“Imagine there’s no heaven”, the song appeals to our higher level of consciousness. It asks us to discard the notion that there is an all-powerful benevolent father figure that has prepared a life everlasting in a land of milk and honey, free of want forever.
The Lennon dichotomy challenges the Christian belief that all we have to do is successfully negotiate the minefield God placed before us on Earth to attain our reward. Complete the course under par and you’re in. Unless you’re a Catholic. If you’re a Catholic, you can admit all of the bogeys recorded on your scorecard as par at the time you sink your last putt on the 18th. The act of contrition will gain you admission to the club house where seventy to eighty virgins will attend to your every need. Whoops, I combined religious philosophies.
I ramble into the religious because of a post I made a while back that brought brimstone down on my head and apparently a pox on my house. I refer to my “If Men Could Get Pregnant” post.
In the post I posit the theory that the Christians are acting very un-Christian in the rabid pursuit of overturning Roe v. Wade and the controlling of the process we will generically call “birth”. The Christians will have us to believe that conception (or birth as it is known to the Evangelicals) begins with the look across a darkened room. Anything that impedes that furtive glance from resulting into a potential acolyte is anathema. There is no scripture to support this philosophy, they just “imagined” it. I’d like to imagine further.
Imagine you saw your child blazing an ant hill with a magnifying glass. You might watch out of amusement for a few seconds before recommending the child pursue a better activity. Imagine you saw same child pulling the wings off of fly. The child argues they’re not killing the fly like they were the ants, but you would still discontinue their behavior. Next you catch your little darling tying tin cans to the dog’s tail. “It didn’t kill him or dismember him” your precious argues, but you still send him to time out because you know cruelty when you see it. Particularly when it involves animals.
Now imagine all of the stories you read in the Bible are true, gospel as they say. Start with Genesis when God’s perfect creations are found to be guilty of lust (you didn’t really believe the snake story did you?). God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden because he knew (all-knowing remember) that someday that lust was going to become an issue. Why he didn’t order the Adam and Eve models without lust mode is open to interpretation( free will, yadda, yadda, yadda).
Humankind bops along for a few millennia until the lust situation becomes such an overwhelming concern that God decides the answer is a complete reboot (see Genesis chapters 6, 7 & 8). Now with Earth 2.0 and an almost clean slate, God watches his experiment with eager anticipation. Humankind eventually reverts back to its sinful self and God decides to correct course using a different tack. He sends his “only begotten son” to die a cruel public death. We assume there were some serious “perks” involved in getting his son to endure the corporal plane. Imagine explaining to Jesus when he got back to heaven why gnats were necessary or hemorrhoids?
Anyway, Jesus died for our sins, and we are all square with God except for the occasional World War, small war, earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, typhoon, flood, tornado, and school shootings. We do have that big bang foretold in Revelations when “the earth shall be scorched by fire and the blood will run to the horses mane” to look forward to. Don’t wait, you need to get all of the lust in you out before then. Just be sure to keep track so that you can confess it all at the end, if you’re a Catholic.
“Confession is good for the soul” and it will help you to ascend into the kingdom of heaven. Just don’t try to sit in the chair on the right side of God. That seat’s reserved. One of the “perks”, remember?
Imagine that I have been astute in my analogy of the cruel child to the “just and loving God.” Imagine my incredulity that so many people need to force their personal beliefs on others? Beliefs that were imagined.
Isolation due to the pandemic has gratefully allowed me to ignore the destruction of our airline industry firsthand. After a weekend trip from Atlanta to Boston, that returned me to Birmingham, I can report firsthand that the friendly skies are no longer friendly, and the ground is even worse.
Our Saturday flight left Boston relatively on time at 2PM and nearly three hours later we were ready to land in Atlanta. I had such high hopes.
The tag on my luggage said “ATL”, why were we landing in Birmingham? I and three hundred other lost souls still want to know the answer to that question. I know the plane information says it will only hold 200 people but believe me there was at least another fifty percent jammed on that flight.
My guess is we will all remain in the dark as to the actual reason why we were diverted from landing in Atlanta eight minutes before our arrival time. Seriously, we were descending into the Atlanta area, on time and everything good when our captain came on the loudspeaker to inform us that the Atlanta airport was being shut down due to severe storms in the area.
