Having Fun In Seattle

The picture below almost got my camera confiscated at the Museum of Modern Art in Seattle. In fact, it would have been had not another couple decided to do what I did and snap a picture. They were seen by the oncoming worker and their film was taken. I was out of there quickly and got to bring home this picture of Margret Stamey kissing a very puckered up whatever you call it. The picture on the right is taken a short distance from the Space Needle in an area of totem poles. I am sure that I am not the only person that has a picture of the top of the Space Needle perched atop a totem pole.

GERONIMO!!!

It was as cold as a witches teat and the wind was blowing across Oklahoma like it was in a real hurry to get somewhere on this cold December day. The grave site is on the eastern side of Fort Sill, where Geronimo was kept during his last years. Native American visitors leave ribbons tied to the tree limbs and trinkets of all sorts that are put on the monument. This is as much the American story as all the stuff that we learned in school about immigrants and their "taming" of the land. In Lawton, the Museum of the Plains has much more about Geronimo and the Apache Nation that was there before the white settlers.

Where Is The Blue Ox? Everybody Asks.

If you are on your way to Bar Harbor, Maine, or on into New Brunswick, and happen to have a couple of hours on your hand that you have to spend somewhere, then turn up the river to Bangor, Maine. For the life of me, I can not think of another reason to go there, but they do have this statue of Paul Bunyan that is unbelievable. While we were there, Don Imus, on his radio talk show before he got into female athletics as a critic, spent two days telling the world how absolutely worthless Bangor was, because they would not let him promote a local appearance by putting an Imus t-shirt on Paul. He could do what Sarah is doing, just come and stand in front of it, but, NO, Imus was a rear end long before his stint in female athletics caused him to be de-aired for a while.

Little Girls Grow Up In The Most Delightful Way

Sarah Elizabeth Moore. And, all of these were before I even knew her. She never matured from the playful little girl in the earliest picture, in many ways, but thank God did in others. This is the reason that God has so little trouble getting males say, "till death do us part." The dark glasses were a sixties thing.

The Thread #5, My Best Teacher

Our lives overlapped by twenty years and as of today, our combined lives span 135 years. I spent the night with him before he died the next morning. A cousin and I took him to the bathroom once, rubbed his feet several times, and listened as he moaned and groaned his way to his mid-morning meeting with his Maker.

The world outside the family called him Mr. Walter. Inside the family we called him Grandpa, Papa, and Daddy. Everybody called him a saint for having the ability to live with my grandma all those years. My love for the old man is the reason that I ask that my grandchildren call me Grandpa. Mrs. Sue was a hellion who never really learned how to live at peace with the rest of the world. Her's in another story.

There is not a day that goes by that I do not meet someone who would have benefited by knowing my grandpa. When I would stand in front of classes years ago and tell them that they did not realize how much knowledge is lost as we adopt new ways of doing things, I was most often thinking of the things that my Grandpa knew about and how to do.

Grandpa could read and write very well, but he was far from an educated man if you are talking about "book learning," except for the Good Book, as it was called back then. He did not own his own land until he was in his seventies. Until then he had sharecropped and rented since leaving his dad's home just outside Pineville as a young man.

I live in an ocean of false bravado, ignorance parading as everything from patriotism to toughness of spirit, "me-ism" parading as honest conservatism and enlightened liberalism, and insecurity so deep that the ownership and display of guns, guns, and more guns substitutes for the security of knowing one's self and one's proper relationship to all of God's gifts. My Grandpa would not fit in this world today.

There is little doubt that different ones of those of us who knew Grandpa walked away with different lessons. He was a complicated man and could speak to a variety of people with a variety of needs. To my oldest brother, he imparted a proper working relationship with God. To me he imparted the need to know how to do many things well. To our brother between us, he imparted frugality and saving.

You see, Grandpa was not a teacher, in his own mind. He just went through his days doing what he had to do and what he wanted to do in a way that you could call efficiently, purposefully, skillfully, reasonably, thrift driven, humbly, and charitably. He let the world see what it wanted to see, and we saw that which we most needed to see, or wanted to see.

