I am two good drinks into this afternoon.  A nice wheat beer and a hard cider.  They are light, yet doing the job.  The sun is out and the service is great inside.  I’m feeling no pain and for the first time in a while, I have a sense that this return back home just might work out well.  I think that the sun has something to do with it but I’ll take the pass and enjoy it. 
The chatter in the restaurant is not foreign and it’s intelligible.  A first in a while.  I think back to some of my friends in the desert and wish that I could share these few minutes of bliss…
After living in the desert, its apparent that my world view is different.  I’m enjoying today but at the same time am acutely aware of an altered approach to my surroundings.
Im not sure that I would want to go back to the sandbox based on today. It is this feeling that makes me think I have landed back home…finally.

An older, unpublished entry.

Been looking toward going home again.  A break from playing in the sandbox is a good thing.  I forgot about the airport chatter.  Languages you don’t understand can become irritating when you have no idea what you are hearing.  I’m sitting on the floor of a packed airport listening to a woman taking (loudly) on a cell phone in a language I just don’t understand.  It’s one thing to hear someone babbling on their phone and quite another to not understand the language.  It’s just a reminder that i am the foreigner.  A novelty of sorts.  I suppose am not the first American these people have seen but I still know I am different.  In some ways, I get better treatment here.  After all, It was the Americans who rescued this country from the edge of existence. 
I will say it has been an interesting experience working here as a resident.  Most people wouldn’t even think of such things, let alone actually try moving overseas for a year to work in a non-westernized land.  It is different.  I have come to enjoy some aspects of it.  While others, I look forward to leaving behind. My job here is in some ways the one thing that makes it worth doing and in others, makes me want to leave.  This time of the year here has been very nice, like late spring back home.  I knew that I would get to enjoy a year of summer weather and it has been fantastic.  In nine months, it has rained a total of four times.  Most of that has been in the last three weeks.
Something else I have noticed is that the women here really try to keep themselves.  Not in a superficial way but dressed nice and not with everything hanging out on display.  There’s a certain attractive quality about that.  Couple that with some of the perfumes they wear and it creates an allure like none other.
In some ways it’s overdone but it shows that moderation can be a good thing.
I have been here long enough to have learned a few things that have given me a different view on the world.

Spent an evening in a Local Kuwaiti food courtyard.  Kids were playing outside with each other.  They were riding bicycles with out helmets.  The platytoys didn’t have excessive amounts of safety netting and no one was getting hurt.  This made me think about my own country.  The amount of safety litigation we are forced to protect ourselves from has become so invasive that we have made enjoying life just a little less joyful.

We elect lawmakers into political offices and they do what lawmakers do…make laws.
Sadly, it is these very laws that are supposed to protect us often do noting more than steal little of our joy of living.  Take some time and look at some of the laws that have been made to control the behavior of people but really have no harming effect on society if they are violated.  An example is a law about peanut shells being thrown on the street.
Do we really have such a lack of decency that we need a law governing basic behavior that should be learned at the direction of parental upbringing?  Does such a law need to be on the books today?  Should such a law have had a moratorium?  Should it have even made it to the books?   What happens to the innocent person who mistakenly drops a peanut shell our two on the ground and someone without anything better to do decides to make an issue out of such a mistake?  The legal system is only designed to enforce the laws and while something as simple as a few dropped peanut shells is truly harmless, the person “at fault” must defend such a simple mistake at a level that goes way beyond the action of dropping the shells.  It is this sort of overly controlled society that loses a little of the joy of living under such foolish and oppressive laws.
Granted, this is oversimplified but it it illustrates a point.  We as a modern society have become so litigious and additionally so unwilling to regulate ourselves that we pass the responsibility on to the lawmakers and expect them to regulate our society with laws that we all agree with.  It is to easy to pass the buck and hope that someone else will do exactly what we want on our behalf…instead, we trade off the responsibility of teaching the next generation about being decent human beings to elected lawmakers and sacrifice our freedom in doing so.
This division in viewpoints of what the government should be doing is what divides our nation and keeps us from moving into becoming the strong nation we once were.  Yes we have military power that exceeds many other nations and we have some advanced technology that other countries only wish they had.  But that gap is closing.

