For the Love and Hate of October...Random Thoughts

October is the culmination of love and hate for me.

The first half is unfailingly busy, marking the official end of the 2007 tax filing season. Many people do no know that extended corporate returns are due September 15th, and extended partnership and individual returns are due October 15th. So while we breathe a huge sigh of relief in April...it isn't really over until October. And that October deadline hits hard...so I hate it.

But once October 15th passes, things at work calm way down, coming to an almost screeching halt. The second half of October is time for cleaning out desk drawers, reviewing and revamping…a nice break in an otherwise blistering pace. Of course October also means autumn, football, Halloween, the World Series and our annual camping weekend at the NHRA races in Las Vegas...all things I love.

Then too, in my neck of the woods, every thing is on fire in October, making the very air around you thick with smoke, ash and anxiety.

Unfortunately this year, we can add that the anxiety of an economic crisis and all things political. Politics in general make me feel stupid. I read things. I hear things. I discuss things. And I wonder how other people, people I know to be very intelligent, can come away from the same things feeling so vastly different. I assume it must be me. I am missing something here. So I read and I listen and I discuss, and still I end up scratching my head. I don't like feeling stupid. And this year in particular, well, I am really am starting to hate this election.

The extremists on both sides are creating a truly frightening turmoil...worse than I have ever seen. If one of these candidates does not get assassinated, it will be a miracle. You've got one side playing a dangerous card by calling a black man with a strange name a terrorist and playing on people's fears of things that are different. On the flip side, painting a successful woman as an airhead, and a bad parent to boot, simply because she is, in fact, a working mother is also incredibly unfair. No one would be questioning her parenting skills if she were a man with five children. Both sides can try to spin this however they like, but this smacks of 1960's racism and sexism to me.

I get these e-mails that are crazy, illogical and flat out wrong in their factuality. The sad thing is, millions of people are getting these e-mails, and believing them. Who is out there telling these people the truth, and letting them make a decision based on fact instead of fiction? I have nothing but respect for another person's opinion, provided that it is based in some kind of logical fact, and not "I think Sarah Palin is an idiot because she doesn't pronounce the 'g' on the end of an active verb," or "I think Obama must have accepted money from terrorists because he had no other way to pay for a Harvard education." Yeah, it's called an accent, and it doesn't make you stupid. None of my family in the Mid West pronounces the "g", and they are far from idiotic. Oh, and there exist too little things...one us smart kids called "scholarships," and another us poor kids called "student loans." If you were lucky enough to be smart and poor, like yours truly, you got some of both.

But no one hears these logical explanations. They only hear the radical ones...and they believe them. Logical explanations are too mundane. The extremism is much more glamorous. Each side is so damned concerned with winning, they could care less about the truth. So nobody wins. Least of all America...and I really hate that.