and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Rachel mentions recently that she can't deal with people and I can only nod my head slowly in agreement because the number of times I find myself gritting my teeth or grinning-and-bearing-it or otherwise stifling cries of "Lunatics!" lately.. Well I oughta.

Part of life, surely, is learning to live with the inadequacies of others.. which is code for learning to live with your own flaws - like your inadequate coping mechanism.

Mine is definitely lacking. So much so that the majority of my blog posting lately has ended in me clicking the little 'X' box up in the upper right-hand corner, just because I don't want to deal with it anymore. If I allowed myself to hit 'Publish Post' more often than I do I'd be one of those seething zealots we all despise.

Extremism is evil, they tell us. Especially religious extremisim. While I happen to agree, this is only my personal opinion and I have to wonder what the poor religious folk think of the matter. If you recall they used to have a lot of the power and clout in this world and, for a very long time, speaking out against gays wasn't extreme at all - it was status quo!! Sometimes I think we forget these things, in our age of elightenment.

High on the mount, from whence they came
Now low in the trench, trudging in shame.

Anytime someone has their world tipped upside down you have to expect a little bit of growing pains. That doesn't mean I'm defending the religious extremists, or agreeing with them, or even feeling too badly for them.. but let's just say I understand why they are there. I understand the reasons that they are having trouble adapting to the new order of things.

I don't think it would hurt to be aware that the environmentalists, extreme in their own right, are often the same people standing out against the religious extremists. The extreme militarists and right-wing conservatives are often the same people who speak out against the pro-abortionists. Whether you agree with abortion or not, you have to admit it is a fairly extreme social idea.

We're all extremists in our own little way. That doesn't make it right or wrong.. it just is. This maybe is why I, like Rachel, can't deal with people sometimes. So I write a few lines of ranting bitterness. I reconsider. Then I delete the post and go about my daily life. It's a venting process that keeps me a few steps closer to the middle - a few steps within the safe confines of "normal" where extremism is just an idea out there, not in here. I try anyway.

In the end I'm just stuck in the middle with you.