My America?

We had just under 2,200 new covid-19 cases in my county last week. Brown County, Wisconsin has less than 265,000 people, so nearly two in a hundred got a completely controlable illness last week. Some of them will die. Even at only 1% death rate, 22 people will lose their lives to covid-19 simply because they got infected in the past week. Remember, the case fatality rate is closer to two percent across the entire U.S. I have so much shame and heartache about how stupid we are acting, but that will need to be worked out elsewhere. This blog is supposed to focus on positive steps we can take to chage things for the better. I know that after more than a year, we should be past this point. I'll go over it again just in case you have forgotten.DO NOT SHARE AIR! JUST DON'T DO IT! When you must be near others, mask, wash your hands frequently, do not touch your face, maintain social distance. Also, use your brain. All of our lives we have been taught that uncovered coughs and sneezes can jettison sputum up to thirty feet or more. Increase social distance around those who cough and/or sneeze that choose to remain unmasked. I would love to go into more detail about how to re-allocate the money we wasted in Afghanistan...

As we change our focus... The fact that millions of Americans love to shoot off their ignorant pie holes about how we need to love this country or leave it, one would expect them to be true patriots and work conscientiously to make our nation a place worthy of living in. There is nothing patriotic about claiming that your "freedom" is worthy of trampling on the health and safety of others. From a foundation that thinks liberty extends to hurting others, what can you build on a foundation that horrid? We can bear witness to the fact tha tthese same people claim to be victims themselves, justifying running stoplights and spewing toxic chemicals, even into our shared drinking water. This is not the nation I was taught to love. No one has the American Dream of buying a farm in the country only to turn the spigot and get shit out of the faucet, but in millions of american homes, that is what you get. How can degrading my property values by tainting my water source be allowed? Why is it not criminal to do business in ways that kill people? My America, the one I was taught to love and respect has three primary tenets, Justice, based on legislation and rights handed down from our legal cases; freedom to choose our leaders, based on the vote and as so many love to repeat, life, liberty and persuit of happiness. (falsely called "property" by some who fight to retain their greedy self-interest in an environment that requires cooperation and mutualism.) My right to make a living never absolves me of responsibility if I negatively impact my neighbor's ability and right to health, happiness or their ability to thrive. As we look outside our own niche, we need to accept and defend the rights of everyone to find the things we all claim have value. Living life requires us to be healthy. To have ultimate freedom, we must also carry the burden of absolute responsibility. To ultimately seek and have the hope of finiding happiness, we need to know that the basic needs we all have are going to be met. The dwindling but very loud minority who claim that they have the "right" to re-define reality to suit their claims rather than accepting facts and reality doomks all of us to meeting an untimely end. How will we react in the face of lies? We the people must speak truth to these power-hungry people who claim undue influence through the media, use of capital and who cling to their outlandish claims. We have the power to change, too often what we lack is the will.

