James Martin:  

From the blog: People say the grass is greener on the other side. I’m on the other side and make it a point to pull up any grass that I find. Things hide under grass – critters, mice, snakes, and fecal matter. If you let the grass get tall enough, it can even hide bull****. I’ve got my shovel and hoe ready because – after all – forget about grass. Yeah. Screw grass. At least in this metaphor. :-P I was born during a blizzard. It was Ohio – January 1977 – and my grandmother had driven from my family’s native Southwest Georgia to witness my birth, only to get her 1975-ish Pontiac stuck in a snow drift. It would be the first of many sacrifices she made on my behalf, sealing herself as one of the four women in my life who helped me become the person I am. On with the story: I moved to Georgia when I was three, had an awkward childhood as the braniac-not-boyish-as-the-other-boys outcast with little more than a passing interest in the hunting, fishing, tree climbing, and other country-boy type stuff and definitively no athletic ability whatsoever.. We were poor sometimes and barely scraping by other times, so I never owned my own Nintendo. I preferred to sojourn my environment unaccompanied, usually by bicycle, even into my teenage years. I was always opinionated and always getting into trouble because I didn’t know when to keep my mouth shut. I graduated high school a year early and joined the Marine Corps at seventeen. Don’t get the wrong idea. I wasn’t some infantry ubermensch ready to rip the world a new one. I started my career in Information Technology here. I traveled to Okinawa, Japan and a few other interesting locations in the Far East. I also met my spouse during my enlistment. We married, with little fan fare, in a Las Vegas courthouse ceremony in the summer of 1998. Our only guest was the Justice of the Peace. We are proud to say we’re just as married as those of you who paid tens of thousands of dollars for your ceremony. It’s the love and commitment that matter the most, after all. A year later, I left active duty and settled here in Vegas, taking up a decent job where that I’ve worked ever since. Our kids were born in 2000 and 2002, the latter is autistic. More on that later. So why is this guy telling you his life story? Just a little background, I reckon, but now we’re about to get into the meat of it – my beliefs. This will get edited a gazillion times as I think of all the stuff that matters to me. I will try, but probably fail, to order them by importance. Rest assured I’ll be talking about every one of them from time-to-time. I suppose the first thing I should mention is that I espouse existentialism. I believe that each individual is responsible for defining her/is meaning to their own existence and that placing this responsibility in another person’s hands is irresponsible and can be dangerous. That covers the metaphysical…sort of. The whole objectivist/libertarian system of belief is ridiculous. This is one sticking point they can’t seem to get past: We are responsible for the decisions we make, but we’re not responsible for the options we’re given. There is no such thing as “self made.” For a person to call themselves this is preposterous because it, in its very posture, discounts the possibility of any external influence or inspiration and exhibits a blatant disregard for the interconnectedness which is the reality of humanity. I support, someti...Expand for more