Questions…with no good answers.
What could possibly be worth listening for one hour, and pays four hundred thousand dollars for it? Barack Obama gave a speech at Cantor Fitzgerald and got paid that amount. Does anyone have an answer, much less a good one, for that? Speaking of the former President, a Hawaiian official has now come forth and said that he was not born in Hawaii, that there is no record anywhere of his birth in the state. Let’s assume for a moment that it’s true…what happens to all the things he signed into law? What actually happens to his Presidency…is it marked in the record books with an asterisk? Now, if he wasn’t telling the truth about his birth, what else might be false about him…his academic time, for example. Did he really go to the schools that he claims?
People in this country like to say that we are a nation of laws…and we are…except when it doesn’t suit us to follow them. That seems to be the reasoning behind the inaction on a bunch of people and the things they say and do, which are clearly against the law. It’s a sure bet, that if you or I said or did some of the things that these folks have done and said, we would be UNDER the jail and probably would never see daylight again! If you threaten the life of the President, if you talk about overthrowing the government (by any means), if you aid the enemy in a time of war (declared or not), there are harsh laws covering these instances. Why then are we not enforcing those laws? Destruction of private property in the commission of a crime, aiding in the commission of a crime, and the crime itself…all have laws covering them. Why in the world are we not jamming the jails with these people?
Oh, gee…what bathroom should I use today? According to one faculty member at Harvard, a person can change their gender identity on a daily basis. Think about it… initially, there was the matter of appearance, whether a person LOOKED like a male or looked like a female. If that appearance produced some uncertainties, one could determine the sex by examining a person’s birth certificate. If appearance and a birth certificate still didn’t resolve the issue, the ultimate, absolute proof of sex was a person’s chromosomes; XX marked a female, and XY marked a male. Case closed, or one might think so. But those old-fashioned, simple methods of identifying sex have changed, and now it only takes a person thinking or self-identifying as this gender or that…and that is where the questions occur. There are men, believe it or not, who are “bathroom shy” and cannot urinate or defecate if someone else is in the room. If they are shy with other men, do you think they’ll be less shy with a woman in there? What woman, then, wants a man in the ladies room, with little girls?
What about NoKo (North Korea)? Shall the United States be bullied by a (probably) deranged dictator? There is NO question that if they succeed in putting together a nuclear warhead in an intercontinental ballistic missile, they would bomb the United States. Will we maintain the theory of no pre-emptive strike, just to show the world that it was not us that started the nuclear world war? Perhaps we should strike first, make it a complete wipe-out and go from there…but, China is NoKo’s big brother and protector, so we might expect some retaliation from them, right? Will we, because of our past stance of “leading from behind”, be considered a paper tiger still, and suffer the consequences of that line of thinking? Why would we think that, given the modern weapons of war, a nuclear war involving the entire world, would be any less destructive than was World War Two? “War does not determine who is right…only who is left.”, and that’s generally attributed to Bertrand Russell, but the author doesn’t really matter when you think about the saying itself.
Here’s an interesting pair of questions. First, how many parents does it take to raise a bunch of kids until they leave the nest and they’re out on their own? Optimally, it would be two, but there are single parent families that do quite well in that department. Now for the second question…how many children does it take to support and take care of elderly parents? Judging from what I’ve seen over about 25 years, the number would have to be huge! If you figure all the things that have to be paid, it might come to about $1300 a month. Don’t forget that the old folks probably get Social Security and Medicare, so the kids might be looking at about $900 a month, and that figure would be divided among however many children there were…or cared to participate, because we have to face facts and one fact is that there will be children that won’t want to chip in. Do you know any families like that? It may be that the United States is one of the few countries that doesn’t revere age. Of course, we don’t set them adrift on icebergs as has been rumored, or feed them to wild animals, also rumored…but we don’t respect age and I wonder why?
Parting shot: You will be old yourself one day.
Image: Excerpted from: Kristoferb at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10784117
