Neanderpundit

By all means, if you intended to enter and haven’t so far, please do so before August 1.

I look forward to scoring your targets.

I hope at least ONE person is as miserable a shot as me.

Thanks

Og

I hope you’re all getting your friends and intend to sign up, folks. i have only ten entries including myself, and I’d like to have at least twenty.

By all means pass the word. If you want to shoot as a group and send in targets as a group to save postage, that will be OK as well, just warn me. All of you who have been nice enough to link to me, post another reminder if you would, please!

When you open a box of chocolates a la Forrest Gump, you often find that the candies with the soft centers are the most attractive, wheras the ones which are dark plain squares often have hard centers. My sister used to bite the candies and if she found a hard one, put it back. When she offered them to guests, she’d say “the ones with the bite marks are hard”

I’m like that. I’m certainly not on the hard left, and the hard right frankly pisses me off. I’m in the hard center, and I have my share of bite marks.

As I define it, the hard center is where a lot of America stands on a day to day basis. We don’t think we need any more government, and we’d be happier with less. We don’t like our pockets being picked by politicians, and we further dislike the ease with which they increase how deeply our pockets are picked.

We have a distrust of those who are quick to judge. On the right and on the left, we see people who are engaged in a shouting contest about who is in the right, and the only sure thing is that we, the people, will lose again.

We dislike the idea of abortion, but we’d rather women who do so have the safe legal option than see teenagers kill themselves in alleys with coathangers. We do what we can to try to promote better things where we can. If we have a goal where this is concerned, it is to make abortion as birth control a thing of the past.

We look at homosexuality as something that is not our business, unless we are. We don’t care. We think Marriage is something that involves procreation so we don’t think homosexuals can do it, but we think homosexuals should have all the legal rights of married couples. Many of us think that marriages should not be issues of law but the domain of the religious societies anyway, and that the legal “marriage” is already a sort of civil union, since it exists in the eyes of the law and not in the eyes of many churches. I don’t know anyone who thinks that homosexuals don’t have a right to be happy.

We are moderately religious. A lot of us are Christians. Christ is a powerful figure in our lives and we are mistrustful of non Christians.We have seen the evil that churches do to their own parishioners and to one another, and we tend to mistrust organized religion in and of itself, though we still partake out of a feeling that the best of us can still make the experience worthwhile, and it often is.

We look at racisim as something that is wrong when it is practised by anyone of any race. We feel that the only way for it to end is for all the people crying about it to shut the fuck up, and for anyone who discriminates to be punished in an appropriate manner. Not more than is appropriate, and not less. We feel the same about sexism.

We believe that charity begins at home. We believe that we can make our charity dollars go further if we control their journey ourselves. We don’t like to tell people what we do to help other people, as a general rule, because being praised for being charitable diminishes the charity, in our minds. We don’t think of charity as a tax deduction first, last or ever.

People in the hard center tend to disagree on minor issues, many would take issue with what I’ve written above. Most agree on this: the current system of govermnent is broken. It may be irretrievably broken. We’d like it fixed, and we don’t know what to do to fix it, or at least we don’t know what to do that’s not going to get us all killed. Certainly, the current process is not fixing things, it’s only contributing to the overdevelopment of the government we have already.

I don’t know all the questions. I don’t have any answers. I feel it should change, before it gets so bad the only alternative is to leave.