Opposition or Juxtaposition?

Conviction. Noun. A fixed or firm belief.

Courage. Noun. The quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear; bravery.

Terror. Noun. Intense, sharp, overmastering fear.

I've been reading about the recent dissention in Senate over the funding for the war. There are varying opinions that range from full support to immediate withdrawal. Please allow me to opine.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t support the troops and oppose the war. That is like protesting the useless slaughtering of cows and paying dues for the American Dairy Farmers. It’s too convenient. You’re trying to be en vogue and take a stance. America is still wracked with guilt from the abysmal, sickening treatment of Viet Nam Veterans. Therefore, the new chic political stance is full opposition of the job we send people to do, while maintaining full support of them. Huh?
Buying a yellow ribbon magnet for your car does not make you a supporter of the troops. Jumping on the convenient bandwagon of Dubya haters doesn’t make you politically savvy.

As a peer from left to right, or right to left, I am seeking the impossible. I am seeking one with an original thought about resolution. I am searching for someone who can tell me how to fix a problem without telling me whose fault it is. While I don’t see what I am looking for when I look for answers, what I do see is actually in what I don’t see.

I see one person that I will tell you has conviction. Like it or not, there is one person in D.C. who doesn’t have the all-too-convenient position of being able to change his mind on a whim; one guy who can’t point fingers. Whether he’s right or wrong is completely debatable – and a major subject of division in this nation.
If Americans could get past their media-induced, seething hatred of Bush and look at the situation, they’d see that no one is offering anything. It’s not about left or right. It’s not about right or wrong. At this time, juxtaposition should be the order of the day, not opposition. Unfortunately, all we seem to be able to do is point fingers.

Everyone thought that Harry Truman was nuts when he signed a piece of paper that effectively created the nation of Israel. He stood alone because it was the right thing to do. Today, Bush stands alone. He put himself on an island, but we took away the bridge. We cannot enter a holding pattern for two years, so we’d better get cracking.

It’s easy to tell people they’re wrong. It’s easy to tell someone how bad their ideas are, yet you offer nothing constructive toward a common goal. You know what’s not easy? It’s not easy to stand up for what you believe to be the best course of action that we have. Don’t we teach our children that they shouldn’t give in to peer pressure? Who didn’t hear the “if he/she jumped off of a bridge would you do it too?” speech from their parents? Well, all of the cool kids are saying that we don’t have any business in Iraq. The only problem is that we’re already there. This opposition would have been nice four years ago. Oh, please spare me the “we were lied to” story. I’ve heard it and don’t buy it.

So, do I support the war in Iraq? Hell yes. My friends are going there to fight it, so you’d better damn well believe that I am going to expect our lawmakers to prioritize them as they will their own retirement and salaries. I expect people to stand behind their decisions too. Bush is standing behind his. Meanwhile, nearly 400 members of Congress are not. They all had a vote. Now they’re claiming they were bamboozled. Wake up America, we’re all being flimflammed here. They’re all just telling us what they think we want to hear and I want to hear solutions - not blame.

You really do learn something new everyday.

Throughout the annals of my dogmatic existence I have experienced faith and doubt; I have learned to believe in heaven and hell and I have wondered what it all meant. Hence, my obsession with the “duality of man” as a punch line, motto and selling point for almost anything we do, but I digress. Being Catholic comes in very handy. Form the convenience of “there’s a big difference between Saturday night and Sunday morning” to trying to go to church in any country you may travel in, there are many understated selling points to the Catholic Church. Roman Catholic, that is. You know the one. We have the big house in Rome. The Nation with the lowest annual birth rate (zero), by the way: Vatican City. The greatest selling book of all time is the Bible. We basically rule the world. That’s a bold statement, I know. So, before I get too sidetracked, let me get to the point.

You learn something new everyday. I really do believe this. I try to learn something new everyday. Sometimes it is how a cathode ray tube propagates an analog display on a radar control unit from a radar beam. Once it was as simple as looking up the word “nepotism” in the dictionary. I’m not making this up. I actually used a dictionary.

Never one to deny my thirst for knowledge, today I learned how they calculate Easter, or more specifically, how they determine the exact date of Easter each year. [Background: My boss constantly jokes about me being a human calendar. OK, so just because I know that each year Election Day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November and that Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November, I am some sort of idiot savant, I guess. So, I have a knack for remembering dates. What of it?] What does this have to do with the Catholic Church or my baptism? Well, it’s simple. I went to Catholic schools so I vaguely remembered something about Easter being the first Sunday after something-something after March 21 (the spring solstice). [That was also my grandfather’s birthday and one never forgets the birthday of a man that called his naps “going into my Yogi trance”.] Well, today I did it. I did what anyone would do - I googled it. Google, by the way, is an official word and was added to the dictionary this year. The number one hit led me to the answer to it all.

So, I also learned that there are two systems: ecclesiastical and astronomical. I discovered that in order for me to fully explain this to you I would have to entail Julius Caesar in my explanation. So, I’m going to simply show you how it’s done and then we can all say we learned something new today. If we need to learn about Julius Caesar we can just watch Rome on HBO.

Here you go. The formula to calculate the date of Easter Sunday:

c = y / 100
n = y - 19 * ( y / 19 )
k = ( c - 17 ) / 25
i = c - c / 4 - ( c - k ) / 3 + 19 * n + 15
i = i - 30 * ( i / 30 )
i = i - ( i / 28 ) * ( 1 - ( i / 28 ) * ( 29 / ( i + 1 ) )
* ( ( 21 - n ) / 11 ) )
j = y + y / 4 + i + 2 - c + c / 4
j = j - 7 * ( j / 7 )
l = i - j
m = 3 + ( l + 40 ) / 44
d = l + 28 - 31 * ( m / 4 )

So, what’s so hard about that? Easy as Pi.