I loved and respected my grandpa too much to give him as the reason for my religious or political leanings. I will not borrow from his well of good sense to justify what may turn out to be my own failings or misunderstandings. My views are mine, not his. He was a part of the world that gave me the freedom to be who I think that I should be.

I have no idea how Grandpa would fall on the healthcare bill in Congress. I have no idea what he would think of modern day church experiences. Would he have registered Republican or stayed Democrat in the seventies or eighties? Again, I have no idea. If he and I diverged one hundred and eighty degrees on those questions, it would be of no concern to me. I do not worry about letting him down so long as I stand strong for those things in which I believe, treat my fellow man with respect, and always keep a charitable heart.

I try to carry the essence of the man in my mind and heart and attempt to reflect that essence in my own life. That is what a good teacher leaves his student. The student, in the end, will educate himself or herself. They will ask their own questions and find the answers where they believe the answers lie. It is up to us adults to give the examples of honesty, strength, charity, efficiency, humility, frugality, and a host of other character building qualities that will made their paths fruitful.

Grandpa was no saint. He could give a mule a lesson in foul language that even the mule would never forget. But, he knew that he was working to become the equal of a saint someday, and he pursued that path with every ounce of his energy. In doing so, he became the teacher of life that I needed, the teacher the schools could not provide.

And thus, no recounting of my early education would be even close to complete without telling of this special man and his influence on my life.

"My Lands Are Where My People Are Buried"

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, about 20 miles from Mount Rushmore, is the carving of Crazy Horse that is taking shape. The carving on the left is what it will look like when finished. On the right was the state of the carving as of the summer of 2008. To give some idea of how big it is, the hole in the mountain below what will be the arm is ten stories high. This dwarfs the carvings on Rushmore.

The completion of this effort is at least 50 years away. It is now in about its 30th year of work. No tax money is being used on the project. This is so much more interesting than Rushmore that is is hard to compare the two.

The visitor center is large and filled with prints and pictures like the one above. Some of you no doubt know the story of the Pema Indian from Arizona, Ira Hayes, who was one of the flag raisers it Iwo Jima. You have seen the famous statue near Arlington Cemetery and the Pentagon. This picture puts Ira Hayes in native dress, a most moving rendition of that courageous event.

Accompanying the statue of Carzy Horse, one of the suvivors of Little Big Horn, is his famous statement, "My lands are where my people are buried." If you are taking a trip out west and are anywhere near, this is one of the great places to visit in this country.

The Thread #4 Thinking Like A Mule

Education is more than schools and books, it is the totality of the experiences of any person. Growing up on a small farm, those experiences have their own character, their own domain within the bigger world of experiences. If you miss them, then supplanting them is hardly possible, and most people would be thankful for that hole in their education.

My dad, his oldest brother, his sister and her husband, and my grandfather went together to buy just under 200 acres of land on what is now Forest Lawn Drive in Weddington. That was about the time that I was born. The Byrum boys from over near Union Church came over and cut the timber from the land. The income from the timber paid for the land.

If you know anything about small farms, then this information is pertinent. While there was limited cleared fields on the higher ground, along the nearly one mile stretch of the West Fork Twelve Mile Creek that ran through the property, there were five good size bottoms. A bottom is a field along a creek or river. In residential terms, it is the flood plain.

It was in one of those bottoms that we set aside space for the grazing of the farm animals that we had. We fenced in about twenty acres total to get one bottom and the creek included for a source of water. Thus, when we had to milk a cow or hook the mule up to a wagon or plow, the first order of business was to find them in the fifteen acres of woods and five acres of field.

Now, cows are pattern animals. They always go to the same area, they take the same paths, and they tend to come to the barn when they are hungry. But, a mule is a different animal. He knows nothing of patterns and he is as likely to be standing beside a tree deep withing the wooded area as he is to be in the field grazing.