Having flown into the Atlanta airport many, many times during thunderstorms, (admittedly some of them quite scary) I conjured an EF5 tornado churning its way up I85 leveling everything in its path. The fact that we were caught short and not offered a holding pattern to the south and east of the monster storm (tornadoes travel SW to NE) was surprising. The fact that we were diverted to Birmingham and not Macon or Columbus which are an hour closer to Atlanta is also a question for deeper thinkers than I. I was able to focus on the calm air of the flight and no storms visible from the window. Could the Atlanta tower have taken their weather advice from those seldom right but never in doubt “Storm Trackers” at Channel 11 News?
We arrived in Birmingham without a ripple, a cross wind, a drop of rain. We sat on the tarmac for an hour and listened to the futile attempts of the captain to get us underway again. “Could we get refueled on the ground and return to Atlanta?” Nope. “Could we go to the gate and deplane so people could go to the bathroom and get something to eat?” Nope. Could we just stew in our own juices for an hour or so while funneling three hundred people through the three bathrooms onboard? Yep.
Eventually Delta Birmingham found a gate for us to deplane to while they tried to come up with a plan for the 8-10 planes re-routed to “The Magic City.” No one has any information. The captain presumes that the flight will return to ATL on the morrow. Delta does want its plane back but doesn’t really care whether the passengers come with or not.
Fortunately for some, Birmingham was the final destination for a large portion of the flight. They are arriving home early. The Birmingham residents are happy, if only Delta decides to off load the baggage. What to do with the baggage seems to be the next big challenge for the multi-billion-dollar airline.
After an hour and a half, we can see that Delta has decided not to hold our baggage hostage any further and they off load it to the carousel. Let me relate that there is not a Delta agent that we can tell that has been assigned to shepherd the group of lost sheep back to their shelter. Just random popups from uniformed people relating more bad news. The captain has long since abandoned his ship. We gather together and stick close to his point of departure hoping another shepherd will appear.
We are informed that because of some convention in town that there are not enough hotel rooms for Delta to put us up overnight. The smart crowd (seasoned Delta flyers, no doubt) had already seized all of the rental cars while we were waiting in line for the bathroom on the plane. We are a hundred or so now, adrift in the airport that appears to be closing for the night. My God, Chik Fil A has closed!
Finally, someone wearing a ramp agent vest tells us that if we can find a room that our flight will head back to Atlanta at 8AM the next morning, we are already ticketed. Otherwise, Delta was trying to secure a bus to carry those interested, first come first served, back to our original destination. Fifty-three or fifty-four of us. Weirdly, some of us hear that the bus will be arriving at the upper level. Primal survival takes over and we rush to be first in line at the door we presume will be our gateway to return home.
There are two reservation agents putzing around behind the counter who offer us water in massive bottles and snacks in bite-size packages. I muse that Delta is only offering snacks in hundred calorie packs as a means to fight America’s obesity problem and eventually get us all down to a size where we need no seat space at all, just slots like in a mail-room. We are told that the bus is on the way and that they are working on getting the manifest so they can check off who gets on the bus. The bus arrives but the manifest does not.
Let’s divert here for a moment to discuss the manifest. The manifest is the list of “souls” who are assigned to the carrier. It’s not magic, there are no spells or potions involved in producing one. You may have noticed assorted airline personnel like stewards checking them on their phone as they make sure you’re not sitting in a seat that has enough room, like first class. Anyway, it seems to be impossible for Delta to produce the manifest so that we can get on the bus. It is now 9-9:15 PM EST., and the bus driver is pointing out he’d like to get back home in time to go to Sunday services.
Mystery guy dressed like a ramp agent reappears and allows us to start boarding the bus. We are the lucky fifty-three that heard correctly that the bus would arrive on the upper deck. We believe there are others waiting on the lower deck, but we don’t seek them out. We squeeze into seats that are even closer together and narrower than airline seats. I know you don’t think it’s possible, but we’re sitting in seats designed for second graders. In spite of the discomfort, we are still elated to be leaving for our homes. Just one more bit of business keeps us tied to the Birmingham airport, the manifest.
The manifest has been supplanted by what we all know to be a legal pad. We spell our names as they appeared on our ticket to the agent that gathers the details for all of the fifty-three lucky survivors of the flight. I casually comment that had our plane gone down the manifest would have been published within minutes to a department at Delta charged with notifying next of kin. The agent is not amused, but then, neither are any of us. Being “stuck inside of Birmingham with the Memphis Blues again” was not on the schedule. Before we pull away from the curb, I get a text message from Delta that the 8AM departure for our flight the next day has been delayed. Who could have predicted that?
