I can’t even…

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I’ve watched a lot of disturbing stuff on the Internet, particularly involving two girls and one cup, but right now there’s one video floating around that I just can’t bring myself to watch.

I just read some tweets from staff members of the news channel in Virginia that saw a reporter and her cameraman murdered in cold blood on live TV yesterday morning – it sounds by now that it was by a disgruntled former employee – and not only was the reporter dating someone in the newsroom, but the cameraman was engaged to someone in the control room who watched the entire thing happen live.

I can’t even imagine watching someone unrelated’s death live on TV, so to see someone like that unfold for the person who you’re planning on marrying???

He was 27. She had just turned 24.

The guy even wore a camera and filmed his attack, posting it immediately online afterwards.

Shock is the only word I can use to describe what happened, and yet frankly it happens so often in America that asking the questions doesn’t even seem relevant anymore. Hearing about somebody getting gunned down out of nowhere in the streets isn’t just something that happens in other, less-civilized countries anymore. Here in the Land of the Free, it happens in our schools and on our streets in cities big and small … there’s been almost 250 mass shootings in the United States in 2015 alone … or more than one a day.

The only reason this one even managed to ride the news cycle all day is because it literally happened on the news.

They were just reporting the local news … just like those first-graders were just trying to learn…

Hello, Birthday #35.

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I’ve been expecting you…

Not really, though. I think people anticipate the big ones – 21, 30, 40, other numbers even higher than 40 – but 35 is kind of an oddball age. You’re not old old just yet, but you’re not exactly young anymore, either.

I mean, fuck – I’ve been out of high school for almost two decades now!

If anything, 35 is certainly proof that I ain’t getting any younger here…

And I think I’m ok with that, for the most part, anyways.

I don’t really want to be 18 anymore – girls wouldn’t talk to me and I still lived in my Mom’s basement.

25 was a little better – some girls were willing to talk to me and I played video games every moment of free time that I had.

30? Meh … by then I was already married and found myself bludgeoned by the fact that reproduction was going to be significantly more expensive for my family than it was for most.

31 – 34 … I honestly don’t even remember those birthdays anymore!

And that brings us to the big 35 – right in the middle between 30 and 40, and I suppose if I had to put it into words that’s about where I feel I am. There’s always something more just off on the horizon – more kids, more career opportunities, more changes. Admittedly it kind of makes it hard to live in the moment when you’re constantly focusing on the future like that – I guess that’s one thing in particular that I’m trying to keep in mind at this particular focal point of my life.

I also think that I’m starting to acquire just the smallest amount of that so-called wisdom that you sometimes hear old timers talking about. For me, it’s been in trying to filter out the things that I actually care about in life from the rest of the noise, and there’s a lot of noise, I’m certainly finding! Occasionally I’ll come across something that not five years ago I was immensely passionate about, and yet nowadays I find myself just shrugging my shoulders and saying, “Whatever…”

Right now more than ever, I recognize that time is my most valuable asset, and I think that wisdom is simply in trying not to waste it on stupid things that just don’t really matter in the big picture anymore.

I have a sneaky feeling that the next five years are going to pass by a lot more quickly than I would like, which I guess is a little ironic considering all of that forward-thinking stuff that I mentioned earlier … by the time that I turn 40, Christopher will be starting school and hopefully we’ll have two more in his footsteps, we’ll be getting ready to move into a new house, Cleo will be just as loud and obnoxious as ever…

Thankfully some things never change! 😉

As a little inspirational message to my future self whenever I circle back to this blog post again, here’s a video that I’ve watched many, many times before but the words ring true each and every time that I hear them. This clip dates back to 1984 from the eulogy that Muppet performer Richard Hunt gave at Jim Henson’s memorial service…

“Jim did not cling to the past, he did not worry about the future – that would work itself out…

And he did not live for the moment.

Instead, he lived in the moment … because that’s all we really have.”

So as I turn the big, old number 35, here’s to living in the moment. Above anything else, let’s have some fun… 😀

movie thoughts … John Wick

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johnwickI actually first watched this a couple of months ago, but recently I’ve gotten sucked into bits and pieces of it a few different times and I realized that I’d never written about it the first time, so here we are!

I think I enjoy this movie because John Wick is a complete and total badass.

Nobody fucks with John Wick, and yet the son of a crime lord ignorantly fucks with John Wick anyways, and thus we get to watch John Wick enact his revenge by killing pretty much anyone who crosses his path.