Some people would suggest that we don’t need military strength to be successful and protected…tell that to the French, or for that matter the Kuwaitis.  We came to the aid of both nations because they were not fully prepared.
I know that it can be a very slow turn around for a nation unless something drastic happens that gains the unified attention of its people.  Typically it’s a war of some sort, either internal or external that does this.
Our own government has only sought to expand its own power for years and rarely does it exert its abilities for the good of the citizens that elected it into place without a high cost.  Even today, the push for expansion of that power reaches out to foreign lands where its resources are highly valued but when need arises for its own military forces to receive assistance when in peril, they are ignored.  The navy seal team of late comes to mind.
We must take responsibility for our actions and stop expecting the government to do the work of raising our children by regulating our society with laws when we can teach them decency ourselves.  We must stop expecting the government to take care of us by redistributing our wealth in a socialist manner.  If you don’t work, you don’t eat.  Pretty simple.  If you can’t work, that is different but generational welfare cases are out of control and need to be stopped.  Lazy people will become motivated by the same instincts that drives the animal kingdom…HUNGER!
We as nation aren’t truly hungry.  We have more fat people than most nations and this is a sign of overly content, happy to rest on our butts, lazy people who would rather take a handout than work for what they need…be it food or any other needs.
What happened to self respect?  What happened to feeling a little shame when we are given what we need when we are fully capable of earning our keep but would rather let someone else do it?
What happens when the people of a country bring an abrupt end to the free lunch for those who aren’t motivated?  Chaos…ultimately driven by hunger.
What happens to a country that doesn’t bring and end to the free handouts and the government can suddenly no longer sustain the free ride?…Chaos…ultimately driven by hunger.
What happens to a nation that is taxed to the point that business can no longer be sustained and therefore the business must be shut down and no longer provide a tax base for the government to hand back out to the non working people?…Chaos…ultimately driven by hunger.
What happens when people are driven by hunger?  Lawless behavior and increased crime?  I think so.  My own father was once headed out the door to steal the neighbors chickens to feed his family and just at the right moment, he received a call for a job and to start that day.  It is already clear that people will do what ever it takes to meet the physiological drive to answer an addiction to drugs…how much more magnified would it be if it was hunger and it was on the scale of 1000’s of hungry people at a time?
When you vote, be sure that you aren’t just voting for someonewho will “take care of you with handouts”.  Vote for someone who will help business stay afloat and not be trying to regulate us to death with laws on behavioral issues that should be learned about in the home.  Vote for someone who isn’t apologizing for America being strong.
Whatever you do, consider carefully the effects of your vote or lack thereof.

For everyone its different.  Early on I wrote about square goldfish.  Its the idea that a fish can grow to fit the environment it lives in.  It was the thought that it might become square if placed in an aquarium and allowed to think that the tank was bigger than it really was. 
I started feeling like I had outgrown my environment at home.  Not the house but the town.  It’s limited in what it has to offer unless you are raising a family there.  It has the feel of a somewhat small town, even though it’s losing that feeling and it can be difficult to get to make long term connections because people don’t stay too long in one place.  It’s a military town. 
It has become commercialized to the point that it’s only saving grace that makes it different is the location on the map and the mountians and water that surround it.
There used to be a fair amount of businesses that were not owned by corporations and you knew who the business owners were.  Now it’s so much like any other town on the map with most of the typical corporate owned services that the uniqueness in that aspect is gone. 
There is that point were a younger town starts off with the basics.  Corner grocery store, a local greasy spoon, a gas station or two, a local hardware store, a feed store for agriculture needs and maybe a few other offerings.  The feed stores are the last to go as the land gets eventually consumed and the agricultural need fades away.  When the feed store goes, you know it’s over.  My town still has one and they seem to be doing well. 
That point where a small town becomes a city can be really good or really bad.  The growth should have some form of managed growth or it can become an out of control monster.  In my town, the local hardware store was bought out, taken over by a big box corporation as they moved into the original big  building.  They then vacated that building and built a bigger new store just one mile down the road.  Now the old building just sits vacant for eight or nine years now and it’s in decay.
Next to it is a similar building that had a grocery store in it but the roof caved in during a snow storm.  Another crappy building in decay.  These are reminders of yesteryear when the town was a little smaller and thrived on small business.  Now the money spent in the town goes to corporations outside the town and little comes back.  It’s no wonder why the place seems to be getting the life sucked out of it.  I didn’t understand that way of thinking before.
The big corporations are only concerned about keeping the shareholders happy and the idea of giving back (financially) to any community that has been supporting the corporation goes against the very idea of what it takes to keep the shareholders happy with profitable gains.
This brings me to a thought about small and medium sized towns vs big cities.  Small towns aren’t often inhabited by big business savvy citizens who are well connected and versed in managing big business and work in the small town.  They are going to go where they can do what they do best…into the city.
This is where a bit of “us vs them” comes into play.
My town had a mayor who had come from the city and brought ideas on how to grow the town into something of a place where larger business could have moved there and considered it home rather than just a place to drop in another store and suck more cash out of the town.  The small minded views of the locals killed that.  They also killed a NASCAR racetrack deal.  A rather foolish move as it would have really made the town a destination spot and it would have brought money into the town.  It would have…but the us vs them mentality kept my town from growing just a bit. 
I truly hope things have improved as I now go back.