Inauguration Day — Sorry, World!

posted in: public affairs 2

I wasn’t going to get into politics right away, but the calendar snuck up and forced my hand. So I’m here to say to the rest of the world–I’m really, really sorry. We Americans elected him who should not be named–well, that or we let him steal the election again–it’s hard to say, with all of the voting chicanery that seems to have taken place in Ohio and Florida (surprise! surprise!).

So many millions of us tried so hard to get Bush (oops! I wasn’t supposed to name him!) out of the White House, and we failed. But we’re not out, even if we’re down, and progressive America is far better organized than ever before. There’s hope–if we make it through the next four years.

It’s pretty much been said before, so I’m not going to try to rehash it all here. But what really bothers me most, I think, is the divide that has opened in America, particularly along religious lines. I just cannot by God (and I mean that literally) fathom why people who profess to vote as Christians would stand for this administration. Let’s do a little thought experiment:

Which of the following most represents faithful Christian thinking?

1. Lying to lead the nation into a preemptive war–and killing or maiming over a thousand of our own people, as well as upward of a hundred thousand Iraqis

2. Filling the coffers of the already wealthy (Halliburton and Enron, anyone?), while bleeding our school systems and jacking up an enormous deficit

3. Rampaging against the environmental protections that have been painstakingly put in place over decades

4. Destroying our standing in the international community through unrelenting arrogance

5. Refusing to tolerate dissent within the administration on matters crucial to world security

6. Dismissing the Geneva conventions as irrelevant

7. Uh…none of the above?

I don’t get it. Not that he does these things, because he’s a lying, cheating, conniving fraud–but that anyone, and in particular, sincere Christians, would follow him. Deception, deception, all is deception.

Opening Round

Welcome to “Pushing a Snake Up a Hill”!

Although I have maintained a web site for a good number of years, this is my first entry into the blogosphere. If you’ve come here from my web site, you already know that I write science fiction and may be familiar with my books. If you stumbled in here by another door, you probably know nothing about me. So please allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Jeff Carver, and I’ve been a working professional writer for not quite thirty years. In that time, I’ve written and had published 14 novels and a number of shorter pieces. Not a huge output by the standards of many of my contemporaries–but then, I’ve always been a slow writer. I like to think that some of my work is pretty good, despite the infrequency of publication. My most recent novel, Eternity’s End, came out a few years ago and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. I’ve been working ever since on the fourth book of a series called The Chaos Chronicles, and have been contending with difficulty in finding enough time to write (while I do other kinds of writing and editing to earn a living), as well as struggling with the book on its own terms. (It feels a little grandiose to say that I’ve had writer’s block, but is probably accurate nonetheless.)

I expect I’ll have more to say on all this in later logs.

The title for my blog comes from an expression my wife and I have been using for years–inspired by the difficulty of moving young children along toward completion of tasks (such as getting to bed!). Our kids are older now, in high school and middle school, but we still use the expression all the time. “Pushing snakes” has become shorthand for any Sisyphus-like chore. And there seem to be way too many of those in daily life!

In the coming days and weeks, I hope to note some of my thoughts on writing, on home-schooling kids, on home repair(!), on science and politics and religion, and whatever comes to mind. Let me know what you find of interest, and we’ll talk.

Jeff

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