last long enough for us to care about them.  (I’m going to start calling such a story move “a Darth Maul”.)  Also, getting back and forth between the factory and the church started taking about 5 minutes, when the first journey was clearly (at least) a couple hours.  Lastly, the distruction of the factory was too easy.  It worked the way they planned it the first time — granted, the big robot survived, but the point remains that, while the tension was present, it did not hang on nearly long enough.
6. I noticed the song “Welcome Home,” nor any other Coheed & Cambria tune (the whole soundtrack was Danny Elfman), was not in the movie.  One of my friends expressed mild frustration over this fact (quote: “All my problems with that movie would have been forgiven if it had a Coheed & Cambria song in it.”)  But I thought putting that song in the trailer, despite it not ending up in the film, was a very clever marketing move.  Maybe this aspect of it wasn’t on purpose (like maybe they just liked the song), but I like to think it was:  what kind of demographic is going to see a movie set in a post-apocalyptic world following the exploits of hand-sized, sentient burlap dolls, facing an evil machine?  Maybe the same people that listen to a progressive rock band whose albums tell a very complex and original sci-fi story?  Yeah, maybe.
7. I’m glad to see Crispin Glover doing stuff these days (since I’m such a big fan of Back to the Future), but that man seriously creeps me out.  It’s like he takes the stereotype of “weird theater major” to a whole new level.
8. Someone, somewhere, is going to describe this movie as “Toy Story meets The Matrix.”  I think that would (or will) cheapen the creativity here, so I will not be happy when I see that.
9. My final word on this movie is that it was wasted.  All of the potential is there, but it was trimmed too much and finished in a hurry.

 

DMV Syndrome

I spend a lot of time talking about problems I see in other people. One thing that might surprise you is that I’m actually very hard on myself when it comes to comparable issues. It’s one of the things that makes me so awesome.

<waits for polite laughter>

I’ve always struggled with what I’m going to call “DMV Syndrome.” Now, of course, I got that name from the stereotypes of the ladies at DMV offices. You know, the ones who chew their gum and roll their eyes at you because somehow DIDN’T know that you’re supposed to fill out the yellow form and not the light-yellow form, or that you (amazingly) were unaware that you needed two pieces of OFFICIAL mail, not just mail, and then on your return trip didn’t realize that this cell phone bill doesn’t count as OFFICIAL. How on earth could you think that ANY bill is official, and not government mail only? Yutz. I’m going on lunch. Again.

When I worked at McDonald’s (waaaaay back in 1998-1999 – can you believe it’s been a decade?) I would often work the drive-through. It drove me batty when someone would ask to “up-size” their value meal. Seriously? Up-Size? You’re at McDonald’s, the fast food chain that not only invented fast food chains, but invented the value meal and the concept of the “super-size,” and you’re asking for an “up-size”? When I repeated back the order I’d often be sure to emphasize the word “SUPER” to make sure they learn to respect the arches. FACE!

Don’t even talk to me about coupons. No, way, lady. I don’t care if you go to my church of 60 people and are in my Sunday School class and your 3-year-old son adores me. That coupon does NOT discount value meals. Even though the computer will let me do it, it’s the principle of the matter – and that principle is that I like to be in control and I like to say, “No.”

It’s definitely easy in food service. At Steak n’ Shake, your burger would not come with fries. You had to order them separate or ask for a “platter.” (And with the platter, which is your choice of two sides, remember that one of them can be fries, not that it’s two sides AND fries.) In a society that has become used to the words “includes fries,” and would expect that it does since the burger is pictured with fries in the menu, many people do not feel it necessary to mention wanting them (I should mention that the fine print DID say “does not include fries“). Well, I can only handle asking, “do you want fries or any other sides?” and subsequently can only handle answering the question, “you mean it doesn’t come with fries?” so many times in a 10-minute time-frame. So I’ll take the order as you asked for it, and then roll my eyes at you when you’re shocked that  your $4 burger the size of what you’d get in a Happy Meal doesn’t have little fried potato sticks next to it. Hey, that’s GRADE A STEAK in that paper-thin burger, buddy. That stuff doesn’t come cheap. I don’t even get free soda at this joint, and I work here.

In retail it takes different forms, and is the same idea, but this is where we (ever so slightly) approach the realm of “you really, seriously should have known that, dude.” I’ve spoken before of the man who looked like he wanted to murder me and all in my bloodline because I ran his “debit” card as a “credit” card, so “now Visa is going to send me a bill.” Well, many other people misunderstood that same thing, but were quieter with their frustrations, and their eyes did not have a reflection of my bloody corpse in them, so I was able to mock them after they left the store with much greater ease. Also, there’s the ladies who would barge into the bathroom, despite the “bathroom closed” sign that’s been up for 10 minutes, and say, “I cannot wait any longer. I am going. I don’t care if you’re here.” And let us not forget the people that seem to follow you through the tables of shirts and unfold every shirt you’ve just re-folded, and then wad it up in a I’m-almost-trying-to-pretend-like-I’m-helping manner.