My dad had the little saying about finding the mule. He would tell us to think of ourselves as a mule and then decide where we would be today if that were the case. He assured us that if we really did that, we would go directly to where the mule would be standing.

It may well be that people today have not the slightest idea of how to think like a mule, or to use the transfer of learning that is inherit in that ability, think like another person. It seems that we have no desire to find the other person any longer and believe that it is incumbent on the other person to always think like us. It is always he or she who is lost, not us.

Now, I am danged sure that the old mule never considered that it was he who was lost. When we appeared with the bridle, he, no doubt, figured that he had found us. If a mule can think, that has to be how he would think because I know that in the human world we rightfully call people of that kind of mind, "mule headed."

The Olivia Dukakas character in "Steel Magnolias" said that it was the ability of humans to accessorize that put us above the other animals. I would like to add a second human characteristic that does that also, the ability to compromise. In more specific terms, it is the human ability to think like the other person and see the value in that person's way.

The acidity of the conversation today on both sides, or all sides, of the issues is of the lower forms of life that we want to think of ourselves as being above. It is of people who have been given so much that they have lost contact with the reality of their own dependence on the others around them.

The mule went to the tree to scratch himself, forgot why he went, and just stood there. We humans, likewise go to positions and forget how we got there, but we are danged sure that those who stand elsewhere are somehow out of place or lost. We never consider that we should think like that person for a moment and maybe find ourselves in the process.

Here is where I am going with all this. We have devalued the humanities in our schools. We now call people educated who are nothing more than trained to do a job. That is a catastrophe for our society. My favorite people to pick on are the half of our college students who are enrolled in business schools.

But, it goes far beyond that. Most colleges are nothing more than cheap training grounds for corporations. The result is a population, not so much unwilling to try the humanity of compromise as incapable of doing it. Rigidity and absolutes, and the wars that accompany them, are the gospel preached from the religious dais and the secular dais alike.

We must put respectable humanities requirements back into our education. We must find the will to require that in order for a person to carry a degree from a college or university, he or she must have a good background in the liberal arts. The quote of why is Biblical. "What does it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?"

Pretty Much As Wonderful As It Looks

From the 6th floor balcony on the opposite side of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Park, a part of Glacier International Peace Park that spans the Montana, Canadian border, looking down Waterton Lake toward the United States, about half way down the lake, and across the neatest little town on the continent, Waterton, you simply stare in awe. If there is a more heavenly view in all the continent, then I have not seen it. A hundred miles to the north, Lake Louise takes a stab at that title, but falls a little short. Sarah and I have spent 5 nights in this hotel on three trips. It is a budget buster, but what a way to bust a budget!!!

My God, I Have A Vagina

I have worked for thirty one years with the best interior designer in the region, hands down. I can give you a list of accomplishments a mile long to justify that statement, if you need it. Or, I can just refer you to other designers in the Charlotte region who will tell you that my friend is the one on the top of the mountain to whom all the other looked up to see.

Along with being a great designer, my friend is also sharp of wit and tongue. One day, in disgust for the lack of talent and lack of professionalism of one of the brigade of would be designers in Charlotte, he let go a quip that I have used often over the years and applied to other areas.

Particularly disgusted with the woman who, without any training or proven talent, but sure of her own abilities, crept upon and murdered an unsuspecting room, he let go the following quip: "She just stepped out of the shower, looked at herself in the mirror and yelled, 'My God, I have a vagina. I am a decorator!'"

Watching Newt Gingrich on television this morning, I wish that Newt had, upon getting a look at what a barber was able to do with that poof of hair, first thought of himself a minister or a gospel singer. America will always be the lesser because he first thought himself to be a politician.

The Thread #3, I Know That Language

I am not sure what grade I was in or what year it was, but my dad took us to a couple of KKK rallies. One was very near the present day intersection of Indian Trail Waxhaw Road and Potter Road. The other was out on Highway 74, very near the present day Walmart. My best guess is that the year was somewhere in the 1954 to 1955 range because they were surely a reaction to the Supreme Court's knocking down the "separate but equal" validity for segregation in schools. The South was in an uproar then as it is now. Everywhere there were signs and billboards that read, "Impeach Earl Warren", the Supreme Court chief justice.