I loved Keanu Reeves in this role – the way he delivers is flawless, both in terms of badass-ed-ness as well as the heavy clout that anyone who really knows who John Wick is continues to honor even as he’s on the warpath. Some of my favorite exchanges are with the people from his past whom he comes back into contact with through this new ordeal…

  • Jimmy, the all-too-familiar police officer sent to respond to John’s “noise complaint”
  • Francis, the VIP doorman at the Red Circle who John courteously pardons
  • The Manager at the Continental, who professes that no laundry service is good enough to clean John’s blood-soaked shirt after his assault on the Red Circle

The whole build up of The John Wick Legend – mostly by Viggo himself, who’s arguably the second-most feared man in the city – is damn near perfectly executed in such a select few lines of dialog. It’s clear that this is the kind of guy you don’t underestimate – no matter who you are, and if you do, you’re as good as dead.

“John wasn’t exactly the Boogey Man … he was the one you sent to kill the fucking Boogey Man.”

“You will do nothing because you can do nothing.”

“They know you’re coming…”

(John himself) “Of course, but it won’t matter.”

What can I say – I loved Keanu Reeves in this movie! I’ve always been a huge fan of his, from The Matrix to Speed to even The Devil’s Advocate … the man plays a great lead and an even better action star.

And fun fact – at one point Keanu was actually in a band! They called themselves Dogstar and I remember going to see them play at some casino in Michigan back in my early 20s. I have no recollection whatsoever whether they were any good – Keanu played bass guitar, mind you – but it was really cool just to see him up on stage in person. 🙂

This was a sweet action movie, and apparently they’re now talking about making a second. Interesting, though admittedly part of the mystique of this one was knowing just enough about John Wick’s past to be absolutely terrified of him. A sequel could go either way…

Fighting the Counterfeit Lego Fight on eBay

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dcExGBJN2g

This is a little frustrating because as I’m nearing the end of my Collectible Lego Minifig collection, the few minifigs that I still need (22 of 266 as of today) are all pretty rare and expensive, so I’ve been wandering the web searching for the most economical ways to help close the remaining gaps in my collection.

I picked up a few series 1 minifigs from an eBay auction last week, and also found myself irritatingly reminded about the joys of sniping as I watched three other auctions that I was in lost by pennies a piece, but I also came across a scary number of copycat minifigs from overseas sellers that makes me hesitant to order anything else Lego from eBay in the future.

Case in point #1 – I still need Bunny Suit Guy from series 7, which currently averages on Bricklink for about $35-45 … however I found a guy on eBay who’s selling lots of five of them starting at only $25…

fake_bunnyguy

Depending on the minifig, if you’re paying attention you might catch on via the posting – for example with this one, the carrot that the real Bunny Suit Guy comes with is actually orange and green in two separate pieces whereas the fake ones were made all as one orange piece…

col07-3

And of course, you should trigger your too good to be true flag for seeing a lot of one of the rarer minifigs for so cheap, but if you’re in a hurry trying to jump on cheap prices, it would be easy to see how you might not realize it until the package shows up and you’re able to take a closer look in person. The video above has some great examples to show how although they may look the same from a distance, disassembly shows that some are made exceedingly cheaply and sometimes in no way like actual Legos are made underneath the surface!

A lot of these guys get away with this stuff because although they’re directly copying popular Lego minifigs, they don’t specifically use the brand name “Lego” anywhere in their listings. A common term that I found was “custom,” but “toys” or “bricks” as the video explains are also popular keywords.

I think what makes me the most nervous though is that although it’s fairly easy to identify these lots of the same minifig … from Taiwan or China and simply overlook those, today I found “a complete set” of series 1 minifigs that’s entirely counterfeit selling for only $29.99 Buy It Now out of Hong Kong…

fake_series1

You’d be hard pressed to eyeball any errors out of that picture, which just makes it worse for genuine collectors and fans once these minifigs leak out through “custom auctions” and into the general population of things that look like Legos, but really aren’t.

It kind of makes me glad that I’m not even in the market for Mr. Gold right now because although I do eventually want one for completion’s sake, I’m honestly not sure where I’m going to find a $500+ minifig that I feel comfortable buying online! Right now Bricklink only has 5 sellers with them, all listed for at least $2,000 a piece, and maybe 4 out of 64 legit listings on eBay.

