I’ve heard a lot of rumbling lately about our possible (and likely) war with Iraq, and being a college student I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about how war is bad.
DUH.
I don’t LIKE war any more than anybody else, but I do recognize that in some circumstances it is a necessary thing. The current conflict with Iraq is a prime example, however rather than harp on that right away I’ll initially establish my point as most intelligent people do—with history.
2002 was a trying year for myself, our country, and our world. After so many years of relative peace, stability, and success we entered the year on a discord—still reeling from the September 11, 2001, attacks and beginning to feel the strains of the economic downturn. Likewise, I entered the year with a number of discords to myself—unhappy in my work at Plexus and haunted by the romantic frustrations of my past despite having been with Melissa over a month.
I had been planning on writing a front page rant about race and race mongering in the United States, and this is a topic I still intend to address in the coming weeks. But as I sat down to begin my rant, I realized that Christmas is this coming Wednesday. I spend much of my life contemplating, discussing, and writing about these grand sociopolitical issues that you hear about in this column all the time and it would be typical of me to publish another rollicking rant about some controversial issue today. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that perhaps now is not the time.
One of my favorite movies is the 1980s comedy slapstick Airplane! During one scene in the movie, it goes through a montage of newspaper headlines and television newscasters discussing the ongoing situation faced by the characters on an airliner over the United States.
The last clip is of a husky political commentator who chimes in, “They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into! I say, let ’em crash.”
(Written for an Admin. in Political Systems [GOVT351] class at George Mason University.)
The Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, is arguably the most despised agency in the United States government. Their purpose is essentially to take money from the citizens of this country . . . lots of it. In fact, the IRS collected over 2 trillion dollars in the year 2000 and processed 226 million tax returns—a daunting task, to say the least.1
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
