So here I sit at work feeling the usual uncomfortable feeling I get for having a government job. It goes against everything I believe politically. Except that my job is in defense. I do actual hands on work with the armaments for our fleet ballistic missile submarines. Someone has to drive the machines that carry the enormous missiles to the boats so they can go on patrol and ensure that no one has the stones to start an outright war with us. That someone might as well be me. After over a decade of making those patrols I do feel a tad bit entitled to the position I now have. I have the unique skill, experience, and absolute focus on work quality required to do this job. And yet there is still a smidgen of guilt over the fact that all those tax payers put the food in my kids mouths rather than me digging it out of the ground.

The angst, however, is less represented by my dependence on government employment than by the actual job I have. I am a crane operator and transportation driver. I push buttons and levers on a crane controller or shift gears in a semi truck or drive the missile transporters we use to move them from the maintenance area to the boats. It's mindless work. It requires physical skill but little mental dexterity. I feel underutilized. I am good with the documentation, and in this world the books rule. I know the requirements backwards and forwards and how to enforce compliance with them. I have a knack for looking ahead to avoid problems before they arise and a knowledge base useful for finding solutions when problems do crop up. But I am not used for these skills. I am used to not bang hundreds of thousands of pounds of explosives against things while they're dangling from the crane. It's frustrating and disheartening.

The bright spot is that a huge percentage of the civil service will retire or die before I do. My chances for a job change within the facility are high. In the mean time I have to grin and bear it until opportunity arises to lift me from this malaise. I hope I'm smart enough not to do anything stupid in the interim.

So I have things I should be doing that are not this. I have two essays due this week at school, but I have no desire to write the one for the gov class, and I'm still formulating my thoughts on the Eng essay. I want to write, just not the assignments.

I did the rounds of reading this morning and was inspired by both Hanson and Will. I'm always inspired by them. Will reminded me again that we longer have a federal republic. Hanson reminded me that I ride the very fine line between being one of the government's new victims in need of a bailout and being one of the governments new victims financing the others. If it was a fire or flood or tornado that caused the mess we'd all happily pitch in for the clean up. But since we're seeing the same idiots from snow filled medians sitting on the bottoms of their over turned SUV's needing someone else to pay their mortgages, because they drive their finances the way they drive their vehicles, we do not want to help. It's a natural human reaction. We long to help the needy; we easily laugh at the stupid. This bailout mentality is out of control. We need a revolution, or at least an incumbent free election and the revocation of the 17th amendment.

I think the reason I'm not writing the paper for the gov class is because I'm becoming a little discouraged with school in general and political science in particular. It should have taken more than the 6 classes I've taken to get to this point. I think the problem is that most of my fellow students, even though they are not typical post high school adolescents, are idiots. An example would be what I experienced in my gov1 class. We had a simple assignment: read the Kelo decision and post in the forums a discussion on whether or not it was judicial activism. I labored for several hours reading both the the decision and the dissents. I even contemplated a change of major for fear of having a stroke during my studies. I finished my reading and restrained myself to only 600 words of so in my post about the subject. My fellow students posted mostly 3-4 sentence bits of drivel. There was no substantive discussion. There was no real learning beyond the initial reading. The only bright spot was when the sole hard core lefty in the class posted his agreement with the majority. Of course he waited until the 11th hour for fear that he would cause disagreement. I happily answered his posting that his opionon was entirely disagreeable, but I thanked him for having the stones to post it.

So within the context of dismal peers and a governmental reality even Orwell would be amazed by, I'm now to write a paper describing the experience of simulating writing legislation, with my classmates as other pretend senators, to ban indoor smoking across the nation. Quite frankly the whole experience has been mind numbingly frustrating. In the entire 8 weeks of simulation the question has never been answered as to why it would be the federal government's business whether or not a bar in the middle of the country allows smoking. These poor dolts will leave this class on the foundations of our government still believing entirely in the nanny state. They will know nothing of the constitution. They will have no love of liberty or respect for the founding fathers. They will truly believe that if enough of the representatives and senators agree to an action then it must be the will of the people. I weep inside. And I wail into a void. No one will ever read this. I am but a voice crying out in a vacuum.