As im sure you all know and are aware. There is currently a controversy started by some very uneducated conservatives about wither Muslims should be allowed to build a community center near the location of the World Trade Center.

What I feel is important to remember is that we are Americans. We are members of a country that was founded not as a Christian country, or a Jewish one, but instead as a place for all to come and be free. Free of this sort of persecution.

Threw out our own history, we have started walking down this path before. The path of forgetting who we are and why we are all here. We destroyed the Native Americans, we enslaved the African people, we even went to war with the Mormons. All in the name of what, Freedom.

What is Freedom when we are not all free. Why should freedom be reserved for some, but not all?

In the famous words of Martin Niemöller ¹:

When [they] came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

I feel Keith Olbermann sums it up very nicely, tho I don’t agree with every thing he says. His main point needs to be heard.

So what are WE going to do about it?

Alone with most of the upper Midwest, Christmas this year in Saint Paul, Minnesota was very snowy.  It was a nice white Christmas, assuming you got to where you needed to go.  Thankfully everyone I know and care about made it through the day without any major problems even with the 10″ to 12″ of snow.

I live on a sort of larger road named Ford Parkway.  The road gets its name from the Ford Plant down the road.  This is all fine and good since I live in a nice, quite neighbourhood, but they do drive a far number of semi trucks directly past my place.

Well on Christmas day, the plows were out, but were not out in the number the amount of snow and the rate of snow fall required.  Christmas day was also just warm enough that the salt they dumped on the road melted the snow, but it was still cold enough that slush re-froze once the cars, and semi trucks drove over it.  This ice then stayed on the road for about a week before the City of Saint Paul decided to finely plowed them off.  The problem was the ice was patchy in its placement on the road.

So now my road has hundreds of dents in it, not pot-holes, but dents!  It’s like driving down a really bad dirt road.

What just pisses me off about the whole thing isn’t the harm it’s doing to my car every time I go home, but that now they will need to redo the entire road just to make it drivable again.  As time goes on, the road will only get worse, until it is un-drivable.