I’m supposed to support our troops.

I’m supposed to support our troops. I used to be one; I ought to know how it feels to be left behind by budget cuts and red tape. I know how it feels to be among the honored who served our country, and then need help from the V.A. Retreating from battle just doesn’t seem American.

 

Yet, when we stood upon the precipice of war yet a second time, with a dictator whom we supported and supplied no less, instead of listening to Saddam who told us he had no WMDs, we ignored diplomacy and chose to yet again impose our boots upon the necks of innocent people and remove a leader from office. I often find it amusing, for lack of a better word, when those who find Saddam’s crimes reviling speak up about them in the U.S. They never spoke of them before. They were woefully ignorant. They instead sung the praises of President Ronald Reagan, who was one of the main suppliers to both the Taliban and Saddam. But times change, and so too must regimes.

 

Night after night, I hear of heroes from 9/11/01 and from the wars on my evening news. And I’m tired of people doing their jobs and being called heroes: Firemen, policemen, soldiers. I understand that one of these people might be a personal hero to you. I’m cool with that. But you know, in the grand scheme of things, heroes are the people who prevent tragedy, not killers or people who just do their job. People are so desperate for heroes that they made up so much information post-9/11 because they needed something.

 

Ground zero was a lexicon term exclusively used for nuclear detonation. It was co-opted for a scare tactic to burn the iconography into the American collective mind. And it worked. But not on me. Because times change, but the meanings of our words shouldn’t change.

 

It has been said that it’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback about this war, but I say not if you’ve been paying attention all along. The signs were there, the proof or lack thereof was always there, and now the bloodshed is here to stay. But times change, and so too must our thinking.

 

I’m supposed to support our troops and rally around the flag. I’m not supposed to think about it. Supporting the troops really means not getting them in harm’s way to begin with, not being a Bandwagon Patriot since 9/11/01. But times change, and thinking and using diplomacy just doesn’t seem American anymore.

2007 MAC Michiana ADDY Award Media Release: Follow Up

Here is a simple list and press release for the winners of the 2007 MAC Michiana ADDY Awards. This was sent to the South Bend Tribune, Elkhart Truth and Michiana Shopper.

Media Release 

For Release January 16, 8 p.m.

Contact:  Christopher A. Sallak Vice President of ADDYs

574-284-4625    csallak@yahoo.com        www.macmichiana.org 

Ad Club Presents 2007 ADDY Awards  SOUTH BEND, Ind. –  The Marketing and Advertising Club of Michiana (MAC Michiana) presented its 2007 ADDY Awards for advertising creative excellence Friday night at theMarie P. DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts, with more than 160 members of the local advertising and marketing community in attendance.Conducted annually by the American Advertising Federation, the ADDY Awards represent the advertising industry’s largest and most representative competition for creative excellence.

Best of Show for print advertising went to Todd Allen Design, for its Renegade product brochure. Martin’s Super Markets won the Best of Show for electronic advertising for the Want It Fast/Want It All/Meat To Eat television advertising campaign.In the student category, Ellen Needham Imbur of Ivy Tech Community College South Bend received the Best of Show Student Print award.

Todd Allen Design received the most awards — a total of eight trophies. This includes two Gold ADDYs for client Dansr and one for Kibbi LLC, and Silver ADDYs for clients Big C Lumber, Crown Audio, Inc., Explore Media, and two for Goshen Health System.

Richard Harrison Bailey/The Agency received four awards, including Gold ADDYs for Warner Pacific College and Nick Bailey and Lauren Swihart, plus Silver ADDYs for clients University of Illinois and Warner Pacific College.Whirlpool received three awards, including two Gold ADDYS for Whirlpool and Gladiator product brochures. The agency was also awarded a Silver ADDY for its Maytag Epic Tradeshow brochure.

Fish Marketing Inc. won two ADDYS, a Gold and a Silver ADDY, both for their work on for work on behalf of Hacienda Mexican restaurants.Pathfinders won two Silver ADDYs, for their clients Supreme Corporation and Global Access Point.

Burkhart Advertising also won a Gold and a Silver ADDY, for their self promotional work and work with Value Center Big & Tall Outlet, respectively.Other winners were Grass Roots Media, Fish Marketing, TaigMarks, Inc., and Phisz Designs, Inc., each winning one award each.

Student ADDYS were awarded to Ivy Tech South Bend students Raymond Johnson, Scott Boehner, Axel Hernandez and Ellen Needham Imbur.