The bus ride is mostly uneventful with the exception of various body parts cramping and/or going to sleep. The bus driver knows what the ATL tag on our baggage stands for and gets us to the airport as quickly and safely as possible. The airport has chosen to have all Uber and Lyft transactions take place at the far end of the North Terminal parking. We are at the South Terminal. What’s a little schlepping at the end of a journey? It’s now 12:15AM on Sunday and we are finally breathing the hot humid air of our hometown.
The Uber driver is a chatty fellow and after I give him some of the high spots of our journey, afterall, he did ask, he informs us there had been no storms in the area that day. He had been at the airport around the time of our scheduled arrival, and everything seemed to be normal. No EF5’s, no active shooters, only normal business. Who am I to believe?
The next day, Delta sent us some apology sky miles and the excuse that the problem was due to the crew potentially going to overtime. We’ll just call that one bull-hockey while we muse on some of Delta’s past prevarications:
1984: Delta Is Ready When You Are
1984: Delta Gets You There
1987: We Love to Fly, and It Shows
1992: Ready When You Are
1994: You’ll Love the Way We Fly
1997: On Top of the World
2005: Good Goes Around
Current: Keep Climbing
The re-flight arrived about 1PM on Sunday delivering Delta’s equipment back to its original destination. Pick one of the catch phrases above.
Thank God there is the occasional good news to offset all other news. This week we are confronted with the Uvalde report. The report is complete with the pictures confirming what we already knew. Children suffered and died because of the cowardice displayed by a vast assortment of men chosen for their qualities to protect and serve. Before we delve into that misstatement / misunderstanding, let’s look at the good news.
By all means watch the video, multiple times. What you are watching is a pizza delivery driver that just happened to be passing by realize that there was the possibility that he could do some good if he threw himself into action. He saved five children from a certain fiery death.
Most importantly, he raced back into the raging fire when he found that there was a six year old still in the house. You can see him bring her out as the firemen are putting on their fire-retardant gear for their assault on the house. Nick Bostic is the hero’s name and you can see from his shorts and t-shirt he didn’t need to suit up to go into action.
“I was ready to lose my life that night,” was what he said after the ordeal. He didn’t die, but he did receive a broken arm while jumping out of a second story window while cradling a six-year-old that now has a chance to grow up, graduate, marry, have children of her own. The Bible says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” I’m sure that now Bostic can count the children among his friends, but at that particular moment, Bostic was prepared to give his life for strangers. An example of pure bravery.
Now we flip the coin:
Note the difference in urgency between a house fire and a psychopath shooting children. Honest to God, watching these police it’s like they’re checking to see whose turn it was to bring snacks. With each piece of information revealed we find out more and more that the first order of business was not to stop the killing of innocents. Even after the child inside the class room got a call into 911 to explain that they needed help, the police just meandered about like neighbors at a yard sale. No urgency here, just innocents being slaughtered. “Let’s be careful out there.”
Forgiving the possibility that the “first responders” were not adequately armed for the situation, although two of the three officers do have semi-automatics and body armor, how can we forgive the inaction of literally hundreds of up-armored police who arrived on the scene minutes later?
The Texas Rangers have made hay off of the phrase, “One riot, one ranger” for over a hundred years. How do they justify not one ranger being willing to confront the killer? How do they rationalize taking the weapon from an off duty officer who wanted to go in and get his wounded wife? How do they explain arresting a mom that drove forty miles to the scene that was frantically trying to free her child? It seems that the ones that had the courage to do something were pushed aside that day.
A lot has been said about doors and keys and classrooms and/or offices. The first group into the hallway knew where the shots came from. They knew it was a classroom. The little girl begging for her life to the 911 operator told the operator where she was. Meanwhile, we hear Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Arredondo yelling into the void that he thinks is the shooter. Arredondo apparently thinks he can send the shooter a pizza and that after a while the shooter will fall asleep and the officers can slip in and take his gun away with no loss of life to the police.
Look at this timeline provided by the Texas Tribune and the Texas Department of Safety
12:46-12:47 p.m.
Arredondo gives approval to enter
12:46 p.m.
“I can hear the police next door.”
— Student who called 911
12:47 p.m.
“Please send the police now.”
— Student who called 911
12:50 p.m.