White southerners are some of the most easily aggrieved people on Earth. A large portion of our people never bought into the idea of a true United States that could function as a government for all of the people. They have spent hundreds of years proving that you only have to take care of certain groups.

If you think that paragraph is some sort of exaggeration, then I suggest that you take off your blinders and look at the evidence. The concept of equality never really made it into the South, not by the decrees of Abraham Lincoln nor the hand of God. This region, especially areas like South Carolina low country, were built on the idea of a caste system and that belief lives today in many of its white citizens. The dictum from Earl Warren and his court was one more reason for some white southerners to don their capes and hoods and turn the Bible and the Christian religion on its head. God, Jesus, the Constitution, and all the angles were not, are not, and never have been reason for many white southerners to accept that they are not, in fact, the focal point of the creation and all good things that came after it.

I remember rather vividly the language of the speakers at the KKK rallies. Once you took out all the racial and ethnic slurs, it boiled down to a very simple, "God put us here as the supreme deciders of all things right and wrong within his creation. To give the other man a chance is to be a fool to the corruption of his soul. It is better to slay him before he has a chance to corrupt our world."

For every white southerner who accepted the errors of the ways of the Old South and attempted to reconcile their lives to the realities of the world, another never considered that he or she had any reason to be contrite, and continued teaching their children the "old ways."

Now, here we are in the twenty-first century, over forty years removed from the enactment of the voting rights bill. We have been through forced busing and other forms of court ordered integration. We have a very large professional and middle class population ofBlacks. It is a fact that most segregation today is more economic based than cultural based.

The election of a person who was half white, half black seemed to be a positive in most respects. There was a pretty big cultural backlash during the election campaign, fueled by the image of the pure white girl who was being used to beat up on the black man. It was ugly but ineffective in the end.

But, many of us said then, and we say again today, the level of and the tone of the attacks on candidate Obama were racially fueled. In my adult lifetime, I have not seen anything that comes close to the level of disgusting lies that were told, with no hint of any attempt to stay with bounds of civility.

But, that was little more than a warmup for what was to come after the election. The image of a black family in the White House seems to be just too much for tens of millions of whites across this country, and especially here in the South. The level of dialogue has fallen to KKK days, again, except absent some of the most vile terminology.

There is indeed a strong feeling about the level of spending in the country and the level of debt. But, it was people fully supported by most of those tens of millions of white people who got us to the debt level that we are at today, and there was hardly a word of accusal language. Where it did exist, it was civil and respectful of the president.

I know this language as well as I know the lullabies that my mother sang to me. I know the difference between honest concerns that may give rise to heated debate and strong language, and the words of the white race that feels that it is under attack. To those who still fight the Civil War, anything done or said is justified to return the people, who see themselves as gods, to the places of power they have always occupied. This is war.

I would hope that all peoples of color across this nation would stop and take a good look at what the Republican Party now represents. It is saddled with the Old South while the Democratic Party now represents more of the New South. We need a strong and viable Republican Party that is willing to shed that burden. It will not grow nationally until it does.

I am actually writing this on September 12, 2009, the day of the Tea Parties and the march on Washington. I have seen the signs of hatred the participants carry that will only stiffen the casue of those who feel an affront by them. I have seen or heard nothing today that will do anything but cause the reinforcement of the lines of defense of those who feel threatened by this level of vitriol.

As a sixty five year old man who remembers the KKK rallies and knows the message, I will say that it is, today, our duty to stand up to this new assault on humanity from those who would bring back to these shores inhumanity masked as God's Will, and incivility masked as the original intent of the formers of the Constitution.

