Well, I experienced something terrible the other day, and since I'm still upset and angry about it I thought I might blog about it and try to "get it off my chest".  It regards a "prayer breakfast" that my mother had invited me to attend with her last Friday morning.  I usually don't go in for those kind of things, but she cajoled me into it by telling me that she would enjoy my companionship and that I needed to get out of the house more, etc.  So I said, OK; and I went with her.  It all started off fine, and the breakfast food was good.  It was a big event that was being sponsored by a County-level businessman's association and was held at a local college auditorium.  I saw a few friends of mine there that were also in attendance and I did the whole social chit-chat thing for a while.  We eventually joined some of my mother's friends from the Church that she attends, and I sat beside her pastor & his wife; and as I settled in after eating I was thinking, "OK. This isn't so bad. I guess I'm glad that I came."  But then everything went to Hell - and fast!  lol

The first thing that happened was they brought out this small Honor Guard unit that consisted of some retired Marines to "post the colors".  The men must have been in their 80's, all of them, and although I always get a bit uncomfortable at doing the "Pledge of Allegiance" thing and holding my hand over my heart, etc., I went along with it and amused myself with thoughts of those same men leaving the event afterward to go and get drunk at a local VFW pub.  heh

I sat down after that was over and was thinking to myself that the worst part was out of the way; but then they dimmed the lights and brought out some local high school kids who started singing a bunch of patriotic songs.  {We have too many of those in this country, btw.}  *sigh*  Which also might not have been too bad, except that all of the kids were dressed up in mock-military uniforms as if they were in the Army, Navy, Marines, etc.!!!  And watching them up on the stage singing the military anthems for each of the service branches just made me totally lose my cool.  I was stunned into shock for a few minutes because they reminded me so much of the kids that I have seen in old WW2 videos about the Hitler Youth and the indoctrination that those children had to suffer through.  And sitting there thinking about how our own youth are being similarly indoctrinated to "support our troops" as well as the military war machine of this country, I became so pissed off that I had to get up and walk out of the auditorium.  Of course, our military spends a lot of money on propaganda, but it still makes me really sad that so many people fall for it all here.  I mean, those kids were not cadets from some military academy.  No.  They were just regular kids from a local high school whose parents and teachers thought that dressing them up as soldiers and having them sing military songs was a good idea!!!  Grrrrrr.  {I'm still angry about it.}

I came back into the auditorium when I heard that the preacher was being announced and sat down again.  The guy was probably in his early 30's and a family man.  He was dressed casually and had a good/relaxed stage presence, and I was hoping that I could sit there and mostly ignore him and calm down a bit after what I had just seen the kids do... but then he started doing magic tricks.  *sigh*  He must have loved amateur magic when he was a kid or something because he had quite a few, including a trick-Bible that would light on fire when he opened it.  *sigh*  {Who would make something like that?}  And he knew how to make balloon animals, too, because he made a couple of those while he was talking about the Flood & the animals getting onto Noah's Ark.  I walked out of the auditorium again at that point.  Fuming.  :-{

After about 10 mins I had calmed down again and returned to join my mother and her friends; and then the guy starts going into this spiel about economics - talking about how bad the economy is, and how he thinks it is because we have all turned our backs on God, etc.  Which might have been tolerable by itself, except that he also had a solution, which was something that he had come up with himself after reading Adam Smith's, Wealth of Nations, and combining what he had learned from that with some principles that he pulled on from the behavior of the "wise woman" in Proverbs chapter 31.  He called it, "Godonomics", and he had books & CD's about it on sale in the lobby, of course.  *sigh*  I walked out on him again - and wanted to strangle somebody.  Anybody would have sufficed at that point, too; and I'm sure that there was fire in my eyes.  lol

After it was over, I told my mother to never, ever invite me to attend anything like that again; and I hardly spoke to her on the way back to my apartment.  I've been ignoring her ever since; and I still feel very upset about it all; but I know that it's not her fault, and that she had nothing to do with creating any of it.  I'm still upset though, obviously, because the whole event shows very clearly (to me anyway) how much trouble this country is in, psychologically; and it makes me ashamed to be an American; but I don't know what to do about it, so I thought I'd just rant about it here a while.  Thanks for reading.  Sympathetic comments will be awarded with a cookie or something.  heh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism

The Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) - a montage to the music of Kent's "Sundance Kid"

Hitlerjugend (1939-1945) - Colorized