Eclectic Writer

I’ve never been a member of the NRA. I’ve never owned a weapon, though I trained with and used a weapon while in the military service. After years of listening to guns rights advocates I have seen the light. With the force of a fifty caliber HEI round striking me between the eyes, I’ve realized that within the text of the second amendment can be found the answer to most of our national problems. The answer lies within a full implementation of the intent of the second amendment which reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Cleary, our founding fathers did not grant American citizens the inherent right to bear arms out of a the goodness of their creator. The opening clause “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” explicitly reveals that the right to bear arms hinges on the need of the nation for a “A well regulated Militia.” But there is nothing in the modern United States that corresponds to a citizens militia, well regulated or not. So I propose that President Obama and the Congress of the United States create a Citizens Militia consisting of every adult US citizen between the ages of 18 and 65.

Of course, there are naysayers out there who will, no doubt, be driven to apoplexy with the very idea. A Citizens Militia would save vast sums from military spending, serve as a boon to health by requiring certain minimum physical requirements for all citizens, implement a national health care system to keep citizen militia members in good health, provide a cheap labor pool that will end Americas addiction to illegal labor, and many other benefits. The Citizens Militia would work in the following way:

Upon a citizens 18th birthday, all American citizens would report for 1 year mandatory training. During their year of training, citizen militia members would train in the use of weapons, small unit combat tactics, threat identification, and use of force. No waivers for conscientious objection, wealth, marriage, pilonidal cyst, or other minor excuse are allowed, though objectors would serve with the medical corps or within an entertainment/stress relief unit to fulfill the fantasies of those bearing arms. After completion of the year of service all citizen militia members will be issued a state of the art combat weapons system to be maintain at the citizens own expense. Medical and entertainment/stress relief unit members will be require to carry maintain their own gear. For three months of every year until the age of 65, all citizen militia members will train with a unit. Only a verifiable medical emergency will exempt a Citizens Militia member from training, though training must be completed upon the first induction date after a complete bill of health is obtained from the National Militia Health Care System.

A benefit of a citizen militia would be the abolition of the US Army, US Marine Corps, and National Guard. The existence of a National Citizen Militia would make such organizations redundant and unnecessary. The Navy and Air Force would be reorganized. Militia members, after their initial year of training, would be allowed to volunteer for service in these organizations. While maintaining the required standards of weapons training, they would serve for three months on naval craft and operating Air Force assets. Considerable savings would be achieved through the use of a unified command structure and bureaucracy and by standardization across the Citizen Militia.

The necessity of maintaining one quarter of all adults in the military at any time would require an efficient national health care system. The current maze of competing insurance companies with different plans is simply too inefficient and costly and would leave millions of Citizens Militia members without adequate health care. Health care would also be required to ensure that a minimum level of conditioning be met by all members of the Citizen Militia. Grossly overweight Citizens Militiamen would not be able to carry 75 pounds of equipment to the top of Mount Rushmore to defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Maintaining an overall high level of diet and exercise would keep Americans in fighting trim and lead to happier, healthier, and longer lives.

Other benefits accrue form the establishment of a Citizen Militia. Members in training cannot perform calisthenics or target practice 16 hours a day. They would form a gigantic cheap work force that can be utilized to build and maintain infrastructure, harvest crops, or fill any other task that illegal aliens perform today. What Citizen Militia Member would not be willing to perform back breaking labor at minimum wage for three months of every year as a duty to country. Use of Citizen Militia assets to perform necessary work could be contracted out to the highest bidder at a considerable savings to the US treasury. For their work, an additional benefit for the Citizen Militiamember would be found by providing the minimum wage to all serving Citizen Militia members tax free for their three months of service each year in addition to three hots and a cot every day and 16 hours of healthy recreational back breaking labor.

Lest prisoners serving time for crimes against the people of the United states be considered to be getting a free ride, prisoners would not be exempt from their required service. They would be required to take moral and ethics training classes while serving in the Citizens Militia to address the deficiency in their upbringing or personality. As with America’s prison population, elected members of the government would also be required to fulfill their service each year, though they would be required to serve in the entertainment/stress relief because citizens would enjoy screwing their representatives for at least three months of the year.

