Beat The Drums, Wolf

Posted by Ty Keenum on 4 December 2015, 12:41 am

The shootings in San Bernadino, California have shocked the nation. San Berdoo, the birthplace of The Hell’s Angels, is an otherwise non-notable city sixty fives miles East of Los Angeles. We just never hear about anything happening in San Bernadino, until yesterday. Now San Bernadino is the center of the universe for CNN and others to take facts and suppositions and weave them into a plot that can not leave Americans feeling safe.

All of America is waiting anxiously to hear the answer of how and why, and sadly, I must report, I was completely caught up in the coverage myself. I know better. I do, really. I know that it’s better to wait and read about events a week after they have happened than it is to stay glued to the TV as the events unfold. It wasn’t until the second hour of Wolf Blitzer asking loaded questions of “experts”, experts who had clearly been brought in based on their point of view, that I realized I was being played. Ok, big statement, if I’m being played, why, and who stands to benefit from influencing my opinion?

Let’s start with how the news was being fed to us. Initial reports were of three tactically armed assailants with “long rifles”. Let me interject here that the way Wolf loves the phrase “long rifle”, there must be something else going on here, maybe something Freudian. Anyway, the suspects, dressed like SWAT team members, broke into a facility charged with treating the disabled. The shooters were supposed to be dressed in full body armor, militarily trained and based off of their quick exit, carrying out a plan that had taken weeks to prepare. Speculation ran high that these “terrorists” were targeting a “soft target” where the people would be defenseless.

It took hours to report that the attack actually took place at a leased conference room that was being used by county employees for a holiday party. It took many, many hours to report that the police knew who they were looking for from the get go. The shooter was actually at the meeting and got mad, left and came back with his wife. They were wearing ammo vests that can be bought from Amazon for $34.99. No body armor, no extensive planning for a “soft target”. In one sense, just another pissed off mentally unstable worker that had had enough. I think we use to call it, “going postal”, before it became a requirement of all news agencies to look for an ISIS link.

The repeated interviews of terrorism “experts” through out  the broadcast was one of the clues to me, that I, and the rest of the public, were being played. I think the second clue was Wolf’s repeated call to carpet bomb all of the Middle East, Israel excepted of course, and turn the desert to glass. I would think that in the interest of maintaining the motto, “the most trusted name in news” that CNN would sit King Wolf Hyperbole down and explain the rules. Quit creating news “links” that support your personal agenda. The “news” are the verifiable facts that are known at a specific point in time, the news are not, “what if”.

I had to laugh out loud at one of the speculations by Wolf that only a terrorist would have four guns and thousand of rounds of ammunition in their house. Most Americans can look out their front door and see one or two neighbors who qualify as terrorists based off of the Wolfman’s narrow definition.

Whipping the American people into hysteria is a shameless, but tried and true method used by the powerful people to foment their agenda. Why do we want the shooters to be Isis and not “postal workers”? Very simply, we don’t want to do anything to diminish gun sales in the U.S. Part two, we don’t want to spend any money to help the mentally unstable get the help they need. We do however want to help all of those brave freedom fighters in foreign lands by providing them with all of the arms they will ever need. Perhaps another “fight them there before we have to fight them here” war is in order. It worked really well in Iraq.

Sorry, I am a sad, cynical, old man that feels abused by the people who are supposed to being truthful with me. BTW, gun sales for Black Friday this year topped all records with 185,345 requests for background checks. That would be the people who are legally obtaining guns.

See, CNN, advertising does work. I’m sure your check is in the mail.

Bernard “Barney” P. Milton Oliver Fife was a character on The Andy Griffith Show. Barney was played to absolute hilarity by Don Knotts.

If you don’t remember the show, Barney was deputy sheriff in a town where absolutely nothing ever happened, but Barney was always at Defcon One. It was his constant over reaction to every situation that provided much of the hilarity in the show. Sheriff Taylor was routinely tasked with having to minimize the damage that Barney wrecked upon the citizenry.

To prevent fatal damage, Sheriff Taylor authorized Barney to have one bullet, and that was to be kept safely in Barney’s shirt pocket. Sheriff Taylor felt that by the time that Barney unbuttoned his shirt pocket, fumbled out the bullet and got it loaded in his gun, that whatever “imminent danger” Barney perceived would have passed. Hundreds of fictional lives were saved over the years by this policy.

I bring up this humorous fiction to talk about the vast disparity between the police reaction in Uvalde and the nationwide day to day interaction of police with the public. Newsweek has provided a list of 229 black people killed by the police since George Floyd’s murder. Obviously keeping the bullets separate from the gun is not a real-world solution to the problem that plagues us now, but some sort of “time out” needs to be implemented.

