Sitting On My Porch Part Fifty Nine

I haven’t posted anything since I got back to New Orleans from my Thanksgiving trip because I have been trying to figure how the WikiLeaks story happened. I just don’t understand how we live in a world where you can barely get back into your personal email unless you remember every single thing you said when you established the account but some private in the Army could log into a computer and send government secrets to someone. At the end of the day this seems like an epic government failure. If the information being released is that dangerous then it should self destruct like Mission Impossible. I have different opinions on the release of information like this. I’m all for transparency and open government. If our country is doing things to compromise the rights of other Americans then I am against that. However, if things need to be done to stop some crazy leader in a foreign country from firing a bomb over here while we are sleeping I don’t think everyone needs to know all the details. As long as we are not killing innocent people are allowing someone to bring drugs into the inner city like the Iran Contra scandal then I can deal with it. I don't know if my opinion is right or not. The world makes it difficult to settle one way of looking at this stuff.

By the way, I don’t blame the other Arab nations for being worried about Iran and Ahmadinejad. We have a few cats like this in the hood. He’s like the DMX of the Arab world. As long as he’s around anything can jump off so you never feel comfortable.

I drove to Memphis last week and that was unfortunate because I didn’t get a chance to experience the new TSA security procedures. I bought new underwear and everything to walk through the scanner. Personally, I don’t think enough attention is being paid to the security folks that have to perform the scans and pat downs. Every day they go to work and feel on strangers’ body just to feed their family and you know they are underpaid for what they are doing. I’m not homophobic by any means but if I had to select folks to pat down lets just say there would be some profiling going on. There would be a lot of potential female terrorists on my shift. Bin Laden is watching all of this from the flat screen television in his cave and killing himself with laughter.

Here are three thoughts from my holiday road trip:

1. My dad has lost so much weight that I’m going to lose 20 lbs just because.

2. We went to Neelys BBQ and it wasn’t all that.

3. My parents have regular retail jobs in the city. If the neighborhood they live in now was in New Orleans people would think they made six figure salaries to live there. I don’t think any of my family is making much more money than they did when they lived in New Orleans before Katrina but they all live in nicer areas now in other places. Working class people live here because they want to and not because it’s the most convenient and comfortable. Don’t get me wrong. There are some rough areas of Memphis but at least there are some areas you can live pretty well without having to make six figures. New Orleans is still working on that.

I think there may some readers of this blog that may not get my Ahmadnijead/DMX comparison. I received a comment on my last post that included the statement.

“I, too, am thankful that i discovered your blog. It's great to read grounded commentary, even if I don't always get your musical tastes. It's a white senior citizen thing.”

I don’t do well with responding to comments but I want to tell the white senior citizen that left this comment that I thank him for reading and not to sweat the music because my dad is a black almost senior citizen and he doesn’t get my musical taste either so I’m cool with it. The next time my dad visits you can come over and I can put on some of this Talib Kweli and drive both of you crazy. It’s actually quite poetic if you listen real close.