Thankfully it’ll be a while yet before I’m ready to figure that one out – maybe I can find a private seller and make arrangements to travel and meet in person for it – but as for those other 22 that I’m still after, I’d rather pay a little more for better vetted sales via Bricklink than risk getting a ripoff that’s masquerading as a bargain… 🙁

Planned Parenthood is not “Selling Baby Parts”

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I’ve been wanting to write about my thoughts on this since I first heard about the ridiculous allegations and watched the edited video in question that depicted a Planned Parenthood executive discussing the sale of baby parts with an anonymous party.

I think this video pretty much sums up the sarcastic angle of my opinion here because if you listened to the outrage, you’d think they were literally selling baby hearts and baby lungs on the black market! I mean, seriously – I watched a clip of Sean Hannity asking whether these parts were being used for transplants…

Just to be clear – even when a fetus hits the 22nd week (roughly time when a fetus is considered viable outside of the womb), it’s about the size of a banana, making the lungs about the size of a quarter and the heart and everything else even smaller.

So what per se would we be transplanting these micro-sized organs into, anyways???

Anyways, the rational angle of my opinion comes from personal experience because my wife and I actually went through something similar two years ago with regards to the fertility treatments we went through that resulted in the birth of our son.

Our first IVF cycle produced 12 human embryos, of which only 3 ended up being viable at the 5-day mark.

2 were unsuccessful in our first attempt, and the third was frozen cryogenically for six months before being used successfully in our second attempt and eventually became our son, Christopher.

As for those other 9 embryos, however, we were given a choice.

They could either be discarded simply as medical waste, or we could donate them for scientific research.

It was one of the few decisions throughout the entire process that we didn’t even have to stop to think about because if research from our failed embryos could help in any way to make the process a little easier for people on down the road by learning more about fetal development or the effect of hormones on maternity or anything else, it was well worth it because otherwise they were just going in the trash anyways.

We had to sign special consent paperwork agreeing to this in advance, and I’m sure just like Planned Parenthood, our clinic collected a small fee for the care and transport of the fetal tissue being delivered to their research partners. It’s not like you can just take discarded embryos and throw them in a box for the UPS guy to pick up once a week! Anything under $100/specimen for professional scientific services once you factor in storage, courier services, etc… is comical to be considered “profit.”

If you want a look at what actual profiting from the illegal sale of human tissue looks like, check out this undercover investigation that VICE did over in Bangladesh about the black market trade of kidneys. Selling an adult kidney for the price of a used car is very different from selling unborn fetal tissue for medical research that was otherwise headed for the garbage…

Of course, it was abundantly clear to me from the moment I heard about this controversy that the stink about Planned Parenthood isn’t really about what they do with their medical waste, it ultimately just ties back to people believing that abortion shouldn’t be legal as a medical procedure at all. Even though it’s this type of research that ultimately serves to make pregnancy safer and more viable for women around the world, and even if abortion only accounts for 3% of Planned Parenthood’s business, who also happens to provide its variety of services to 1 in 5 women in America.

If something’s too ridiculous to be true, it probably is.

Lego Collectible Minifig Display, phase 3

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As mentioned last month, the time had come once again to reorganize my minifig collection, as noted by the minifigs that were hanging upside down and otherwise cluttering up entirely too much real estate on my desk!

Some sixteen series in with at least 2-3 new lines coming out each year, scalability was a primary concern.

Also, well … space, because this collection is starting to get mighty big!!!

Mighty big, indeed…

LEGO1

So I started by doubling the number of baseplates that my last display used – the alternating colors are pretty much because I learned the hard way that blue is out and apparently the tan baseplates are now officially in. 🙁

I pretty much hung them the same way that I did last time – drilled a hole in the top corners and then tacked them up to the wall, with the one major difference being that this time I did what I should’ve done last time and went the extra step to connect them all together so that the baseplates would all be touching like one giant display area.

It’s honestly about the same number of rows per plate, but I think I like how it looks better.

LEGO2

To save you from counting the whole lot (because I just spent the last two hours dusting and putting them up 16 at a time!), my current count is 235 minifigs total … still missing most of series 1 and then a few random figures from the rest, along with the 9-figure limited edition Team GB set done in 2012 for the Olympics, and of course, the elusive and way too expensive Mr. Gold.

My rough estimate is that I can fit about another 8 series up on my new wall as-is, and if need be after that I can relocate a row of picture frames beneath its position on the wall to add another row of baseplates that would at least give me another year.