To visually display what I see is a huge disconnect in policing I posted this meme, where I hoped to point out humorously that the police were less concerned with the lives at stake than the police’s break time.

The meme gathered what I would call a minimal of responses. I deduced from the lack of response to the meme that either the joke was “too soon” or that the readers accepted that the police could be standing in the hallway of the elementary school in Uvalde, up armored to the gills, listening to the screams of children and be more concerned with their own comfort than trying to end the crisis.

What I find most disturbing about the situation, other than the paralysis by the police, is the litany of excuses offered by the police afterwards for their inactivity. We are accustomed to the various police excuses for shooting an unarmed man walking away with his hands held above his head, not the “we didn’t have enough guns or the right kind of guns” to stop the pedicide taking place twenty feet away. I ask myself the question, “What was different in their training, or their psychological makeup?”

From this bodycam footage you can see that there are more officers arriving and the officers clearly have a numbers advantage. They even have a helicopter overhead. There are enough armored vehicles surrounding the school to attack Normandy again. The “perp” wasn’t going anywhere. What was missing from the equation was the courage of a Barney Fife to run into danger to “serve and protect”.

It’s hard to imagine anything breaking down as badly as it did in Uvalde. I’m sure that the writers of The Andy Griffith Show would have rejected the story idea just because of the cravenness displayed by the officers. Not even Barney Fife was that incompetent or scared of the public he was supposed to be protecting.

Which brings us to the call to defund the police. Clearly buying the latest most expensive military grade weapons isn’t protecting the public from those who would do us harm. Certainly, funding for the police could be better spent on training and the employee selection process. A very stringent fitness standard should be instituted for officers in the field. Every threat from a person in better condition than the officer should not be resolved by the gun.

There should be psychologists on staff to teach officers how to deal with the mentally ill. Methods for confronting people having a mental crisis should be rehearsed as often as “active shooter” drills. You can get a lot of psychology training for the cost of one SWAT truck. Maybe we don’t defund the police but defund the armaments manufacturers.

If you are an Anglophile, run, hide, find a book, and bury your head in it, this column is not for you. This column is for those of us who remember that our country gained our independence from the degenerate tea-sippers two hundred and fifty years ago. This column is for those of us who remember that a petulant monarch sent his armies to burn our capital in 1812. This column is for those of us that remember that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought in World War Two so that the monarchy would be preserved, and some other stuff too, but you get my point.

Now we are supposed to be overcome with the news that a really old woman has died. As always, when I hear anything about the “royal” family, I think, who cares? Haven’t we been divorced long enough to not have to worry about the precious “royal” family anymore? Haven’t we sacrificed enough in terms of toil and treasure to not have to be concerned about the comings and goings of some inbred yahoos?

Take a look at the current winner of the conception lottery. Through no fault of his own, the current king inherited wealth, power, and servitude from peoples scattered all over the globe. Peoples scattered all over the world, because that used to be the family business for the royals, exploit others. At the peak of its power, “the empire on which the sun never sets,” controlled over one fifth of the world’s population.

The “family” business was full time world domination. Whole countries were laid waste to provide materials to keep England’s war machine humming. Ireland, the “Emerald Isle” was almost completely clear cut to provide England with wood for ship building and gunpowder. England’s desire to gather up all of the world’s treasures and hide them in the Tower of London was insatiable. England set up colonies from Australia to Africa and was responsible for bringing the slave trade to America. And the monarchy spoke, “Let no moral go un-compromised in your quest to bring me riches.”

Think of it, a country smaller than Alabama was the dominant power in the world. If that concept doesn’t blow your mind, think about randomly picking any Fred and Ethel out of the local Walmart and elevating them to the rank of King and Queen. Compound your error by ensuring that only Fred and Ethel’s progeny would rise to the throne. No matter how harelipped, wall eyed, degenerate, or feeble minded the lineage might become, they were guaranteed a life of privilege and power.

This life of privilege and power was sanctioned by various religions entities granting to the “royals” the concept of “Divine Right.” Divine Right says that the “royals” answer to no earthly being, but only to the higher power. Sort of like our Supreme Court. Unlike our Supreme Court, when a “royal” dies in office, he is replaced with a family member. The current line of “royals” goes back hundreds of years and is one of the last monarchies on Earth. The fact that the British people continue this tradition is more a proof of Stockholm syndrome than anything else.

