Ack!

Allergies. It has to be allergies that make me feel this way. I was almost convinced that I had developed a summer cold, but the symptoms went away later in the day and have only returned this morning; same as yesterday. Very depressing. I haven’t been bothered by allergies in years!

But, as I was typing that last sentence, I looked up at the screen just as I created the word ‘been’ and saw the word, ‘bee’, which made me think of honey… and honey is supposed to be good ammunition in the fight against allergies. It has to be local honey, not your everyday honey packaged in a plastic bear. That sort of makes sense. Local bees, local flowers, local pollen. And the honey contains small amounts of the local allergens. It’s sort of like having a vaccination. OK. More honey!

It looks like it’s going to be a pleasant week with temperatures that we can easily bear; all in the low 90’s. Next Sunday will return us to HOT.

And as I read the news stories this morning, I am struck by the ones that tell of crackdowns on internet use and access. Most of the stories are about governments in Africa and Asia that are doing their best to keep information from their citizens. When the governments are technically unable to stop the flow of data, they resort to the physical; imprisonment of the offenders. I have a feeling that executions won’t be far behind. Information is just too powerful a weapon for these governments to handle. And since, at their core, all governments are alike…we need to be wary of anything that restricts our own usage of the internet. Our legislators are a mirror of society and our society has some especially dangerous ‘fundamentalists’ within it. They would love to keep you ignorant.

A very short time ago… 80 something years ago. Those same kinds of people pushed their agenda onto this nation with the passage of the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution; the Volstead Act, or ‘Prohibition’. It was only after the fact that the population decided that the law went too far. But it was too late. The ‘fundamentalists’ had done their job and the nation suffered immense damage from it. All because the citizens had abdicated their responsibility to watch over their representatives.

Most people love the concept of democracy but hate the reality of it. “It (democracy) should be based on my morality and on my concept of what is right and wrong. Why should we even allow these other ideas?”