| Experiments in Tangible Geometry... & other things | |||
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Tuesday, November 09, 2004 ( 9:17 PM ) Jayme it's been an interesting week. a lot of knitblogs i've come across have been less about knitting and more about politics. there is little mention of politics here, mainly because this has been a record of my slow progress as a knitter, crocheter, and all around crafter. i don't know if there is a label for my stance on politics, but it doesn't matter because labels bring up stereotypes. i shall sum up quickly: i am the oldest in a navy family. moved around little, thankfully, because of the large military presence in san diego. rather few memories of dad while growing up. he was at sea when my youngest sister and i were born. the middle one had dad there, mainly because we were stationed in hawaii. he was gone through desert storm. i have a shoebox of postcards and letters and foreign calling cards from dad in storage somewhere. thankfully he is retired now, but retired with a percentage of disablility. i was there every time he stepped off that ship. i had his mailing address memorized from my letters and things. i was there when one of his ships was finally decommissioned (jason ar-8). i was almost named after that ship. my friend ron is like a brother to me. he defied his parents and joined the army a bit after high school (while i was still in high school -- he's my best friend's oldest brother). their family is also navy. he's only been back from being stationed in alaska for a year or so. he is afraid of being called up. growing up navy in san diego makes it difficult to not know the kinds of people that are being shipped out. many families that my family is friends with is navy, if not military. i grew up with their kinds and watched them join branches of the military. i understand the difficulties in switching presidents during a war, but i hope that 4 years from now we aren't still in some sort of war that promts voters into wanting to keep president bush a third term. for some reason, i am the most liberal person in my family. i don't call my parents (dad mostly) the evening of election day. 4 years ago, dad called me and said, "haha, my president won." my family is conservative, rather republican and very roman catholic. i'm not even that radical! the thing is, invading and occupying a country for a significant amount of time can be more harm than good. look at the philippines. u.s. occupied for the longest time, and when the u.s. left, it still maintained naval/air force bases there. i used to fly in and out from clark. and now, (i think) 7-10% of the nation's income is sent in from expats who left in search of means to support family. history tells me that the u.s. found the location convenient and so they negotiated with the reigning dictator. our military helped marcos in order to keep their bases. now many educated people in the philippines have left, just so they can make money to send home. if you couldn't afford the education, you joined the u.s. military to become a citizen and bring your family over. is this what's going to happen to other places? occupied territories suffer once the occupation stops. i've seen the weakening of the filipino peso. in the span of 10 years, i've seen it become half as valuable, in comparison to our dollar. i'm not outraged at the outcome of the election; it has led to lots of thinking. and reading. i've been taking in lots of other viewpoints, because understanding helps more than unfounded accusations and (virtual) yelling. i realize that this isn't that short. that's mainly because the class in the studio has run terribly late. 21:15 and now i can start closing. i think i lost my point in there somewhere. anyways. i'm more liberal than anyone else in my family, but i think i've been that way growing up, so it's not college. not sure where it comes from. i don't think that people that voted for bush are any particular sort of terrible, but i'd like to know how they think. hey, i've got a commenting system! feel free to use it. there are only a handful of people that read this, but what do you think? # | 
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