In my mind, just because something is old doesn’t mean you keep it around. No matter how comfortable you get with a pair of shoes, eventually you need to trade them in. Trading those old shoes in might just put a new spring in your step. I think England ought to give that a try. Certainly, Scotland and Ireland should have the opportunity to try to govern themselves.

Great Britain currently has the facade of a democratic government working behind the scenes of their “Constitutional Monarchy”. They just need to cut the cord and stop seeking the “royals” approval on everything. Parliament should divide up all of the royal property through eminent domain and turn the palaces into tourist attractions.

The “royals” can keep what they can carry out in a 40-gallon garbage bag, and they have to carry the bag themselves. Everything else goes to auction. Pseudo public land like Hyde Park should actually become public land. Then the public wouldn’t have to endure a travesty like the one outlined here.

In short, the “royals” should just go away. Don’t care if they give birth, don’t care if they get married, don’t care if they die, don’t care if they setup shop in L.A. That’s why we fought the Revolution, so we wouldn’t have to bothered about one of those pasty-faced “royals” ever again.

Being a southerner there is a phrase that I’ve heard almost as often as my name, “it ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity.” Depending on my mood and time constraints I may decide to engage in the scientific theory posited that we are only uncomfortable on a 100-degree day because of the humidity.

I might go for the jugular right off and ask the question, “Did you ever notice how people don’t complain about the humidity making them feel uncomfortable when it’s snowing?” That would be the question that I probably would not wait for a response from the prognosticator. Even the dimmest among us recognizes that the humidity is extremely high when it’s snowing. If I do stay around for a rejoinder, I will generally deliver my coup de grâce “It ain’t the humidity, it’s the heat! It’s always been the heat and it ain’t getting any better!”

From www.climate.gov, “The nine years from 2013 through 2021 rank among the 10 warmest years on record.” Now being a loyal true blue American I’m always proud when our team comes out on top, and it’s icing on the cake if we break the record while doing it. Unfortunately, there’s some records that we shouldn’t aspire to, like number of cats living in a one room apartment.

There are those among us, fossil fuel companies and their shills, who will make the argument that the earth has always had periods of fluctuating temperature ranges. We do have a lot of historical information to look at, going all of the way back to 1659 in England. The thing is generations before us didn’t have the technology to observe or record the changes in the environment like we do today.

To some degree we have to rely on the writers of the day to record the events of their time like when the Mississippi river ran backwards. For historical reference I’ve reviewed writer’s works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for diary entries that reference “couldn’t write today, perspiring so profusely my undergarments are soaked.” I found none. Admittedly they may have been too proper to give voice to their distress, but surely a reference to the high humidity would have found its way into their tomes.

The world is in a climate catastrophe and even the “good guys” are not being spared. The drought out west has reached apocalyptic proportions. Lake Mead’s water level is so low they’re uncovering bodies that were hidden were they would never be found. We may find Jimmy Hoffa yet.

It’s An Inconvenient Truth, but Al Gore has been warning us about this coming disaster since 1989. Rising tides, stronger and stronger hurricanes and tornadoes, unseasonable weather affecting crops and growing seasons, the loss of our coral reefs, wildfires, and the loss of the permafrost. It’s all been there for people who were willing to listen to scientists for over thirty years.

Meanwhile, the state of Mississippi is being encouraged to take showers with their mouths closed because the flooding in the state has compromised their water treatment systems. We do want to encourage Mississippians to shower, you know that whole high humidity-soaked undergarments issue. But if you don’t trust just a splash of water in your mouth, what’s it doing to your skin?

Speaking of skin, the loss of our ozone layer has resulted in record skin cancers. “The increase in the incidence of skin cancer can be mainly attributed to the use of artificial sunlamps and intense exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light.” Ok, time for a reality check, who still uses a tanning bed or sun lamp? No one.

The same thing that’s giving us skin cancer is melting the polar caps, glaciers, and mountain tops around the world. As that snow melts, the seas rise and that beautiful condo you have in Florida will be accessed only by water taxi like Venice, Italy. Hope your place wasn’t on the first floor.

It ain’t the humidity, it’s the heat and we need to do something about it right away or mother earth will fix it for us.

I love science fiction. Absolutely, love, love it. People that know me ask, “why don’t you write science fiction instead of the silly piffle you do write about.” The piffle part is silent of course, but I know what they’re thinking.

The truth is, I can find ample topics to amuse/bore my readers with without having to conjure up wormholes and sentient robots. Here’s some science fiction, sentient Republicans. Ha! Gotcha!

But that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t have to travel to Westworld to get an unbelievable story, they’re right here all around us. You just have to follow the news and cock your head a little sideways and you’ll get the story in perspective.