Judges for the ADDY contest were Bill McDonald, creative director, One Alliance Communications, Lexington, Ky.; Toni Bloom, visual communication assistant professor, Gateway Community and Technical College, Cincinnati, Ohio; and Clark Most, freelance art director, Midland, Mich.

A local affiliate of the American Advertising Federation, MAC Michiana promotes and protects the well-being and advertising through a number of programs including the ADDY contest and monthly luncheons featuring leaders of the advertising and marketing industry. 

-end-

Stop this War re-write

Our freedom, it is said, is won with the blood of brave soldiers. But as a thinking person, I have always maintained freedom was best maintatined by peacemakers, and by soldiers as a last resort. As a veteran, I know that our soldiers always need support, in times of conflict and not. As a disabled veteran, I attest that the system is merely set up to send men to die and to be mutilated, but to receive little support from their government and it’s people when they get home. One of the things about war is that it tends to bring out what people call ‘heroes,’ disabled veterans, and dead soldiers. If you really support the troops, you do so with funds, not empty slogans and jingoistic ribbons on vehicles.

When I was a child, Vietnam was the same issue as it is today. The very same people who fought for ending Vietnam who ought to know better, are now now proud to “show their support of our troops.” Supporting the troops would mean having them home with their families making a decent wage and being taken care of, not being put in harms way in a civil war with no end. It seems a shame they didn’t learn anything thirty some years ago about warfare and government slight of hand.

What was once black is now white. Now people give away their freedoms for a glimmer of a false sense of security and are willing to send others into harms way to garner that feeling.

The right wing agenda is to follow an old testament standard of an eye for an eye to make them pay. How many have we killed? What have the Iraqi people done to us? Were we right to go there to begin with? We have decimated their country. It is unforgivable. Bandwagon patriotism is not the answer, nor blind obedience to an administration that has gotten every single intelligence issue incorrect.

President Bush continues to wage his own personal agenda and war instead of listening to his constituents who are actually paying the price, while he continues to smirk his way through press conferences. As if people dying was something to smirk and joke about. I want my elected officials at the top branches of government to know that when I disagree with their policies, it is not up to them to carte blanch ignore them. Bush, for example, represents the American people, who, through a majority, support an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

The only way to support our troops is to bring them home. Not send more of them into harms way. The thought of that Republican strategy, for lack of a better word, is sickening. More people should die so their sacrifice wasn’t in vain? And what about those deaths? Will it ever end? Will we ever give peace a chance? I’m sorry to be the harbinger of bad news, but folks, every Soldier and Marine who dies in this war is dying for Iraqi freedom, not ours. And it’s for a freedom they do not want. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but it is true. You nor I are any safer because a serviceman died in Iraq. Terrorists do not hate us for our freedom, Middle-Easterners (and thusly Muslim peoples) have never shared our way of life. It’s that simple. It is time to re-focus our priorities and for our President to stop using our citizens as cannon fodder.

No one wants to take away funding for this war because it will look like they don’t support our troops. It isn’t like we’re going to leave them behind without what is necessary, they will be here at home. But that’s how the strings are manipulated. If you want to support the troops, support the money.

No one ever stops and thinks of using diplomacy in this country. We have a great deal of weapons at our disposal, but not arbitrators or diplomats. If we spent a fraction of the time and money we spend on peace that we do on war, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the complicated mess we are in right now and will be in the foreseeable future. Peacemakers are the real heroes who should get medals of honor, not people who just follow blindly in times of war. People who stop bloodshed before it happens, not who enable it. Under orders or not. What good is a freedom that’s bought with a gun? Diplomacy works much better and costs less, pound for pound, for the bombs we drop and the blood that cakes foreign soil.

Someday, when the war is over, people will inevitably want to build a memorial to all of the servicemen who died during the conflict. And tons of money will be poured into a design and land. And you know what? I won’t contribute a dime.

Because I’d have contributed to a peaceful resolution.  Because monuments to dead soldiers who followed orders is not as great a deed as someone who would have prevented this travesty to begin with. No, instead, I’ll be giving my money to fellow disabled servicemen and women who have been left behind by a government that didn’t think far enough in advance to treat outgoing soldiers very well. Because they so desperately need, and righteously deserve the best health care they can get instead of being in a war without meaning.

If getting out of Iraq now means stopping the funding for this war: Stop the funding now.

2007 MAC Michiana ADDY Awards review

Friday night’s ADDY Award for the 2007 Michiana area were a smashing success! Thank you to all who attended, your contribution to our local advertising community is invaluable. It was a great turnout, about 160 advertisers and marketers in our local Michiana area.

