Fourth of July & Quitting Time

This will be my 985th blog post. I'm thinking that I may either call it quits at one thousand or maybe just take a long break. I don't know. Blog writing is as addictive as cigarettes. And I've given those up, like Twain, who said quitting smoking was easy. He and I have done it many times. It isn't that I'm running out of topics. Good heavens, every day the news is filled with stories worth commenting on. And movies and books and television shows are still available for reviews. I think it may be that I'm feeling claustrophobic as my life ruts keep getting deeper and deeper. Too many days and nights exactly the same, so much so that I can't keep track of the days flying by, time just a comet racing across my horizon. I'll decide about the quitting when I get to 999.

The Fourth of July is now behind us. There were fireworks displays all over the country, with countless performers singing our nation’s praises, reminding us of where we were 239 years ago and how far we’ve come since that 1776 Fourth of July. It was a wonderful day. We all had good reason to celebrate our freedoms. It was also a day of holding our breath, waiting to see if the ISIS idiots would launch one or more attacks on our country, on our celebrating citizenry. And they didn’t. I hope it was simply that they couldn’t rather than that they didn’t want to. I would like to think that the bully boys and girls of the Middle East don’t have the firepower for any large-scale attack within our borders. I would like to think that our security forces and security measures could make such attacks impossible, on the Fourth or any other day of the year. I think it should be the end of the Jihadists’ holding us and the rest of the world hostage. But how do we accomplish that? We can’t resort to their tactics of simply killing whoever doesn’t believe as they do. We can’t win them over with love. We seemingly can’t convince them to just leave the rest of the world alone and have them go about their own religious monkey business. I keep wondering what would happen if all of us in the U. S. were magically transposed to Iraq or Iran and all of ISIS or a conglomeration of Jihadists were transposed to this country, living here, ruling here, with our present military might. They would undoubtedly rain nuclear bombs down on our heads, killing all of us and however many others in that part of the world who didn’t share their beliefs. Wouldn’t matter to them how much collateral damage resulted. Just gotta kill all pagans in order to attain that heavenly reward. That makes no sense. What sort of Creator would want that?