I’m not going to worry out more than a few years because at that point we may be in a different house altogether and despite the horror of having to move this whole thing, I’d still love to do something a little classier looking with custom-made shadow boxes and whatnot … though as you can see, wall space even with this configuration is tight so I’d need to have a ton of new space to work with to do proper cabinets or something.

Oh well, for the time being I’m happy once again – now it’s time to hop on Bricklink and order another couple of series 1 minifigs before they’re all going for $20+ a piece! 😯

Even more personal banking fun … a year and a half later

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So I’ve spent a good part of this weekend going through our finances, planning for the future – both near and frighteningly far (retirement?!)…

The good news is, our retirement savings are actually in pretty good shape! They could be better – as is always the case – but I’m feeling ok with the balances as I’m about to turn 35 here in another month and they’re on a good track to be ahead of schedule another five years from now.

Our emergency fund isn’t bad, either, namely because it actually exists considering that apparently 1 in 4 don’t have anything for savings at all.

Debt-wise we could also be doing better, but by estimate we’ve managed to pay down about 20% of our debts in the last year and we’re now looking at a plan to pay off the rest in the next 2.5 years if we can stick to it. I think we can.

One thing I unexpectedly found myself circling back to today as I was reviewing everything and making some tweaks to our plan, though, was this giant tirade that I made last year about having lousy options for personal banking, and like a lot of other things that I’ve found myself more so just shrugging off that used to give me oodles of frustration in years past, I’m honestly not sure how much I really care about it anymore.

Maybe that’s what getting older and gaining wisdom is really all about – figuring out what to not give a shit about so that you can worry about the things that really matter! 😉

A year ago I talked about considering a plan where I would eventually move some of my accounts over to a credit union that offered better interest rates and whatnot … because “what’s the point of having everything in one place if the bank treats you like crap?!”

And don’t get me wrong – Wells Fargo still pisses me off from time to time because I just got a notice that they’re going to start charging fees for my business account because it doesn’t carry a high enough balance…

But still, having six accounts under their roof for the last year and another seven all at separate other banking institutions, there’s something quantifiable about being able to manage a good share of my banking from one login, and frankly the difference between 0.01% and 0.10% APY in interest earnings doesn’t even come close to comparing to how much time I can save.

Sure, the example still stands – $5,000 in savings makes me $1.50 a year at Wells Fargo and $17.50 a year at the credit union – but that $16 difference equals $1.33/month vs. a little bit of my sanity preserved for not having to juggle so many accounts in different places, and not for nothing but at 34 years old, I think my sanity is worth at least a buck and a half each month!!! 😛

So my long-term banking plan – which mind you won’t be fully in effect for another couple of years – looks something more like this…

  • Personal & Business Banking – Primary Bank
    • Personal Checking
    • Savings – Emergency Fund
    • Savings – Reserve Fund
    • Home Mortgage
    • Credit Card #1
    • Credit Card #2 (one of these may disappear or go HELOC … not sure yet)
    • Business Checking (if I can find a way to make the fees go away)
  • Personal Banking – Secondary Bank
    • Credit Card #3 (rewards card – we currently route regular purchases through here)
  • Personal Investments – Primary Institution
    • My 401k
    • College Fund for Christopher
    • Brokerage Account
  • Personal Investments – Secondary Institution
    • Sara’s 401k

I’d love to find a better rewards program under Wells Fargo to eventually ditch CC #3 just because there’s an annual fee and admittedly it’s not that great of a card. Plus, the addition of a Reserve Fund Savings will eliminate a lot of the benefits of this card anyways, as it’s our Disney Rewards Visa from Chase which we currently use to help fund our Disney World Annual Passes.

The idea of the Reserve Fund is something I came up with last night because I’d like to start pre-saving for larger, regular purchases so that they don’t have an impact on our normal budget anymore. It would pretty much work just like the escrow with our mortgage works – we’d identify a monthly payment for our Disney passes, average vet fees, car repair expenses, or whatever, and then as those came due we’d have a big pot to pull them from rather than diverting money from our regular budget and throwing it off for that particular month.

I’m also trying to organize things in Mint a bit better so that maybe we can start using that again to better judge how much we’re spending on groceries, gas, and whatnot to try and stabilize that part of the budget to maximize the larger things we’re trying to do.

