Tag Bad Behavior

Did you know

Michael 10 Comments

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. There have been 3 airplane crashes plus a helicopter in 8 days and 2 runway incursions tossed in for good behavior all starting within 24 hours of air traffic controllers being “offered” 8 month severance in exchange for leaving their positions within the next 7 days. The chairpersons of the National Archives, Federal Elections Commission, and National Labor Relations Board, the entirety or near entirety of the FBI cyber security division, US Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Kennedy Center board of trustees have been removed from their offices (although some are fighting those orders). And all of your social security data has been turned over to a group of 20 year old computer programs working for an unelected, non-vetted, immigrant. (I wonder if anybody ever called him African American?)

Also in the news this week, a measles outbreak in Texas, a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas, and the flu at its highest incidence level since 2015.

The stuff in the first paragraph you knew. That was all over the news. The stuff in the second paragraph…show of hands please for who know about them.

I’m not sure if there’s a moral to that story but it’s made me really tired. I suppose I should try to get rid of the anger and bitterness. Forget about the ironies like sending ICE into the Navajo Nation. Life might easier to forget the anger. But it wouldn’t be better.

Have a good week.

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Selfish Is and Selfish Does

Michael 4 Comments
I’ll start right up front apologizing to all my non-US readers. You’re too kind and don’t deserve to play the innocent bystander but you should know from the start that this is not going to be pretty. 
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Now for the rest of you, my fellow Americans, just how incredibly selfish is this country getting! Not the people in this country. The whole darn shooting match. It’s now a national pastime to do whatever you want regardless of consequences. Go to parties, get on planes, play football, go to happy hour. If you’re reading this you are more than likely among to ever shrinking quantity of intelligent, courteous individuals but you probably know more than a few handfuls of whiny, reckless, selfish bastar…er, jerks. I don’t know how it is where you are (which is the polite way of saying things are getting out of control everywhere) but around here, things are getting out of control. For example: 
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Every day for the past 8 days the morning paper headlines have been [State, County, City] Sets New Record for COVID [Infections, Hospitalizations, Deaths] (they rotate the where and the what so you don’t think they just re-ran the same story). Someone on that same front page is the other inevitable headline [Party, Candidate, Congressmen, Senator] [Claims New Voter Fraud, Decries Latest Fraud Claim], sometimes all the above! While the world is falling apart, these imbeciles are busy engaging in playground “did so, did not, did too, make me!” games. Children have more sense than these disgusting, miserable, adolescent excuses for human beings. (Too rough?) 
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It’s gotten to the point that now I personally know seven people who have been tested positive for CoViD-19 and one who died from the infection. Once removed (as in know someone who knows someone) the numbers are greater than 70 infections, over a dozen hospitalizations, and 2 deaths. There were all cautious, all held fast to safe prevention practices, only one was a nursing home resident (one of the deaths), 18 were health care workers or first responders (including the other death), and a handful of other essential workers. These aren’t great numbers when you consider my state is reporting over 424,000 cases and nearly 11,500 deaths but these “numbers” are people I know. They are people I have shared space and time with, who over the years have been to the same church or party or store or hospital as I have been. They are friends and neighbors. They are not Democrats or Republicans, they are not maskers or anti-maskers, they are not cowards or daredevils. They are people. People who relied on public servants to serve their public rather than serving their egos.
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KeepCalmSo, what can we do about this? I’m staying calm but taking names. Oh sure, today I’ll write a couple letters to my so-called representatives in between  checking in on friends and relatives to see how everyone is doing and that my “numbers” aren’t going up. But some day those so-called representatives who today are busy representative themselves will surely run for office again. That’s when the real letter writing campaign begins. That’s when I will start reminding everybody that when they should have been meeting in chambers, representing us working on health initiatives, equipment and vaccine allocations, or financial assistance packages, our so-called leaders were instead meeting in courtrooms and TV studios representing themselves and working on undermining the security and confidence of the country – all in the name of “did so, did not, did too, make me.” 
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I’m sorry, it wasn’t a very pleasant post today. They made me do it.
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The Rotten Pot

Michael Leave a comment

The potpourri – a quite lovely arrangement of highly scented dried flowers used to decorate and perfume.  Or collection of songs or poems, or a mélange of thoughts, ideas, or fact.  Whatever you want to make of it, or make it from, it is a beautiful order of otherwise unrelated things. In fact, I have often used it in post titles when I have too little of any one thing rummaging around in my head to add up to a couple hundred words of lucid thinking thus keeping that post from getting too ugly. Until now.

Now we have the not so flattering side of the potpourri – it’s otherwise disagreeable origin. From seventeenth century French it is literally the “rotten pot.” And today is a collection of the rotten side of reality that stuck its ugly face in my path this week.

The major ingredient in this pot is “some people’s children.” Not once, not twice, but three times just since Sunday did I get to witness not one, not two, but three little monsters disturbing the peace and leaving it in pieces.

There was the 3 or 4 year old girl (or boy, at that age does it matter) who made her own potpourri while seated in a shopping cart and systematically pulled petal after petal from the bouquet of flowers I suppose that her mother left with her to keep her (the child) occupied while she (the mother) gave her order to the deli counter clerk (and who couldn’t contain herself (the clerk) and pointed out the impromptu de-blooming). And then there was the 6 or 7 year old girl who at the local party store walked through a full aisle of piñata, punching one after the other until she got bored with that, realized that mom was not within arm’s reach, and wailed at the approximate pitch and volume of an ambulance siren.

But the killer (could we wish) was the around six-ish boy (I think) who stood (yes stood!) on the conveyor belt at the supermarket checkout line while he (I think) systematically threw every item in the impulse rack above the belt onto the belt to his (hers?) mother’s chorus of “Please get back in the cart, get in the cart, get back in the cart, I’m telling you get back in the cart, this is the last time now get back in the cart, get in the cart, get in the cart.” When the cashier had the nerve to say “It’s all right,” I couldn’t just stand there idly at the next check-out line. I said “No, it’s not alright. It’s rude and disgusting. And it’s why I’m in this line because I’m certainly not putting my food on that belt and if I were you (now directed to the cashier) I’d have someone get over there and clean that up.” And I actually felt good about myself having said something until the mother said, “Like that belt was any too clean before.”

And that was my mélange of otherwise unrelated urges to kill.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?