Now we cross into that realm . . . that realm where either I just haven’t yet figured out that I should have been better at my job, or those people were seriously lacking in brain capacity.

I worked at Rent-A-Center for a while, and in case you’re thinking of trying out their stuff — don’t. We had some people that would pick out a stereo, a computer, a couch and table set, take it all home, and then not pay for a month (payments were due every week). When we’d demand our money or our stuff, they’d scoff at us and say, “why do you care when you get the money? I said I’ll give it to you and I will. It’ll just be a while.” Or when I went on a service call to fix a guy’s computer. He said the keyboard and mouse didn’t work. Well, I took along extras, but didn’t take them in since I had a suspicion, and was right, that he had plugged them in backwards. For some reason he was very mad at me when I pointed out the mistake. I think his speakers were plugged into the microphone jack, too. He seriously didn’t bother with any trial-and-error. He basically tossed it into a pile and screamed because it didn’t work.

Oh! Oh! Or my FAVORITE one! This family had a HUGE stereo system and they called, complaining that the speakers were popping and the sound wasn’t working right. I went to figure out the problem and saw that they had their surround system hooked up very wrong. Please refer to the below demonstration of my mad skills with Microsoft Paint:

To further explain this debacle: they had the speaker wire coming out of the left front speaker output on the receiver to what should have been the left rear surround, and the wire twisted together to the next wire that led to what should have been the left front speaker, and the wire twisted again to the next wire, leading to what should have been the left front speaker, wires twisted together again, going to what should have been the right rear surround, and the wire twisted to the last wire going into the right front speaker output on the receiver. The surround outputs were unused. Again, the customers were mad at me for telling them their setup was wrong and threw a fit that when I fixed it they “had too many wires” running through their living room,” (one wire to each speaker coming out of the receiver).

To their credit, they got positive and negative correct.

In the “defense” of all those who rent from such places as Rent-A-Center, one has to have a certain lack of intelligence to even buy into such a ploy, so who can really be surprised when their dryer won’t dry because they haven’t emptied the lint tray in 6 months? (Yeah, that really happened. More than once). If you rent from one of these places, I want you to try something. Take that TV back to them, so instead of spending the $40 a week on it, you put that money to the side, and give it about 4 months and see what you can actually OWN.

Nowadays I’m struggling with another manifestation of the DMV Syndrome. I debate daily if I’m justified for scoffing at loan officers and processors who “read” our documents we provide to tell them who to ask certain questions, and then ask the same person everything. Or THOSE . . . . WHO TYPE . . . . . . . . LIK THIS . . . . . . IN ALL THERE EMAILS . . . . . WONDERIN IF . . . . . . . . . . WE CAN TEL THEM . . . . WITCH LENDR CAN DO FL 203K . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THNX.

I don’t know if it’s me or them when I tell a branch manager to send identification and resumes with his new hires’ applications three times in a row, and number four comes in with, yet again, no identification or resumes. Or those who are told to re-disclose the terms of the loan they’re working on to the borrower, so they sign all the forms themselves and are shocked that we would say that to do such a thing is against the law. I don’t know if I’m the right one or the wrong one when we ask for 3 forms and they send one and it’s not even complete, and then complain that it’s taking too long to get things done.

Okay, I’m sure who’s right. Me. I was just trying to take an approach of “maybe I’m overreacting, maybe I’m ‘going DMV’ in this situation, to coin a new phrase,” but these guys typically make $50,000+ easy every year and they can’t spell or read instructions.

So, before I run off on THAT tangent, let me bring us back to the subject at hand. DMV-ism. What I find amusing now is that I make efforts to not allow fast food workers or retail cashiers, etc., to get snobby with me. I honestly am not sure if I’m doing as a gesture of “I know where you are – I’ve been there,” or if I’m afraid they’ll spit in my burger. But all the same, I don’t excuse a whole lot – like if I ask for my hot mustard sauce and they forget it. How the heck am I supposed to eat 12 nuggets without any hot mustard sauce?! It’s not that hard to get it right, but somehow it’s my fault for not holding up the lunch line in the drive-through to check to make sure it’s there (which, by the way, I always do now). I’ve allowed myself to troll around some forums before and gotten into debates with people who are obviously me 10 years ago, working at Dairy Queen or Target, as they defend their attitudes and blame us, the customers, for all their issues. I don’t see much of an excuse for it anymore. I look at myself then and want to tell me, “get over it, chump.” Maybe I’ll do that when I’m not in the mortgage business anymore, too. Yeah . . . or maybe not.

For the record, I never spit in anyone’s burger.

 

Let’s see if I can write this thought in 14 minutes . . .

I was thinking the other day about something that has crossed my mind before . . .

EVEN IF, somehow, everything the Bible says condemning homosexuality has been misinterpreted, making such a lifestyle not sinful in God’s eyes, there is the issue of pride. Pride, it turns out, is a bigger problem all together.