The food was good and there were few complaints. Everyone seemed to like the cash bar and the wide open spaces that the DeBartolo Hall afforded everyone to spread out and enjoy the main attraction: the work on display!

In the meantime, video presentation for both Silver and Gold Award winners is available here.

A more comprehensive list of winning advertising team members is available here, and pictures will be available from the gala event soon!

2007 Michiana ADDY Awards! (rewrite)

MAC Michiana is the premier organization in Michiana for all marketing, advertising and media professionals as well as for college students pursuing studies in the field. And we serve the area’s marketing and advertising community through joint career-enhancing luncheons, networking opportunities, communications and other joint ventures. If you are part of the marketing and advertising community of Michiana, you belong in MAC Michiana. MAC Michiana provides monetary support to area college students pursuing studies in the marketing and communications fields. This support takes several forms:

• $1,000 grant to help any National Student Advertising Competition team attend the district competition.
• $500 for the best student entry from each Michiana-area college in the annual ADDY Advertising Competition.
• Students can pay $5 instead of the $20 member rate or $30 non-member rate to attend MAC Michiana luncheons.

The money for scholarships is raised at the MAC Michiana Auction each November.Become a member today!

 Attend the 2007 ADDY Advertising Awards!

This year’s ADDY awards will be held on Friday, February 16, 2007 at The Marie P. DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts.

University of Notre Dame.

5:30 p.m.- Hors d’oeuvres, cash bar and viewing entries

7:00 p.m.- Awards Presentation. Please RSVP by Wednesday, February 7, 2007.
To RSVP: Click here, or call 574.233.3066 or 574.323.7190 (cell)

Judging:January 19-20, 2007 – O’Laughlin Auditorium, Saint Mary’s College

ADDY Show:February 16, 2007 —DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, University of Notre Dame
5:30 – Gallery opens
7:00 – Awards Show

If you have questions, please contact Chris Sallak, V.P. of ADDYs, at csallak@yahoo.com.

Judges:

Bill McDonald, Creative Director/One Alliance Communications, Lexington, Kentucky

Bill began his career in Canada, working as a writer/director for radio stations CJOB in Winnipeg and CHUM in Toronto, then as a writer for J. Walter Thompson Advertising in Toronto, then a freelance writer/director. His work included Ford of Canada and the first Just Say No anti-drug campaign. While in Canada he collected more than 200 national and international awards for broadcast creativity including Billboard awards for internationally syndicated radio documentaries including The Evolution of Rock, The Story of The Beatles and The Elvis Presley Story. Next, Los Angeles, where Bill partnered with broadcast legend Chuck Blore to write, direct and produce award winning creative for almost every national advertiser and every major advertising agency in the country plus several in England and Australia.

Among his notable campaigns are Reach Out and Touch Someone for AT&T (radio), The NFL ON FOX (television), Call BAC for British Airways Cargo (radio) and California Camero (radio).  During his 15 years in Los Angeles he collected over 300 more national and international awards for broadcast creativity, including two Emmys.  While in Los Angeles, he co-taught classes in Broadcast Communications at UCLA and Cal State Northridge.  He is a published author and an in-demand industry awards competition judge whose credits include the CLIOs, the Ollies, the New York Festival Awards, London International Awards and ADDY competitions throughout the country.

Clark Most, Art Director and part-time professor, Midland, Michigan.

Clark Most has been the principal of Redpoint Design Direction in Midland for twenty years and is an Associate Professor of Art at Central Michigan University where he teaches graphic design.
Clark has serviced companies both large and small including Dow Chemical, Hobi Outback, the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament and others. He has received national awards for his photography and design work and has had his work published in a number of design annuals. This last year he was the recipient of a district Gold Addy award and his design work is being used by Finch Paper company to promote their paper products. 

Toni Bloom, GCTC Visual Communication Assistant Professor and Student AAF Chapter Advisor, Cincinnati With 22 years of experience in advertising in the Cincinnati area, Toni Bloom brings the real world into her Northern Kentucky classroom at Gateway Community and Technical College every day. She also introduces her students to the business environment by forging partnerships that have netted real-world assignments for her graphic design students. A dual focus on design fundamentals and client service helps create a culture of creativity that benefits Gateway students and business professionals who help keep the program current. Bloom began her advertising career as a stat camera operator working her way through the ranks to Associate Creative Director at Rick Warner and Associates. For the past 11 years Bloom has held what she terms her “most challenging and rewarding position” as a Visual Communication Art instructor at Gateway. “It’s especially rewarding to see former students successful, employed and winning lots of Addys,” says Bloom.

