Quilly's Three Word Challenge

Thursday brings us Quilly's three words you may never heard of before challenge. This week's words were: comity, sublunary, and specious. Here are the definitions:

Comity: a friendly social environment; loose, a wide-spread community based on common social institutions; avoidance of proselytizing members of another religious denomination.

Sublunary: relating to the terrestrial world.

Specious: having a deception attraction or allure; having a false look of truth or genuineness.


Listening to the news coverage of these specious, supposedly "grass roots" tea parties around the country is enough to make me spit tacks. We have outraged citizens protesting higher taxes just when the taxes of 93% of us have gone DOWN. We have the Republican governor of Texas threatening to secede from the Union. Texas is that gave us the evil dim-wit George W. Bush wants to leave the union because of big government. Oddly they weren't bothered when GWB spied on us, took us into a war we shouldn't have entered, gave us a record deficit, stuck his finger into personal matters like a family's private decision about pulling the plug on a brain-dead woman or the right of gay people to marry one another.....

I really don't like being a bigot, but Republicans bring out the worst in me. They are continuing to try the route they used when they had power... to keep the country divided and fearful. Commity - in it's best sense - is their enemy. In Republican eyes, in Republican parlance, the social welfare of the bulk of our citizens is "wasteful spending." They seem to have no shame about simply repeating old lies and half truths over and over and pulling in the gullible and unhappy with fears of freedom lost. It's ugly, insane and short-sighted.... not that I have strong feelings on the subject.

Then there's the issue of government spending. Republicans had no trouble spending money on rich people and bombs and spying. That, I guess isn't big government. For people who are supposed to be fiscally conscious they also seem incapable of grasping the idea that sometimes you have to spend money to save money. They continue to ignore the long-term impact of some of the projected expenditures. Our current failures in health care are costing us tons of money and lives both. Sometimes being thrifty is smart. Sometimes it's self-destructive. Sometimes it's not so much thrift as choosing who to help. Republicans don't so much like helping poor people. If anything is a testimony to the need to improve our educational system it's the fact that Repubicans (whose fingerprints and money are all over these tea parties) can get people to protest tax hikes in a year when their taxes have gone down... using the theme of taxation without representation when that too is patently absurd since if they voted they are being represented... and even if they didn't vote they are being represented by the person they chose by non-action.

When I lived in New York I was blessed to live in a complex called Stuyvesant Town. They ran the complex wisely. They took care of problems as soon as they arose. They didn't wait for the little leak to turn into a ceiling collapse. They fixed it while it was a little leak. It cost them money to keep a staff around to do this, but in the long run it saved them major expenses and it made Stuyvesant Town a nice place to live in. A country where bridges don't collapse, where roads are maintained, where schools aren't toxic and students have books and computers is a better country to live in, even if it costs a little more in the short term to catch up from all the neglect we have experienced in past years. This neglect lies at the feet of Republicans and Democrats alike, but it's time to turn it around. Doing so will bring us into the 21st century in terms of our power grid, which will make life better for all of us. It will be a step toward educating more children to be qualified for better jobs and so that they can live better, happier lives. Taking care of health care will save lives, keep people working, prevent catastrophic illnesses, and make us a better democracy in the long run.

This isn't pie in the sky. It isn't talk. It's keen attention not to misty realms of "tomorrow" but to true care and attention to sublunary issues.

I've long said - before I became truly poor myself - that something people with money don't understand is that poverty is expensive. Of necessity,, the poor often have to buy cheap because it's all they CAN do, when buying better quality goods would last them longer and ultimately cost them less. Cheap clothes, cheap furniture, cheap toys, cheap washing machines don't last as long and don't work as well. This is kind of off topic.... but what made me think of it is that we as a nation have too often gone for cheap rather than good. Whether it pans out in the end only time will tell. Hopefully, we can keep the forces of the status quo from hackin the vision and substance out of it, from spewing specious nonsence about burdening future generations for "frivolous" causes (like health care and education and modernizing our world).

I guess that's enough of a rant for today. I got the three words in.

It's beautiful here today. The sun is out and the temperatures are truly Spring-like. Yippee!!!!

This is Princess.... Shannon's new Webkins critter.
She is the pet of the month which is a big deal at Webkins.
Like Angel, looks like she is longing to go out and play.