hometown news

   The old hometown.  What a place.  Actually, it isn’t the OLD old hometown, since we’ve lived here only 6 years, but the place where I grew up has long since been swallowed up by “urbia”, so this is what we consider home now.  Some things in this town are very wonderful and homey in the way of smaller, used-to-be country, places.  And some things are not.  Wonderful, I mean.  Some things are just narrow-minded and backwards.  We have a strange mix of peoples here, which sometimes makes the place feel a little bi-polar.  We have the born-again Christians AND the KKK.  We have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates among white females in the nation AND MS13 gang members’ graffiti on the walls downtown.  We don’t have a lot of any one thing, just representation from all the groups.  Since no one thing presents itself as “the” major problem, the city fathers can’t decide what to do about any problem.

Billboard space is sold to any group with the funds, although the question of exactly how many billboards it takes to make a town look completely tacky has not been satisfactorily answered as yet.  The secondary question of whether tackiness is a good trade-off for city funds seems to have out-weighed the need for answering the first.  In any case, we have apparently not achieved “complete” tackiness, merely “potential” tackiness.  The diverse mix of groups and interests in the town can be witnessed by merely reading the billboards as one drives into town.

“Fulfill your most secret desires at Pandora’s Box. [I made that up – that’s not the real name of the store.]  Toys and lingerie for him and her.”  This is followed a half-mile later by “The Ten Commandments are not Multiple Choice.  Come visit the church today; God is waiting.”

Not sure what’s funnier; the thought of the baptized sneaking into the sex store on  Wednesday, or the cashiers at the sex store sneaking into church on Sunday.

Maybe we need a new church.  For the sex people. They can advertise on billboard space.

 

It’s a mad world

I watch the news and wonder: how can the news anchors READ this stuff and not break down?  Not make an aside comment about what they are reading?  Just read it and go on to the next thing?  How can they even come to work the next day?  Most of the news is business as usual.  Y’know, the house and senate will NOT vote for a sensible solution to any given problem; what they WILL do is vote to have a hearing on how the T.V.  Evangelical Christian church leaders spend their money.  (Sounds like an I.R.S. issue to me, dudes.)  Or the candidates are calling each other names again.  “You did drugs.”  “Yeah, well you belong to a religion that thinks Jesus and Satan are brothers.”  “Oh, yeah?  Well, THAT guy saw a UFO.”   “You boys need to stop that.  My 35 years of fictional experience tells me that you all don’t play nice, and if you don’t quit it right now, I’m taking my toys and going to the White House.”  This is normal news.  [They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain, there’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain.]

However, when the news is that towns in the South have to import water because of the drought, how do the news people read that and not wonder what’s going on?  They have to bring in trucks of potable water because there is no water running through the public water system.   Has that ever happened in the USA before?  A whole town has run out of water?  Towns with water are selling it to towns that have no water?  Towns have to legislate how much water will be allowed to continue downstream after it has passed through the local river?  In the mid-west, in normally dry states, the floods during the spring, summer, and fall have been sweeping homes away and killing people.  Last year, in the winter, in the WINTER, the mid-west was inundated with more lightening storms than ever before in recorded history.  Strange goings on.

Closer to (my) home, we have had in the past month two cases where a man has killed his entire family and then himself.  In the past year, we have had lots of these cases around the country; like school shootings, we almost don’t even notice any more.  On Monday, several teens at a local high school, being pissed off because of some puppy-love nonsense, took hydrochloric acid from the chem lab and put it in the food of three other teens.  The three poisoned ones got a free trip to the hospital and lived, luckily.  It was reportedly “a prank”.  The news anchor read that with a straight face.  “The three charged as juveniles with disorderly conduct said it was a prank.”  A prank is putting salt in the sugar bowl.  Disorderly conduct is peeing on the sidewalk.  Juveniles are too young to consider the consequences of their actions.  I would say more, but why?

I suppose I could skip the news.  But you have to know what is going on out there.  “There” is where you live.  “There” is where your children go to school.  “There” is where they make the laws that decide how you will be governed, and “there” is where the people in charge are doing things that affect your life.  You can’t turn off reality.