A new rant from our good friend, Robert "Bob" Beierle. This one is a theme episode, starting off with a letter he "received" from a faithful Our Town reader, 8 year old Virginia. She's in the 4th grade, and even though her grammar and spelling aren't that great, she's perceptive enough to know how great Bob and Our Town is and how evil those people protesting Wall Street are. Her daddy calls them "free loading blasterds" and mommy and daddy fight with mommy's brother who is sleeping on their couch because the "fastest pigs" chased him out of the park he was camping in. Isn't she just the cutest?

Well, Bob goes on to explain to her about Never Never Land, a subject on which he is singularly qualified to speak, since he is the sole resident. He blathers on about how Never Never Land is actually Washington DC and that it is filled with Lost Boys who are led by Peter Pan. I'm not sure just who these people are allusions to, but I think John Boehner is supposed to be Peter Pan, and these guys and these guys must be the pirates he's talking about, since they're so intent on taking things that are valuable to us.

There's an entire paragraph here bashing the Occupy Wall Street protestors, though not directly. It's a fantastic example of passive aggression, really. He says that if we were living in "olden times," these "lazy, dumb and stupid" (but not redundant, no never that) protestors would have died off because of natural selection (this in the same paragraph that espouses creationism, no less). Since they are too lazy to hunt or scavenge for themselves, they rely on others to do it for them. Way to really showcase your intelligence, Bob. For the record, I'm rubber and you're glue, what you say bounces off me and sticks to you. Trying to keep the discourse at your level, hope it's working. Maybe you should turn off Fox News for a bit and actually read something about who OWS is and why they're protesting. You might find you actually have some things in common.

What kind of things, you ask? Well, there are three paragraphs here about how much you hate the government, how government stifles creativity and prevents innovation. Ironic that the examples you use (doctors curing diseases, advanced methods of communication, (can't forget ARPANET!) and high speed travel, also here) are great examples of how government has spent money to improve the lives of the people. Sure, many of those things were invented by private citizens, but they would be useless without the government funded development of the technology. But, hey, don't let me rain on your parade. You just keep on bitching about how horrible the government is and how evil everything they do is because they make you pay taxes (you do pay your taxes, don't you Bob? Wouldn't want anything bad to happen to you.)

Anyway, the point is, OWS is about frustration with the government as well. Despite what Fox News and Rush have told you, they don't want to institute a socialist government. They don't want to take all the money from Wall Street brokers. They don't even think that the wealthy should be paying for them to live. What they do want is a fair and equal government, one where having obscene amounts of money does not give you a greater voice than the working class. One where the people regulating our banking industry are not members of said industry. One where millionaires don't pay less taxes than people making $50k /year. And if a couple of the jerks on Wall Street who took our retirements and homes and gambled with them and lost, or the ones on K Street who facilitated it, or in the Federal Reserve who looked the other way and let it happen, gets prosecuted in the meantime (not one, as of this writing, BTW), that wouldn't be so bad either.

I'm sorry if you're against these things, Bob. I'm sorry if you can't understand how the system works and how broken it is. I'm sorry you're so angry that you will side against people trying to help you (I assume you're not a millionaire, but anything is possible) and make things a bit more equal for everyone, not just the wealthy. Please, Bob, for the love of reality, do a little research. Get a fact or two before you start ranting and raving. You're not helping anything by publishing this crap, you're only making people less informed and more angry. Either get a clue or go away.