In the news:

More troops are being called up for the war in Iraq.

Gary Ridgeway confesses to 48 murders, citing that the odd positions in which the bodies were found was due to the fact that he'd often return two or three days after he'd dumped the body to have sex with the corpses.

This morning, as I arrived for work, four police cars were sitting in front of the McDonald's accross the street from my office building. They performed a pat-down search on the guy and pulled a calf-length stretch of doubled-over chain from his jacket pocket. One end had been taped into a crude handle.

Last night, in Belltown (a fairly trendy section of downtown Seattle near Pike Place Market) two seperate stabbings occured. The police are still searching for the suspects in the first. Both victims are in critical condition.

I saw three different incidents on the bus this morning in which one driver sped up in order to flip off another driver who had cut him off.

A few years back, in Bellevue, a young lady went to Bellevue Square (a rather large shopping mall in an affluent bedroom community of Seattle) with her grandmother to do some Christmas shopping. Her grandmother was driving and was handicapped (she required a walker to get around) with the appropriate decal hanging from her rear-view mirror. All the disabled spots were taken, so when the young lady spotted an open spot near the front, she jumped out of the car and stood in the space until her grandmother could pull the car around. Another driver pulled up half-way into the space, rolled down his window and told the young lady to get out of the way or he'd run her over. The young lady explained the situation, but the man insisted again that she move or he would just run her over. The girl crossed her arms and stood her ground. The man ran her down, trapping her under his car, set his emergency brake and went inside to do his shopping.

In Texas, three Christmas' ago, a man was put to death in relation to a murder that the D.A. had prosecuted and sentenced someone else to being the trigger man. They used legal maneuvering to keep any testimony from that case out of the trial. In essence, they allowed the jury to believe that the this other person was the trigger man. (The man had only been along for the robbery, a crime which does not fall under the death penalty statutes of the state of Texas unless he had been the trigger man in an acompanying murder.)

George Bush signed into law a partial-birth abortion ban law which takes no account for the outlook of the woman's health. (In all fairness, it does provide provisions for allowing the proceedure where the life of the mother is at stake, but c'mon! If she's going to end up with a debilitating blood disease as a result of the birth, that's okay?)

And I feel like I'm pissing into the wind by saying anything about it. Let's just all shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, what can you do?" and go about our business, shall we?

Why not? If I open my mouth and point to the root problems in this country, everyone just rolls their eyes and says, "There he goes again . . . You're just going to have to learn to be tolerant of other people's beliefs, Joe."

Even when those beliefs are killing people?

Even then?

Fine. You don't want to hear it.
I don't want to cry about it any more.

Joseph Haines, signing off from The Edge of The Abyss