The Orange Menace versus Pizza Man

August 28, 2025August 27, 2025Michael 7 Comments

Hello everyone. I’m home! Something 3 people in Minnesota will never say. In breaking with my new tradition of discovering and delivering only good news on Thursdays, we’re going to talk about the recent shootings in Minneapolis. Yes, shootings – plural.

We all know that a deranged 23-year-old, armed with a rifle, shotgun, and handgun, opened fire through a window of a Catholic Church on school children attending daily mass, killing 2 children ages 8 and 10, injuring 14 other kids, and also injuring 3 adults in their 80s. Yes, the Second Amendment gave him that right. Or so that’s the perspective of every New Wave Republican, NRA member, gun owner, MAGnut, and other disgustingly irrational fruitcake, including everybody who ever own, ran, or invested in a firearms company in the U S of A.

Less than 24 hours earlier, some other nutcase opened fire on six individuals outside a nearby Catholic high school, killing one. Depending on your perspective, they could be related. That’s as reasonable an assumption as that there are two wackos targeting religious groups in the same city at the same time. I’m not sure which is scarier.

Just two days ago, the orange menace said on camera that it’s not a dictator, it “just knows how to stop crime.” Let’s see it stop that. I’ll tell you where it’s going to land. It will tell you that the shooter at the Assumption shooting was a suspected trans person. It’s putting a stop to people deciding what gender they want to be so we can forget about this one. What will he say about the gun freaks who have killed 195 other people in 24 school shootings since the Columbine massacre in April 1999? Let’s not even bring up all the people targeted at churches, synagogues, temples, other houses of worship. So-called “normal” people committed these crimes. Come on criminal-pardoner-in-chief, let’s see what you can do to stop these crimes. What sycophant will you appoint to the committee to look into how to lie about those. Well, I suppose it a matter of perspective.

It’s time for action and we don’t mean some unhinged social media rant in all caps posted in the dead of the night. And the last thing we need are thoughts and prayers. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said it best: “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.”

In the midst of all this, here is some good news. Also from a Minneapolis suburb this week, Chuck Kolstad, owner of Pizza Man in Columbia Heights, puts food out for people who previously were rummaging through his dumpster for food. He tells them to call, or leave a note by the door saying they are hungry and he’d leave food out for them. He said there are always mistakes or extras they can’t sell and rather than throwing them away, he offers these to the hungry homeless. His efforts caught the attention of food truck and other restaurant owners who have also offered to help. That’s a perspective with a positive view.

So, now it’s time, even with this sad news, to plug the latest Uplift post, A Matter of Perspective. Not everything in life is valued equally by all, but all value everything according to their own wants and needs.

Untitled

May 1, 2023April 30, 2023Michael 13 Comments

I had a very busy month the last couple of weeks. Yes, you read that right. I had more things going on in April than there were days in April! Some of them resulted in more than a few hilarious moments and were more than blog-worthy. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to write about any of them.

Last week there was an unsettling piece in the local news. Four and a half years almost to the day after the Tree of Life shootings added Pittsburgh the list of cities that had hosted mass shootings, jury selection finally began for the trial of the man seen on camera, walking into a local synagogue and shooting 13 people, 11 fatally, while they were attending Saturday morning services. Four and a half years those families had to watch other families of victims of violence find some solace and maybe even some closure from crimes that happens years after the massacre that took their loved ones. Are we so jaded by killing we can take our good old time seeking justice?

During those 4-1/2 years over 1,900 mass shootings have happened in the US (I’m using the definition of mass shooting is one where 4 people excluding the shooter are killed or injured in a single incident.), 53 in April. Perhaps the most heinous was one of the most recent occurring on April 29 when 5 people were killed after asking a neighbor to stop shooting his gun in the front yard in Cleveland, Texas.

After each of the 1,940 mass shootings in the last 4-1/2 years, calls for gun control have been made and successfully opposed in the name if the Second Amendment. You remember that one.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Some day, somebody from the NRA can tell me how killing 5 of your neighbors because they asked for some quiet, or killing 11 of them while they worshipped their God, is “necessary to the security of a free State.”

I’ll try to find some hilarious anecdotes for next week.

Too often we are defined by the work we do. Is that because we surround ourselves with work friends? We owe to ourselves and our closest contacts to see that our “loved ones” truly are our loved ones. In the most recent Uplift! we talk about why.

On being loved into being

November 21, 2022November 21, 2022Michael 6 Comments

I was working in adapting a post I wrote for my foundation site for here because, well, because I think it’s really good and would make a great lead up to Thanksgiving blog post. I thought after what we as country just went through having to experience the childishness that accompanied s years general election, that a word from someone who worked so successfully with children is just what the doctor ordered. So I ordered it.

And then Colorado Springs happened. You’ve heard of that incident. Five dead. Nineteen wounded. One nut case up with a f-ing assault rifle destroys the dreams of 24 People because he has a “right” to carry an assault weapon into a crowd and start firing. Of course you know that same day in Philadelphia, Mississippi nut case or nut cases unknown shot seven people, killing one, over a dice game.

If you’re keeping score, those are mass shootings #26 and 27 in the US for the month of November. Not the year – for November’s, which still has 10 days to go. One of them is Thanksgiving. Are you still thankful we have the “right” to carry guns at will? Maybe this will help. How are 602 mass shootings for this year.

It’s time to stop this madness.

The post that I was going to rework, you can read it here. And actually if I were you I would. It’s a whole lot happier and more positive than this dreck.

The theme running through that post is based in an idea voiced by Fred Rogers in his acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award, bestowed to him at the 24th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards in 1997, “All of us have special ones who loved us into being.” What a wonderful way of thinking of how we have become who we are, that there are people who have loved us into being. Gratitude is not, and should not, be an exercise is saying thanks for what we have, for in truth we will not always have. We should be expressing thanks because we are, because even when we do not have, we always will be.

Maybe the nut cases of the world didn’t have anybody to love them into being. We did. Be grateful. Be grateful you have people who have loved you into being. Say thank you to them, because without them, you are not the who you are.

Seriously, do yourself a favor, go read it. It will take you less time to read than you’ve spent reading this junk that I’ve written here. Go find out about this idea of being loved into being. And then go out and love somebody that much.