Officers kill gunman
I count three minutes from order given to situation ended. Imagine the difference in the situation if the breach order had come at 11:38 when Arredondo arrived on the scene? We don’t know how many babies would have been saved, but surely more than the final result.
A lot of times you hear that the cover-up was worse than the crime. All government agencies have been very reluctant in being transparent about the events at Uvalde. This is one time that I think the crime of cowardice, of shirking one’s sworn duty is far worse than the coverup. There will be trials. I’m assuming that the defendants will ask for a change of venue since the defendants have definitely tainted the jury pool. I’m a big believer of defendant rights, but this is one case I think should be tried where it happened.
Hopefully justice will be served and policies put into place to prevent this from ever occurring anywhere in our country again. Just remember if you’re ever in a life threatening situation, call Domino’s.
Just finished watching the documentary “Unprecedented” directed by Richard Ray Perez. This is the documentary that has provided behind the scenes footage to the January 6th committee with regard to what was going on within the Trump camp on the day of the insurrection. Lots of “state of mind” questions seem to have gotten answered by some of the documentary’s footage.
The filmmaker was allowed to follow the Trump family all around the country during the 2020 campaign. The film gives the viewers a behind the curtains view of each family member as they stumped hard to Make America Great Again, Again. There were very staged sit-down interviews with the family, but the real meat came from the snippets taken before and after the individual rabble rousing.
What came through was how dedicated the children were to helping their father maintain his power. Their interest was not unselfish, nor was it sympathetic to the multitude of issues, mental and physical, the Donald exhibits. The “fifty speeches in forty-eight days” was the price the children were willing to pay for the family to maintain its stranglehold on America and continue the dynasty.
We all remember the Clampett Trump family visit to the Queen and what the Trumps felt was the opportunity for the two bloodlines to mingle and strategize. That’s how it works, right? One person is elected and then the family just takes turns being the supreme leader until they’ve all had a turn? The documentary makes the leap that it will be Don Jr. that will follow in the Donald’s footsteps, and not the fairest child Ivanka. Start popping the popcorn if they are both still free during the next election cycle.
It’s admirable that the daughter could be perceived as the heir apparent, and if you ignore all of the salacious gossip surrounding the pair, and I don’t, it would seem right and proper that Ivanka would win out over her mouth breathing brothers. But how sad for the brothers. Here are two guys that no matter how hard they try, they, like their father, will never win the approval or the love of their father. No amount of risk taking, felony committing, womanizing, race baiting, double dealing or cheating will ever be enough to win the favor of their father. How sad.
Like their father before them, the boys were instructed by a critic, not a promoter. The Donald only has time enough to promote himself and anyone that steals that limelight is suspect. It was very telling to watch the Donald viewing his son’s campaign speeches. The proud smile he had for Ivanka’s performance was turned into a grimace suggesting a bad bowel blockage after viewing his sons.
Not that the boys hadn’t thrown every accolade and hyperbole they could at the frothing crowd. The speeches promised “a chicken in every pot” in an America where only the “right” people could own a pot. The boys stood before God and everybody and promised that their daddy could walk on water, if the liberal congress and media would just get out of the way.
How the Donald was not overcome by the sheer volume of prevarications espoused by his heirs was amusing. These boys are world class truth benders and one would think that that alone would have put a twinkle in daddy’s eye. But alas the only twinkle in the Donald’s eye was for Ivanka.
We know that Fred Trump, the Donald’s father, drove his namesake to an alcoholic death. Fred Jr. couldn’t withstand the scorn heaped upon him by his dad who wanted him to follow in Fred Sr.’s real estate footsteps. From the looks of this video it looks like another generation of Trump sons is on their way to a substance abuse problem.
Sadly, there’s another generation of Trump sons being ignored by their father’s insatiable drive to measure up to their father’s expectations. All dynasties eventually fade away. The end of this one can’t come soon enough.
“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” was a rebuttal given by Joseph Welch to Wisconsin Republican Senator Joe McCarthy at the Senate hearings in 1954.
McCarthy, the lunatic Senator from Wisconsin, was distinguishing himself in front of America by conducting a witch hunt for communists. Lacking any of the qualifications normally found in a Presidential candidate, McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn plowed through people’s personal lives in an attempt to gain national recognition for a potential Republican party nomination. McCarthy and his chief counsel Cohn ran roughshod over witness after witness under the guise of ferreting out any communists that might be “hiding under our beds” in an attempt to gain notoriety for himself.