The Clan

Ok, I will admit that I am proud of the gang. Everybody is pictured above but Sarah. I am sure that I will get to her later. The tall one that does not look like the rest of us is Enrico Gallinaro, who became a part of our house at the age of 15 and still comes back regularly from his home in Rome. The picture taken at Goose Island in Glacier National Park shows our three, Brian, David, and Darren. Darrens family at Disneyworld is he and Amy with Logan and Emmett on their laps. The picture of David and Kate, his wife, was made on a Halloween night in downtown Chapel Hill. Many of you know about the great tradition there.

Here are short bios.

Emmett-Three years old and in playschool 3 days a week. Emmett is a strong willed fellow who loves his grandparents. When I read "The Lorax" he gets his whisper-ma-phone and listens.

Logan-Six years old and just started first grade. Logan is a very serious young man who can already read at a very high level. Last week, over the telephone, I taught him to spell "arithmetic" with the old phrase, "a rat in the house might eat the ice cream."

Kate-Newest member of the family. She and David were married just over a year ago. Kate is an English teacher at Durham School of the Arts, does capoeira, and graduated from Michigan and UNC-CH(masters program). She is much tougher than she looks.

David-Our youngest son, 29 who goes by the name Ormand everywhere but home. He is an English teacher at Chapel Hill High School and got both degrees from UNC-CH. He and Kate just bought a home in northern Durham.

Amy-Amy is a vetinarian who practices in Wilks-Barre, Pa. She loves working with large animals. She is a graduate of UVA and VT Vetinary School. Amy is a reader and a runner. She did the Pikes Peak run when they lived in Colorado Springs.

Darren-Darren is starting his second profession, teaching high school social studies. Darren graduated from Davidson College with an Army commission and served 10 years as an officer in the Army, including deployments to Bosia and Doha(where he worked with CentCom). He spent four years in Germany. He was second in his Captain's class and left the Army just short of making the rank of Major.

Enrico-Became Brian's friend in high school at Sun Valley where his dad had brought him to get an American education. Later gained a degree from College of Charleston, MA in Economics at Oklahoma, and taught Economics at College of Charleston. Is a very accomplished sailor, but makes his money in real estate development here and in Italy. Now lives part time in Rome, Milan with his girl friend, and on the Adriatic where he owns a farm that produces olive oil and wine.

Brian-Works with me in the drapery business, has a second life with his girlfriend Genny and her two daughters, and a third life as a gardner and reader. Brian is currently waiting to hear from the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire people where he passed the test and the interview. Brian served his country as a calvary scout in Germany and the Middle East in the first Iraq war. He became an avid skier and lived for a while in Colorado where he was able to ski and climb mountains, his two great loves.

