either get off or help pull

Generally speaking I’m a pretty easy going dude…at least from outward appearances. I get along just fine in public. Make friends fairly easily and overall play very well with others. I enjoy a good conversation and like small talk as much as the average guy on the street. I would say that my patience is good, for the most part, and that I am very capable of tolerating a pretty high level of stress…

This being said; I think I might be ready to go postal...Go ballistic. Go rogue.

As Popeye put it so eloquently… ”I’ve had all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!”

People are getting to me. They are getting under my skin and inside my head. They seem to be coming out of the woodwork just to pull out in front of me and then step on the brakes.

Is it me…or has someone turned the volume up on ignorance, short-sightedness, negativity and closed mindedness.

Sure, they aren’t known by those names when they're out on the town, in street clothes.

They come dressed up in tweed jackets with labels like conventional, traditional, cautious, and conservative.

They come with a side of “that’s not the way we do things around here” or “we tried that back in ’83 and it didn’t work, why would we try that again?”

They usually travel in groups, because their attitude is viral. Contagious. Easy to catch and hard to get rid of.

They are the voices from the right of the room that always have to bring up past failures.

Past struggles and missed marks are the center of attention for them, not present successes and certainly not the future. They're obsessive about clinging to the downside of any news and the naysayers of any potential changes, positive or not.

Real change is their underlying fear, though I rarely hear them admit it.

Now, don’t read into this that I am a liberal rebel nutcase who wants everything turned upside down just to have something new to view. Though I have been known to look at the “what ifs” and “why nots” more often than the “why bothers” in life, I am not a card-carrying Democrat (or Republican for that matter) or a sign wielding protestor. At least not yet.

I do believe that the future belongs to those who have learned (and it is a learned skill) to embrace progress and change…I also believe in the value of positive changes made by those who were the entrepreneurs and pioneers of yesterday. In other words, just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s broken.

But if it IS broken, whether old, new or otherwise…don’t expect me not to try and fix it. That's what I do. Don't show me something dirty unless you want something shiny there when next you look.

What I will not do however, is sit by and let the curmudgeons complain about all of the “radical” new ideas out there today and tell me how “terribly liberal” our society has become, simply because they have failed to pick up their feet and move along with those of us moving forward. If you are going to get off the rollercoaster, that's fine, but don't scream at me from the ground while I'm in the middle of a triple loop about how I am going too fast and how you prefer to keep both feet on the ground.

Someone has to keep this world moving, growing and evolving and it's usually those of us who are pulling the weight, pushing the load…and it seems to be done lately with the naysayers sitting on top telling us to slow down.