Opinion

Sinister

Friday, May 16, 2008

I suspect I am like many of you, already quite tired of this presidential election year. I would not be writing this now if it were not of such importance.

For you see friends and neighbors, there is a "sinister plot" hidden in this campaign. If the news media is correct, our next president will be left-handed!

Both John McCain and Barak Obama, the presumptive Republican and Democratic candidates for president are left-handed. This is not just an accident, there has been a shift in the number of potential leaders to this "evil" side. In 1992, there was no choice for the American people either. Incumbent George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, were all of this left leaning persuasion. We barely escaped in 2000, as Al Gore was a well-known "lefty."

The word "sinister" actually is derived from the Latin word meaning left. The ancients and most societies have always known what we seem to be blindly allowing to take place. Left-handers are a dangerous "devilish" group of people.

By now, I hope you realize that I am spoofing this symbolic nonsense. I do not believe that left handers are evil. For that matter, I don't care much what church they attend, the color of their skin, or whether they have a so called "American" name.

I am much more concerned with the individual themselves. Anyone can take positions on issues. It is the whole person that I want to see and sense. Do they make me feel like they are a real and genuine individual?

As a very young child, I was according to my parents, doing almost everything left-handed. They had no general preference or inclination to force a change on me, so they let nature takes it course. In due time, I began to use the right hand more and more.

There are still some signs of my childhood tendencies.

In eating for example, I am totally ambidextrous. I almost always keep my fork in my left hand, but cut with the knife in the right. Most people change the fork back to the right hand.

When I was researching this article on the internet, I took a test to determine if I was right or left-brained. After the 20 questions, they sent me an e-mail which stated I was half and half. I had answered exactly 10 questions left-brained and 10 right-brained. I know, some would say that is no-brainded!

In my Internet research, I found that there have been a total of 7 Presidents who were left handed.

Garfield, Hoover, Truman, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bill Clinton. It should be noted that Reagan was a little like me. He started out left-handed, but his teachers forced him to do things right handed. Much like his change in politics.

If the next president is left-handed, that will result in eight Presidents out of the 44 total. That is really not too much of a change from the actual natural statistics of left-handers in everyday life. The eight would represent about 18 percent of the total when the new President becomes the 44th President.

Is there a change taking place? That is not so easily rebuffed. If one realizes that the first left hander in the Oval Office was James Garfield, the 20th President, than things look a little different.

Out of the last 24 presidents, that would mean that one third of all the presidents since Garfield have been left-handed.

There are some scientific studies that indicate that left-handed people act and think differently from the rest of society. Ironically this is due to the fact that humans use the opposite side of their brains as the dominate part.

Thus a right-handed person is left-brained, and vice versa for the lefties. Testing over many years has shown that lefties or right-brained people are more likely to be artistic. Conversely they are more likely to have a mental illness. That should give all of us voters real comfort.

Over the years, I have often wished that I had remained a left-hander. In sports the lefty always seems to have really artistic movements. Not to mention the tremendous advantage that lefties receive in baseball by having first base closer to the side they hit from.

So here we are once again, just like in 1992. We are it seems going to have a "sinister", wrong-handed, wrong-brained, president. There is no doubt that there is a conspiracy at work here.