CSotD: Decisions, indecisions, non-decisions
Skip to comments
Ted Rall (Counterpoint)’s cartoon sent me scurrying to find whatever blog/podcast/column went with it, because it made no sense to blame Millennials. Turns out he saw a Millennial tell a homeless person “I don’t carry cash” and he feels the cashless society is a government plot.
Well, possibly, but I don’t carry cash and I’m too old to be a Millennial. I don’t know if my kids or grandkids are government dupes, but they’re a mix of X’s and Millennials and Z’s. I doubt that whether or not you carry cash is a function of age, though I see a lot of old folks clinging to the stuff.
The other day, I mentioned giving money to a homeless guy, but I was on the road and I usually carry a little cash when I leave town. And I usually return with nearly all of it, except what I leave as tips for housekeepers and an occasional cabby.
I also question whether failure to reward panhandlers is equal to killing them, though it has crossed my mind that it must suck to depend on cash in a cashless society. But it’s also crossed my mind that it must suck to be drug-dependent or to be so mentally ill that you can’t hold down a job.
Fortunately, our community has a relatively robust food bank and homeless shelters, though we’re always scrambling to keep up with the issue. The grocery stores all have collection bins, our coop’s round-up program has collected $1.3 million for local charities and we’ve got an active gleaning program that captures overflow from groceries and from local farmers.
So, okay, I’m not handing out dollar bills on the street, but this feels like one more example of “If you’re not doing it my way, it doesn’t count.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
As long as I’m bragging on the place, we’ve also got a solid waste setup that includes aggressive recycling, including of plastics, by which I mean plastic things go off somewhere and we get money and they don’t end up in our landfill. Ditto with glass, paper and cardboard, as well as clothing and one-use grocery bags.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re typical and I know we’re not perfect. Aside from the fact that the Plastic People make the stuff faster than anyone can collect and recycle it, there’s also an informational disconnect, for instance, in that many people don’t recognize the importance of keeping cardboard clean and dry.
I’d like to see more glass bottles and less plastic packaging, but in the meantime, the perfect is the enemy of the good and doing something is better than doing nothing.
So if kids like Zoe are going to nag their parents into being compliant, good for them. I’d suggest this is a place where young people who carry no cash can be effective lobbyists for more effective practices, even before they’re old enough to vote. Your city will listen.
I’m not as concerned with microplastics in my bloodstream because, to adapt an old limerick, if they found their way in, I say with a grin, they can find their way out of it, too.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
To be clear, those top two cartoons, mocking the uproar over the Princess of Wales’ disappearance, ran before she finally popped up with the bad news that Steve Breen marks.
All the speculation was absurd, as I said before, but what is really absurd now is the flood of columns in which wise people of decent upbringing lecture the peasantry on how horrible we were to wonder aloud and to turn the whole thing into “Qanon for Housewives.”
I was going to provide links, but there were five such stories in the NYTimes and three or four in Washpo and (A) I didn’t want to use up my freebies on this, because (B) they all said the same thing anyway.
Which makes me wonder where the hell they were at the time. I hadn’t heard of any brawls in the newsrooms of decent people demanding their indecent colleagues knock it off.
It’s sure easy to be righteous now that the Big C has reared its ugly head.
But as both a journalist and a cancer survivor, let me say that it’s about time we quit tiptoeing around it as if it were an STD.
It’s not all that long ago that people didn’t put cancer in obituaries, as if it were something to be ashamed of, and I guess it’s not surprising if the monarchy — an odd anachronism in a modern world — remains old fashioned. Apparently, the Queen Mum had cancer twice, the Duke of Windsor died of it and George VI, Elizabeth’s father, had lung cancer.
Buckingham Palace could have been a focal point for educating people about cancer, rather than a prissy place where such nasty things aren’t mentioned. But they’re still holding back on which cancers Charles and Catherine each have.
The point being that these people are paid to be public. As the catchphrase goes, “They’ve got one job.”
One of the things I like about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is that they are both extremely famous and so each of them is used to the scrutiny they’ve had to endure. But, besides the fact that they earned, not inherited, their fame, they had no preparation beyond the steady growth of the spotlight.
The Windsors have had generations to prepare for fame. The speculation, rumors and conspiracy theories are their fault for hiding the facts.
For $109 million a year, I’ll not only tell you what the doctors said, I’ll let you watch.
For $110 million, I’ll let everybody watch!
The People’s Juxtaposition
I promised yesterday that I’d address NBC’s hiring of former RNC head Ronna McDaniel once the cartoonists had weighed in, but they must have overslept and missed the bus, because pushback from NBC staffers and a flood of memes already caused the network to back off and explain that she won’t be on MSNBC after all, but only on NBC sometimes.
Thus addressing a vast controversy with a half-vast solution.
At least we got some good memes out of it:
Sorry, cartoonists: You snoozed, you losed.
Comments 13
Comments are closed.