Bloom has been a member of the Advertising Club of Cincinnati for 5 years, a member of its Board of Directors for 4 years, Chair of the Social committee, has served on the Scholastic Relations committee, and recruits several new members. Bloom’s most recent accomplishment is forming and advising the Advertising and Design Student Group. The group sponsors several judged student exhibits, and they are a student AAF chapter. Under her tutelage, a Gateway student received a prestigious national Silver Addy from the American Advertising Federation, a first for Gateway and the Cincinnati Ad Club.

 

In addition, Bloom has garnered high-profile real-world assignments for her corporate identity class, including designing the new logo for Kenton County Schools, designing a logo for Western Kentucky Audubon Region and designing a commemorative poster for the Lane’s End Stakes at Turfway Park race track.Bloom is a native of Cincinnati and continues to freelance as much as time allows. She is a member of the Union Township Kiwanis and the mother of three children. Her kids, four horses and three dogs keep her very active. 

Op-Ed: Stop this War

I just love the news footage of American Soldiers kicking in Iraqi doors and ruining their property. I think the goal of the footage is to show me that something is being done, but what I’m not sure. Property damage. Disrespect to a foreign land and peoples? Our own liberty’s are supposed to be secure from encroachment. Our freedom, it is said, is won with the blood of brave soldiers. One of the first things they do when you enter military service in this country is take away your freedoms. I must say, I have never taken them for granted since. As a veteran I stood proud and felt I was defending our way of life.

Now people give away their freedoms for a glimmer of a false sense of security and are willing to send others into harms way to garner that feeling.

What was once black is now white. The very same people who fought for ending Vietnam who ought to know better, are now now proud to “show their support of our troops.” Supporting the troops would mean having them home with their families making a decent wage and being taken care of, not being put in harms way in a civil war with no end. It seems a shame they didn’t learn anything thirty some years ago about warfare and government slight of hand.

The right wing agenda is to follow an old testament standard of an eye for an eye to make them pay. How many have we killed? What have the Iraqi people done to us? Were we right to go there to begin with? We have decimated their country. It is unforgivable. Bandwagon patriotism is not the answer, nor blind obedience to an administration that has gotten every single intelligence issue incorrect.

Republicans maintain that they are a serious party with an agenda. After 9/11/2001, a Republican Congress wasted their time with Freedom Fries. President Bush continues to wage his own personal agenda and war instead of listening to his constituents who are actually paying the price, while he continues to smirk his way through press conferences. As if people dying was something to smirk and joke about. I want my elected officials at the top branches of government to know that when I disagree with their policies, it is not up to them to carte blanch ignore them. Bush, for example, represents the American people, who, through a majority, support an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

The only way to support our troops is to bring them home. Not send more of them into harms way. The thought of that Republican strategy, for lack of a better word, is sickening. More people should die so their sacrifice wasn’t in vain? And what about those deaths? Will it ever end? Will we ever give peace a chance? I’m sorry to be the harbinger of bad news, but folks, every Soldier and Marine who dies in this war is dying for Iraqi freedom, not ours. And it’s for a freedom they do not want. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but it is true. You nor I are any safer because a serviceman died in Iraq. Terrorists do not hate us for our freedom, Middle-Easterners (and thusly Muslim peoples) have never shared our way of life. It’s that simple. It is time to re-focus our priorities and for our President to stop using our citizens as cannon fodder.

No one wants to take away funding for this war because it will look like they don’t support our troops. It isn’t like we’re going to leave them behind without what is necessary, they will be here at home. But that’s how the strings are manipulated. If you want to support the troops, support the money.

No one ever stops and thinks of using diplomacy in this country. We have a great deal of weapons at our disposal, but not arbitrators or diplomats. If we spent a fraction of the time and money we spend on peace that we do on war, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the complicated mess we are in right now and will be in the foreseeable future. Peacemakers are the real heroes who should get medals of honor, not people who just follow blindly in times of war. People who stop bloodshed before it happens, not who enable it. Under orders or not. What good is a freedom that’s bought with a gun? Diplomacy works much better and costs less, pound for pound, for the bombs we drop and the blood that cakes foreign soil.

