Friday, July 27, 2007

i know it's not just in my head, but is it just in my apartment...?

so there's been a legal bottled water movement (or something like that), and i'm just left to wonder whether it's partially propaganda.

yes, i drink bottled water. i also drink tap water. given the chance, i'd probably drink well water. but to for state governments to assert that "tap water," in general, is the same as bottled water is, i believe, somewhat irresponsible.

first of all, the public reservoirs aren't the "source" from which most people get their tap water. it's through the pipes that deliver the water to the glass. drinking water from a garden hose is certainly not as safe as drinking it from (most) kitchen sinks. who knows what crawled up or grew in the hose while it was off.

okay, okay, so most people would be smart enough to figure that out (or strong enough to not care). what i actually take issue with is the water in which i shower. some days, it's fine. other days, i'll be sitting in the office at 2, and un-lotioned parts of my skin (say, the back of my hands) will smell like i've been in a pool. chlorine-smelling-8-hour-post-shower skin does *not* instill confidence in the city water system delivering drinkable water. the smell seems to come and go in waves, so i can't even invite people over to try this. i never know when it will or will not smell like a pool.

does anybody else have this problem?

***

my other point of contention here is that bottled water offers something that tap water can't: vendability. if anything, water filters (think brita, pur) "[undermine] confidence in the safety and cleanliness of public water supplies" more than bottled water, and those haven't been addressed here. the waste-production and inefficiency of bottled water are its "evils." don't act insulted on top of that. it ruins your credibility.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

with apologies to spoon...

... and anybody else waiting for further installments of "driving courtesy" with bated breath. part 2 is in the works, i promise. well, if you take "in the works" to mean "i created the post and put the topic headers into it." you should believe me when i say that i'm forced to think about content of those posts every day. i do, after all, commute between manassas and annandale (that is, with a mix of people who are "beltway" drivers and people who aren't comfortable with more than two lanes in each direction).

i've decided to post today, now, because i just read something about the separation of church and state in the anderson cooper 360 blog.

the post is written as if this turns the current understanding of the concept on its head. as i see it, if you look at the motives for placing the concept into the foundation of this country, it doesn't at all. what i don't understand is the idea that this means we're doing it all wrong.

there's a difference between a religion having input into a government, and a religion running a government. what cuts is when a religion's input into government violates another religion's protection from government interference. so while this understanding of the concept doesn't prevent the overwhelmingly christian population from "injecting religious beliefs into the political process," it does draw the line where these beliefs will come back out of the government against another religion.

how is this different from the current mindset? there are laws all over this country based on morality rooted in judeo-christian beliefs. sodomy, for instance, is illegal here (in the state of virginia). this sense of morality is so ingrained that some fail to see the religious influence, and therefore some will see "all" religious influence labeled as controversial, or even rejected, since the widely accepted portions are not religious, but common sense.

what this boils down to, as far as i'm concerned, is that, while the church may have input into the political process, it can not effect laws and policies that will violate others' freedom of religion.

this includes gay marriage (which, i should point out, is not even an issue that all christians agree upon), and, in my eyes, polygamy. no, i do not desire to be in such a relationship, but what does outlawing it accomplish? warren jeffs's (and i'm sticking to that as the posessive of his name, since "jeffs" is not plural) practice of forcing young girls to marry older men would still be illegal without laws regarding polygamy. children of adult polygamists would no longer be classified as illegitimate. yes, the paperwork and databases would be more complicated, but paperwork and databases should not govern lifestyles.

before i go, i would like to point out that i'm not terribly affected by any of these laws. there's no religiously motivated law that stops me from doing anything that i want to (at least none that's enforced. i believe that "living in sin" is against the law in this state), but i still cringe at these things. why must we tell others how to live their lives when it doesn't affect us?

if you're afraid of seeing men hold hands in public, telling them that they can't get married isn't going to stop that. barring that, you could try to outlaw homosexuality in general, and to that, i say... gay marriage for all!

***

after reading some of the comments on that blog entry, i'm going to clarify what i "agree" with.
i "agree" that the separation is to protect the practice of religion (or the choice not to) from the government, not that it's to protect specifically "the church" from the government. the separation protects you (joe schmoe) from having the government shove religion down your throat, but it doesn't protect you from having religion shoved down your throat. it also doesn't protect the shove-er from having counterpoints shoved down his throat when the shove-ee doesn't like it.

this is all in a non-violent sense, of course.