Real Men - an example of what one is and what is expected.....

Theodore Roosevelt was a huge badass. Nothing illustrates that more than the following story. In 1912, while campaigning for President as the candidate of his newly formed Bull Moose Party, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a saloon keeper before a speech in Milwaukee. The bullet was slowed by Roosevelt’s steel eyeglass case and his thick, folded up fifty page speech, before it lodged itself in his chest. Roosevelt, an experienced hunter, realized that since he wasn’t coughing up blood, the bullet hadn’t reached his lungs and so he said to hell with it and decided to give the whole ninety minute speech anyway even though he had blood seeping into his shirt. Goddamn! His opening comments to the crowd were “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Indeed. Look, I don’t even have a joke here. Just read that over again and try not to be in awe of the badass that was Theodore Roosevelt.

Where I have gotten to

The kind of people that put faith in government first speaks to character, and to a character I prefer to not associate with much. I find them..., when all artifice is peeled away, to mostly be scared little children unwilling to stand and fall on their own and of their own accord - wanting to be, at their core, taken care of from cradle to grave & are willing to give up their rights and freedoms to have that life of mediocrity. I find that reprehensible & would rather live not at all than that foolhardy sort of half life. This is worsened by the fact that they are more than willing to try an coerce me into giving up my freedoms for their perception of safety & that is not only wrong but fundamentally offensive. So much so that I have reached the point of utterly discounting anything any one of the "Hope and Change" crowd says other than " I am sorry, my entire world view was selfish, immature, unrealistic, and wrong". Keeping this type of person at bay - This is the personification of the statement "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"