Happy Birthday!

I used to get a real kick out of my birthday. It was such a fun day, I got presents and my mom baked me a really nice cakes with candles and stuff. Even now that I'm older I always manage to have some fun on my birthday. Although I have to buy my own presents and make my own cake, it makes me feel special for just the day — plus — an added bonus of doing it all yourself is that you can decide how many candles to display on the top of the cake! My birthday is always extra fun because it comes right next to the 4th of July so I get a paid holiday from work and there’s always a fireworks display!

But recently there has been a pall cast over my once happy birth date. I found out that I not only share my birthday with Ringo Starr and Burt Ward (Robin on the Batman TV series) I also share it with a most loathsome public figure. So now, when I think of my birthday, I think of him. I try not to, but it is there, throbbing under the surface like puss in an infected cut. I tell myself; “At least it’s not the same year.” But that is of little consolation. I fear that somehow we are linked, that we are the same because we share the same birth date. I fear I am more like him than I want to be. I fear that the only thing people will ever remember about me is that I had the same birthday as him.

I am a social justice person. I’m not a perfect social justice person, I do stupid things that don’t help the problems we have all the time. But I try to vote with people who claim to want to use our tax dollars for the common good. One of my least favorite public policies is the waging of war. The only people who would wage war are those who would profit from it. The profit could be monetary, or political, but they reap the spoils. This person wages war. This person stands to profit from oil revenues as soon as he manages to strong-arm the Iraqis into signing over most of the rights to their sovereign reserves.

The whole thing is sick. Americans like myself have to sit by and pay for him to profit using our hard earned money through income taxes we pay. He mortgages our future and the futures of our children to pay for a war that looks as though in the end will profit only him and the 1% of Americans like him! Each day more and more men and women, someone’s son, daughter, sister, brother, mother, father, uncle, or aunt dies for his policies of greed and aggression. Each day he gets away with more graft and thievery. I wonder what the world will be like when he's through with it. It physically disturbs me.

So now when I think of my birthday, I grimace and get a terribly fowl taste in my mouth. Not because I am steadily getting older and older, but because of having to share it with such a Golum-esque character such as him. I feel I have no choice but to try to forgive him because this anger I feel for him is so toxic it is eating me alive — but isn’t that what true evil will do? For instance: as I drove in to work today I was thinking; "I wish he would eat this war and choke on his so-called power". — See what I mean? —

This is one of my birthday buds! I can't dis him like that! Does this mean I have the potential to be evil like him? Well if I look at it honestly, I guess the answer is yes. I assume we all have the potential to be really evil. Given the right circumstances, the right bunch of sycophants around us, and the right amount of money, we all have that potential. So after all, I guess we really aren't that much different.