Before I got started I wanted to define just one word: Fascism. I spent hours wandering in the vastness of the Google and by the time I called it quits I had thousands of words mined from scholars, historians, and politicians. I then boiled them all down to these 109 words:

Benito Mussolini said, “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

Leon Trotsky, “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

One year ago today we loaded up a borrowed truck for the last time and in the great tradition of The Grapes of Wrath and The Beverly Hillbillies, rolled on out towards a dream of a better life. The Joads struggled along Route 66 from Oklahoma’s dustbowl through California’s Mojave Desert to get to the Promised Land. Jed Clampett sold his oil-rich swamp in the Ozarks for 25 million and moved his family to the hills of Beverly. Our move wasn’t as difficult as the Joads' and certainly not as well subsidized as the Clampett’s. It took us 10 years to have the wherewithal to make the two and a half hour drive from our house in Seattle to our new home in Canada. Though we woke up in A New Country … we didn’t have the time to appreciate it for the first three months or so.

First we had to deal with schools that were going to start in a couple of weeks. Our son was going into the 6th grade and my wife was going to the University for her graduate degree. And we literally had an accumulated lifetime of boxes to unpack. All the nuts and bolts that held together our day-to-day lives had to be figured out and fast. Where are the schools? Where are the stores? Where do we get the car fixed? Where’s the library? Where’s everything? For the first time in my atheist life I welcomed guidance from above.

We had our cheap but trusty Tom Tom GPS to tell us how to get to where we wanted to go.

I won’t vote for Barack Obama. I can’t vote for Barack Obama. And it’s not because he’s not liberal enough for me. I gave up on the idea of a progressive president before I was old enough to vote. No … the reason I won’t vote for Obama is because he’s just slightly less murderous than George W. Bush. And a man with bloody hands doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

So who will I vote for?

Who cares?

Living and working in LA was always pretty ugly but starting in the early 80’s it became especially brutal. All the dirty effing hippies were out of a job and the stupid swaggering Republicans who took over walked around like they owned the place … because they did. In the early 80’s nobody in the “Entertainment Industry” talked about making records or movies anymore. Now everybody made … product. And if I wanted to work in “The Industry” I had better jettison any idea I might have about doing something good and wrap my head around cranking out the movie equivalent of Velveeta Cheese ... The Sequel.

The balancing act of artistic vision vs. making money created a dynamic that made for some pretty good movies. But accountants and lawyers found out you could make a whole lot more money if you threw away the script and just filmed the bottom line.

What should we do with Occam’s Razor? Cut the Gordian Knot … or our own throats? Now we can do the “To Be, Or Not To Be” two step all day long, but by the time the clock tolls the Midnight of the Soul … what are we going to do? Do we snuff it and light out for the undiscovered country or do we take back the one we live in?

Once Upon A Time we believed everything we were told. While we were being taught how to dress and feed ourselves we were also beginning to learn a bunch of baloney. I learned how to tie my shoes just in time to walk to school to learn about God. As it turned out, I didn’t need to know those two things.

Before the Affordable Care Act came to pass almost fifty million Americans were uninsured. Now that the Supreme Court has upheld President Obama's signature health care law … 26 million Americans will remain uninsured. But how many more millions of Americans can barely afford the coverage they now have?

Depending on your personal outlook on life … the glass is half full or half empty. But who wants a sip?

Where I live it is unimaginable that people can’t afford health coverage. it is unthinkable that a person can’t get health care.