The McCarthy hearings were aligned with the Hollywood Blacklist and authors and actors had their careers cut short by the accusation, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the communist party?” Relentlessly grilling and insulting witnesses, McCarthy set a tone for the meanness, the pettiness, that lies deep in the soul of the Republican party today. Finally, McCarthy was brought up short by the question from Welch, “Have you left no sense of decency?” America heard the question and decided that they did have a sense of decency and the hearings were brought to an end.
This past week came the announcement that a ten year old rape victim was denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio because she was determined to be three days past the six weeks cutoff date. Take a moment. Get a drink of water and slow down your life long enough to contemplate what a full term pregnancy will do to a little ten year old’s body. Now, take another moment to contemplate the psychological damage done to the child through absolutely no fault or action of her own.
Somewhere in the bowels of hell the Republican party has deemed themselves to be the prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner and media rep, all in one for all of us.
I’d like to think that it’s only a sliver of the Republican demographic that would be so heartless to enforce a pregnancy on a ten-year-old. I’d like to think that the majority of Republicans don’t think that rape victims should carry the child of their rapist, have to share custodial rights with the rapist, sit at the family dinner with their child’s father who might also be their father. I’d like to think that it’s only a sliver of the Republican party that is this cruel, this mean.
Evidence does not support my notion. Ronald Reagan famously said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left me.” Horse Hockey! Reagan left the Democratic party to quench his/Nancy’s lust for power, his need to tell everyone else what was right and wrong, to be the lead actor on the biggest stage in the world. Aided by unscrupulous individuals like Newt Gingrich, the Republicans set a course for dismantling all of the social programs so vital to the American poor and middle class. The heartless movement that they started has become the American Taliban we see today.
American Taliban, a bridge too far? What else do you call a society that is being governed by religious theories? If a sliver of society doesn’t believe in abortion, gay rights, miscegenation, a woman’s right to control her body and her destiny, and you have six Supreme Court justices willing to throw the Constitution aside in favor of dogma, what do you have?
When you throw in the sliver’s irrational support of guns, the guns that enable that sliver to have a “louder” voice than the rest of us, we wind up with daily crises that divert our attention from the main issues. These people want child rape victims to give birth to the consequence of their most horrible moment in life.
I ask you again, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
“Once upon a time” as most fairy tales start, there was a zeitgeist in America of doing good and being the “good guys”. Most people took pride in living honorably and in doing for others.
We all remember the cartoon about the Boy Scout that was so desperate to do a good deed that he walked an old woman across the street against her will. Such was the expectation for good citizenship in the community that the Scout saw an opportunity to do a good deed where none in fact existed. What the heck happened?
The persecuted Christian right wing is now wreaking havoc from the Supreme Court on the rest of us. The “righteous few” are doling out decisions for us everyday Americans who just want to muddle through our daily lives without the fear of our children being shot while they’re at what should be the safest spot in the world for them.
Now admittedly we had our fears as school children in my day. We hid under our desks to enhance our survival from nuclear attack. The likelihood of that attack was minuscule compared to the likelihood of being shot by an aggrieved shooter in today’s world. An aggrieved shooter that can’t get the mental health services he needs because “the money’s just not there,” but can buy a military weapon the same day he has his mental break, no questions asked.
More school children have been killed so far this year than on duty police officers. Let that sink in for a minute and ask yourself why the Supreme Court would tell the states they can’t regulate guns in their states. Juxtapose that ruling for FREEDUMB! against the very narrow view of freedom when evaluating a woman’s right to choose when to start a family. Somewhere in there the “right to life” has gotten muddled. It seems “forced birth” has become equated to a right to life, and the right to life is how well you can dodge a bullet.
In my twisted convoluted Judaeo-Christian belief system I’ve equated the Golden Rule as the only tenet I need to embrace. I should do unto others as I would want done unto me. I don’t want the court system telling me I don’t have control over my own body. That’s a bridge way too far.
If I don’t want the courts telling me I have to get a vasectomy or produce seed for a generation of super Americans, I should respect the rights of the female population to not have a group of religious zealots doing their thinking for them with regard to family planning. If they can tell you you have to have a baby, they can tell you which sex is acceptable.
As pointed out before, the absolute buy in of the mother is a prerequisite for me to the birth of a child. The state’s needs for children should not be part of the equation. Family planning shouldn’t be a consideration for future armies, or altar boys.
