This article didn't find a publisher. Too didactic, I suppose. Oh, well. Anyway, here it is:
Every morning I wake before dawn, take a few sips of coffee on the front porch, weather permitting, and then say aloud the same words: “Well, time to see what’s happening in the world.” (I live alone and admit to talking to myself.)
So I’ll go online and visit half-a-dozen news and opinion sites. Within minutes, I’m muttering and shaking my head, astounded by the adolescent antics of some of my fellow Americans whose age and profession would have once branded them as grownups.
Every morning I wake before dawn, take a few sips of coffee on the front porch, weather permitting, and then say aloud the same words: “Well, time to see what’s happening in the world.” (I live alone and admit to talking to myself.)
So I’ll go online and visit half-a-dozen news and opinion sites. Within minutes, I’m muttering and shaking my head, astounded by the adolescent antics of some of my fellow Americans whose age and profession would have once branded them as grownups.
Here are two recent examples that bring me amazement along with my coffee.
First up is the article “Peta Wants Major League Baseball To Stop Saying ‘Bullpen’ Because It’s ‘Insensitive To Cows.’” Instead, PETA wants baseball to call the pitchers’ warm-up area the “arm barn.”
“Words matter,” says PETA executive Tracy Reiman, “and baseball ‘bullpens’ devalue talented players and mock the misery of sensitive animals.” PETA contends that a bullpen is a holding area where bulls and cows await slaughter. My online dictionary notes only that it is “an enclosure for bulls” and an “exercise area for baseball pitchers.” There’s no mention of slaughter in either definition.
Here you can find several possible origins for baseball’s use of bullpen, only one of which has to do with slaughter. Whatever the case, I doubt there’s less than one ball fan in a million who is thinking of actual bulls in anyway whatsoever when they use this term.
Now let’s bid a goodbye to PETA and jump to Hazard High School in Hazard, Kentucky, where students and faculty recently held a “Man Pageant.” Teenage girls dressed up like Hooters’ waitresses while nearly naked boys, some of them wearing female underwear, lap danced for teachers, administrators, and the school’s principal, Donald “Happy” Mobelini, who also serves as the mayor of the town.
An uproar ensued when pictures of this event appeared on social media. Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear criticized the event as “totally unacceptable.” The Superintendent of the school system launched an investigation. The Louisville Courier Journal found that the school had sponsored similar sexual performances in years past.
And the reaction by some students? About a hundred of them gathered in public support of Happy Mobelini. One of them described the firestorm of criticism as “an attack on tradition.”
Robert Spencer, the writer who opined on this event, then adds these comments:
“Well, yeah, Gavin. If your ‘tradition’ involves the school principal and town mayor getting a lap dance from a high school student dressed in women’s underwear, then yes, this is an attack on your tradition. The fact that so many Hazard students quite obviously cannot conceive of what could possibly be wrong with this is an indication of how thoroughly indoctrinated they are, and how successful the Left has been in eroding American cultural norms and marketing libertinism and perversion as normal, wholesome, and to be encouraged.”
Reading about Happy made me recollect my high school principal, a feared bear of a man who used to patrol the hallways carrying a yardstick. Nobody would have described Mr. Simpson as “Happy,” but everyone respected him and his efforts to run a tight ship designed to educate students.
How times have changed.
And then, of course, there are those parading as adults who are now running our country. Our president is a befuddled old man who often speaks gibberish and who is now openly mocked by countries around the world, our Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttegieg, has apparently spent the last two months on paid paternity leave while our nation’s supply-chain is in crisis, border czar and vice-president Kamala Harris says and does nothing to halt the massive and illegal invasion of our southern borders, and many in our Congress on both sides of the aisle seem out to lunch when it comes to curbing runaway spending. We’re in the middle of rising crime and a health care crunch, and some localities are firing police officers, fire fighters, and hospital workers for failing to take a vaccine.
Round and round it goes, and where it ends nobody knows.
We might want to change “where” in that old line to “when.” We all know where it ends—can we use the word catastrophe? —we just can’t tell when sanity and adulthood will return to some of our leaders.