Will Rogers once said, “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” My God, how we could use a man like him today, or a woman like Molly Ivins. Those are two people who could look at the facts and get right to the true essence of the matter. Most importantly they did it with humor, which allowed the person being pilloried the opportunity to laugh at themselves. The medicine goes down a little easier if the administrator can add a little sweetener to it.

This week’s absurdity comes as we find out that the “twice impeached, disgraced former President” AKA the Donald has been hoarding more than empty Kentucky fried chicken buckets at his compound at Mar-a-Lago.

I feel like a fly in a nudist colony, never has there been such a target rich environment. We are talking TOP SECRET DOCUMENTS here people, like the kind of stuff that sent an Army private to Leavenworth for thirty-five years. The kind of stuff when published sends the publisher into exile, hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years. Said publisher is now fighting extradition back to the U.S. where he faces 18 felony counts. Each count carries a sentence of ten years. Of course, these are “little people” not the Donald.

As long as he is outside of a jail cell the Donald will continue to have ample opportunities to display his self-serving ignorance on almost all topics and the press will proudly broadcast his drivel to his minions. What I am unable to comprehend is how the grandchildren of WWII veterans, Vietnam veterans, the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan can give the Donald a pass on this one.

“Loose lips sink ships” pales in comparison to the security bombshells that the Donald had spirited away with his broken golf clubs and Whopper wrappers. Reportedly some of the documents dealt with “sources and methods”. A source is someone spying for the good guys. We’d really like to keep their identity a secret. We all remember when we had to bring our top Russian spy home after the Donald took office. The intelligence people felt that it just wasn’t safe for him anymore since the Donald was sitting in the oval office.

This theft of documents was a willful action, not an accident, not an oversight. As dumb as the Donald is he knew the documents had value and that’s why he spirited them away with him when he was forced from the White House.

Did some of the documents provide the basis for the 2 billion dollar Saudi investment in the Pale Prince? Did the Donald plan on selling off secrets to keep his properties afloat? Were any of the documents used to re-negotiate his billion dollar debt? Would any of the documents provide the Donald with the ultimate get out of jail free card? Extortion is just part of the Art of Making a Deal right?

The Donald’s hubris, like his sense of ignorance, knows no bounds. Taking documents that are catalogued seven ways to Sunday and not expecting the intelligence services to come looking for them is delusion on a whole new level. Espionage, I think we will agree, is the lowest of the low.

Sadly, I feel the Donald will find a way to sink lower.

There are people that are secure in their belief that evolution is just a scientific theory. Not a theory like gravity, because they can drop stuff and see it fall to the floor. They see evolution as more a theory like the destruction of the ozone layer is causing climate change. They can see the climate change as it effects their daily life, they just can’t see how the use of fossil fuels makes things worse. I just can’t abide that.

Georgia has a Senatorial candidate that has dispelled the theory of evolution with the logic that “if man was descended from the apes, how come there’s still apes?” That’s not the most Herschel thing he’s said, but it does give an example of a person that is ignorant about a topic pontificating to a group of similar minded folk. Their ignorance confirms their suspicions, and everyone is happy to move along.

From Wikipedia: Is the theory of evolution a scientific fact?

“Biologists consider it to be a scientific fact that evolution has occurred in that modern organisms differ from past forms, and evolution is still occurring with discernible differences between organisms and their descendants.”

It’s fun to discuss whether babies have innate fears of snakes and spiders and how those fears got planted in their little brains. My take is that it’s a survival of the species, natural selection type thing, but I’m willing to listen to the other arguments. Where I’d like to detour the argument/theory of evolution is in the area of personal growth and how that personal growth affects the general zeitgeist.

We use the word “evolving” all of the time. An artist might say, “my work is constantly evolving”, a politician might say “my position on the matter is still evolving.” What we are referencing is personal growth. We are gathering information; our opinions are becoming more informed and we’re able to make better decisions because of the increase in knowledge. At least that’s how I think it’s supposed to work.

We then take our growth and share it with our children so that they don’t have to learn by repeating our mistakes. It’s bad enough for one generation to test sticking a paper clip into a wall socket, no need to let our children experience the shock of learning the hard way. We can inform them of a dangerous situation, and they can put it into their lexicon and pass it to their children. The family evolves and prospers from not continually repeating mistakes made by the previous generation. At least that’s how I think it’s supposed to work.

Think about the things we’ve had to learn over the centuries that we bake into our daily lives to keep us safe. Fire, floods, lightning, high winds are natural occurrences that our past experiences have formed how we prepare for them today. Past experience forms current policy, and we learn “never get involved in a land war in Asia” and to “never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” I digress, but only to point out that as we evolve, we learn what works, but more importantly what doesn’t work.

