Foo fighters 101

Everyone has some craziness in his head. This is foo.

There is craziness that is created any time two humans, with their foo, interact. This, too, is foo.

There is craziness that is created any time a human being interacts with the rest of the world. This, again, is foo.

Foo exists. Foo must be dealt with. While the goal, always, is to live in the least foo possible, foo will never be eradicated.

But do not lose hope, grasshopper. There are certain principles that can assist us in our task as foo fighters. The first and most important is this:

DO NOT FEED THE FOO.

Like any stray animal, if you feed the foo it will follow you home. Let me say it again, for this is the crucial central principle:

DO NOT FEED THE FOO.

Foo fed is foo that will grow. Do not under any circumstances nourish foo.

And the second principle is related:


DO NOT SEEK ASSISTANCE FROM THE SOURCE OF THE FOO.

If the foo you are dealing with at the moment is owned by a particular person, do not attempt to fight the foo by appealing to that person's rational being or sense of logic. When in the grasp of foo, none of us has full access to rationality; we may not have any access to rationality.

Accept that they are currently possessed by foo. Seek solutions that do not require their assistance.

These two principles will do much to reduce the foo in your life, and the less foo there is, the easier it is to cope with the foo that remains.

If you don't know your history, you don't know your present....

I know people who are of the "If you can't speak English, you shouldn't be allowed in this country" camp. People whose parents I grew up with.

Whose grandparents I knew; they were my parents' age, our neighbors.

And *their* parents I also knew: well enough to say hi to. Not much else. Not because I wasn't friendly; not because they weren't.

But because "hi" was about as far as we could go together in the same language.

I know people who are of the "If you can't speak English, you shouldn't be allowed in this country" camp. People who don't know their own family history as well as I know their family history.

How can you say "you should be deported if you don't speak English" when your own great-grandmother came to this country as a new bride, not yet 21 years old....raised a family, watched her grandchildren grow, lived well into her eighties.

And in those sixty-some years, never mastered more than maybe two dozen words of English.

Do these people REALLY mean their great-grandparents should have been deported? That they themselves should not have been born Americans?

Of course not.

They're just too ignorant to understand just how recently "they" was really "us." And ignorance is NOT bliss; ignorance is the road to destruction.

History marches on; the pouting ignorant will not stop it. They can only inflict pain, most of all on themselves.