Animals, wild or domesticated have clear objectives.  Food, shelter, companionship… and in the case of my dog Rufus, ball.  It’s not complicated.  That’s why we love them so much.  Now it seems to the point where their value exceeds friends and family.

It shouldn’t be that way.  When you go back and look at history, when phones and computers weren’t around… when cars and SUV’s weren’t such status symbols, when vacations were simply piling up in the station wagon and driving down state to see your grandparents… when life was simpler animals had their place but we didn’t have the capacity or space to love them as much as we do now, because we loved humans.  We loved God, or should I say we loved and feared something greater than us… and it wasn’t the government.

A wild animal doesn’t pore over their own guilt when they kill another animal for survival, and they don’t need to hoard it to show the other animals how much they have.  I assume they feel grateful to eat it, and proud of their own ability to have caught it.  Simple.

Humans have always been clever.  A quick lesson in history and you’ll learn lies, deceit and manipulation have been going on as long as man’s been here.  Whether it was Caesar’s 23 stab wounds, Jesus warning the people to ‘forgive them for they know not what they do’… meaning he understood his killers had been tricked to believing he was evil… all the way to JFK, Malcom X, MLK, RFK.  And if you believe any of these were lone gunman, well I have a rowboat in Florida to rent you this week.

But there’s something I began to notice years ago when my kids were in grade school.  We signed them up for basketball, baseball, soccer & roller hockey.  With the exception of the last, I had to pull them out of all these sports for one simple reason:  The parents.

It was gross, going to these Southern California games with the intention of enjoying watching little guys do something new in life.  Whether ours were natural or destined to be one of the greats mattered less than zero to me.  I just loved seeing them have fun.

But that was not the mood of the crowd.  These parents wanted their little Zach’s and Max’s to win.  At any cost.  They didn’t care if they intimidated the referee by screaming and frothing at the mouth from the sidelines.  The refs in little leagues are usually just grown kids themselves and can be intimidated by rabid parents… so it was painful on a lot of fronts.  It seemed that by witnessing their kids losing, it was just another loss their egos couldn’t withstand, so they’d scream, shout, yell, curse, threaten.  It was honestly a light crime scene.  And when they got their way and the verdicts were changed, a look of power and satisfaction came over their faces.  Personally they looked like big fat children with poopy pants.  I was disgusted.

At one point during a basketball game it became so blatant I couldn’t pretend not to see it anymore.  I pulled my boys from the sport.  Tried getting them into music instead, which lasted all of them learning “Satisfaction” and “Smoke On The Water”… until they pulled the plug on me.  Ha.

This coming election reminds me exactly of those parents all over again.  We’ve been mind controlled into thinking we actually win if our candidate wins, when by now we should know all these folks are controlled.  Even Trump to some degree… and if he’s the outlier, they’ll show him who runs the world just as they did with Covid.  They’ll sink the economy, create new John Kerry climate change catastrophes… well you know it could be any number of arrows they decide to shoot.

When I see people who have 100% of their egos attached to ‘winning’, and to what I have no idea… reproductive rights? as if we’re going back to coat hangers J Law? … is really something to behold.  The hate of people who’ve been watching cable news.  The despise from both sides when they see you’re not on their team.  It’s just surreal, biblical.  It’s like watching a collective generation go insane at the same time.

Enter Asheville.  Now we have a few different angles as to what we’re seeing, but one thing is for certain.  People are hurting, and in need.

Please, if you know about individual donation centers where the money or items go directly to victims please share.  I’m not talking about The Red Cross or FEMA or any of the other tried and trues.  They have too much bureaucracy to actually help anyone but themselves.  I’d really like to do something for our fellow Americans, so maybe we can start here by just posting what we know to get them some relief.  Churches seem to be the most reliable with what they take in.  Yes those money grubbing evil churches we have to witness in nearly every Hollywood movie.  These are trying times from Paradise, CA to Lahaina, Maui to Asheville, NC.  It’s starting to look like our food processing plants.  One by one they fall to fire, planes flying into the buildings etc., never to be rebuilt.

I will do my own due diligence as well and share what I find.

Prayers to those in the wake of the coming Milton.