Someday, when the war is over, they’ll inevitably want to build a memorial to all of the servicemen who died during the conflict. And tons of money will be poured into a design and land. And you know what? I won’t contribute a dime. Because I’d have contributed to a peaceful resolution.  Because monuments to dead soldiers who followed orders is not as great a deed as someone who would have prevented this travesty to begin with. No, instead, I’ll be giving my money to fellow disabled servicemen and women who have been left behind by a government that didn’t think far enough in advance to treat outgoing soldiers well, give them the care they so desperately need, and righteously deserve.

If getting out of Iraq now means stopping the funding for this war: Stop the funding now.

Blindsided

I suppose the beginnings of my issues with this war began far before it, when I was in the military. See, I was enlisted as a Security Specialist or Security Forces in the U.S. Air Force. Most of my job was counterterrorism. It was blindingly boring for the most part. I guarded foreign dignitaries, aides, tankers, bombers, missiles, weapons of mass destruction (I think that’s about all I can say legally, but use your imagination) primarily at the ‘showcase of SAC,’ Ellsworth Air Force Base outside of Rapid City, South Dakota. SAC stood for Strategic Air Command and controlled two thirds of our nation’s nuclear triad. I also served on Olympic Arena training teams, and our base’s E.S.T. (Emergency Situation Team, S.W.A.T.). It was a dark joke amongst our fellow airmen who were privy to CIA and FBI intelligence that it was only a matter of time before we were attacked on our own soil. No one wanted it, but it was a harsh reality.

The way we trained made us think like the enemy, in a matter of speaking. We were a defensive force that constantly looked for ways to exploit our own defenses in order to protect and patch them. By doing that, you learn many things about your nation and its defense, many are not pleasant. I knew the Taliban were bad people before the ‘event.’ I remember in the summer of 2001 when people largely ignored their destruction of Buddhist shrines and monumental statuary in Afghanistan that had been there for hundreds if not thousands of years. It simply didn’t affect them. I also knew that the Taliban were very heavily contributed to by the United States in the height of the Cold War against the Soviets and were able to keep them from occupying their land.

September 11, 2001 came as a shock to me as it did everyone else. And yet, it didn’t. I expected it. I knew it would come sooner or later. And when it did, I turned to my wife and detailed to her, at great length, how the next few years would play out. How Americans would lash out at citizens. How Americans would suddenly become patriotic overnight. How Americans would find a scapegoat. How needless people would die just to satisfy an insatiable bloodlust because reality had finally reached our shores.

In a matter of days a friend who I had shared many social, political and religious thoughts with via the Internet, sent me this picture from a online Enquirer like rag that featured a devil like face Photoshopped into the smoke of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Actually she sent it to a lot of people. I found myself so angry that people would perpetuate this kind of ignorance that I lashed out and did something I had never done, nor will again. I responded to the whole mailing list with a refutation of the fact that the devil was indeed not involved. It was just misguided, evil men, who were already dead. 

My intentions were noble and pure, but this of course did not stop the torrent of hatred that sailed my way. I learned then and there, that people were hurt and willing to lash out at anyone who did not join in the jingoistic fervor. I was appalled, but it wasn’t to be only lesson. No, evidently, I’m not quite that smart.

A few years later, just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was on a plant tour of a local business. I had just started a new job a few weeks ago and was being introduced to all of the local vendors whom I would be doing business with. I was very excited about the opportunity and am very professional when working and meeting with clients.The representative of the company introduced me to the President of the company and he dispensed the usual pleasantries. Trying to find a common denominator, he began probing my history for past links to professional organizations in the field. Unfortunately, I had taken a very non-traditional route in life. Military first, worked my way into management in the business and retail world, and then back to college. So, I had little to draw upon. When I stated this, and that I was a veteran, he seized his opportunity and asked my opinion of the war. I had stated that I was a disabled veteran, and this piqued the interest of the man, his eyes beaming; sure that he had found someone who was certain to share his point of view. That we should invade and kill innocents. After all, someone had attacked us, right? Well, the evidence never pointed to Iraq (some of us didn’t have to play Monday morning quarterback… the lack of evidence was there all along if you were paying attention), and I knew that my informed opinion was contrary to his, so I tried to duck the question, but he would not relent. “No, please, tell me!” 

“No. You don’t really want to know,” Knowing of course, that he didn’t, but he thought he did.

“Yes, I do.”He would not let it drop. 

After about two minutes of bantering back and forth, I told him I would tell him, if he promised to keep my opinion to himself, professional, off the record and understand that it was just my opinion. “Please respect me for it, regardless of what it is.”

“Of course!”

