Switching gears...

I have a problem deciding between believing in what's just supposed to happen for a reason, and what happens because of the choices you've made. For instance, you were born at that time and place, for a reason...you found someone you loved, for a reason. When good happens to you, it's because you were in the right place at the right time and that's just what was supposed to happen, for a reason.  If you find that one true love, you happened to be in the right place at the right time.

On the other hand, I'm where I am because of the choices I've made in my life.  How do I accept the choices I've made and where they have led me and still accept that I am where I'm supposed to be because that's where life decided I needed to be right now?

What if I missed out on my one true love years ago because I made some bad choices in my life?

Isn't it really just about being happy with who you're with at this moment?  And if that's true, doesn't it mean there is no such thing as true love?

I want to believe I'm going to find that one person that I can make happy for the rest of her life, but those examples are few.  Also far between (never miss out on a good cliche when it presents itself).

It's a bunch of hooey.  There are couples that get to live their lives with their soul-mates.  I know of two couples.  One half of one of those couples is one of my best friends, and he has taught me more about being a good person than anyone except my dad.  He has the life I always dreamed of having.  Unfortunately, my decisions have kept me from having that life.  I have no one to blame but me.

Maybe that's the lesson.  Be a good person.  Find a good person you're attracted to, and just keep being good people.

There are things I need to work on, but what if I did miss the woman I was supposed to be with sometime back then when I was making bad decisions?  How do you know?
Are you where you are because of fate or because of the decisions you've made in your life?

The Toyota Starlet

Figured I ought to tie in the title of the blog with my new hobby.  To better understand current politics, I decided to go back to the beginning of America and read up on the politics and political parties through (American) history.  I was curious what exactly the issues of the time were and how they related to current political discussions.  To be honest, I was mostly curious of the evolution of each of the modern day parties.

To understand how I got to that point, I should introduce my first outsider.  I have a good friend that is a certified genius.  He's also a bleeding heart liberal, but we can't all be perfect.  When I say he's a genius, I'm not just spouting random, blow sunshine up your ass praise.  He is truly a genius.  The best analogy I could use is the "solve life's problems, forget your wife's name" kind of intellect.  Anyway, we have some neat conversations and like to give each other shit about our respective political views.  He has mentioned a few times that today's conservatives are fighting for a way of life that they have never experienced, and I have to say, his arguments hold some validity.  He recalled a liberal economist on NPR saying he felt he was a "conservative" because he wanted things to go back to the way they were when he was younger.  I even went so far as to ask him what a "neo-con" was, because I was curious what the "other side" thought, and well, I didn't really know.

As those thoughts rattled around, I got to thinking how this all got started.  I remember vague terms and ideas from History class (Whigs, Tories, Democratic-Republicans (surely Joe Lieberman's ancestors)), but was it always this bad?  Turns out, it has pretty much been like this from the time the first fish started to walk/first set of brothers felt "brotherly love" (feel free to pick your favorite beginning of Earth tale).

So, where do you start?  I'm not going to include the divisiveness about declaring independence from England, although that is integral, and will likely come up later.  Let's start with a new nation and go from there.

The first two parties were the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.  Per Wikipedia, "The Federalists appealed to the business community, the Republicans to the planters and farmers."  Fairly broad terms, and obviously, there were other issues, but for the most part, the Federalists believed in a strong, centralized Federal government, while the D-Rs believed in mostly State's rights to govern.  The Feds were represented by Alexander Hamilton, while the D-Rs were represented by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Sound familiar?  I'll get deeper into the other issues in the next post, which if history is a guide you can expect in about 5 months, as I do more research.

As for the Starlet, that was my first car.  When trying to come up with a name for the blog, for some reason, I kept thinking about the cars I've owned.  It seemed appropriate as the title of this post.

Feel free to comment so I don't think I'm talking to myself.

B-

My Philosophy

The University of Georgia is and always will be the first State Chartered University in America.  UNC needs to do a little more research on history.

Political Correctness is just enabling the semi-smart crazy people.

Republicans and Democrats can't get out of their own way long enough to figure out what's best for this country, this state, this county, or this town.

America is the land of opportunity.  You really can do whatever you want.  Wanna bitch about how the system is treating you poorly?  You can do that here.  Wanna bitch about how hard it is being rich?  You can do that here.  Wanna bitch about having student loans because your parents aren't rich enough to pay for college, but aren't poor enough to get grants?  You can do that here, but I don't think anybody's listening.

When you have two parties fighting over the country, the extremes get magnified, and yet it's the middle they're always fighting for.  In my limited historical knowledge of the past, it seems whoever can win the middle will win the election/war.  If we go way back to the Revolution, we can see where winning the middle won the war.  There were, of course, the Loyalists and the Colonialists, but why would people not involved in whatever was going on at the time want to change?  There were people living a happy life before the Revolution.  They were just existing.  What caused them to want to join a revolution?  The Boston Tea Party?  "Taxation Without Representation"?  People just wanting to be left alone?  Is it possible that the news and slogans from the North may have influenced some of those living in the South that the Royals were causing all these problems?  Is it also possible that people in the South were also suffering from the same oppression from England, but they weren't in the position to change anything until folks up North took a stand?

I'm just gonna ask questions.  Some of them you will not want to hear.  Hopefully that will foster some discussion on where we are, and where we are going.

We're also going to talk about UGA football from time to time, mostly between August and January.

Probably some other stuff too.

First Post

I have no idea where this is going, or how it's gonna get there.  Hold on and enjoy the ride.