A Freaky Religious Revival

We have witnessed something like a really freaky religious revival over the last year or more. Republicans, perfectly happy to party through nearly eight years; never giving a hint of any realization of what they were doing to the country and the economy; but noticing that they were about to be put out of office and replaced by people who might party as they partied, continuing the spending binge but on people of their choosing; suddenly got religion; turned on their own and their president and their own party; and dropped back to calling themselves only Conservatives.
This was the party that roared when their second in command, Cheney, told the world that President Reagan proved that "deficits did not matter!!!" Let me repeat that. Totally unambiguously, in 2004, Cheney said that "DEFICITS DO NOT MATTER." Reagan proved it by raising the national debt to just under $3 trillion. Then the Bush administrations went about pursuing policies and legislation that added $6 trillion to the national debt. Three presidents who gave the finger to debt and still were adored and even worshiped by their followers oversaw the increase of the national debt by $8 trillion. Only Clintons administration lowered the debt to GDP ratio, something that it did by 8.8% while the three Republicans around him added 53.2 % to that ratio. There is little doubt, national debt is a Republican created problem, who have used it to create a false sense of good government management.
Now, the Republicans who got religion are.......Conservatives!!! The problem is that the term conservative has its own trappings. It is, in today's politically charged climate, undefined.
Conservatism is actually a graduated scale. Anyone can claim to be anywhere on that scale they want and then turn around and call all the ones on lower rungs by vile names like.... Liberal.
We saw a perfect example of that last week when a well known Union County native called three county commissioners Liberals. That had to sting the one who is so proud that she honors her daddy by being a good Conservative.
We all know the suburban game of "keeping up with the Jones." It is a game played by what you would call, by definition, "losers." It is a game you can not win because no matter how much stuff you have, somebody has more, always. It is the old infinity condition that given any number X, there is always an X+1. There is only one winner in the Jones game and that person does not really exist. He is on the bottom rung in keeping up with the Gates(Bill and Melinda).
The same is true in the Conservative game. I'll take your Ronald Reagan and raise you a Barry Goldwater. I'll take your Barry Goldwater and raise you a Robert Welch. Locally, I'll take your western side commissioner and raise you an eastsider. I'll take your RINO and raise you a Birther. Sorry folks, but the scale never reaches its most ridiculous, because as we have learned from Conservatives, there is always somebody more ridiculouser, kinda like that redundant superlative.
Like Zeno's paradox, about motion being non-existant because at any instant the arrow shot from the bow was in a given location; therefore motion is nothing more that a set of locations for the arrow; there is no Conservatism because there is noting more that a bunch of disconnected positions that deny the validity of all the others.
You have less trouble finding hair on a mangy dog than you do finding a real Republican these days. "Everyone's gone to the moon," as the sixties song goes. As a matter of fact, I will close with a rehashing of that song by Jonathan King.

Streets full of RINO's, all alone.
Houses full of Republicans, never home.
All the pretenders singing out of tune.
Everyone's gone to the moon.

My Other World

Here is what I do and have done for 31 years. The designs are by four of Charlotte's interior designers. The work is all ours.

The Thread #2, Educate or Indoctrinate?

Today, we know that a lot of the things that we learned in school during those early years at Weddington were pure indoctrination. Anything dealing with race was to be challenged in the near future. It was all built around telling us that we were better and different than the black people in our community.
The relationship between religion and public education was such that the dominant religion of the area, Protestant Christianity, had full access to our learning and could use school time freely and openly to indoctrinate our young minds. There was no line between church and public school.
Literature was chosen to idealize the dominant culture and disregard all others. "Dick and Jane" had no black, yellow, or red characters. All of our stories, all of our books, and all of our lessons were about being good and religious white people. When other races were presented to us, they were presented as caricatures, not real people. Uncle Remus is a perfect example. Who can forget "Little Black Sambo?"
Our songs about black people were songs like, "Carry Me Back To Old Virginie" and "Old Black Joe." Let me go through some lines of the former.

"Carry me back to ole Virginia, that's where the cotton and the corn and taters grow. That's where the bird's sing so sweet in the springtime. That's where this old darkie's heart is long to go."

