CSotD: Last laughs

Pearls Before Swine (AMS) sets the mood for today’s risky choice, which is to have a few laughs while we wait for Joe and Kamala to take the wheel.

It’s a risk because there’s nothing new to be said about Trump’s endgame and I don’t want to wallow in it this morning, but if political cartoonists don’t come up with some New Beginnings material, I won’t have much in the larder tomorrow.

Note that panel was 11/3, but hardly 2020.

Still, we’ll take our chances.

Meanwhile, I’d suggest to Rat that he use a smaller hammer. When I was in 10th grade, I had an ongoing conflict with a teacher and I used to come home from school, grab a hatchet from the garage and go out into the woods to chop down a tree. (Not to fret; there were plenty.)

If I’d used an ax, it would have been over way too soon and I’d have come back as frustrated as I went out. The hatchet took forever.

Sometimes inefficiency is your friend.

 

And, like Arlo (AMS), I’ve been inefficient all my life. He seems bothered by it, but I’ve come to the opposite, Janis-style conclusion, which is that, if it didn’t bother me at 35, there’s no reason it should bother me now after having lived every bit as inefficiently for twice as many years.

I generally take Arlo as my doppelganger, but this reminds me of an old Irish story about Patrick and Kathleen, who went walking out together every evening.

One such evening, they paused, as they often did, on the stone bridge to watch the river run under their feet, and Kathleen says to him, “D’ye know we’ve been walking out now for 30 years?”

And he replies, “Ah, well, I suppose we have.”

“Well,” says she, “don’t you think it’s time we thought about getting married?”

“Aye, lass,” he says, “but who’d have us now?”

 

Thanks, Desmond, but that wasn’t quite my point.

However, onward and upward and, as Satch warned, don’t look back; something might be gaining on you.

 

Deciding not to obsess over things you can’t change doesn’t mean giving up on things you might, and this Candorville (WPWG) struck at a propitious moment.

We’re about two weeks away from a public meeting about a proposal to end funding a police officer in our local schools, the alternative being to hire a social worker or possibly two.

I’m not against Resource Officers and, if they can provide a kind and stable role model for kids, so much the better. But our cops interact with the kids down at the park in the town square, and they haven’t had a lot of need to step in at the schools.

So I was glad to hear Lemont echo the issue of positive role models and character development, because a version of that idea, coming as it did from Daniel Patrick Moynihan a generation or two ago, was not simply dismissed but condemned as paternalistic.

But Lemont describes the situation without speculating on causes, and in any case, and I’ll say this in two weeks: People are wrong to complain that schools are being asked to do what parents once did, and should do.

Parents once earned enough money that they could have one half of the couple go into parenting mode during their kids’ vulnerable years.

Try it now: Take a look at working class wages and at the cost, for instance, of housing and tell me how young parents are supposed to feed, clothe and house their children and still have time to act as full-time, effective parents?

Robert Reich claims that the richest men in the country could give everyone else $3,000 a month and they’d still have more money than they had before the pandemic.

I haven’t seen actual numbers on that, but we’ve dug quite a hole for ourselves, and I do believe that it’s more important at this point to pay for someone to listen to our many unheard kids than to pay someone to patrol the halls in case of another Columbine.

Which a social worker might stop before it happened.

 

I also got a laugh out of this Pardon My Planet (KFS), but it won’t be so funny when two or three or a half dozen Joes show up at that public meeting in two weeks.

 

Also on the topic of money, it’s been a decade since I was responsible for my driveway, but if Eno falls for this offer in the Duplex (AMS), he’s nuts.

I was paying $35 a pop for the plow guy back then, and maybe it’s more expensive to live in the city but the driveways are a whole lot shorter.

BTW, driveway plowing is like fuel oil, in that you have to choose between a flat rate for the season or paying for each visit. So far this year, the flat rate greatly favors the plow driver, who has only come by once, though February is still out there.

And this: When I lived in Maine, I blessed good timing because it would snow all day but, when I drove home tired at night, I’d find that my plow guy had been there after the town plow so that I didn’t face the specter of a snowbank across my driveway.

Until the night I came home a little earlier and discovered that my across-the-road neighbor, a logger who ran a sawmill, was simply scooping out my driveway with his front-end loader when he did his own.

The world really does contain some good people.

 

Which brings us to this photo by Reuters’ shooter Joshua Roberts, of young African-American National Guardsmen on duty in the Capitol rotunda, posing for photos with Rosa Parks.

It’s a reminder that a lot of good men and women go into national service for solid reasons. As Satch also said, “There ain’t no man can avoid being born average. But there ain’t no man got to be common.”

In light of January 6, it also reminds me of when the 127th United States Colored Troops were assigned guard duty at the POW camp in Elmira, NY.

 

When the rebel prisoners objected, the laughing response was “Bottom rail’s on the top now!”

Keep the faith.