The following are a few thoughts that’ve been wandering through my mind of late:
- What if, in order to keep pay in line with performance, we made congressional salaries equal to the average salaries of, say, janitors everywhere? Actually, that would make our elected officials vastly overpaid since janitors are honest, responsible, reliable, and hard-working individuals who don’t go out of their way to create a mess and who leave things better than when they found them.
Try finding that anywhere inside the Beltway these days.
- I see where yet another study has found that people who use cell phones while driving are every bit as dangerous as individuals who’d had a few drinks before they got into a car. The study also found that other individuals, hereinafter referred to as “pinheads,” who send text messages while driving are even more of a danger to us all.
Of course, as regards such findings, the word “Duh!” comes most readily to mind.
To help prevent texting while driving (I’ve given up hope on our ever banning the use of cell phones while driving), a new slogan along the lines of “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” might be appropriate.
In the spirit of public service, I’d offer the following: “Friends should reach over and snatch pinheads who are texting while driving bald.”
- I wonder what would happen to the debate on “health care reform” if members of congress were presented with the demand that either every American citizen gets precisely the same medical coverage currently available to members of congress or members of congress will be subject to exactly the same system they foist (likely without reading) upon the rest of us.
- Would anyone care to speculate on what would happen if the only signal from earth that ever reached an advanced, extra-terrestrial civilization in outer space was an episode or two of some of the current “reality” shows on television. Think that the members of that civilization would ever want to drop by? In peace?
- Perhaps we should stop calling the death penalty “the death penalty” and start referring to it as “Society’s Right to Choose.” That might help us to more quickly move move some of the oxygen bandits we’re stuck with on to their next plane of existence - hellish though that next plane might be.
- I think that one thing that came from the recent arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge, Massachusetts, Police Sargeant James Crowley is, yet again, proof positive that any situation will be viewed differently by those in the situation themselves.
The down side of this incident is that it showed that despite all of the (quite substantial) progress that we’ve made in racial matters, many of us who are older still respond to any incident in ways that are heavily influenced by the individual and collective experiences that we’ve been through. The good news is that many in the younger generation tend to look at our behavior with a “What’s up with you guys?” attitude.
I think we need to encourage that.
Minor aside: One small step that we might all take is to simply start writing in “Human” on any questionnaire that asks for our race.
- There’s been a bit of back and forth in the local news regarding a photograph of an eagle snatching a duckling off of a nearby lake. Maybe we should look upon that photograph as something our current president might refer to as a “teachable moment.”
Having spent a lot of time on, over, near or under the earth’s seas and having been a (brutal?) hunter and fisherman for almost the same amount of time, I think I can safely say that Mother Nature is not now nor has she ever been all sweetness and light. Unfortunately, due to the way we now live, many of us have forgotten, choose to ignore, or, perhaps, never learned this.
That eagle was simply behaving as eagles behave and the photograph was a powerful reminder that nature’s laws will continue in effect whether we wish to be aware of them or not.
Knowledge is a good thing and that photograph imparted knowledge. Kudos to the photographer who took the picture, the editor who published it, and to all who’ve taken the time to discuss it.
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