Sitting On My Porch Part Seventy Three : A Long Winded Weekend Edition

Life these days can be confusing for a person that thinks the way I do. My code in life is that your actions have to match your words. Sometimes the words come first in form of ideas and then your actions have to follow that. This is the basis on how I judge people and give them respect. Whether or not I agree with them has nothing to do with it. I have tried to apply that to myself especially since I put my thoughts on this blog for public view. I never want to be put in a situation where I look like a hypocrite.

For instance, I could myself look good by telling how wrong guys are for hanging out in bars and strip clips. Everybody would be giving me compliments and telling me what a great guy I am. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that because when my bills are paid and everyone is taking care of, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to find me and my friends sitting a table in a place like that with a few adult beverages. I stay honest with myself and leave that kind of moral high ground to folks like my dad. It seems like he’s never been out without my mom since about 1970.

The other night I was watching the Republican debate on Fox News and the moderators asked a question about foreign policy. Rick Santorum went on to answer about how we should be spreading democracy and American freedom all over the world! The crowd started cheering. A few minutes later a gay soldier asked a question by video from overseas about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The crowd that was cheering for spreading American democracy started booing the soldier. Rick Santorum said he would reinstate the policy if he becomes president because serving in the military has nothing to do with sex. Gay people in the military don’t want to be able to come out to get some action. They are probably getting that anyway. They want to be able to come out because this is supposed to be a country with freedom to be who you are. That’s the kind of thing I can’t respect.

I could have respected him if he said that since he doesn’t want to give gay soldiers the freedom to be who they are he’ll make them exempt from having to go and risk their lives to give people in other countries the kind of freedom they can’t have in their own military. If he did that I would think he’s stupid but at least I could say he has conviction.

Stuff like that is the reason why even though I don’t agree with most of what Ron Paul says I respect him.  He’s the only guy that gets booed at a debate for how he feels and doesn’t backtrack on anything. That happens every debate while Mitt Romney attacks a healthcare philosophy he damn near created in Massachusetts. This always seems strange to me. I’m going to give Ron Paul a compliment. No matter what you think of his beliefs, his supporters never get cheated by having to watch him turn on his own principles just to win a poll. We could use more people like him accept for the wanting to take government back to the 1800’s part.

Issues of the world are complicated. I followed the Troy Davis execution story waiting to see if someone was going to step in and stop it to at least review the information and make sure that they were killing the right man. When no one did and the execution was over I felt a strong sense of sadness at the fact it seemed like the justice system was not working.  I am not a fan of the justice system because I think it is bias towards young black men. We need to fix that by keeping ourselves out of the system so the chances of another Troy Davis story happening again are minimal. At the same time we have men in our community like Telly Hankton that are so dangerous that the chief of police himself went to sent in on his trial just to see if he was really going to get convicted so his officers wouldn’t have to deal with him. Guys like that can’t be out here on the streets with the rest of us and a lot of them are too far gone for rehabilitation. Some of us may not like the current system but our community isn’t quite safe enough to pretend we don’t need something to keep some of our failures away from us.

The Saints play Houston this week. The Texans are not a rival in the minds of Saints fans the way Dallas is. It might be a more personal game because since 2005 Houston might as well be called Western New Orleans.  There are some folks here that have a strange feeling about Houston. Some of it is jealousy because they seem to have the money and progressive nature we can’t seem to master. The other part is frustration because no one talks about this but a lot of the people who stayed in Houston after the storm were hardworking and productive.  Don’t get me wrong a lot of good people came back home too but the thugs came back with them in full force.  Houston is too big for my taste but I have no problems with the city or its people because if they hadn’t opened up all of the Astrodome people may have been sitting on that interstate even longer. I pull for the Texans when they are not playing the Saints.

On the football side of things the Saints defense finally held a team under 20 points for the first time in a long time. We are either ready for another Superbowl run or the Chicago Bears have the worst offense in the league. Houston ran through our first team defense in preseason like they weren’t even on the field. Tomorrow we will find out if that was just preseason and the defense is ready to play well or if we should be looking at the schedule to see how many teams have prolific offenses and count those as a lost. This game will tell everyone a lot about where the season is headed because it’s too late now to fix the roster. I’m going to say the Saints score enough to win and come up with one big play from Darren Sproles in special teams to pull the game out. Darren Sproles is making all the preaching I did against the Bush trade look silly. If he scores every week I don’t mind being wrong.

Saints 31 Texans 27