Everybody’s Got a Plan Till They Get Punched in The Face

I can’t remember if it was Plato or Mike Tyson who said this. But right now it’s in my top 5 profound thoughts of all time. There seems to be a lot of people worried about what Barack Obama is going to do, and how quickly he’s going to do it, to make the world peachy keen before the end of the year. There are people who object to the homophobe that will swear him in. There are people who have a problem with the gay bishop he’s appointing. It seems that people on both the right and left expect Obama the president to be the same guy as Obama the candidate. For the love of Krispy Kreme I hope this is not the case. The closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay is higher on people’s priority list for the president than I think it should be. Philosophically, I agree with all of the popular reasons for closing Gitmo: human rights, constitutional illegality, we’re better than that. And I’d be more than philosophically on board if more Americans understood that getting punched in the face is a cost of doing business. Oil is cheap because we screw people over. Food is cheap because we screw people over. Clothes are cheap because we screw people over, and sometimes these people get fed up. When they do, we have a choice. We can take a step back for a moment of reflection and examine what may have caused our neighbors’ outbursts, or we can hit them back. I’m fine with either choice, but I think we should own that choice. We should embrace the evil that it is to be Americans. But we don't. We want our sausage, but we don’t want to see how it’s made. That’s crap – figuratively and literally. We’re not God’s noblest children. We never have been. We never will be. There has never been a good leader who was a good guy, and I hope Obama understands that.