First, let me say that my grandfather is insane. No, literally. One of the symptoms is that he would make little signs at the local copy shop that said, “A Fourth of You Lie” and glue them to popsicle sticks to make little flags. Nobody’s quite sure exactly what it means, but he sure does cackle like a crazy old coot when he displays his signs.

Silly introductory paragraphs aside, I wanted to make a quick little complaint. You see, 230 years ago, Congress ratified a vote making us independent of England, the bastards. A bunch of nasty stuff happened between the US and Great Britain shortly thereafter, but nowadays, they have Tony Blair, so relations between the US and GB are good, but the rest of the world rightly thinks we’re buttholes, which I think is very sad, especially when you take into account that our country was founded on courage, guts, intensity, and a bunch of social misfits.

Seriously: think back and remember your eight grade American History class. The actual lessons part, not the trying to get somebody else to kiss you part. You’ll remember that what happened was a bunch of people were feeling somewhat oppressed. They didn’t want to go to the Church of the State, they didn’t want their children to have to grow up to be peasants, and so the all jumped into leaky boats. These leaky boats had bad drinking water, short food, not enough room, and they sailed for three months to get to America. Think about that. Think about living on a crummy little boat with no running water, stale drinking water, hard bread to eat, and no privacy. That other family’s screaming baby? Your problem for three months. Awesome.

Then when you finally get here, there’s no hotels. There’s sailcloth tents, wild animals, an indigenous race of people who aren’t happy about you showing up, and there’s not much food to go around. And there’s still screaming babies.

So after building a house, growing your own food, friends and family dying, the horrible bastards in England still want to tax the bejesus out of you. So what happens, but you go into a nutty guerilla war thing, eventually winning independence from our British oppressors.

Keep in mind that the people who won our independence were essentially the Trench-coat Mafia of the day: the weirdos. Now days, the Trench-coat Mafia types get harassed and messed with until they, too, do some rebelling. I’m not saying what the Columbine kids did was right, but I understand why they did it, especially when you look at it in a historical sense.

I also want to point out that as a nation, we’re wimps. We are addicted to reality TV and scare-tactic news programs. We’re a bunch of conservative, fat, arrogant wimps. Republicans. Our current political climate showed up at least once in history; Nazi Germany had a very similar political climate and ideal just before they declared war on the entire world ¹ . And now America’s declaring war on the entire world. I tell you, after the 9-11 attacks, we had the entire globe on our side, giving us good will; GW squandered that right quick, though, and now we’re perceived as jerk bullies, and we’re killing our own soldiers for… well, for mystery reasons. I’m pretty sure, “defending our country,” isn’t done in Iraq. I think that’s called both invading and bullying and embarrassing, but that’s just me.

To sum it up and end it nice, I’d like to say that now more than ever, I’m proud of my family’s heritage.

1. Not actually true, but since Americans will believe anything, and most of my readers are, in fact, American, I decided to put that in. Besides, it has the feel of truth. ↩