The woman giving me the guided tour would close the door for me, so that my opinion would not be broadcast out into the hallway. She looked very uncomfortable.To his astonishment, I gave exacting reasons for my position why we should not invade and kill. Why we should not call the site of the World Trade Center “Ground Zero,” (it was not a nuclear bomb…this was language cooked up to propagate fear) and that not nearly 3,000 Americans died in the attacks. Many were citizens of other nations, and they are mourning also. I further stated that the public was apathetic and largely uninformed about the real issues at stake and how long the war would last and how far it would spill over. Could we go to war with Syria or Iran? Talk about a bloodbath. Not them…us.

It was about a year later when I had my first performance review with the company I was working for that I learned that President of this company had told my boss the details of our conversation, only a few weeks prior. He had waited almost a year, and then vented a personal conversation that he dragged out of me, my personal opinion, no less, into a professional arena. I was subsequently chastised in my review for making the company look bad for my own personal opinions while on the job. I was furious. I had indeed done the deed, but I was sabotaged and set up.

It was from that point on that I learned that my opinions could and would be held against me, whether I wanted them to be or not. I thusly am careful to watch what I say and to whom. A shame really, as this is a country based upon freedom. It is sad that you cannot exercise it without fear of reprisal. Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, as long as everyone is in agreement. As soon as you step out of line…the sheepdog mentality takes over. In the end, I don’t blame them though…I should have known all along but was naïve enough to think that people could be smart enough to see for themselves. Instead I learned was that they are not. I learned that I need to pick my battles. I need to learn when to speak and when not to. 

Changes to the blog.

I uploaded an Avatar today! Getting more comfortable with this blog. Re-wrote my story today also. Check that out.

This should be easy for me…but it’s not.

I found sentence and paragraph structures in Jajs’s blog a refreshing pace to break up the long article. Very nice use of facts and figures! I really understand what she means when I read her writing, as she is an accomplished communicator. I grasp the concepts and the writing flows.

Another example is Barbaraj, whose writing follows intricate paths of questions and answers. Usually in groupings of three (tripartite construction), and done very skillfully. Language is a factor, especially in both of these last two people’s last blogs, as they deal with cultural issues relating to age. Words are used to indicate to the reader that they are from an older generation, and it is clear what gender they are from by what choice of words they pick, and what topics they choose to write about within the story itself.

I know Barbaraj and Jajs well enough to respect them and know that they are great people. They are genuine and honest. I know that from discussions, deliberations, and disagreements. I know they are good communicators. I always thought I was a good communicator and still do. Somehow, though, I feel like I’m holding back.

When I try and write, and find a style, I feel contrived. I feel suspect. I feel dirty.

I think for me, struggling to get it all down, as it were, makes me second guess the emphasis and nature of my writing. I think I put down candor into my writing, but somehow, I haven’t hit the stride yet. It takes practice, I suppose. This is a much different form of writing than I am used to professionally or academically. It’s pretty much how I speak, but not how I express myself in written form.

I must find a style that fits.

Something that evokes my passions yet retains the credibility of my writing skills. Something simple or something complicated? Something not yet decided. Simple is always seen as better, yet, I really don’t articulate myself in that way all of the time. I think more ‘thought out’ in written form. I think part of what has made me struggle for years is that I don’t wear a mask. Who I am is who I am. Masks are phony and I never wanted to be phony. I’m the same with my grandmother to my wife to my boss.

There have been times I wish I did wear one and it could be that easy. It would have saved me a little embarrassment over the years telling people what I really think, when they don’t really want to know…

It could be that easy…but it’s not.

But that’s where we are isn’t it? Do I evolve or remain the same? Is one better than the other? Could there be a benefit to hiding myself from the world and faking it some of the time? I’ve already admitted there is. I’m just not sure the benefits outweigh the idealistic notion of being true to you. Well, that was cathartic.

Chocola and irony

October 26, 2006

After reading the Fed Up with Everybody article by Bob Herbert, from The New York Times, I had to laugh.

Poor old Congressman Chocola. Got what he deserved. After all the letters I wrote to him telling him how much I disliked him siding with President Bush and receiving pat form letters in the mail back; informing me that he supported the President all the way! How ironic. How ironic that he would separate himself from Bush. I was working for a Republican strategy company for a very short period of time just before the election. If you could call them that, as they had no real direction or idea what they were doing, but I digress. They all knew that he was in a tight spot, and supported him. Friends with him. Helped get him elected. And yet, on TV and in the paper, Chocola is putting on a brave face, lying and stating that he’s going to win. He lost his ass. I find that ironic. Guess you should have listened to some of those constituents, huh?