Chapter 75.3: Blog Till You Drop?

Ok, as any regular reader of my blogs (Cammy, this means you) has probably noticed by now, I'm not on any sort of regular schedule of posting. This is my first post of April, and we're closing in on the sixth day of the month (Happy Tartan Day, all you Scottish-Americans out there!) I'm sorry if anyone has missed me, but I do have a life offline, as the photo above is meant to imply.

So, I'm a little dismayed at reading this in the New York Times. The story is about a few bloggers who have died because of the stress of posting regularly for paid blogging jobs. Of course, I'm not getting paid to blog, but I do get paid to write and edit. That is, after all, what I was placed on this earth to do, as far I've been able to tell. (Though the cats beg to differ.) But blogging is not worth dying over, no matter what someone gets paid.

Now, I must admit, it never occurred to me that my occasional posts might be worth a minimum of $10 each. I mean, come on! Who in the hell cares what I have to say? I don't care what presidents and members of Congress have to say, most of the time. (Funny aside -- at least I think it's funny -- I was driving home just a little bit ago and heard John Lennon's Give Me Some Truth and I thought, if I ever run for any office, that'll be my theme song.) So, I can't imagine making $10 for the fifteen minutes I might spend writing a drafty piece of crap like this. And surely, if I were getting paid per post, I'd write a whole lot more and would soon demand more than $10 per.

The economy sucks right now. I think it's a fairly nonpartisan thing to say and altogether accurate for most people. I live in an affluent nook of America, and I see people struggling. It's not necessarily that they can't pay their bills but they're feeling their bills in ways that they weren't before. I was talking to a friend a couple weeks ago and she put it perfectly. She said, "I was in the super market, and I overheard a mother tell her kids, 'no, we're not going to dye Easter eggs this year.' The reason, my friend continued, is because the price of a dozen eggs has skyrocketed. In my area, each egg costs twenty cents. That's right. Per egg. Remember when your kids could toss them to each other during summer camp because they only cost about a nickle? Fun and laughs were cheap then. It wasn't so long ago.

Now, if the bloggers in the Times story had their heart attacks because they had slathered on layers of cholesterol from eating twenty-cent eggs and buttered toast, perhaps I'd have a little more sympathy for them. But no, these poor guys died because they were working their buns off to have a chance to pay for the frigging eggs and butter. I have sympathy for them; I think they should be regarded as casualties of war.

The price of eggs is up in part because the price of gasoline is up. The price of gasoline is up because some moron decided to stick other people into a hornet's nest in the Middle East and now we're quagmired there for at least another decade. Neither Hillary nor Barry (Barack) nor McCain is going to solve that little Rubik's Cube any time soon, no matter what they say (and in this regard, I think only McCain has been close to honest). So get used to expensive eggs, expensive milk, expensive gas, and cheapened lives.

I've got better reasons to die. And as the photo above suggests, better reasons to live. I may just have to start blogging daily in order to pay for the basic necessities.

Chapter 65.7: Finally, Some Sense and (Perhaps) Honesty

I know a lot of Democrats (and probably a lot of Republicans) don't want to hear it, but anyone with a whit of sense would see that we have to have a significant presence in Iraq for the forseeable future. Not because of oil, but because we have a moral imperative. I completely agree that President Bush and Vice President Cheney led us into the wrong place at the wrong time, but we're there now and we will have to be there for years hence.

Apparently the major Democratic candidates for president are starting to acknowledge that too, though I hesitate to say they're just realizing it. I think they -- and certainly Sen. Clinton -- have known it for quite a while. Iraq cannot sustain itself if we were to leave. "That's their problem," I hear people say. But, no, it's not. It's ours too. While some Americans seem to wish we could go back to being a 19th century agrarian society in which we could afford to be xenophobic and isolated from other people's problems, that's simply not possible. And though at this point a majority of Americans say the war is going poorly and we should pull our troops out of harm's way, it's simply a bad plan.

Allowing Iraq to struggle for itself makes as much sense as allowing Germany or Japan to fend for itself after World War II. At that point, the concern was Soviet Russia and probably China too (I'm not a student of history, so I don't know if China was jonesing to jump into Japan). We had global concerns then, and we have similar concerns now.

Anyway, back to the 2008 presidential race: The three major Democratic candidates (Clinton, Sen. Obama, and former Sen. Edwards) would all keep some contingent of forces there. Gov. Bill Richardson says "Get out now," but, if memory serves, this is the man who allowed Los Alamos's secrets to walk out the door as Sec. of Energy and then somehow got elected governor of New Mexico. Sen. Biden, the future Sec. of Defense (only because Delaware's governor is a Democrat), says split the country three ways.

Quite clearly, a lot remains to be seen, but I'm just happy to see that the people who might become president recognize that even though the war is unpopular and divisive -- and politically devastating (hello, one-term presidencies!) keeping our troops there is what we have to do until Iraq is stable. We never should have invaded in the first place, but we're stuck in the sand till further notice

Chapter 54.9: One Uninformed Person's View

I've never served in an armed service, nor have I studied anything significant about battle strategy or how armed conflict affects political realities. However, no moderately informed American is totally clueless about what the media and our elected officials of all stripes have been saying about what's going on over there.

Last night, President Bush officially announced his decision to increase the number of troops in Iraq by 21,500 -- mostly in Baghdad. And many people are criticizing the decision saying that it won't improve the situation. I wonder, however, whether it means that we need those additional troops just to stay put -- to not cede territory or strategic positions -- and that it reflects the realization that the American public wouldn't countenance a large-scale escalation of troops. My question is whether these are the right troops. As a taxpayer, I'd rather pay more for more-effective deployments -- perhaps better spies or infiltrators into the most dangerous insurgencies -- that will achieve our goals.

The president said that 2007 will be bloody, suggesting (at least to me) that it might be even bloodier than 2006 was. He's probably right. I just hope we're safer at home as a result. I don't know that we are.