Overall, I think we’ve got a good set of goals for the next five years…

  • Finish paying off debts in 2 1/2 years (not counting mortgage)
  • Save enough to buy a new house in 5 years
  • Continue funding retirement and emergency savings
  • Increase funding for Christopher’s college fund
  • Stabilize budget to maximize focus on previous four items

And unlike the last year which previously focused mostly on paying down debts (and figuring out how to be a new parent!), the next twelve months hold lots of potential for making big headway with all of these, so it’ll be interesting to follow-up again next summer to see where things stand and if I’m still more or less content with settling for a big bank vs. a credit union! 🙂

Dream Journal : Another Really Big House Tour

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There was a lot of frustration in the air, mostly on my part because everybody else seemed to be having a really good time.

I mean, they should have – apparently they were in town for our wedding and we had all of our friends and extended family gathered at our home before the big day to relax and help prepare and generally celebrate, but it wasn’t just any home…

We had been on the market for a bigger home for a while and were looking for that special one to become our dream home, and although you wouldn’t have known it from the outside, this one certainly had some hidden features that were remarkably cool and admittedly made the home a bit of a bargain even at its list price of one million dollars!

For my part, I explored the interior of the house in a bit of a panic because there was just too much going on and apparently I still have anxiety issues even in my dreams. 😉 I had walked into a room that seemed to be either the living room or master bedroom, and our immediate family was showing off a huge display of stuff that they had helped to pick out for our new home, to the point where I had to stand up and announce that we had sunken all of our money into the house and couldn’t afford to pay anybody back if they opted to help us shop and bought all sorts of expensive things requiring reimbursement…

Anyways!

I tried to get my wife’s attention to come help me simmer down on my way back through the house, but she was sitting on the floor with some friends and a baby who was not Christopher – we’ll get to that more in a second! I ended up back in what was to become my new office area, which was considerably bigger than anything I’ve had in the past mainly because not only was it just a much larger room, but it ended up being a series of rooms that connected down one end of the house, a la OFFICE -> PARLOR -> LIBRARY -> DEN, ultimately ending up back at the front of the house with a pair of large, sliding doors so that in essence half the house could be walled off into my own private wing, which seemed pretty cool!

Still on the hunt for quiet space, though, I walked through what I thought was the dining room, but was configured with several tables to accommodate all of our guests – some of whom were hanging out and snacking – and I pushed on what was almost a hidden, disguised door at the end of the room which lead out into sort of a grotto that was both outdoors and indoors, and was very amazing.

The walkway was made of stone with water on both sides, and every so often it would dip down so that you would be just barely wading from one little garden area to another, and here I passed one of my aunts who seemed to be really taking in the natural aura of this hidden gem.

Beyond the gardens was more of a “play area” that had lots of places for seating, but it was all setup as see-saws and so people were bouncing up and down while they talked and waded their feet in the saltwater! There was also an old-fashioned swing where one of my uncles was gently swinging back and forth, enjoying the breeze, and as I approached, he pointed out a small crustacean that had gotten stranded on its back between two of the landings that rose above the water.

When I reached down to flip him over and help him back into the water, I looked in myself and saw this myriad of sea life that was swimming around in our own little personal escape here – the most noticeable of which was a pair of lobsters that were play fighting a few feet out into the water.

Then as I picked up the stranded crustacean at my feet, suddenly he was a lot bigger than before and he was a lobster, too.

That’s when I turned and heard someone call, “Hey Dad – what’s that?” and turned to find Christopher standing over my shoulder, much bigger than I remembered and now talking and everything. 😀

movie thoughts … Jurassic World

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jwI went through a lot of phases leading up to this movie…

First I thought it was ridiculous because I hate Hollywood making sequels instead of trying for new stories and then having them be horrible.

Then I got curious because I watched Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy and realized that I didn’t actually hate him, just the character he played in the first few episodes of Parks & Recreation.

My skepticism grew as its release got closer and we started finding ourselves overwhelmed with all of the marketing and product tie-ins that the movie had secured, even though admittedly I didn’t make the connection of how clever the Barbasol sponsorship was until far later than a proper fan of the original movie really should have…  😳

Finally as the movie came out and reviews started floating around the Internet, I became both hopeful and even excited to see what this movie ended up looking like. We don’t get to see nearly as many movies in the theater as we used to, so we kind of have to aim for the big hitters and leave the rest for home viewing. Jurassic World seemed like it had the qualities to make up a pretty sweet summer blockbuster … but once the film started rolling, would it end up just feeling like yet another unnecessary sequel like … well, Jurassic Park 2 & 3 ended up feeling???

Actually, not really!

