Praying for Death and Dying from Prayer…

(And, before you ask, this is not an April Fool's joke...)

Just a few things…

Schiavo. A single word that encompasses so much stupidity. We all know the story: Coma, feeding tube, death. Tom Delay and the Republicans (sounds like a band!) made so much noise about this and ignored the real problems with the nation, bringing the media right along with them. Why? Well, Delay had problems and had to find a distraction. Michael Jackson wasn't good enough. So, they picked a dying woman on a feeding tube and said it was unnatural for her to die. Unnatural. Death is unnatural but keeping a vegetable alive on a feeding tube is.

Hello, NewSpeak!

Let's face it, folks. I don't see the outrage that all dying people should be given feeding tubes to allow them to live - all the people in Iraq, for instance. It's a non-issue. And, yet, the Repugnicans use this distraction to spread such disinformation as "Hospices are Evil" (did you hear that one?), while keeping such news from you as the commission that found ONCE AGAIN that there were never any WMDs or the study that found more proof of humanity's inhumanity towards the planet or the dwindling oil supplies or any of a hundred other things. Look at it this way - in one year the name Shiavo will be forgotten and we'll still be living on a doomed planet. (Doomed for all life, at least…)

The Pope. He's been dying for a long time now. We'd better get him a feeding tube! The vitality of the Catholic church is proven by this dying man at its head. It's an embarrassment and a sham!

The Praying Doctors. Last night, at the gym, I saw a story on the news that made me want to vomit. (And, if you've never seen someone doing that while running, it's not pretty.) There's a pair of conjoined twins being operated on in LA. Last night, the doctors came outside of the hospital with the family and prayed on television.

You know, when I was a kid, there was a joke about praying doctors. The point was they couldn't be that good. But we live in a society where we have so little faith in science and so much in our moronic superstitions that we take comfort in doctors who pray. Public displays of faith have become so grotesque of late, God's taking Tums. There's nothing wrong with having a spiritual life but when it comes before common sense, you have a problem.

And, folks, our society is full of them.

Full of it as well.

We obviously aren't a society interested in what's important. Our values have become so twisted that more people are interested in who wins a talent show on television than in who is running the nation into the ground. This week, (burning) Bush appointed a former chief lobbyist for the Safari Club, a club that kills captive wildlife for trophies as the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And nobody even blinked.

If anyone with any power ever decided to stand up for common-sense, rational thinking, it seems painfully obvious that the majority of Americans would be angrily, militarily opposed!

We should all be very ashamed.