As a Christian, God is the one in control of one’s life. It is completely contradictory to speak of following Christ, while at the same time speaking of your pride as a homosexual. On a personal level, I’ve had to deal with NOT finding my identity in the fact that I play guitar, that I live in Seattle, being a Midwesterner, or in the movies and music I enjoy. Those are all fairly small items, but even my marriage is not something in which I can hang my identity. Although God would never lead me to getting a divorce, even the existence of my marriage is something that has been given to me by Him and is ultimately His. If homosexuality wasn’t sinful, God could still ask someone to give that up. This becomes the main problem with the Gay Pride movement –  the act of homosexuality and sexual debauchery is a big issue, but bigger than that is PRIDE.

What we think we are based on our own conclusions is up for reinterpretation by God, and to accept Christ is to take his definition of who we are over what we think we are.

That’s pretty deep for the morning, but that happens on the way to work. I hope I didn’t write this blog before . . .

And the clock reads 13 minutes. Good job me.

 

There’s a reason it matters.

One way to get someone mad at you really quick is to point out their flaws. However, many people’s responses wouldn’t be to the tune of, “why do you have to focus on my imperfections? We all have them,” but instead a justification of themselves (citing extenuating circumstances) and/or belittling you for noticing. It is my belief that such a response is a sign of both narcissism and lack of education.

Recently, the movie Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen came out. I paid $6.75 at a theater in illustrious Carbondale, Ill. to watch this piece of trash. Thank goodness I saved my additional $3 that I would have spent in Washington; Michael Bay will never get that.

Now, you can go anywhere on the internet to find blogs and reviews of why this movie was so bad, with its poorly edited exposition, gaping plot holes, crude humor, plastic characters, and overall minimization of the title characters. And anywhere you go you will also find a mass of people attacking the reviewer for taking things too seriously, or forgetting that it’s just a movie, and reminding said reviewer that it’s just meant for entertainment “and it did just that.”

What is happening here? It is my opinion that, more and more, people in America today are allowing themselves to become uneducated and are losing their ability to recognize quality in forms of art, or lack thereof. We are allowing ourselves to be stimulated by only our most basic and primal of instincts, and not just leaving our brains at the door but never taking them with us anywhere; so we end up with Michael Bay movies, useless reality television, and music that consists of nothing but the most basic of chord structures, over and over, and poorly written lyrics. And what’s worse is that when someone points this out, we attack them like rabbid dogs. But we’re not really upset at them for not liking that movie, or that show, or that musical artist. We’re upset at them because they’re saying that it was unintelligent, and we are subconsciously denying that we have bought in to such a ploy, and we can never be convinced otherwise because our pride won’t let us.

And on the flip-side, when something requires a little more thinking, or some time and focus to appreciate fully, it is diminished by the masses. This is, at the end of it all, what makes this so concerning. It’s not that we just allow ourselves to be filled with sugar-for-the-brain, but that we also despise that which is truly visionary and creative.

I have no redeeming comments; I’m very saddened by this and hope that when I become a father that  can instill in my children an ability to appreciate that which is good and wholesome.

 

I’m going to talk about Terminator for a while. Part III

Well . . . here we are. This whole time I thought this would be my last writing about Terminator, but I read a review of Terminator Salvation in which the author rants about how stupid Skynet was.

Ah, heck. I’ll try to fit that rant into this one.

In Superman: The Movie, a large southern Californian quake (triggered by a missile launched by Lex Luthor) causes a crack in the ground that swallows Lois Lane’s car and crushes her to death. Superman gets there too late to save her, so he gets really angry and flies around the world so fast that the Earth spins backwards and time reverses, allowing him to get Lois out in time and also somehow fixes everything wrecked by the earthquake. By putting this into the movie, the writers opened not only the time-reversal box, but the “he can fly fast enough to go around the planet several hundred times a second” box, so that creates questions such as why couldn’t he fly there fast enough to save Lois in the first place? Why didn’t he keep going backwards for a few more minutes and just stop Lex from the get-go? That is a plot hole, one that is created by trying to write oneself out of a corner. You and I can discuss this one all day, detailing how bad of a story move that was.

Yet it is my thorough belief that when someone nit-picks plot points like this guy, it’s not about the story but about his ego. “Why doesn’t Skynet just kill John Connor when he was in the factory?” Golly he’s clever. Why didn’t Marty go back to the future a whole DAY before he originally left to guarantee he could talk to Doc before he got shot? Why didn’t Frodo just fly on those big eagles over Mt. Doom and end the whole Sauron thing in like two days? Why didn’t the Emperor use some Dark-Side action to trip Vader when he picked him up, or to fly or something when he was thrown down the pit? Why? Because first of all, you wouldn’t have a movie. And second of all, you’re talking about “in retrospect.” Sure, it’s a movie, but these are all things that the characters could look back on and think, “Oh, that may have worked, too,” but it’s pointless for us to debate them because, back to my first point, you wouldn’t have a movie. I believe that when reading a book, watching a film, or even playing a game, you should let the storyteller take you with them, instead of sitting there, bitching about where you think the storyteller should go in a subconscious attempt to make yourself feel smart. At the end of everything, everyone has a right to their opinion on the end result, but just remember it’s not YOUR story.

