I have not lost track of reality here, but I may have lost track of what is real – out there and  independent – and what is augmented by my projecting my interest in the Civil War; but it seems to me that we are going to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of the Civil War by re-fighting it. OK, re-arguing it.

There are people out there – probably nuttier about the Civil War than me – who will be following it on a day to day basis. The New York Times had an editorial yesterday on the start of the Civil War and then had another one today. There will be – shit, must be – websites set up to follow what is happening 150 years ago on any given day.

The 1960's were the 100 year anniversary. But this is also sort of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights movement and that will color everything.

Fifty years ago, on February 1, 1960 black people staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter.Two days from now – 150 years ago -South Carolina votes to secede from the Union. Next year , in March – 50 years ago – northern student volunteers  will invade the South to push new laws that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities.

Today, the Senate repealed DADT. This should be a very interesting next couple of years.

Not so much because it shows any totally new information, but because it shows it in such an interesting way.

Yesterday was International Human Rights Day and it pretty much just swept by me.

I am so glad that I live in this country; where I can complain about living in this country. Out loud and in public! Yesterday I could say that my country is a liar and not be worried about being arrested today. (Well, at least not for that.) 

This wonderful country is not the only country where I can do that, but it was pretty much the first and has been a beacon of truth for the world. I am not sure who or What to say thanks to, but Thanks.

When I was a couple of months shy of turning twenty, I first lost my innocent belief that I could trust my government. I was young and pretty pissed at the world and almost everything in it. My mother used to call me an Angry Young Man after an movement in England at the time. But I also was confident that I could trust the government. The Federal government.

America was changing rapidly and the Feds were one of the changers. In 1954, then President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division to force integration of schools in Little Rock Arkansas. The courts were working to make black Americans almost equal to white Americans. I had – I think we all had – a feeling that the government was on my side.

And, then, in 1960, the Soviets shot down one of our planes. They said it was a spy plane. Now, this was only twenty years after the US Secretary of State said Gentlemen don't read other Gentlemen's mail. and it was obviously not a spy plane because we didn't have spy planes; we were the good guys.  We were in a cold war, true, but only because the otherside was Godless and evil.

Some surrogate for the president – not the president, because, as it turned out, the president didn't want to be on record telling a lie – said that it was a weather plane that had strayed off course. We believed him for about three days. Then it became overwhelmingly obvious that we were lying and the Soviets were telling the truth¹.

Then it sort of dawned on me, dawned on us. The government was lying. Not lying to the Soviets… just us. The Soviets knew it was a spy plane: we had been flying these planes over the Soviet Union for a couple of years when this happened, always over areas where we wanted information, they had been tyring to shoot these planes down for years, now they had the plane and all its gear, and they had the pilot  and he was talking.

As I type this, it still rocks me. It is still incredulous. I think of Obama running on transparency and I think of how disappointed I have been that he hasn't governed with that transparency. How easy it is to run on giving up power and how hard it must be to actually give up that power once someone gets it. I can see why the government hates WikiLeaks and it reaffirms my love for it – them.

 1 Because I looked this up in Wikipedia, I now know that there is some question abvout whether the Ruskis actually shot the U2 Spy plane down or it managed to fall out of the sky on its own.