I mean, don’t get me wrong – there were some ridiculous moments … running from dinosaurs in heels throughout the entire movie, driving when a simple phone call would do, arguably even the Indominous Rex in general, but if you even look back to the original Jurassic Park, we had plenty of the same types of moments back in 1993, too … “This is a Unix system – I know this!” It didn’t matter then because our adrenaline was pumping as we explored this terrifying, new world, and the same thing happened 22 years later with Jurassic World.

Besides, if you can suspend disbelief long enough to tolerate cloning dinosaurs from 65 million years in the past, not to mention building yet another park after the first two resulted in many, many people’s deaths … then maybe the idea that Claire wore high heels isn’t really that big of a deal, after all!

Although I will admit that the gyrospheres or whatever they were called not having a return home command to invoke in case of emergency kind of bugged me a little… 😛

All in all it was a fun, wholesome summer blockbuster for what it was, holes and all, and even though so many people have died at this point, it should be interesting to see what they get away with next when no doubt Jurassic World 2 hits the screens to re-merchandize the franchise all over again a few years from now!

The Changing Perception of the Confederate Flag…

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It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for this former banner of the south, first brought into the news by a single flag flying over the South Carolina capitol to be followed by some of the biggest retailers in the country following suit to remove merchandise bearing the symbol from their shelves as well.

And a lot of folks who’ve always been fans of the flag have been particularly pissed, citing everything from censorship to heritage and southern pride…

So I wanted to vent a few thoughts about this because I passed a couple of huge trucks on the road today – one with the Stars & Stripes hanging from the back and the other with the Confederate flag, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes because while the last couple of weeks have caused a lot of us to rethink how tolerant we are of seeing this emblem around us, there are clearly still others – and there will always be others – who only see what they want to see.

First of all, the easy part of the equation – the flag flying above the state capitol in SC … it doesn’t belong there. The south lost the Civil War over 150 years ago and represents, if nothing else, a subset of the union that tried to secede from the United States of America. A state can’t claim to be united when it still flies a symbol of treason over its capital.

Now as for the private sector’s perspective on the Confederate flag, that’s where it gets interesting because sure, freedom of speech protects anyone who wants to fly or sell the flag even if it may be dated and controversial, yet here we see the free market at work where major players like Amazon and Walmart have also made the decision where it might not pay – this time with their own bottom line – to sell these types of products.

And I know that a lot of people like to write things like this off as our society simply being too politically correct, but I think there’s more to it than that because our history is littered with changes in public perception as society has evolved to rule out things that it no longer deems acceptable – be it prohibition, slavery, women’s suffrage, etc… What some are calling politically correct equates to others saying, “You know what? We used to turn a blind eye to that in the past, but it’s not cool and we shouldn’t be doing that anymore.”

We’re seeing it very much forming a critical mass with gay marriage right now. There were still gay people who wanted equal rights decades earlier, however at the time society was more willing to look the other way while those individuals were treated as second class citizens in many respects by their fellow citizens. And while we’re certainly not there yet, the tides have at least turned enough on that front where majorities are speaking up and denouncing the treatment of their gay friends and family members as something that isn’t right and needs to change.

Waving the Confederate flag around really isn’t any different, and so while a bunch of people still somehow see that flag as the banner of the rebel and tattoo it on their skin as a symbol of pride, another subset is willing to consider the entire story and admit that maybe it’s not something to be as proud about as others would like to think, especially considering racial tensions that still bleed strong throughout our country.

So personally I think that anyone who chooses has every right to fly the Confederate flag should they like, with the exception of government buildings where its tainted history simply has no place, but that doesn’t mean I’m still disposed to turning a blind eye to seeing it on pick-up trucks and t-shirts and every other redneck icon that they carry so proudly. That flag has a lot more to do with than just Lynyrd Skynyrd and Budweiser and the Dukes of Hazzard just like gay marriage is a lot more than just a couple of queers flaunting their sexuality, and in the last couple of weeks I think more than anything we’ve heard segments of the public starting to call bullshit on all of that.

Because the thing is, eventually we’re going to have to shed those losing anthems of a period long behind us if we truly want to move forward as a society – a society that can honestly say that racism no longer divides us as it once did. Coming from a time when it was literally cool to keep other people as slaves, I would like to think that this would be a little more obvious than it’s proving to be, but what can I say?

Getting 350 million people all on the same page is tough and collectively as a country we’re still pretty young, but at least we’re learning … albeit slowly.