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Reptile Brains




The Brain: Evolution? or just a freaky thing that happened eons ago to confuse us?


I am taking my Obama bumper sticker off my car this morning. The election is over, and the honeymoon has begun. It won’t last long – but after 8 years of Bush, he will get the benefit of the doubt until at least march of 09.
If I wake up on November 5th and find out he has lost, I will conclude that the election was stolen, or look for the hand of god in all the oblivious places.

If McCain steals the election I am prepared – orange flap hats to family and friends, re-entrenchment in all things social, and preparations for a wartime economy. The end will be nigh and all things will come to pass quickly in a furious anger; justice and decisiveness will rule the day, and all will rue the night.

At time like this I start think the big part of the brain that sits on the reptilian part is just a steroided genetic mal-selection gone wild. That the stress of thousands of years of conflict between hormonal emotion and cool logic has decompensated into a free for all of craziness. Sort of ‘without god there is no morality’ combined with ‘ no attachment of logic to words makes randomness sound as good as anything else.’ Adverbs and adjectives spewing without the structure of nouns and verbs – anarchy of sentence structure thrust onto paragraphs of speech and thought.

Obama makes sense to me when he talks. The words follow a pattern in my head that, like music or art, rings true. I don’t know if he has it in him to be a Lincoln or F.D.R., but it gives me hope to think that with him there might be a chance. I know that what makes us great as a people, and what makes the crap of democracy worthwhile, is that when facing crushing times, we find the strength to make better, and a leader to hold up to a mirror of best we can become.


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