Opinions

The subject of election security remains piping hot, and with one party leading investigations and the other fighting any attempts to limit fraudulent balloting, the issue will assuredly wind up in the hands of the Supreme Court. One common sense method is to make certain that each person voting is kosher. That means showing identification at the polls to receive a ballot. There is already a long list requiring personal identification in order to do certain things. Why it is not required in all 50 states makes no sense. ID is mandated for just about everything, from driving, to flying, visiting a doctor, registering a car, renting an apartment, and writing a check. Proof might be needed to just have a good time.

There’s a lot of traveling associated with Christmas. Throughout the season, the nightly news focuses on the hurdles: the weather delays on highways and airport cancellations, too.

Gregarious in nature, ground squirrels, let’s face it, are cute rascals. They’d be highly attracted to the internet simply for the social media, though they have only four fingers on their front paws. They have four chisel-shaped incisors and are able to rise up on their hind legs and stand erect for hours. Their marmot family of rodents include prairie dogs, chipmunks and groundhogs. The latter, also known woodchucks, are famous for their association with a question; how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? One of them, Punxsutawney Phil, from the small town of Punxsutawney (pop. 5,769), just north of Pittsburgh, is famous for predicting the weather once a year. He just predicted six more weeks of wintery mix, much to the boos of the thousands who trekked to western Pennsylvania to observe his morning exit from a burrow. He saw his shadow, which is easily his most common assessment.

Quotes related to global warming have not aged well, especially those with attached dates. It’s not that we don’t believe the warnings, because we’ve seen it in bananas, yet we throw out more of them than we’ve eaten. As recently as the 1990’s, the belief and acceptance in climate change have been universal. To say you had questions came with automatic ridicule like those associated with flat earthers. Fearing the label of denier, most people just rollover and give-in because believers declare you are rejecting facts. So, they add guilt to push you over into approval. We’ve seen the signs; “Denied Facts are Still Facts,” meaning denying reality is an essentially irrational behavior. They often point to those who reject the Holocaust of the 1940s, that during World War II the Nazi’s had concentration and extermination camps for the mass murder of six million Jews. It was true.

I have this friend with a theory. Actually, most of my friends have theories. This one, however, is unique in many ways--the friend and the theory. First of all, she has come to believe that Perry really is the center of the universe. Honestly, she believes this. What’s truly phenomenal is that she’s not from Perry, so she has no fifth-generation heritage to defend. She is, instead, from a place which most people think is the cultural center of the universe, at least for North America. She grew up within a stone’s throw of New York City, and can you imagine her anxiety when she found out that she would move far, far away to a planet in a nearby universe, called Perry?

I inquired about “something to kill the moles that are tunneling up my yard.” He shook his head in a “Wish I could help you” way, checked online to see if there was a product he didn’t know about and then admitted: “We don’t have anything.” “Okay,” I said, wondering how we can send a man to the moon but we can’t keep a blind mole out of our front yards. Another sad soul was nearby and looked at me with shared angst. “Good luck,” he said. “I fight them all the time.” Then he studied me seriously, trying to determine if I was an undercover agent for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and said, “I tell you what I did. I paid a boy to sit there with a shotgun at the top of the tunnel where the mole would come out.

Whatever we are concerned about today, faith and discernment are key components of our prayers. Without spiritual sensitivity, we do not understand God’s plans, which is why seeking Him empowers and activates our communication with Him. We believe in miracles because we know that God listens and is the only one who has the authority to restore and provide for us. If someone is having a health crisis, the Bible declares that He is the Great Physician and our healer. This is an exciting truth until doubt and fear sneak through the back door, and Satan repeats the same strategy to deceive as he did with Adam and Eve in the garden. His favorite temptation is to sow seeds of uncertainty and fear in our minds, causing us to question whether faith is real or just an illusion. In our times of trouble, we are bombarded with opinions, but we must become unmovable in knowing that God’s promises cannot fail.

“You could live on a dollar and 27 cents a day,” the husband said to me, shaking his head.

One of my closest friends, an Italian in Florida, often shared his point of view of what the real story is, by saying “You think you know.” But in his Connecticut accent it sounded more like, you “tinkayoono.” And we always listened. He either had a tough-guy explanation or he was about to offer a funny response. Either way, we were all-ears.

I still retain my 2014 calendar and I’m not even a certified hoarder. It’s still with me…