Not so for Justice Amy Cony Barrett. It seems that the gentle prevaricator outlined the shortage of children for adoption in her opinion of Roe vs. Wade. While commendable that she has adopted children of other races and with special needs, does she have the right to force her beliefs on the rest of us? I think not. The Constitution used to be pretty clear on the right of privacy.
Does Uncle Clarence have the right to finally get even with “the libs” after being subjected to their heretical viewpoints of freedom? Apparently he thinks so. It will be interesting to see his take on Loving vs. Virginia when it comes before the court. I may misunderestimate him. Ruling that blacks and whites can’t marry might have been his game plan all along to avoid a costly divorce from Ginni.
The wah, wah, wah, you hear is the unloved babies about to be born and those of us who remember when empathy for others was a thing. A Christian thing.
In news that we should all be concerned with, on a level that runs much deeper than our obsession with politics, it has been revealed on Youtube that any day now is the beginning of the “End of Days”. You’ve got to skip past all of the trailers for Arnold’s movie of the same name, but eventually if you keep scrolling you’ll get down to where the prophets are doing business.
According to some religious seers, the Antichrist will be unveiled today, or maybe tomorrow, or certainly by the end of next week, and with that revelation, Armageddon is just around the corner. While I do mental gymnastics with all of the possibilities of the Rapture, I wonder how the Antichrist will be revealed. For those unfamiliar with the scripture, I will defer to the secular humanists at Wikipedia to define the phenomenon .
“In Christian eschatology, the Antichrist or anti-Christ refers to people prophesied by the Bible to oppose Jesus Christ and substitute themselves in Christ’s place before the Second Coming. The Antichrist is announced as the one ‘who denies the Father and the Son.’ Jesus alerts his disciples not to be deceived by the false prophets, who will claim themselves as being Christ, performing ‘great signs and wonders.'”
According to “Christian eschatology” and Wikipedia, there’s millions and millions of people who are awaiting the return of Jesus Christ. Some are convinced that the second coming has arrived in the form of one Donald J. Trump. These people are so convinced that they’ve even erected a billboard declaring their belief to one and all that the Donald is truly the anointed one.
Never the one to let a quality scam get past the rubes, the Donald just smiles benevolently and accepts their adoration. Maybe in some corner of his Swiss cheese like brain, there is a neuron firing, “You are Jesus, you are Jesus.” That would certainly explain his miraculous escape from being held accountable for any of the multitude of sins he has committed.
I’ve often wondered how the faithful have ignored the Donald’s complete ignorance of anything regarding religion. In this video the Donald is being asked what his favorite part of the Bible is, his favorite verse. As you can see, the Donald won’t be pinned down, “he likes it all.” It might have been easier if the interviewer had asked the Donald if he could recite John 3:16. Any child that has ever darkened the door of any church knows the answer to that one. It’s a shame he’ll never get asked.
No, the Donald just likes the Bible, “all of it”. So much so that he felt compelled to carry a copy across the street from the White House to proudly display it upside down in the churchyard. Now there are those among us that see the symbology of upside down Bibles and crosses and such as signs of the Devil. I’m not saying the Donald is the Devil, but maybe he’s Devil adjacent. Or maybe he is the one prophesied, the one who parades as Jesus but is really the false prophet.
In news that you’ll never be allowed to see in the main stream media, the Donald’s normal stylist has replaced by someone who has been forewarned to cut around the two prominent horns emanating from the Donald’s frontal lobes. The paired hollow sheaths of keratin are currently hidden by the Donald’s coiffure. Those “Make America Great Again” hats aren’t just for advertising, you know.
I could be wrong, but I prophesize that at some point a really strong wind or perhaps a fall will unsettle the coif. Once confronted with the evidence, will the MAGATS believe the evidence of the Donald’s duplicity or continue to follow him to his just reward? Stay tuned. “But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”
What more do I have to say than it’s the thirtieth-sixth anniversary of the release of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”? The instant classic was released to the world on June 11, 1986 to critical and popular acclaim. Who knew so many of us would identify with a Chicago rich kid slacker? John Hughes did.
