(I write this with full gratitude to the U.S. armed forces, who make it possible for me to sit and ponder such things in peace.)

I spent hours of my childhood crouched down and hunched over the backyard bugs — so much so that the adults would joke that one day I would be an entomologist.

Eventually, I chose other professions ending in -ist, but still, the hours I’d spent in a New Jersey suburb, watching the insects, shaped me.

I would pick up an ant from the red colony and march him to another part of our yard and drop him into the black colony. And he would, inevitably, run away quickly. I’d try to stuff him down the hole — the entry to the ant hill. Usually when I did this, the alien ant would run out a few seconds later. Sometimes, he never made it out.

My aim was to see if ants from different colonies would assimilate. They would not.

Many times, I saw rival ant colonies at war. The ants would lock heads with each other and pull back and forth. Eventually, the losing colony soldiers would be outnumbered, fighting one-to-three against the victors. There were dead ants all over the place. A littering of specks amid the grass.

Death and destruction, right there in my backyard. It was ridiculous and pointless and seemed, to me, a waste of time. Those ants had no idea how small  and insignificant they were.

Every time I read about the latest warring among our own species, I think of the ants and wonder, “How much wiser are we?”

On the same day that hundreds of thousands of Obama critics took to the national mall in Washington, D.C., to rally, the President flew to Minneapolis for a public rally of his own. I was there.

Obama drew a crowd of 17,000 who stood in the heat for more than two hours to see him speak. His supporters turned out in full force on just a few days notice, sacrificing one of the last few sunny Saturdays left before the Minnesota winter blows in. The Target Center was filled near capacity, despite the fact that Obama’s visit competed for attention with a Twins game at the Metrodome and the University of Minnesota Gophers first game in their new stadium.

The rally was set up to mimic Obama’s 2008 campaign, surrounding the president with thousands of adoring supporters.

What surprised me most, especially after a summer of passionate town hall meetings, was that virtually no protestors entered the arena, preferring to tout their opinions with signs outside.  I did notice one scuffle where someone stood up to protest, but people around him booed him, and he left pretty quietly.

So, while the probamas seemed to arrive in droves, most of the nobamas stayed home (or maybe they were at the 9/12 march on our capital?)

Here are photos followed by a recapture of my live tweets.

I apologize for my low-quality photos. I intend to get a better camera one of these days.

Better photos can be found at Minnesota Independent.

Following are my tweets, which I posted live over the course of five hours. They are in reverse order of when I tweeted them. Think of this as a bullet-point list of observations. (Thanks to those of you who followed along online!)

(more…)