TheOnly Thing More Expensive Than Education is Ignorance

We frequently hear the lament, "Our taxes are too high." Some, especially in the business community, have taken to heart the message of the Right, that we are over taxed and the money is frittered away in wasteful programs, inefficiency and graft. These same folks are happy to have our tax dollars spent on programs that will help them, up to a point. Construction firms love to be offered curb and gutter, turn lanes and traffic signals or sewer laterals, sometimes even tax free status until their developments are completed. That kind of corporate welfare is welcomed, even expected, whether we need another sub-division or not.
I think that if I were to reap those kinds of rewards, I might not complain either. It rubs me raw when those same recipients of my tax dollars balk at spending money for our schools. The fact that school buildings are woefully overcrowded and in need of repair, or that teachers keep receiving more unfunded mandates that take away from teaching time, or that we continue to churn out graduates that have dubious qualifications for any job, most likely the same ones that these business people offer.
To illustrate, I was recently speaking with the head of a solar installation company, his lead man at a job site couldn't figure out how to do Algebra, or he just didn't understand how important it is to angle panels toward the sun. He had blundered through an install, only to do it wrong. Then it took several workers a full day to rip it off and re install the system. Waste, waste, waste. Lack of education cost him more than a day of labor, it may have cost him his reputation, at least with that homeowner. Knowledge, even the insight that sometimes we don't know as much as we need to has power. I am the last person to defend the waste fraud and corruption that happens in our government, but the education of our children will have lasting effects for generations. Imagine the difference it would make if job applicants had a better background in spelling, math and communication skills.
I would rather pay taxes that were wasted on children than put to good use by corporate elites that have bonus checks issued to them from companies receiving bail-out money from the Feds. It is hard to not see the erosion of test scores, readiness for entry into the job market, and basic communication skills in our young people. I fear that this is a harbinger of what is to come, all over America (Sorry, Canada and neighbors to the South, for lumping you in with the U.S.) schools are attempting to do more with less. We have passed the point at which selling candy can turn the tide. Hoping for a rapid recovery without additional funding flies in the face of facts. Time was, every child learned the meaning of our patriotic songs, flag etiquette and enough history to realize that the Declaration of Independence is not the same document as the Constitution, or that the Revolutionary War was different than the Civil War. Sending our children unprepared into intellectual battle with the rest of the world is a menace.
Reason and intellect are given to us by Creator, squandering them, or allowing others to tell us what to think, puts us at odds with reality in very dangerous ways. The overpowering urge to cut taxes must not lead us down a path of cheating our children out of a future that is at least as bright as the one we inherited from our parents. Take time to study the history of the past twenty years and you will find plenty of examples of why we should not continue on the current course. Taxation without representation is what the Revolution was fought over, but only a small minority advocated war with Britain. The ultra-wealthy among us today, adept at bait and switch tactics, will always have reason to want more for less. Their tyranny more than any other fact drive the rhetoric of the "Conservatives". Business as usual has led to the greatest disparity between haves and have-nots since prior to the Great Depression. When trying to grapple with salaries of the top earners, ask yourself why one person would be worth more for a single day's labor than another could make, working two, or three years?

Crazy Old Lady Makes Excellent Point About Obama's First Year

Today, while driving, I had the good luck to hear an older woman on the radio, talking about our current President. Using my imagination, I matched the voice with a person I had known many years earlier. It sounded like a cat lady. You know, the type. A woman who all the youngsters in the neighborhood know, because she gardens inside a fence and hangs out her underthings under the roof of her back porch. Long ago she tired of losing her tomatoes to grubby-faced hooligans who most likely used them to throw at one another. She can't afford to keep up her house, but feeds the birds and keeps the curtains pulled to preserve the colors on her couch cover. Most of the children fear her, but they challenge each other to ring the bell at her house on Halloween. Those who are brave enough to do it tell no one, because she gives full size candy bars if you aren't too scared to sing a song, tell her your mother's name and take an apple as well. I have learned to listen to these wise crones, but many forget that women twice you age or older know more than you can possibly imagine.
Her point was that we are living in a drive-through culture. If we could have gotten things yesterday, that's not soon enough. She said that those who deified Obama, electing him by a large margin. We all knew that he was inheriting many of the worst crises in history, and yet we have expected him to turn the ship of state on a dime. They expected this one man to carry the day by whipping five-hundred entrenched politicians into shape (not including the hundreds of thousands of local politicians) and taming the media Medusa.
Children fill in the gaps with what they know. Real or not, their imaginations make their world. Adults respond to facts, ask the right questions and hopefully listen long enough, and hard enough to get closer to the truth. Our culture needs to turn the corner on our childish ways. We all need to eradicate feelings of entitlement that plague our children as well as many of their parents. We need to take a good long look at the current situation, fight for what we want, change.
How many of us have written letters to the intransigent representatives in the House and Senate? How many of us have stopped providing the fuel that fires furnaces of hatred? How many of us have used the rhetoric of hate, the fruits of slave labor? The disconnected contrition that fuels much of our apathy reeks of cynicism, used against us by those who have the most to lose.
I was strengthened in my resolve to fight for what is right with our country by hearing this lady's words. Those who would bow their heads and admit defeat are not worthy of the freedoms we profess to stand for. This is the part where the route to freedom gets messy. There is plenty of B.S. to shovel. It has been heaped up on us for years. If we all take up shovels, we can eliminate the threat to our freedoms in time, but if we keep our heads down, there is sure to be more coming.
Ask yourself, "Am I all that I can be?" I'm sure you know that my answer when I asked was "No.", but rather than letting that stop you from changing, rather than giving up, or getting more depressed, reach out to one another, become an agent of change. Our President needs us. Don't abandon him in his time of need. We all know what happens when that is done to us! We have the right to demand change, no matter what the money says!