So what do I like about the Terminator series? Let’s hit a few points.

John Connor and Skynet are a yin and yang. Neither can exist without the other. John exists because he sent Kyle to defend his mother from the first T-800, which led to their short but fertile romance. However Kyle’s defense means that the T-800 is destroyed, leaving a couple spare parts for Cyberdyne to find and reverse engineer, eventually leading to Skynet’s creation. If Skynet were never created, there would be no war, no time travel, and no way for Kyle to meet Sarah at a comparable age. John could not be. If John were never born, Skynet would have no reason to send a Terminator to 1984. Skynet could not be.

When I first saw T3, I thought the idea that “Judgment Day is inevitable” was stupid and weak.. “Couldn’t they come up with something better than that?” I thought. But the more I thought about it- the more it made sense. It made sense because as long as John exists, Skynet will exist, and Skynet will cause Judgment Day. And while I’m here, let me retract a statement I made about “why would Skynet send the T-X to a time when it couldn’t find John?” I believe the quiet reasoning for this is because Skynet didn’t want to risk the delay of Judgment Day again. If it went after Connor at an earlier time, that would clue him in that something still needs to be done to “prevent” Skynet. Instead, the T-X arrives at a time when Judgment Day is imminent – thus ensuring the elimination of its targets without risking its existence. I can’t believe I’m saying this about the third film, but that’s really clever. I wonder if it was on purpose.

John Connor and Skynet are both their own grandfathers. Now that’s something you don’t see every day. Of course John wasn’t the father of Kyle, but he was directly responsible in making sure Kyle met Sarah. Skynet is, in truth, actually its own grandpa, but it’s a computer so it’s really not that gross.

The only way to stop Skynet is for John to wipe out his own existence. This one may seem like I’m thinking a little too far into this, but it’s true. I’ve established that they can’t exist without each other, so the only way to prevent it all is for John to not allow Kyle to meet Sarah. No John, no Skynet, thus no Judgment Day.

Some parts of the story were cleverly left open enough for these new movies. A lot of people have griped about Salvation, and when I saw the trailers I found myself to be skeptical about the inclusion of Marcus. I hate (as I think others should) the re-writing of cannon. Yet when you think about it, nothing about what we know up to 2016 in this fictional universe comes close to excluding the posibility that Marcus was part of the story all along (he wasn’t, but you get my point). In fact, it beautifully develops Connor more – instilling, or re-instilling, in him a willingness to trust a machine.

Marcus was a very deep concept in addition to a new character. The main thing being that Connor gets his heart to survive. It was Marcus’s human heart that kept him on the side of the resistance, and it is that which was given to John. You could say that John has the heart of a machine. That’s kind of deep.

For being a series of movies about killer robots from the future, it seems to be really a thinker’s story. That’s what makes it so great when you pay attention, and what makes it so upseting when they skip details.

But all in all . . . I’m really lacking for a good conclusion. I’m out.

 

I’m going to talk about Terminator for a while. Part two.

There are two kinds of stories.

Okay, there are more than two, but go with me on this.

There are two kinds of stories. There are simple stories, and there are complex stories.

A simple story, as in my meaning here, could be like many one-shot movies that have been made for decades. I just watched Pixar’s Up last night with my wife. It was an extremely charming movie, endlessly entertaining, and very simple. The basic ideas and themes were conveyed quickly, and it didn’t take much to determine where a character was coming from or what the motivation was at any given moment. It worked.

In a complex story, such easy viewing isn’t possible. The motivations are hidden. The events aren’t linear. There are twists around every corner. To tell this kind of story, you have to be very careful. You need to have your facts straight, have events mapped out, and have names memorized. To do so is extremely important because when everything is said and done, it all has to make sense to be worth the time of those watching, reading, or listening to it. I’m a huge fan of the Lost television series because it does exactly that – drops little pieces here and there while you think the story’s headed in one direction, but when it all takes a major left turn out of nowhere, you can go back and see it was coming all along.

The failure to do this can and will result in what I call “The Refrigerator Box Syndrome.” Let me quickly define what this means. When a family buys a brand new refrigerator, often they will give the cardboard box in which it came to the children. Such a box is a blank canvas of imagination and adventure, where anything can happen. The children get in and envision journeys of peril and heroics. At one point, one of the children suggests adding a back door. All the children agree and they do so, and it makes the box that much more exciting. Then someone wants to paint or draw a logo on the side, so they do and now it looks better than ever. Then someone wants to add a hatch on top. Then someone else wants to add their own details to the mural. Then someone thinks the back door would be best if it was just an opening and not a door at all. By the end, the magical world that the children had was destroyed by too many ideas and not enough cohesion, direction, and common purpose.

