I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Saturday I was up listening to GameCast, enjoying my bottle of twelve-year MacAllan, and playing .hack//quarantine until almost five in the morning. It would've been four in the morning, but because of DST we lost an hour, so Jessie and I didn't crawl out of bed on Sunday until nearly 14h00. This threw my schedule off for most of the day, and I didn't crawl into bed until well after midnight.

Once there, though, I should have snuggled up against Jessie's side and gone directly to bed. That would've been the sane option. Instead, we both lay awake for over an hour, talking about the sorts of things that only come to
light under those sorts of conditions. I joke about lying awake at night thinking about things I can't possibly answer, but last night it happened.

I'd blame Kincaid, but she's not really at fault. That post was a catalyst for thoughts that already plague my mind. Most of the time, I have the common sense—or perhaps the will to blindness—to not think about any of these things. I live in a bubble mostly by choice, because the world at large scares me in ways I can't really define. I don't understand what makes a lot of people tick, other than to say that they believe different things about the world from me, and they let their beliefs guide their actions. That's all well and good, but what happens when their beliefs—immune to logic, reason or reconciliation—contradict mine?

There're a lot more of them than there are of me.

In a proper democracy, there'd be some understanding of the principle of "majority rules, minority rights." Everyone knows the first part, but most people forget the second. It's that part of the Master Plan as conceived by the Founding Fathers that makes majority rules possible: the understanding that there are certain lines one just doesn't cross, because if one should ever find oneself in the minority one wouldn't want those same lines crossed.

This is the step that most people forget, the most crucial and significant part. Less than a month ago, I had someone try to tell me in earnest that it was alright to trample on my rights and deny me the right to express my opinion if that were what the majority believed were in the best interest of everyone involved. He even went so far as to say that were he in the minority, he would expect me to do the same to him and thought the point was
to ensure that one never became part of the minority, so as to avoid that fate.

He didn't really seem to grok the idea that everyone is a minority of one at some level. That's what makes us truly individual, as opposed to approximate clones of each other.

All these thoughts came to me last night, as Jessie and I lie awake, talking about them. I really do fear for the future of my country. I believe in the ideals upon which it was founded, but I have lost my faith in the notion that we properly implement those ideals, or even that we can fix the mistakes we've made in trying. The founding fathers envisioned an educated populace, eminent statesmen of office who held strict moral codes, a government run primarily on inertia, and a wealth of political parties to offset the inherent evil of idea-labeling. We have none of these things with any regularity, and when we get them they are often as not decried as part of the evil of "partisan politics."

Running to Canada will not make anything better. Staying here will not make me feel safer.

I don't know what I want right now. I want to believe that the situation is going to improve, that the American people will at some point realize what they have allowed to become of their country and take back the glory that
should have been theirs by right. I want to think that a revolution like the Summer of Love is just around the corner, that we will somehow realize that we have been asleep for so very long and the time to wake up is at hand. 

All I can really do is plan for the day when I never have to leave my house again, unless I choose to do so.

I am not a hero. I do not dream of taking on the world. I will not be one of the ones taken to Atlantis. I want to be like Candide, and tend to my own little garden. I want a hole in the ground into which I can crawl and not these about these things, because I'm too smart to be able to leave them alone and too dumb to know how to fix them. I want my hutch, the inviolate walls of a cage to protect me for when I no longer have the strength to
protect myself.

I'm not Dagny; maybe I never was. At best, I'm Cheryl, struggling to make sense of a world I didn't create. All I can truly hope is to avoid her fate.