I hope our wisdom will grow with out power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.
-Thomas Jefferson

God on twitter sent out a tweet that said “Be prepared to lose any lingering neutrinos of respect for Bush,” and he pointed to this YouTube video on George W. Bush’s 8 years of presidency, condensed into 8 minutes:

Eight years of hell maybe over but the after effects linger and the world— not just America felt those eight years. As Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States putting back the pieces is just the beginning.

Speaking of power, Conrad de Quiros’ talked about It takes An Addict and the Warrior Lawyer’s The Addict in GMA both referencing Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s addiction to power and her role now as drug czar. Most apt is the Warrior Lawyer’s update in that post, he said:

Update: The day after I made this post, Conrad De Quiros wrote in his regular Inquirer column (19 January 2008) an article along almost exactly the same lines, “It Takes An Addict“. I guess the analogy is obvious to a lot of people.

The random student drug testing, the current policy to drug test every driver’s license applicant ironically for a land that’s suppose to be free, and where everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent, we think the opposite. And this of course extends beyond drug testing. It extends to how we view government officials, not that we have cause to believe otherwise. We think everyone is a crook, everyone is guilty.

Primer Pagunuran in random student drug testing here on FilipinoVoices, wrote:

In the US military, drug testing was resorted to and yielded a drop from 30% to 2% and in the US workforce, from 18% to 4%. This ought to be the kind of historical backdrop against which a random drug testing must be proposed. Theoretically, it is an exercise in futility and graphically even absurd if not stupid to have to reduce a possible incidence of less than 1% to an even much lesser rate since it tells us offhand, that the drug menace so-called is a myth. Which part of the equation would we have to change here, pray tell?

I agree that it is an exercise in futility to root out the real addicts— but not if you profit from drug testing every driver’s license or do random drug testing of students. How many driver’s licenses are there and how many school children do we have again?

Fortune passes everywhere, does it not?

Time and time again, history has us concluding that power is its own reward. Power is rarely given, most often taken. That power is for power’s own sake. Inevitably it destroys those who seek it. One very wise man by the name of Thomas Jefferson has been quoted, “I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.”

I can not help but think, perhaps Power should have a focus, should have a purpose beyond its own sake.

When I think of GMA and her ilk it isn’t because of her lies or her personality that I am most often in disagreement with. It is how she exercises her power, with such obvious arrogance. Such waste I think, to have power and not have it focused, to have it merely for its own sake. Shame.

That said, is it why I have this mental image? *points to video:*

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