Many stories have suffered from this, and the result is usually abandonment by its fans until a reboot occurs and promises to keep things together. The biggest example of this of which I am aware, which many people may not get, is the X-Men comic book series. I haven’t read comic books in over 15 years, but I remember in my middle school days that the X-Men story line was being pulled left and right by countless, arrogant writers who want to drop their own stupid ideas into the mix regardless of established canon. And at the time, in my eyes, it ruined the story.

The Terminator story is, in many respects, standing on the edge of a cliff above this abyss of worthlessness and butt-of-bad-jokery.

The first reason for this, and the most prominent in my mind, is the TIME LINE.

My goodness, people, is it that hard to stop and do some simple MATH?! Let’s put some pieces together as they are presented to us, shall we?

As mentioned before, Kyle Reese and the first Terminator were sent back in time from the year 2029 to the day of May 12, 1984. How do we know the date? Well for one, nearly the very beginning of The Terminator gives us the setting: Los Angeles 1984, 1:52 a.m. Shortly after this, Kyle attacks a cop and demands he tell him the date. The cop tells him it is May 12, to which Kyle replies, “No, THE YEAR!” This was  confirmed again in T2, in the scene which two police officers are questioning Sarah Connor, locked in a maximum security mental care facility, and show her surveylance pictures of the first Terminator from the shoot-out at the police station in the first movie. The say that they were taken “at the WesttownPolice Station, 1984.”

Big deal, right? Well the problems begin to mount when you remember that Terminator 2 came out in 1991. However, we can’t just assume it’s 1991 in the film. Why? Because John Connor would only be SIX! He was conceived in May of 1984, meaning that if Sarah carried him for the full nine months, he would have been born sometime in February 1985 (see? I know I can do math!). But John Connor cannot be six in this movie! Edward Furlong, the young actor playing John, was 13 when they were doing principle photography in 1990! Sure, older kids play younger kids all the time (e.g. Daniel Radcliffe, Michael J. Fox, the entire cast of 90210), but a 13-year-old passing as a 6-year-old? Not gonna happen.

But hold on – this is still fixable, right? We can just say it takes place in the near future! Why should they have to wait until the year in which the fictional character John Connor would be in his middle school years just to do the story? Sure, that works. Of course you run in to the problem that you’ve got middle-schoolers in the mid-to-late 1990’s listening to Guns ‘n Roses, wearing mullets, and playing After Burner at the arcade, but we can get past that.

Yet there’s another obstacle in the way. The writers set the date for Judgment Day to be August 29, 1997. In 1991, the year 1997 may have seemed like an eternity away, but now you have issue because that means John Connor is TWELVE YEARS OLD WHEN THE WORLD ENDS! How old did we say Edward Furlong was during shooting? And this WAS done to an extent because the T-800 tells young John that he will send him back “35 years from now.” That means it would be, at the earliest, 1994. That makes John Connor nine. The writers have managed to chop of their own arms to make a believable story because there’s no WAY that kid is anything less than TWELVE! His voice is changing, for goodness sake!

You can brand me a nerd for noticing these things, but actually having things line up in your story shows that you care about what you’re saying. To completely ignore it and let things fall where they may is lazy and it shows you put as much effort into it as a D-grade 9th grader does in a 10-page research paper. If you write movies, then that’s your JOB. If I did my job to an equivalent of that I’d be fired in a week.

Well what has been done in retrospect is to say that Terminator 2 takes place in 1995, when John is 10.  Sigh. Whatever. Let’s move on.

Now we get to the crown jewel of the series (*cough* sarcasm), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Right from the get-go you can tell the producers and writers of this film really didn’t give two hoots about what they were doing – they just saw dollar signs due to their super-model villian and Arnold’s mug on posters. Most people understand that the third movie was horrible, namely because of bad acting and over-the-top and way-too-long action scenes, but allow me to explain the other reasons it was bad.

The opening narration given by John Connor states that he was THIRTEEN when the 2nd Terminator came. We’ve already established that’s impossible within the timeframes given within the first two movies, so there’s no need to embelish on how wrong that is. What this means is the writers either didn’t care or didn’t check when they established this. My money is on both.

This error is embelished all the more when John later explains that his mom was diagnosed with leukemia and was given 6 weeks to live, but “fought on” for three years to make sure Judgment Day didn’t happen. That means she was diagnosed in 1994, three years prior to Judgment Day. I’m sure you’re doing the math by now to realized that John would have had to have been nine in the second movie (at the oldest), not thirteen, for those time frames to work. Though I am willing to bet that the writers assumed the first movie took place in 1991. I just got that vibe.

Now that I’ve pretty much exhausted the Time Line problems, let’s move on to a few more.

1) What the heck is the name of Arnold’s character? – In Terminator and T2, Arnold was called a “Cyberdyne Systems, Model 101.” The extended scenes in T2 refer to him as a T-800, and he is also called T-800 in the latest Terminator Salvation. Terminator 3 calls him both “T-850″ and “T-101.” Can we all just have a meeting and come to an agreement? At least pop a cassette into the VCR to see what the movie said. Does it take that much time?

