Opinions

If you have wondered what happened to normal discourse, you were likely born before 1990. The advent of social media, which followed the popular Blackberry device that hypnotized young adults to the point they were often incapable of leaving the house, has done great harm to the daily dialogues that drew people together. Separated from their electronic lifeline, the dependence tied to mobile phones has crippled adults, college-age students, teenagers, and even elementary children. The good is that information, music and video have been therapeutic entertainment. Too often, parents have yielded day-to-day conversations to whatever keeps their kids from bothering them.

He is a grandfather, and as such, he wishes to introduce his granddaughters to the simple pleasures of life. Like riding to the dump in the truck. “We’re going where?” the girls asked, with an overabundance of sophistication. “To do what?” they wanted to know, with some impatience. “Hop in,” he said with authority. The truck has no air conditioner so the girls were told, “Roll down those windows so we’ll catch a breeze.” He nearly slammed on brakes when the girls then said, “Do what? How do you roll down a window?”

“Something smells horrible in this room,” I announced as I proceeded from throw pillow to throw pillow, picking each up, and burying my nose deeply in its downy fill.

Thursday was sunny and as warm as a plate of country biscuits. Driving along Ennis Avenue, behind Dairy Queen was a sight to behold. Day Care staff at a church were pushing youngsters down the banked parking lot on four-wheeled skateboards or scooterboards. Not a single kid lacked for a smile. Oh, what fun it is to ride on a modern-day X-Quad. I sat in the drive-thru and reminisced the days of my youth. We did some crazy stuff outdoors, all in the name of fun. To try again at my age would find no room for anything on the mini-cart except for my wide posterior. With nothing to hang on to other than my belt loops, this ample derriere would turn jollification into sheer fear at the thought of stopping short of a trip to ERMC.

Somewhere along the way on my 300-mile journey to Alabama, I lost my voice. By the time I prepared to travel back to Florida, my voice had not returned to me. If you’ve got to lose your voice, I recommend the South for the setting. My heart has been blessed countless times since I began whispering for a living. At the fast-food restaurant, I touched the clerk’s sleeve and said, “I’ve lost my voice.” “Bless your heart,” she said to me, and I had her attention. She focused on me intently trying to interpret my order. “Now you just sit down over there,” she said, “and I’ll bring this to you. Are you drinking plenty of fluids?” she asked. “You know that’s important. If there’s anything else you need, just raise your hand and I’ll come help you.”

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?