Starting with Pretty in Pink in 1984 and continuing through Some Kind of Wonderful in 1987, Hughes spun tales of teenage angst into box office gold. Ferris Bueller earned 70 million at the box office placing it at number nine for the year. Top spot went to Top Gun. I guess most of America was more aligned with watching a farcical dogfight with World War III implications than watch Matthew Broderick pose as Abe Froman the sausage king of Chicago. To each his own I guess. I thought Ferris’s impersonation was spot on.
It wasn’t the impersonation that made Ferris a legend, however. It was clear from the tone of Ben Stein’s “Beuller, Beuller, Bueller, Bueller,” and the immediate response of one of his classmates that Ferris’s panache had earned him a degree of notoriety. The response of the classmate sounded more like an urban legend than an accurate accounting of Ferris’s absence. The explanation was delivered by Simone, the prettiest girl in the class, with such relish that it cemented in the viewers mind that Ferris Bueller was “the dude”.
Only “the dude” could convince his hypochondriac best friend Cameron to play hooky with him. Not only play hooky, but to do it in style. The boys steal Cameron’s dad’s most precious possession, the “thing that he loves the most”, his Ferrari, to squire the group on their adventure. After checking out Ferris’s girlfriend from school, the trio embark on their odyssey of fun for the afternoon that culminates in Ferris leading a parade through Chicago. Just a typical day for any American high schooler.
The great thing about movies is the total suspension of reality for a couple of hours. Teenage viewers from all stripes were transported to a reality that less than the top five percent of the world could experience. The first clue that the Buellers were not an average middle class family was the thousands of dollars of electronic equipment Ferris used to carry out his ruse of being sick. The second clue was the private bathroom. This is not an average American middle class family, but we identify with them just the same.
Through John Hughes’ writing and directing we find a way to embrace a smug, self-centered rich kid slacker as a role model. Somebody we’d love to give us a call the next time he’s going to boost a priceless car and act out. We accept the idea that destroying the Ferrari was actually a good thing for Cameron’s psyche. We ignore the fact that the dad had built an exhibition room to display the “thing that he loved the most” and that it too was destroyed. Just another day of hijinks in the cool kid’s club.
Not to rain too much on the parade, I do have to admit to loving all of John Hughes movies. I’m particularly fond of “Pretty in Pink” and “Some Kind of Wonderful” for their more modest settings and characters. Not that we all wouldn’t love to live in Ferris’s neighborhood. The neighborhood where there are no consequences for actions. Where even the least studious philosopher can counsel, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Welcome to middle age, Ferris.
There are a great many things that are different in small towns from big cities. The topic for today is policing.
I grew up watching Andy Griffin of Mayberry fame. While his character is based on a true life character, most people believe a policeman with strong ties to the community is a fiction. Not true. Sheriffs in small towns are elected, and, as a result, are known by the community they serve. More importantly, they know the members of their community. I believe that knowing the people in the communities that the police serve has more to do with how criminals are handled in the smaller communities than they are in the cities.
When was the last time you heard of a small town sheriff rolling up to a report of a kid playing with a toy gun and opening fire in three seconds? Never. In a small town, the sheriff would have likely rolled up, told the kid to quit acting a fool or he’d tell his Momma. The sheriff would probably mention the kid’s Momma’s name, just to drive home his point.
I get it, we don’t all live in small towns where everybody knows everybody’s name. That said, I feel a national effort to humanize suspects is in order. Kind of a “Black Lives Matter”, with a subset of, “don’t dehumanize any of us”. The dynamics of policing change when you view a “perp”, or my favorite, “un-sub”, as a daddy, mommy, son or daughter. The preservation of life should be the absolute first order of business for the police, even if it means that occasionally they’ll get their uniform a little dirty. A life should have a higher value than a cleaning bill, right?
The police are so over-equipped with gadgetry that is designed to disable suspects, I think they feel cheated if don’t get to use their toys. It has been reported that there have been over 1,000 deaths due to tasering in the United States. What do all of these dead subjects have in common? They were all unarmed and most of them were people of color.
Are there other methods available to police that are possibly less lethal to use? Of course. Most countries use the baton as the method of choice. The baton allows the officer to apply a proportional amount of force to a situation while not running the risk of killing a suspect who might be endangered by other methods, such as pepper spray. Since 1990, there have been 60 in-custody deaths in which pepper spray was a contributing factor. In-custody deaths. Pepper spray is not just an irritant to an asthmatic, it’s a death sentence.