2) We can all debate about how time travel can work, but it doesn’t work that way – This is essentially one of the major plot flaws of the third film. Putting aside the fact that Skynet wasn’t supposed to be around in 2032 (which I’ll get to in a moment), the T-800 (or 850, whatever) explains that John could not be located so the T-X was sent after his generals and future wife. Well that’s all fine and dandy since John told us in his opening narration that he’d been living off the grid for several years, but why didn’t Skynet send the T-X to a time when John could be located? I do believe that we’re talking about time travel. Does anyone else remember the climactic scene in Back to the Future when Marty remembers that he is in a TIME MACHINE and he can give himself all the time he needs to save Doc’s life? (Of course he comically gave himself only 15 minutes, but never mind that).

2) The T-1000 was supposed to be advanced as it got – This might seem a bit picky, but it ties directly into my main point, which I’ll conclude with. When Kyle is being interrogated by police in 1984, he states that his forces in the future had smashed the defense grid of Skynet, effectively winning. They found the “time machine” and that the Terminator had already been sent through. Kyle believed that after he went in after it, the time machine was destroyed. However the second movie reveals that there were actually two Terminators sent, and that the second one, the T-1000, was an advanced prototype, meaning those things weren’t in mass production yet and it was likely the only one. Then, remember, the human resistance wins the war. As Kyle said, they’d destroyed the defense grid. If that’s the case, how does the T-X come around three years later? And why all the sudden does Skynet know about John’s T-800?

Sure, you can say that Skynet knew all along. You can say that Kyle didn’t know that the war would rage on for 3 more years, just as he didn’t know a second Terminator went through. But by that point you’re not creating a good story, you’re mopping up bad writing.

My main point is that in these kinds of stories, one should not rewrite what is already written. You can write around what’s already written, and (even better) you can write into what is already written, but you shouldn’t change it. It negates everything already established and makes it less interesting because the multiple parts cannot be enjoyed as a whole.

Now that I’ve beaten up relentlessly on those movies, it’s time for me to bury the hatchet and admit how blown away I am by the over-arching story’s complexities and its subtleties . . .

 

I’m going to talk about The Terminator for a while. Part One.

When I was a kid, I viewed the film The Terminator as little more than a sci-fi horror flick. When I was in junior high, I saw the acclaimed Terminator 2: Judgment Day and loved it, but still saw it as something of a horror movie. As I grew older and matured (a little), I began to see something else in those films, something beyond scary robots and graphic death scenes. Then Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released, and despite being a mediocre film that butchered the time-line of the story (which I’ll expand on later), it gave the story an opportunity to logically continue after the finality of T2, and it allowed me to see how incredible the story arch of this fictional universe actually is. Now that Terminator Salvation has hit theaters, I’m on a full-blown Terminator kick. I loved it. I know lots of people hated it (one of my best friends at work seemed angry with me when I told her how much I enjoyed it), but I’m telling you, that film has brought this flawed-yet-great story beyond being just a Schwarzenegger movie. (Oh, and for the record, while some people enjoy The Sarah Connor Chronicles television series, its very existence bothers me therefore I refuse to watch it and thus do not consider anything from it to be canon.)

Just to get this out of the way up front, this will NOT be one of those discussions that takes a secular story and equates it to the Gospel, as many people have done with the first Matrix movie. Don’t get me wrong, I like those discussions when they’re done well, but this is not my intention and it’s important to understand that because the character John Connor can very easily be seen as a Christ-like figure. So are we on the same page? Good.

Okay, here’s the game plan. First I’ll summarize the full story as it stands by the end of Terminator Salvation. Next I’ll rant a bit about the things that actually bug me to nearly no end, including (but not limited to) the complete disregard to the time-line that the films seem to take. Finally, I’ll get into what I think makes The Terminator, despite its flaws, one of the best stories to come out of late-20th century American culture.

The Story Thus Far

The story of Terminator, which could be logically re-named “The John Connor Story,” could be said to begin on August 29, 1997. In this fictional time-line, this was the day that a global defense network called “Skynet” became self-aware, and “in a millisecond” decided that the human race was a threat to its existence. Since it had absolute control over all the United States’ nuclear weapons, it launched every one against Russia, which started a chain-reaction of counter-attacks across the globe and annihilated 3 billion people. That day was called “Judgment Day” by the survivors, who would go on to live in hiding from Skynet’s race of machines. A resistance was formed and a war started that raged on for decades. It was led by a man named John Connor, who led his forces to victory by the year 2029 when they smashed the defense grid of Skynet. As a last-ditch effort to survive, Skynet sent two Terminators back through time to kill John Connor before Judgment Day. Connor learned of this and sent defenders for himself back to the exact times the other two were sent back. The first defender was one of Connor’s best soldiers, a man named Kyle Reese, who volunteered for the mission. The second defender was a re-programmed Terminator, which was actually identical to one of the two Terminators sent back in time by Skynet.

