This week’s challenge at Illustration Friday is “Shaky.”

I go against the grain of the art community in most of my politics, especially when it comes to ecology, the economy, and the military.  That is one of the main reasons I wanted to separate The Small Town Big Life Show from The Artistic Biker.  I didn’t want the politics to interfere with the art and vice versa.  I am not a tree hugging, tofu eating, prius driving, latte sipping, hippy like my good friend Mark Dyson.  I do have a healthy respect for living things and refuse to kill things unecessarily.  I didn’t eat at a local restaurant for almost five years because they moved their establishment from one side of a street to another and cut down a 150 year old tree to do it.  Ok, maybe I’m a little bit of a tree hugger.  On the economy, I typically follow that if you support the infrastucture, it will support the people (REPUBLICAN).  You will do better in the long run to support the industries that create jobs than you will creating social programs to support un- or under-employed.  And for the military, I am not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination.  I agree that the best defense is a good offense.  If you take the fight to them, then there won’t be a fight in your back yard.  Sometimes, war is the only viable option for the security of our nation and our world.  Often, though, I find myself conflicted on whether or not a particular fight is one of those viable options.  I find myself asking more and more often how the comments or actions of a foreign leader actually affect my security.  Sometimes, I even find myself more concerned about my neighbor’s and our leaders’ reactions to those foreign events.  My country has troops stationed everywhere in the world there is a conflict.  Lately, I have been asking if that is simply because we have troops everywhere, or if the conflict is only there because we are.  I’m sure it’s a little of both.  Sometimes, I feel like the little bit of peace we have carved out for ourselves here might be falling away on shaky ground.