On August 25, 1994, the assault weapons ban was signed into law. We can argue at length why a sunset clause was written into the legislation, but let’s just agree that the sunset clause allowed politicians to “do nothing” and allow the manufacturers of assault weapons to continue on as before. I can just visualize the NRA congress critters meeting with the weapons manufacturers over brandy and cigars explaining to their donors, “It’s just for ten years and then think about the pent-up demand when the law is repealed. Here, we’ll sweeten the deal with constant ads appealing to law-and-order acolytes.” The death-dealers took a ten-year hiatus on some of their wares and then this happened:

We’ve seen the videos of the Uvalde police, et. al. paralyzed by the fear of facing an assault weapon while children were being slaughtered. A suggested cure for their paralysis was to up armor all police with assault weapons. Watch this video to see how that might not really be a viable solution. The chief of police in the video recognizes he has a teaching moment.

We learn what works, and what doesn’t work and then we pass that knowledge on to our children and their children and collectively as a society we grow and prosper. Banning assault weapons works, unrestricted guns don’t. It’s time to evolve to where we were in 1994, with no sunset clause. Evolve.

The way I see it, there’s nothing good going to come from allowing a minority group of small thinkers to determine big decisions for the rest of us based on their limited understanding of a topic. I bet you could still find people that think the Earth is flat, or that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Just because these people believe what they believe with all of their hearts and souls, doesn’t make their conjecture right, right?

To give another example of small-minded thinking that is not only wrong in its supposition but runs contrary to the values that it states to purport, are the assorted Religious Freedom Bills that are being proposed in various states around the country.

First we have to lay to rest this silly idea that the Christians in this country are being persecuted and that they need a special bill to “make them free”. Nothing further could be true.

Sadly, the only the example that I can give for the Christians behavior is similar to when a child tries to run across the street against the light and you grab them and keep them from being crushed by a truck. Rather than thanking you, the child screams “you don’t love me”. The child doesn’t understand that society has created rules for behavior that are for the betterment of the group, not just him.

The reality of living in Democracy or a civilized society is that not everyone gets their way all of the time. At least that’s how it used to work before this group of simple-minded politicians took office. Now the zealots are trying to claim their “religious freedoms” are being impinged on when they are required to allow others their basic civic freedoms. 

According to the title, “SB 129 “Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act”; provided for the preservation of religious freedom” and was pushed through the legislature ahead of other bills more worthy of consideration. The immediacy of the bill was that “religious” shop owners needed the “right” to tell gay people to go to hell when they requested service. Perhaps, I oversimplify, but I like to cut to the quick of the matter.

People who have been taught to “love others as themselves” want to deny service to gay people because their “holier than thou” sensibilities are offended. I’m not sure how religious people resolve the “what would Jesus do?” component of this question. Maybe they’re tired of trying to do what Jesus would have done because it doesn’t feed their bigotry and homophobia. Maybe this group of “Christians” just needs to bash folks who are different in some way to feel better about themselves.

Outside of reestablishing segregation, I don’t know what the long-term purpose of this bill, and these simple-minded individuals, hope to accomplish. You can’t make gay go away. You can’t pray it away, and it won’t starve to death because you didn’t make it a wedding cake. It is the Civil Rights issue all over again with a different victim, a different face. It is quite easy to see how these types of bills can be extended to refuse service to blacks, Hispanics, anybody that didn’t pass the shop owners narrow spectrum of approved people. That’s fine if it is a private club, but, once you are open to the public, you must serve the public. A lot of people lost their lives to gain this right. We don’t need to relive this period of time again.

The overreach of the persecuted Christians has now gone to reproductive rights. Tantamount in their view of their persecution is the belief that blacks and browns will outnumber the “superior white race” and that the white Christian’s “way of life” will come to an end. I won’t get too deep into the illogical assumption that denying people the ability to control their population will somehow help reverse the demographic trend, I’ll just point out that nothing short of genocide will change the “minority” becoming the majority. I guess the “persecuted” will be ok with the genocide component. There’s probably some Bible verse that can be re imagined for their use.

I’ll leave you today with the definition of persecution from the webmd website: “The most common is delusions of persecution. It’s when you’re convinced that someone is mistreating, conspiring against, or planning to harm you or your loved one. Another type is grandiose delusions, where you have an unrealistically inflated sense of yourself or your achievements.”

If you are experiencing any of these symptoms please report them immediately to your health care provider, not your preacher. The world will be a better place.

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“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.

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try.

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.