The first of the two Terminators, which was Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, or a “T-800″ (aka “T-101″, which is a robotic skeleton covered in living human tissue to give it the appearance of being human for the purpose of infiltration) was sent to the night of May 12, 1984, to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah Connor, before John was born. Kyle Reese was sent back to the same date. Kyle found Sarah and, after fighting off the T-800 a few times, took shelter in cheap motel. Kyle taught the young future-mother-of-a-war-hero how to make an explosive called plastique, which apparently made the room a little hot because they had a spontaneous pre-marital romp when they were done. Unbeknownst to either of them at the time, their actions that night actually conceived John Connor himself. Kyle would meet his end hours later in a factory as a result of the exploding plastique that he placed into the abdomen of the bare, charred, metal endoskeleton of the T-800. The still-operating top half of the T-800 was terminated itself moments later in a large metal press, which was switched on by a rather witty and potty-mouthed Sarah.

Sarah continued her life, soon to be a single mother and bearing a horrible burden of knowing the fate that awated every face she would meet from that point forward. Also, not long after the night she lost Kyle, workers from the company that owned the factory, called Cyberdyne, found the remains of the T-800 and salvaged the forearm and hand, and an oddly-shaped computer chip that had been in the Terminator’s head.

The second Terminator was sent back in time to the year 1995, to kill John as a 10-year-old (as I’ll discuss later, these dates and John’s age are debatable, but this is what’s most commonly accepted). This second Terminator was a prototype, comprised entirely of a “mimetic polyalloy,” which means it’s liquid metal that can take the shape of over living organisms and simple metal objects. John’s defender, a reprogrammed T-800, arrived at the same time. While fighting and avoiding the T-1000, John actually becomes attached to the T-800 and views him as something of a father-figure. Sarah, who at this point was hardened by her hard years, attempts to assasinate a man named Miles Dyson, who would be responsible for the designing of Skynet (information courtesy of the T-800 with files full of future history). Dyson worked for Cyberdyne and was studying the first T-800’s two remaining pieces (the chip and the forearm). After almost killing Dyson, Sarah is intercepted by John and the T-800. They explain themselves to Dyson, who agrees to help them destroy all his research. Dyson later dies in a self-triggered explosion in his office building, and the T-1000 and the T-800 both are destroyed hours later in a vat of molten metal in a nearby foundry. After both Terminators are destroyed, John throws the original T-800’s arm and chip into the same vat. He and Sarah leave the scene believing that they have stopped Judgment Day.

Shortly thereafter, Sarah contracted leukemia. She would die by the fall of 1997, living just long enough to see that Judgment Day didn’t happen.

However, they did not stop Judgment Day – they only delayed it.

In 2003, a convicted murderer named Marcus Wright was executed by lethal injection. He had sold his body to scientific research to be conducted by Cyberdyne. More on him later.

On July 24, 2004 (again, dates debateable), an even newer model of Terminator, called the T-X, which is designed to not only kill humans but destroy other Terminators, arrives from the year 2032 to eliminate top officers in Connor’s future army, including John’s future wife, Kate. John was something of a “bonus target” to this Terminator because John was “off the grid” at this point in his life, never staying in one place for long, not carrying a cell phone or a job, etc. A third T-800 (and the second to be reprogrammed) is sent back in time to defend John and Kate. This third T-800 was not sent by John, but by Kate, because John had been killed by the same T-800 before Kate reprogrammed it.

The T-800 explains to the young John and Kate that Judgment Day is inevitable, and that it had been delayed to July 24, 2004, at 6:18 p.m. This meant they had less than three hours until it began.

Years earlier, the USAF had purchased Cyberdyne. In their purchase, they found remaining records of the research of the late Miles Dyson and began developing a defense system, which they would call Skynet, which would be capable of controlling all the country’s weapons, including nuclear warheads. The Air Force Lieutenant General in charge of the project, Robert Brewster, happened to be Kate’s father.

By the time John and Kate learned that Judgment Day would begin in less than three hours, they were already too late. A seemingly-unstoppable computer virus had been spreading around the world for days, shutting down everything from PC’s to military defense grids. The only remedy that seemed plausible to the US Government was to activate Skynet and send it into all the world’s systems to eliminate the virus. Lieutenant General Brewster activated Skynet moments before John, Kate, and the T-800 would arrive in an attempt to stop him. The activation made Skynet immediately self-aware, and it first used its already-built robotic soldiers, called “T-1’s,” to eliminate all personel at the base in which it was activated. A mortally wounded Robert Brewster would give John and Kate directions and access codes to what he said was the core for Skynet, but turned out to be a Cold War-era fallout shelter for U.S. VIP’s. The two of them were secured and safe in the shelter when the nuclear missles launched at 6:18 p.m. due to both its location and the T-800 destroying itself and the T-X in an explosion that collapsed the entrance under a mountain. John’s only connection to the outside world is an old radio, on which someone is crying out for help and John replied to them.

