Moonlight and moon shadows

I saw the rising moon tonight as I left work (I work kinda late) and it was a beautiful yellow full moon, hanging low in the sky. I decided to go up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and take a longer look at the moon on this cold winter night. I'm sure if I was allowed to drive further on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I would have found snow, but they close the parkway down when there is snow or ice. They don't want people going headfirst into the closest ravine, not to be discovered for weeks or months, maybe. But such thoughts as that were not on my mind tonight.

I pulled off the side of the road and walked up the Parkway to the bridge over the Swannanoa river. The moon was higher in the sky, and a clearer shade of white, and still very beautiful. My shadow was easy to see. I walked to where the moon was shinning down on the river, not in a perfect circle, but a messy oblong white reflection. The ripples in the Swannanoa were pretty to watch, but it is overall a calm river..... not like the wild whitewater rivers I used to kayak.

And as I stand there in a beautiful spot that I am fortunately enough to live close to, I thought again of what is happening to my country, the USA. I remember the energy and enthusiasm that went into the Dean campaign a few years back. The slogan we had then was "Let's take our country back!" Well, we did not succeed in doing that. We are still meeting, organizing, trying to improve things, but my fear is that we are losing our country, in spite of all our efforts. And the people we are losing our country to are not conservatives. No, they are radicals who are trying to destroy our constitution. They are trying to ruin our country with debt and our world with war.

If the US goes and bombs Iran, the Iranians will be in world of hurt and we will be stepping into a world of shit. It is impossible to say how far this will go, or where it will all end. I used to wonder how the Germans could elect someone like Hitler and follow him, and then I see the same sort of thing happening before my eyes in my own country. This is not to say that Bush is a bad as Hitler. Hitler killed about 50 million people, and Bush has killed less than a quarter million. I guess things will never get that bad here in the USA.......... I don't know. I sure don't feel good about it. Americans are amazingly gullible or stupid: a great many of them now think Iran is a threat to our country. It, of course, is not. And there is no evidence that they are planning on building a nuclear bomb, but even if they did it would not be nearly as dangerous as Pakistan having a nuclear bomb.... which they already do.

How can people be so dumb?

And how can they be so blind to the suffering we have visited on the Iraqi citizens?

It is pathetic that Americans cannot see that.