thinkitthru

I rolled up to a stoplight this afternoon.  My eyes settled on a slightly tattered black and red bumper sticker that proclaimed “Don’t Blame Me; I Voted for Palin”.

I thought about that for a minute.  Palin, mind you; not McCain.  Two things struck me as maybe being just a little out of place.  First, the sticker was on a pickup truck.  And second, well, I think it was just the fact that it was just simply there.

Voters are interesting folks.  They always tend to surprise me.  Questions I didn’t even know that I had suddenly pop right up in my mind whenever someone opens their mouth or, in this case, slaps a sticker on their automobile.  Like, for starters, why would anyone driving a pickup truck even admit they voted for Sarah Palin in the first place?.  If it had said, “Don’t Blame Me; I Voted for McCain”, it might - might, have made a little more sense.  But Palin?  This is Texas, after all.  And yes, true Republicans seemed okay with voting for Palin, at least along with McCain.  Okay, maybe, but not particularly excited at the prospects.

The other thing I am still thinking about some five or six hours later is why anyone would choose to stick the thing on their bumper in the first place.  What, after all,  does it mean when someone says, “Don’t Blame Me”?  Blame them for what?  Because that person thinks things have generally gone to hell in the last three months or so?  Because we still haven’t managed to pull out of the steep dive of a protracted recession?  (Of course, I say call it what it is, a depression, but I suppose that’s probably being picky.)

Could it be that the person driving that truck thinks we would be better off still trying to continue to justify torture and mistreatment of prisoners-of-war?   Maybe they think a Republican President wouldn’t have nominated a latina woman to serve on the court this week?  Who would they have preferred instead? 

Maybe this particular guy was just generally not happy with the way things are going in this country.  Or maybe he just wanted to wash his hands of the whole matter of anything going wrong. I don’t really know.  So far I haven’t been able to answer any of my own questions.  

But I will keep thinking this thing through.  That, after all, is what I intend to do here on this blog, with your kind assistance.  I want to think about what people are saying, doing and thinking.  I want to really wonder about it and try to figure out some of the reasons why it is that they do the things they do.  I hope you will want to join me and do the same.

Seems to me the only way to even begin to ”think it thru” is going to be to keep your eyes open and take careful note of what you see, what you hear - and yes, what you read off a bumper sticker.  And when you do see something that causes you to stop and think, “Now, I wonder, what does that really mean?”, well, that’s probably going to be something worth burning a few brain cells for and asking a couple of  questions about. 

Don’t blame me for thinking that way, okay?

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