There are those who will complain that requiring a quarter of the adult population of the United States of America to complete military training and public service for three months of the year is too harsh a sacrifice. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the privilege of being an armed and dangerous US citizen should not come cheap.

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Nations rise and fall in a complex dance with history. Sometimes we think we have the reasons nailed down. Rome decayed overtime and, eventually, was destroyed by barbarians. Now, geologists have found information that may indicate that a long term change in climate my have been a contributing factor to the end of these civilizations.

Cave’s climate clues show ancient empires declined during dry spell
The decline of the Roman and Byzantine empires in the Eastern Mediterranean more than 1,400 years ago may have been driven by unfavorable climate changes.

Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area’s climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. Their analysis, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Quaternary Research, reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.

They, of course, aren’t the only ones. Climate may have brought an end to the Easter Island Civilization and the Anasazi of the Southwest. For me, this puts the human world on equal footing with animals. We already know that climate change has disastrous affects on animals. Perhaps, those same climate changes echo through the human world. As a species, we are tied to the earth, and when the earth deals us a bad hand, our own populations and civilizations collapse.

As a writer of both fantasy and Science Fiction, this information gives me fodder for conflict. An entire civilization collapsing due to an inimical change in climate is an interesting idea: man against nature. How would a magical civilization adapt and survive? How would a civilization that relies on science overcome a change in their world? What technologies wold they develop?

As a thinker, it opens up other avenues of thought. If the Romans and other civilizations could have been done in by the weather, why not us. With global warming (call it climate change if you will) what will be the result? Will we rise as a world and find a way around it? Will our civilization crumble and give way to the next civilization?

You can’t smell them, taste them, or feel them.  They have no mass, no volume, or color.  They emit no form of energy, be it electromagnetic, light, sound, heat, or other more exotic energy.  They have no measurable characteristics, at least from a scientific point of view. Though we have no way of ascertaining their actual existence in any fashion, they are of immense importance to a majority of humans. A belief in these objects are ancient, as the image to the left testifies. Of course, I am writing about the human soul, and recently an archaeological discovery in Turkey has cast light on this belief.

The Human Soul: An Ancient Idea
The slab, or stele, was recovered from an Iron Age city called Sam’al in Turkey. It dates to around the 8th century B.C. On the 800-pound, three-foot-tall piece of rock was an incised picture of a man, the deceased, who was presumably cremated, and words that explained that the soul of this man now resided within the stone slab.

What is it with humans and the idea of a soul? The ancient Greeks, who were around about the same time as the slab was cut, also loved the idea of a soul, and most cultures and religions today buy into it as well. Yet there’s no evidence that such a thing really exists. But still, even the most cynical of us is always trying to save our souls, damn other people’s souls, and searching for soul mates.

The article discusses in a light hearted fashion the way this belief penetrates most cultures, as the discovery illuminates the ancientness of the belief. My thoughts, however, are less on the reality and more on the fantasy existence of souls.

Fantasy fiction, almost by definition, requires the existence of souls. I can not think of a single fantasy novel that doesn’t, at least in some minor way, presuppose the existence of souls. Think about it. Undead ghost, goblins, demons, angels, and other such fantastical elements could not exist without souls. Magic, the channeling of some supernatural power to create marvelous effects, exists within a world view that takes souls and other unmeasurable phenomena to granted.

Science Fiction is often, though not always, a soulless creation. Such ephemeral things as souls are unnecessary in most stories. When they do appear, such as with “The Force” in Star Wars©, or in “Dune” they fit neatly within the social/cultural matrix created for the story and are more implied than discussed.

In my own novel “Red Tears” souls are a critical aspect of magic. Without their existence, no magic could exist. Undead, marvelous magical spells, and miraculous prayers are all part and parcel of one, carefully thought out, magical system, they are the source of all energy within the world.

