Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Today I got into a debate. A long and kind of boring debate that involved some spectacularly long blocks of solid text that, I admit, I couldn't finish reading, due to hemorrhaging of the eyeballs.

But here's the end of it, which I did find somewhat interesting. (Mostly because the guy tried to use Tolkien against me.)

The original text is in white. The additions I've made for the purpose of this post are in red.

His statement:

 I'm not saying that criminals will not have guns with the implementation of tougher gun laws, all I'm pointing to are the stats and the general trend of, tougher laws + less guns= less gun crime. (His stats came from wikipedia and some Australian newspaper I've never heard of.)

I vote more sonic screwdrivers and less guns, Sara, surely you can get behind that?  (That, I can indeed.)

And if you ever get over here to middle earth (He's from New Zealand, apparently.) I can take you on a Lord of the rings tour. And show you how peaceful the shire is without mass produced weaponry. 

And that's something J.R.R. Tolkien I'm sure would have been a big fan of.

My reply, which is the point of this post:


Hmmm. Yes. The Shire was a pretty sword-free zone. Now, recall with me how absurdly easy it was for Saruman to swoop in and enslave the entire country without a fight.

(I honestly can't help but think that Tolkien was making a point here, and it wasn't that living without guns is safer.) (I also can't help but believe that most people don't remember this for the sole reason that  it wasn't in the movie. No one reads anymore. I understand all the reasons for not putting it in, but I still do feel some sadness at the fact. It's such a powerful statement about how evil affects everything, even the innocent, unless people are willing to stand up and fight it.)

But joking aside, I guess this is the point:

No, I don't approve of the need for all this mess. I don't approve of shooting people up or waving guns around to get what you want. I don't approve of murder or breaking the law.

But I believe in my right to defend my family against people who do. (Add some exponents to this. I really ^10 believe in my right to defend myself from bad guys.)

See, the entire world is getting more and more dangerous, and it isn't because of laws, good or bad. (What it is from is a whole nother basket of fish that I won't address at this present time.) Laws don't stop criminals from doing anything. If they did, they wouldn't be criminals. (Irrefutable and undeniable logic. Even if nothing else in this entire post were relevant, this would still be the clincher.) 

In this ever more dangerous world, I believe in my right to be prepared. The whole life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness thing? I have an inalienable right to life and liberty. I have a right to keep myself and my loved ones alive when someone tries to alienate that right.

When the nearest cop station is a half-hour drive away, and the neighbors are half a mile down the road, and there's not but one street light on the whole 2 mile stretch, I have to fend for myself when bad stuff happens. (Our house in Va. Luckily, that one street light is at the foot of our driveway. But still...) And no government should be allowed to tell me that I don't have the right to fend for myself. No government should be able to tell me that I just have to sit down and die because the cops can't get to me in time.

(Because that isn't the point of government. Let's review our John Locke, shall we? Humankind's original state was anarchy. In anarchy, people do whatever they want. They take your goats and kill your wife and ravage your daughter, and they're perfectly within their rights to do so (legally).

Government is what happens when a group of people get together to protect themselves from said ravagers. They give up a certain few lesser rights (Like, I dunno, the right to not have to stop the car when a hanging light turns from green to red) in order to gain more important ones. Ie. protection and security from said ravagers. THEREFORE: Protection from crazies is the whole point of organizing a system in the first place. So taking away our personal right to defend against crazies is entirely counterproductive.)

Disarming the innocent is doing exactly that. It's taking away our freedom to protect life and liberty. Ban-the-guns laws don't make me feel safe and protected, because they're telling me I'm not allowed to prepare myself for hard times ahead. And that does not make me feel safe and protected. (Truth. I do, in fact, feel much less safe when someone says that we have to get rid of all defense mechanisms. Tell you what, though, no matter what happens, my Louisville slugger stays next to my bed, come rain, or snow, or dark of night.)

On that note, most people I've talked to from outside the USA (and quite a few inside, oddly enough,) seem to have this idea that we can just pop down to the corner 7-11 and pick up a glock on our way home from work. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are already an enormous number of gun-safety laws on the books. Including some that don't even do anything, but got voted in because it made the politicians feel good about 'doing something'. 

(These largely include "assault weapon" laws. The definitions spelled out in those laws don't actually ban a kind of gun. They ban guns with certain features which, incidentally, aren't applicable to the function of said gun. Therefore a person may legally own this top one but not the bottom...)

(Yeah. It's a little silly. But like I said, there are quite a few sensible laws too.)

And I don't mind that. I'm okay with people having to pass a test before they can concealed carry. I'm okay that not just any ex-felon can walk into a gas station and grab a few 45's. (In fact, I'm glad that they can't. Gun safety laws have a place. But A) they should be enacted by people who know something anything about guns, and B) should be safety laws, not banning-all-citizens-from-everything laws.)

So yeah, it's sad that guns have to be a thing we use for more than sportsman-like target shooting. (I almost said "It's sad that guns have to be a thing." But I corrected myself because it is a perfectly acceptable and rather enjoyable past time to have aiming and shooting competitions. Bowling is also an aiming and throwing competition. And you could kill someone as easily with a bowling ball as with a gun. However, I do agree that it's sad that the gun developed as a result of war, not sports.) But just because it's sad, doesn't mean it isn't true.

I could never live with myself if someone I know got mowed down by a crazy, and I just stood by and did nothing. It would haunt me to the end of my days. (Not even kidding here. I'm a fixer. It's an integral part of my nature. And if me taking a bullet kept someone else from taking one, so be it. If me delivering a bullet kept someone else from taking one, all the better.) And I believe in my right to not be haunted by that image for the rest of my life. No president should be allowed to sit back behind his line of (armed) security guards and tell me that I no longer have the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but he still does.

Ps. Why yes, I do indeed approve of sonic screwdrivers. ;)

Anyway, so that's that. Hope I made sense. I'm now off to actually become a productive citizen at my government job. (Please, don't destroy the government too quickly. I need my job. And we all need libraries.)

The answer to life, the universe, and everything:

Onion Powder. No, really. I'm not kidding. Yes there are loads of different spices out there, and yes there are many, many ways to cook delicious food, but some of us are poor college students. The real secret to surviving as a poor, single, working/student type is not to make gourmet food all the time. It is being able to take all the cheapo stuff and knowing how to make it palatable. And one of the keys to that is onion powder.

You see, onion powder works more like a spice than a separate food, like regular onions do. Real onions are sort of like the potatoes and carrots, and all that in a stew. They kinda sorta give flavor to the rest of the stew, but mostly they're just a separate part of it with their own flavors and textures. Onion powder, on the other hand, works entirely for whatever you put it on. It has none of it's own presence. It just makes things delicious and amazing. This is especially good for me, because I happen to be disgusted at the taste of straight onion. I'll be sitting there eating meatloaf, or stew, or something, and it's like meat flavor, meat flavor, meat flavor, ONION!!!!!, meat flavor, meat flavor... It totally just hijacks all the taste out of everything and screams it's presence. Some people like that. I do not. Plus I'm really picky about texture, and onion texture is weird. But even if you do like the oniony-ness, onion powder is good when you want/need something a little different. You can flavor pretty much any meat with onion powder.

When you use onion powder, your turkeys will always look like this:

Yeah, I wish. Actually, I've never really cooked a turkey on my own. Kat usually takes care of that part, and she knows some pretty awesome spices to use on it. I don't know what they are though. I keep meaning to ask, and I forget. But I do cook chicken, and I do happen to know that onion powder is extremely effective in tantalizingly delicious chicken. That and Paula Dean's favorite ingredient. IE. Butter. Butter is also an important part of many, many foods. Some people eat stuff without it to try to be healthy, but I think their reasoning is completely flawed. If you eat certain things without butter, then they don't taste good anymore. (Many kinds of vegetables fall into this category.) If they don't taste good, why eat them at all?? Just don't eat them, and you'll save yourself EVEN MORE calories on your little daily counters or weight watchers, or whatever you do. I'd rather save my calories for something I'm actually gonna enjoy while I'm eating it.

I think that the whole "organic" fad is really stupid. I mean, I understand the theory behind not wanting chemicals on your food, but here's my two cents on that: One, just wash your food. Not that hard. Two, without man-made fertilizers and all that stuff, the world would not be able to produce even the amount of food that it does, and starvation would be world-wide, instead of just in third-world countries. Like literally, the ground does not have the nutrient capability and all that stuff. It can't physically produce enough food for such a huge world population unless we had farms literally EVERYWHERE. Even then, that would be tricky, because some places don't support farms very well. I mean, why else would "organic" food be so much more ridiculously expensive. So be grateful for the chemicals.

Plus, the word organic actually refers to being alive/part of a living carbon based organism. You are organic. Coal is organic. Banana peels are organic. Amino acids are organic. It really has nothing to do with how it was grown. So that's another reason I think it's dumb. Because people named it badly.

So onion powder is the answer to life and the universe, but we still have yet to explore 'everything'. I will now proceed to enlighten you. The answer is "Just seriously chill out!!" And by this I mean: Some people freak out about the stupidest things. There are some things in life that are just not even important. Other people have hard things happen to them, as do we all, but they choose to be bitter about it. Which, let's face it, never made anyone's problems go away. Other groups of people don't even have things bad at all, but they're really good at seeing the bad in life, and that turns into a self fulfilling prophecy. If you think your life sucks, it will. So there are all these groups of people, and every single one of them has the same thing in common. They make everything in life so much harder than it needs to be. Just relax for like two seconds. Breathe in, breathe out. Stop and smell the roses. All those other cliche phrases that people ignore, but that are actually very, very wise.

Taking time to just chill for a sec really is astronomically more important than you might think. It's scientifically proven that people who take just five minutes every day to relax lead a happier, fuller, higher quality life. And by relax I mean doing something that does not have anything to do with your job or your school. Sleeping does NOT count. And if you're sitting there thinking about all the stuff you have to do, it does not count either. People who don't do this seriously burn out at a way younger age. Granted there's a huge difference between this, and being straight up lazy. You still have to live an active life, but not a scheduled 24/7, never getting sleep, trying to fit 40 hours into a 24 hour day life. That's just stupid. It defies all common sense. And yet the world seems to think it's necessary.

There is a sub-category involved in this that I think is also really important. It has to do with what I said earlier, about people who stress about stupid things, and people who are negative about everything. "If you look for the bad in mankind, expecting to find it, you surely will" - Abraham Lincoln. What this means, is that if you try to find the bad stuff in life, you will be able to find it, because there are things that are unfortunate. But all that succeeds in doing is making you focus on crappy stuff, and then your life sucks. And then it sucks to be you. Because you, on your very own, made your life not a fun place to be. On the other hand, if you look for the good, you'll find it too, because it's also there. And when you focus on good things, your life naturally becomes much better. That is not to say we should ignore all that's bad, and maybe it will go away. You have to work on trying to better the world. But when you're so focused on bad, you can't see the good. And life starts to feel like a chore instead of being worth living. Life is way too short to spend it moping around and being bitter.

You have to find things in life that are happy. Sometimes the smallest things are amazing.

Like this Snape pumpkin. Someone carved this. How so totally awesomely cool is that? Plus Snape is pretty much my hero. I mean he's hard to like at first, because he really is biased with his teaching, and that's rather annoying. But honestly, you can't many cooler examples of loyalty, honor, devotion, and straight up wicked-awesome magic skills.

Here is something else to brighten your day. We shall call this simply a FAIL of epic proportions. Complete misunderstanding of automotive mechanics. Unless... you don't think he invented a bus that doesn't run on an internal combustion engine? Cuz that could be useful.

This is an example of taking time to just be silly, ridiculous, and freakin' awesome. This is a spray-painted death eater tattoo. It was applied before entering the theatre on the night of the midnight Harry Potter 6 opening. It is here smeared a bit because of getting rubbed around during the movie. But the point is that you need to just do things that sometimes seem pointless. Because they aren't. Pointless things are some of the things that make it all worth it.

So, now you have been educated in the answers to life, the universe, and everything. Namely Onion Powder and 5 minute chill time. You may now go forth into the world with your newly acquired wisdom. I know lots of people specifically who need this advice. If you get mad at me for saying some of the stuff I said, you are one of these people. Like I said before, probably more than once, Life is way too short to use it for holding pointless grudges, and harboring completely un-necessary anger. So go forth. Seize the day!