Black folks were darkies not people. In "Old Black Joe", his head is bending low. He is submissive. "Gone are the days when his heart was young and gay" in the cotton fields. Another line calls their hearts "so happy and so free." We were taught that black folks loved their toil in the fields and the good ones always wanted to go back.
Everywhere, including school, we played Cowboys and Indians. The game was pretty cut and dry. The cowboys killed the Indians. If you were one who was an Indian, you were expected to yell while covering and uncovering your mouth in a fast rhythm. You were expected to die when you were shot at at close range. Cowboys never died.
Our history was about white people. We were taught that white people had done everything worth doing because we were never told that anyone else did anything of significance. Every American that we learned about was a white person, period.
Now, here is the disconnect. While what we were learning was mostly indoctrination, outside of the sciences, the skills that we learned were the skills of learning. Within our culture, we learned all the right rules for getting along with others and being good citizens. It would be left to the individual to realize that he or she had gone through an indoctrination process.
Everything that I said in Thread 1 was true. Elementary school at Weddington was a very good experience for me. But, I was indoctrinated into a world that was to come crumbling down very soon. It was the skills that I learned there that I took with me into adulthood. The idealized world of the Christian white person faded into oblivion.
Unfortunately, most of the people who went through what I went through as a child never realized what had been done to them. Pick up any local paper today, talk to any group of arbitrarily chosen people, or open up the internet. There are a lot of people here who were effectively indoctrinated into a world of lies for a lifetime, and they have probably done the same to their children.
One of the really depressing aspects of today is that I expected those from other regions of the country where slavery was not what it was in the South, where understandings of Native Americans was better, and where Hispanics have always been a significant part of the population, to be less indoctrinated into the white world fairy tale, and that is not the case.
There is a present argument circulating that President Obama wants to indoctrinate our young people rather than educate them. I think that the President will have to stand in a long line if that is the line he wants to get into. The problem is that those who argue this are the products of strong indoctrination themselves.
Now, what you choose to allow your son or daughter to hear, see, smell, feel, or taste is up to you. I know children well enough to know that if they start feeling that you have alterior motives beyond their safety, then many will rebel at some point.
Those children not trusted with the freedom of making up their on minds today may well be the radicals that you have to battle tomorrow. The most avid white radicals grown here in the South were all indoctrinated into the white world when children. My parents did me a favor, sort of, by allowing me to be fully indoctrinated into the world they knew. When time came to rebel, I knew exactly what it was that I was rebelling against.

Colision Course With Reality

The only sure thing in the healthcare debate is that we as a people have surrendered any demand that the economic model that is used in providing healthcare make sense.
The result is that we have a system that costs us up to twice as much as any other system in the world.
What we have is a smorgasbord of options and charges that allow all sorts of little tyrants to build their fiefdoms of influence and absurd compensation. There is a reason that Doctor A does not talk to Doctor B, that lab A will not use the findings of lab B, and so on and so on.
Add to that the most absurd system of payment that could possibly be built; insurance company clerks deciding who gets care and who does not, what is paid for and what is not, and you end up with a system that will, unchecked, destroy this country within the next quarter of a century.
Why will it do so? Because some people listened to one line from Ronald Reagan and turned it into both a political philosophy and a religion. "Government is the problem!!"
Now, with religious fervor, these people have set about to ensure the destruction of our country by not allowing the only entity able to set us on a sustainable course to function.
Relative to money and product, there are two types of businesses. One is labor intensive(most of the expenses are for labor), and the other is capital intensive(labor is not a high percentage of expenses).
Labor intensive businesses are going to continue dropping their health insurance benefits on a massive scale. There is no way that most of them can stay in business otherwise. Most of the businesses that have left the country are labor intensive. Most small businesses are labor intensive.
We finally have an administration willing to take the body punches and attempt to do something about this road to destruction that we travel with all the self assurance of the king with no clothes, and the Reagan air heads will have nothing of it. The language is vile and filled with illusions from blood running in the street to the death camps of Hitler.
We have made it thus far as a country because we got a good start and we have changed when change was necessary. The government even went so far as to wage war on dissenters in the 1860's. We have amended the Constitution on several occasions and we have passed laws that spread the blessings of liberty to women, Native Americans, and people visibly identifiable as having Negro blood. We have changed our immigration policies so that northern Europeans were not given preference beyond other groups.
We can treat this problem of the rising cost of healthcare as a bump in the road, or we can let it destroy us. Gone unchecked, it will do the latter. Ronald Reagan was not the problem. The problem lies with people who do not know how to integrate a thought into their total life experiences and philosophies.

Coffee or Tea?

Date---September 12
Time--12pm till 2 pm
Coffee--Free, plus hotdogs, ice cream and lemonade
at the Coffee Table in Wesley Chapel.
Bubble Party and Face Painting for the children
Wesley Chapel VFD Fire Truck for the children.


Tea--A gimmick that is a cheap play on a great American day.
Place defiled--The Old Courthouse
Keep the children at home or cover their eyes and ears.
Purpose is to keep the echo alive that supplants thinking.
Bring a poster that says something nasty about somebody.
Really sucks--No damned free tea