Back in the day that would be the late 1940’s, there was a strong belief in the US that if the working poor were given any extra money they would run out and spend it getting drunk and not return to work. In order to keep society moving and grease the wheels Capitalism the working poor needed to remain the working poor. Then after the last “Great Depression” they, that would be the Capitalists like Henry Ford, discovered consumerism. Give the working poor more money, convince them that they had to spend that money on countless items they don’t need, and the economy would take off. Whole new classes of companies would explode onto the scene that that wealthy 10% would get wealthier, though never grow beyond the 10%. You would build a middle class willing to hock their pajamas for the next new thing. Cars, televisions, fashions changing with the season, lawn gnomes, Captain Midnight Decoder Rings, and a gazillion other wonderful things that we consumers just got to have put a bullet through the forehead of Capitalism and left all those rich Capitalists with their capital behind. The US embraced Consumerism, and became the first real Consumer society and enjoyed the endless benefits, not to mention the bills, of Consumerism. Somewhere along the line, they introduced unlimited credit making all of us Consumers slaves who, paraphrasing Tennessee Ernie Ford, “…Owe our soul to Master Card.”

By the early 70’s we were a vibrant Consumer nation, though our politicians still lied to our faces and told us we were Capitalists of the Adam Smith Wealth of Nations variety, and damned proud of it, thank you very much, and curse those commie-pinko-Ruskies. Even then, the wheels were threatening to come off the rolling economy of the most vibrant of consumerist nations. Consumerism required relatively high wages, relative in terms of the pre WWII days. Relatively higher wages required relatively lower profits. The enormously wealthy 10% shook there heads and look for an answer to the critical burning question, “How do we take more money out of their pockets (their=consumer) and put it in our pockets (our-capitalist/controllers of capital)?

Japan offered a nice model for that. After WWII, Japan rebuilt their industry and created a plague of cheap, consumer goods with a reputation for shoddy workmanship. (I know most of you don’t remember when made-in-Japan = Crap.) As Japan became successful, they created products that were reputed to be the best in the world, and their own low wage populations demanding to be consumers, were given raises, and the fabled Samurai economy began to service the American consumer. But the idea of taking an item with a perceived high net worth (even it if costs only pennies for the pound) and making it in low wage countries in order to maximize profits was born. They named it globalism.

In all of these countries with extreme low wages, a small middle class like group (call the globalists) emerged as economic prostitutes servicing the Globalist 10%. They have now grown to the point where this globalists out number the US Consumerists, though there may be relatively few of them in any given country. The wealthy 10% controlling capital have switched marketing strategies. Market their just got to have goods and services to globalists and put a bullet through the head of the middle class US cash cow. They are now free to strip the manufacturing industries, the source of the money for the American middle class, and send them to China and other countries with an emerging low wage economy. Continue with an historic trend to destroy unions, whose demands kept wages artificially high (from the capitalist perspective), and add that to the use of bubble economies (dot.com and housing bubbles now burst) used to strip the last of the money/capital from the middle class and you reach today. The US is now well into a trend of wage adjustment as people answer the call of their stomach and work at ever lower and lower wage jobs. In not to long, relatively speaking, the majority of US consumers will become a low wage resource and the cream of consumers will go to work for globalized capital holders (that wealthy 10%) and join the globalist in the new distributed global economy.

In a world where Corporations are international in scope and activities, no single nation, no matter how powerful, can control them. Their economic output dwarfs that of any nation and thereby controls all nations by speaking the language of money. All our closely held freedoms and ideologies become a commodity with no value and zero worth. We have now entered the age of, to quote Janis Joplin, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

It is time for Americans to realize that we are never going back to the days of cheap oil and cheaper gas. Our individually based transportation system, otherwise known as the automobile, may not be history but will change dramatically in a world where gas is $6.00 or more a gallon. It is time for the second most efficient transportation system in the world to reemerge.

Rail is beat only by big transport ships for efficiency, but isn’t limited to ports or deep river traffic. It can be used as light rail for local commuter traffic, long distance high speed passenger rail, or heavy cargo.  Rebuilding the system will not be cheap, but it is critical for America that we find new Rail Barons.

The US Government must encourage the expansion of rail, either though AMTRAK style subsidies, or tax incentives to encourage private companies to enter the field.  Yes, its not the same experience as a car.  You can’t carry your private chunk of personal space.  Rail is a more community based experience.  But we are not going back to the days of cheap gas and the sooner we start building for the future the easier our transition to a different civilization will be.

Travelers Shift to Rail as Cost of Fuel Rises
WASHINGTON — Record prices for gasoline and jet fuel should be good news for Amtrak, as travelers look for alternatives to cut the cost of driving and flying.

And they are good news, up to a point.

Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month.

But the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand.