Skip to main content

Get your own chickens!

Firemen in Obion County, Tennessee, 
watched a house burn down last week.  
The owner forgot to pay the $75. fee.
They were able to save the farm field next door.
The farmer had paid for fire protection.


Fire protection.
Police protection.
An education.
Health care.
National defense.
Safe medicines.
Safe food.
Parks to play in.
Roads to drive on.
Coordinated air flight.
Water for our homes.
Sewage disposal.
Electrical grids.
Communication services.


Well, what do you think? 


Do you think you should contract individually 
for those services (and many more), or do you
think they should be available to everyone? 


Do you believe people should be on their own,
if they can afford it, or remember to pay the fee,
and if they aren't, let the house burn down?


Is that Ronald Reagan I hear, encouraging us
to stand on our own?  To be strong?  Rebuild the house?
Maybe pay the $75. next time, if you have it?
He advised us once, to dig a hole in the back yard
in the event of a nuclear attack, and pull an old door 
over the top.   Do-it-yourself nuclear defense!


All the noise coming from conservatives and Tea Party people
is hole-in-the-backyard defense.  Do it all yourself!  Quit paying
taxes!  Get a gun, go to Idaho, and damn the torpedoes!


Get rid of the Education Department!  Get rid of public schools!
Trade chickens for health care!  Send witches and warlocks 
and people who hate government to run the government!


Cut off unemployment benefits!  
Get rid of Social Security!
Quit building public rail transportation!
Turn the health of the nation over to insurance companies!
Let private companies discriminate if they want to (Ron Paul).
(Ron Paul, personally, of course, says he personally
would not do that, of course.  Purely personally.)


If you are afraid of salmonella, quit buying eggs! 
Or get your own chickens!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more