Ralph Nader barred again from the debates just after he sued the Debate Commission for excluding him the FIRST time. “Mark my words, this is the debate commission’s last hurrah,” Nader said. You know, can you really blame them from excluding Nader? I mean, if they let him join in the debates, it would become SO painfully obvious that Bush and Gore think and debate and dance around questions in the same exact politically molded way. We’ve all gotten lulled into accepting the “way politicians are” (snort) and what their supposed to talk about, and Nader would be too much of a contrast to that. Heh heh. John was listening to the debates in the car yesterday and told me someone had asked about young people and regaining their interest and Bush responded something about the defense planning while Gore said that healthcare was important to EVERYONE – or something like that. I couldn’t bother to be shocked or annoyed, it just really brought home to me how much these guys and the whole political/government system as it stands are a part of the old guard that’s just crumbling away. But that’s okay, because there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s waiting in the wings to emerge at just the right time. I don’t believe in any of that ‘new world order’ conspiracy stuff – I just believe that most of the people who don’t put energy into this old stuff are too busy thinking of processes and inventions that DO work and that ARE supportable and it will make us wonder why we didn’t let go of all this old crap sooner.

I mean, let’s just say that you’re in this club, and it’s very popular. The club used to be really cool and exciting with new ideas, but after a while it just started to be the same thing over and over again, and any ‘new ideas’ were then seen as a threat to the survival of the club itself. You can spend all of your time trying to get the club to see your point of view, putting energy into struggling with them within this one framework. OR – you can just go off and do your own thing, put energy into what YOU think is important, and realize that you’re pretty damn happy not even thinking about this other club. (I guess if you grow up as a geek, you come to this conclusion sooner or later anyway. And, BTW, geeks are just people who express their own individual interests and passions that don’t usually match up with what we’re told COOL is – if a supermodel ever admitted to a passionate interest in gardening, for instance, and read books, talked to others about it, and spent her off hours in her garden, she could be considered a geek.) A “cool” friend of mine once said, “You know, all along I thought it was the popular people that others followed and who set trends and were making things happen, but all of that amounts to nothing in the end – all along, it was geeks who were REALLY doing stuff.” Wow.