I suspect that most readers know, as do I, plenty of level-headed Americans from all walks of life and all points of the political compass who work hard, raise children, protect their families, and love their country. None of them even vaguely resemble Tracy Reiman, Happy Mobelini, or so many of our political and corporation elites.
There’s this saving grace for the rest of us: the normality of most citizens of this great country.
As for me personally, here’s the good news: I get to sit in the stands, nibble on my popcorn, watch the three ring circus—better make that 30 rings—of American life, and put out articles like this one.
I’ll be dead before I can possibly run out of material.
First up is the article “Peta Wants Major League Baseball To Stop Saying ‘Bullpen’ Because It’s ‘Insensitive To Cows.’” Instead, PETA wants baseball to call the pitchers’ warm-up area the “arm barn.”
“Words matter,” says PETA executive Tracy Reiman, “and baseball ‘bullpens’ devalue talented players and mock the misery of sensitive animals.” PETA contends that a bullpen is a holding area where bulls and cows await slaughter. My online dictionary notes only that it is “an enclosure for bulls” and an “exercise area for baseball pitchers.” There’s no mention of slaughter in either definition.
Here you can find several possible origins for baseball’s use of bullpen, only one of which has to do with slaughter. Whatever the case, I doubt there’s less than one ball fan in a million who is thinking of actual bulls in anyway whatsoever when they use this term.
Now let’s bid a goodbye to PETA and jump to Hazard High School in Hazard, Kentucky, where students and faculty recently held a “Man Pageant.” Teenage girls dressed up like Hooters’ waitresses while nearly naked boys, some of them wearing female underwear, lap danced for teachers, administrators, and the school’s principal, Donald “Happy” Mobelini, who also serves as the mayor of the town.
An uproar ensued when pictures of this event appeared on social media. Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear criticized the event as “totally unacceptable.” The Superintendent of the school system launched an investigation. The Louisville Courier Journal found that the school had sponsored similar sexual performances in years past.
And the reaction by some students? About a hundred of them gathered in public support of Happy Mobelini. One of them described the firestorm of criticism as “an attack on tradition.”
Robert Spencer, the writer who opined on this event, then adds these comments:
“Well, yeah, Gavin. If your ‘tradition’ involves the school principal and town mayor getting a lap dance from a high school student dressed in women’s underwear, then yes, this is an attack on your tradition. The fact that so many Hazard students quite obviously cannot conceive of what could possibly be wrong with this is an indication of how thoroughly indoctrinated they are, and how successful the Left has been in eroding American cultural norms and marketing libertinism and perversion as normal, wholesome, and to be encouraged.”
Reading about Happy made me recollect my high school principal, a feared bear of a man who used to patrol the hallways carrying a yardstick. Nobody would have described Mr. Simpson as “Happy,” but everyone respected him and his efforts to run a tight ship designed to educate students.
How times have changed.
And then, of course, there are those parading as adults who are now running our country. Our president is a befuddled old man who often speaks gibberish and who is now openly mocked by countries around the world, our Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttegieg, has apparently spent the last two months on paid paternity leave while our nation’s supply-chain is in crisis, border czar and vice-president Kamala Harris says and does nothing to halt the massive and illegal invasion of our southern borders, and many in our Congress on both sides of the aisle seem out to lunch when it comes to curbing runaway spending. We’re in the middle of rising crime and a health care crunch, and some localities are firing police officers, fire fighters, and hospital workers for failing to take a vaccine.
Round and round it goes, and where it ends nobody knows.
We might want to change “where” in that old line to “when.” We all know where it ends—can we use the word catastrophe? —we just can’t tell when sanity and adulthood will return to some of our leaders.
I suspect that most readers know, as do I, plenty of level-headed Americans from all walks of life and all points of the political compass who work hard, raise children, protect their families, and love their country. None of them even vaguely resemble Tracy Reiman, Happy Mobelini, or so many of our political and corporation elites.
There’s this saving grace for the rest of us: the normality of most citizens of this great country.
As for me personally, here’s the good news: I get to sit in the stands, nibble on my popcorn, watch the three ring circus—better make that 30 rings—of American life, and put out articles like this one.
I’ll be dead before I can possibly run out of material.