To what can we attribute the over use of force in America by the police? I believe the police are scared to death. I’m not ready to cynically say that they all are a bunch of neo-Nazis. I think they’re scared, and out of that fear, overreact. Do they have reason to overreact? In my opinion, and a study done by the CDC, no.
According to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, “In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013) ” Let that one soak in for a while. You are three times more likely to be killed by gunfire, if you are a preschooler than if you are a policeman.
President Biden recently pointed out that since the year 2000 more school children have died due to gun violence than the total of military and police killed combined. Something is clearly out of whack here, and the answer is not that we need to up armor the kids.
To me, the answer is the sense of community the police officer needs to have, the training in non-lethal methods, and strong robust gun control measures to be enacted. It’s not sexy, and it doesn’t move billions of dollars worth of military weapons to the police, but it could work. It works everywhere else. Don’t spare the rod, and save the child.
We’re watching two trials currently that have the same defendant, racism. I realize that they are in different parts of the country, with people that have much different accents, with different sets of circumstances, but the same cold dark hearts are in evidence. I’ve recounted how I learned racismfrom my Mom. I suspect that the defendants in these trials must have had a similar experience.
There are so many logical inconsistencies in both trials that I started to entitle this piece “Cognitive Dissonance II”. Upon reflection, I decided that more than the disassociation of their thinking playing a part in the commission of their crimes, the inbred dictum of blaming the “other” for all slights, real or imagined, was the key to these crimes. Racism is taught, nurtured and at a certain point for some people becomes the reason for life. “I might be poor, stupid and an all round loser, but at least I ain’t a n—er.” It’s right there in full display in the Arbery trial.
For those unfamiliar, the Ahmaud Arbery trial is about three white men who chased a black man in their pickups who was unfortunate enough to be jogging through their neighborhood. Not to be deterred by the victim continuing to change course to avoid confrontation, the father and son team chased the victim down multiple avenues before finally cutting off the victim. The son jumped out of the pickup, shotgun in hand, and put the shotgun in Arbery’s chest. Arbery responded to the shotgun by grabbing it, a logical mind presumes to move it away from his body.
The illogical mind presumes the shotgun is going to be wrenched from his grip and used to kill him. The racist fires three blasts of the shotgun. In testimony the shooter marvels that the victim was still able to run a few steps away from the scene before dying in the street. He seems to give voice to the superstition of the all powerful negro who must be dealt with using the most extreme measures lest the negro prevail using his super human strength and guile. Nothing to see here but good old southern racism in full bloom.
Meanwhile, in the far reaches of the north, a seventeen year old took it upon himself to join in a vigilante effort to put down the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. All evidence presented points out that the interlopers from neighboring states where not hired or even invited to police the areas they staked out as their strongholds. The fact that the defendant was underage and not able to legally carry a military weapon on the streets of Kenosha was charged and dismissed. Giving military weapons loaded with full metal jacket ammunition was poo-pooed by the 2nd amendment people. After all, doesn’t one’s right to bear arms extend to the cradle?
His association with the proud boys and a video showing him describing how he’d like to shoot some people looting a drug store was deemed inadmissible by the judge. From my observation post, the judge doesn’t want the jury to have too many examples of the killer’s intent to ponder while deliberating his fate. The fate of this teenage shooter who was motivated to travel to another city to render aid and support to his fellow man. The logical mind must assume that all opportunities in his own community for public service had been exhausted. The teenager had to travel to Kenosha to do good.
I’m going to digress a bit here for a moment. The teenager portrayed himself as an EMT in the trial and to protesters who engaged him in videos of the scene. He is not medically trained. Imagine if a teenager showed up on your front lawn dressed in camo slinging an AR15? Would your first thoughts be, “I wonder if he has an Ace bandage in that little fanny pack he’s carrying?” I’m guessing no. Your first and correct assumption would be that the character on your lawn was there for nefarious purposes.
I imagine the tender scene between mother and son as the killer leaves home telling his mom, “Don’t worry about me Mom, I’m just going to render aid. I feel it in my heart, it’s something I have to do.”
The mom replies, “I really wish you wouldn’t go; I really don’t want you to put yourself in a dangerous situation. If you must go, don’t you want to wear a shirt with a red cross on it so people won’t confuse you with troublemakers? Ok then, stay away from people with guns.”
The results point out that my little scenario didn’t take place. Even Johnny Cash’s messagewas wasted on these moms. These mom’s were more concerned with their sons going and helping keep “them” in their place. They must be so proud.
