My Dad or My Aunt?

Try to imagine that you live in a place where Bob Dylan is still a seditious hippie who writes songs that might influence your daughter to get pregnant by some no-count who rides a motorcycle and takes drugs.

Imagine a place where a memberships in the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce are essential.

Imagine a place where you get your family dressed up on Sunday to go hear someone tell you, in a false voice, with many references to Jee-zus, that time is about to end.

Imagine that these are the ideas that swim around your head all day long mixing only with the ideas that you aren’t making the money you used to and that your wife hasn’t been interested in sex for the last 15 years but if you fuck your secretary everything could go to hell.

You don’t need Fox News to tell you that you are scared shitless. Fox News just amplifies that by telling you that brown people want what you have.

This is the definition of hell on earth and this is what inspires lots of people to vote for politicians who want things to just stop.

There is only one thing I can think to do about this.

I donate money to my college so that some of their children can be exposed to something different.

I was fortunate enough to go to college.

I spoke to my father all my life. To his 98th year, he still thought of black people as niggers. Even the ones he liked.

God only knows what he thought about women. I was to chickenshit to ask.

But I know what my aunt thought about him.

My aunt, his sister, spent years in Alaska as a midwife. She started a midwife school in New York and ended up at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. The number of people she helped is uncountable.

She thought my dad was a disgusting son of a bitch with no table manners.

I agree.

My dad came from that place where everything was a threat.

My aunt came from a place where science and action could make a better world.

Who would you rather be?

Take it back…

I don’t understand Republicans.

What do they want?

They already have engineered this American society so that the rich have almost all the money. The middle class hasn’t gotten anywhere in 30 years. The poor have never gotten anywhere.

What more do they want?

Why privatize social security so it can be looted by Wall Street? You just create a huge bunch of impoverished old folks. The Wall Street boys already are rich.

Why privatize Medicare? You just create a lot of hardship. The insurance boys already are rich. The doctors are rich. All it will do is kill a lot of folks who can’t afford insurance, if they could get it.

This is taking food from peoples’ mouths and medical care from their hurts.

What do the Republicans get from this? A few more billions of bucks?

Do they really need it?

Ah, the government is best which governs least.

Wrong.

Government is citizens banding together to get things they couldn’t have on their own. Like clean water and clean air.

Without government, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland would still be on fire. The air in Los Angeles would be toxic. The eggs and bacon you eat for breakfast could kill you.

The roads you ride on to work would not exist.

Without government, 911 would not work. If you fell down and couldn’t get up, nobody would come.

Without government, flush toilets wouldn’t work and you would be up to your ass in garbage.

I know the Republicans say you can contract all this out. But then you would have absolutely no say unless you are a Republican and own part of the industry.

Do you know what it means to have no say?

It means you are a slave. You do what they tell you and get whatever they give you.

You want to take back this country? Take it back from the Republicans.

Make sure your parents can be comfortable because they have Social Security and Medicare.

Make sure your school teachers, firefighters and police have decent lives because they can ban together and bargain for wages and benefits.

Make sure your savings are insured against the wizards of Wall Street and that the company you have worked for has the money to pay the pension and medical benefits they promised you.

Make sure you can breathe the air and drink the water. Only government can help you there.

Do you want to breathe, drink, live and raise your children? It is government that does that.

The problem is to make government better, not kill it.

Another total idiot …

Cudos to Joel Engelhardt and Frank Cerabino of The Palm Beach Post for preserving in amber the latest example of hubris from the good people who are supposed to be looking out for our environment.

The South Florida Water Management District has hired its executive director’s boyfriend for a $120,000-a-year job with her administration’s watchdog.

Bob Howard was hired by SFWMD’s inspector general. The inspector general and his staff report to the SFWMD board on whether things are done correctly at the agency – the agency headed by Howard’s honey-bun.

Executive Director Carol Wehle told The Palm Beach Post she had no role in last June’s hiring so she saw no reason to disclose the relationship.

The problem here is not the obvious conflict of interest. The problem is bigger.

First, Whele is a liar. Nobody in a an organization is not attuned to what the top manager wants. That she would go along with such a hire shows a complete lack of ethics. That makes ethics down the line something that could cost you your job. Thus, she had something to do with the hiring in that she allowed it.

Second, it shows she has no regard for an inspector general’s office that is supposed to backstop bad decisions.

Third is hubris. The stupid twit thought she could get away with it.

This is what we call a monumental mistake.

You can make an honest mistake and recover. When you do something so fundamentally dishonest and get caught, it is curtains.

So goodbye Carol Wehle, you are just too stupid to be in government.