By the year 2018, the human race is hanging on by a thread and the resistance is hard at work in its full-on war against Skynet and its machines. John Connor is not yet in charge of the forces, but is already revered as something of a prophet because of his intricate knowledge of Skynet’s tactics and research (such as the development of the T-800). John’s primary mission to himself is to locate the teenage boy that he knows will be his father, Kyle Reese, and protect him. Meanwhile, the young Kyle Reese meets a revived Marcus Wright, whose last memory was dying in the year 2002. Kyle is captured by the machines, but Marcus escapes and is brought before John, only to find out that Marcus was unkowingly a cyborg, with only his brain and heart remaining in tact. After a few scuffles, John comes to trust Marcus and they work together to get John access to Skynet’s central base in what was San Francisco to rescue Kyle. John finds Kyle, frees him with many other human prisoners, and manages to destroy the San Franciso facility, but not after facing an early-model T-800 that manages to scar his face and stab him through the heart. Marcus, seeing that he has no future and understanding John’s importance, sacrifices himself and donates his heart to John, who was now leader of the resistance due to the machines cleverly locating the original leadership’s submarine base.

At this point in the story, I can only fill in that the war rages on for another 11 years, at which time John leads his armies to victory by smashing the defense grid of Skynet. Skynet issues a last-ditch effort to win by sending two Terminators back in time, and John sends Kyle and the reprogrammed T-800 after them. Somehow (if the third movie’s story will be regarded as canon) the war will continue for 3 more years, at which time John will die at the hands of a T-800 that is later reprogrammed by his wife and sent back in time after the T-X.

Well, that was brief, wasn’t it? Now that you’re caught up on the story, I’ll give a decent-sized rant about the carlessness of Hollywood writers in regards to plausible time-lines, among other things.

 

Election Day

I hate election day. I begin to enjoy life again slowly as each day passes beyond it. I’ve already gotten into three arguments over things that neither I nor any of the three other people really understood. I told one of them that Obama came from obscurity, and she said that Palin was more obscure, and I said she wasn’t, and then she somehow got me to defend the notion of Palin as President some day, when all along I don’t really think she’s that capable. How did she get me to that place? I’m awful at real-time arguments.

I usually try to keep myself out of the American political arena, instead standing on the outside where I can clearly see how everyone inside all act exactly the same way or, at the very least, have the same, messed-up hearts despite the fact that their issues are opposite.

So many people think that the future of the world hangs in the balance with this election, but that’s just not true. It’s the same as all the other elections previous. The left says that if the right stays in power, the world will be thrown into the dark ages. The right says if the left gets in power, they’ll take over everything we own. Obama is a Chicago politician (a city known for corruption) who has rose from obscurity over the last 4 years (he was first elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, served 8 years, and then has been a US senator for 4), and he’s gotten us chanting things like, “Yes We Can!” and “It’s Time for Change!” without any of us really knowing what he means. Sure, we know what WE mean, and that’s what those who wrote those slogans were counting on: that we’d all fill in our own blanks. McCain is a Republican who has stood in the Moderate range at best for years now, and now that he’s the GOP’s candidate, he’s suddenly as right-wing as they come. Do we really think that Obama will make all the difference with the issues we’ve made him represent in our own minds? Do we really think that McCain really means it when he tells us he’s against abortion, let alone anything else he’s said? If you answer “yes” to any of those, I’m afraid you’re naive. The crossroads where we stand right now WILL NOT be the defining moment in our nation’s history that either brought about our demise or our success. It can be a step in either direction, but nothing that’s not reversible within 4-8 years. When Clinton took office, the right shouted “he’s undoing everything done in the last 12 years!” and then when Bush took over, the left shouted “he’s undoing everything done in the last 8 years!”

In the end, when you vote today, you’re just defending a point of view or your own comfort. Those on the left can go on about how horrible the Bush Administration has been, but the fact is there are those who think he’s done an excellent job – it all depends on the criteria you put forth. Those on the right can scream about universal health care and assisted suicide and increased governmental controls, but the fact is there are those who want those very things and will be happy if they are put into place. As much as anyone on either side wants to think, their opponents will not someday think, in mass, “Oh, gosh, guess I was wrong about this one” under any circumstances. Americans are stubborn like that.

I think we need to take a long, hard look at how important we make this stuff. Yes, it’s important and valuable in this nation to be sure to vote, but the fact is that people see various issues differently and you might lose. We have turned the act of NOT voting into an immoral action, and not because of fear of an unelected person taking over or people of which we don’t approve making decisions for us, but to keep the other guys from getting their way.

Go ahead, get mad, tell me I’m not seeing the importance of this election. Tell me that I don’t really understand what’s at stake. I’ve already heard it. Let me tell you that all of this will eventually pass, be it 4 years, 8 years, or maybe 16 to 20, and we’ll all have some other list of issues that we’re debating and thinking that the world will end if things don’t happen the way we think they should.