Musings: Freedom Fragments

It started with a black hole, chock full of impossibly brilliant stars, bored clean through a quilted thicket, and then hours passed before Koko and I went back out again, this time to grayness and cool gusty winds that sprinkled rain drops loose from the trees. As we walked, an orange disc appeared, murkily, on the northeastern horizon and then it blazed into gold and before long there was a sort of fire happening in that corner of the sky against a backdrop of soft lavender with pearly swirls.

And then it went white — all white, bled white, bleached white, sun sucked into dense clouds leaving only paleness, and a faint fragment of rainbow in the south.

We still have a few faint fragments of freedom remaining to us; heck, you can opt for a pat down rather than the radioactive full body scan now being inflicted on passengers at the Lihue Airport. Or maybe, if you’re unlucky enough to have a few napkins in your pocket, you’ll get both. Aloha!

If you don’t like it, well, you have the freedom not to fly, and that’ll teach you to oppose the Superferry. After all, as one person noted in the Star-Advertiser’s comment section:

i dont think that this is a constitutional issue. its for the safety for ALL Americans

Yeah, even those who haven’t done anything wrong and still somehow got on the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list, resulting in a shake down, delays and more than a little stress for a hapless Kauai surfer wrongly targeted while traveling with the latest WMD — surfboards — between those two radical snake pits of Kauai and Samoa.

If you’re a gay or lesbian, Gov. Lingle just might decide today to give you your full complement of civil liberties. Or then again, she just might decide to burn your ass, because she knows you ain’t gonna vote Republican, and so you’re of absolutely no use to her.

One thing we haven’t lost, though, is the freedom to have it our way, whether at the fast food counter or on the world stage. That’s why we’re sending warships and Marines to Costa Rica and solidifying our ties with that terrorist nation, I mean, valued ally, known as Israel.

So in honor of that freedom, and all the guys and gals who are playing the RIMPAC war games to keep us safe — garage door openers and Waianae beach bogdowns be damned — here’s a little video to remind you just how damn lucky you are to live in the US of A.