ou wake up in the morning. Your restless night’s sleep over; your brain suddenly re-boots and all of the stress of the day before is back in an instant. Immediately your body starts to react to it and your health begins to slowly but steadily deteriorate from it.
You must live in the United States, where the almighty dollar is worshipped. You have trouble living a happy life because you just don’t have enough of those dollars to handle all of your obligations. You watch while elected politicians and their corporate cronies rake in big money and wave their capitalist flags in your face, breaking laws and laughing about it. They have friends in very high places.
You get in your beat-up old car that cost you five hundred bucks to fix, and go out looking for a job, since you lost yours last week when things got slow. No matter; it didn’t pay all that much anyway and there was no health insurance or 401K attached to it so the first time you got sick they probably would have fired you, since you hadn’t been there long enough to get sick days or a vacation, which you have not had in many years, except for that two weeks a year you got when you worked for the factory.
That job was okay, but then they shipped their work to Mexico where labor was cheaper, so they closed the place down. Out you went, on unemployment for six months, which is how long it took you to find another job that paid somewhere near the same money.
Then you had the baby and when she got sick you and your husband were out of work so much that you almost lost everything you had trying to keep your heads above water keeping up with the doctors and medicines, but, despite the best care you could afford, she didn’t make it.
While your life was happening, big banks and insurance companies were robbing the public blind, and when they got found out they got a nice big bailout from the government. A sweet reward for very bad behavior. “Too big to fail,” they called it. That’s the way it is here in the United States.
Then came a new regime in Washington, similar in a lot of ways to the old one but different enough to make some people begin to scream about the dreaded “Socialism.” You’ve heard about it, vaguely, in reference to medicine. Not good, is what the voices on the radio said.
Imagine a place where you had free health care, free child care, a retirement system that was far better than Social Security, free college for all your kids, paid sick days, six weeks of paid vacation every year (my goodness, a week every two months!), a good job re-training program if you lost your employment, paid parental leave for both parents if you have a child, and free senior care for later in life.
That is what Socialism is. That is what the big players in this country have told you is evil. Why? Is it because it costs more in taxes to provide all of that to you, which it does? Is it because it’s a big trick to make you slaves to the government, which it isn’t? No. They don’t like it because it means that the government looks out for people instead of corporations. It means less money in their pockets and more in yours. People would actually be more equal, a scary proposition for them.
How many of you would you be willing to pay more taxes to get rid of all of the stress in your life that you have because you don’t have all of the things mentioned above? I’m betting most of you would, if you knew the truth.
Imagine that.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Bob Dylan column
Genius. Technically it means someone with an IQ of 140 or higher.
It’s not just the brain we are born with; there is also the factoring in of a certain amount of self-discipline and striving to improve one’s intellect, or their talents in one area or another.
Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking are geniuses in the traditional sense, just as Michael Jordan was a genius basketball player and Muhammad Ali was a genius in the ring. We appreciate their abilities and recognize them as such.
During a TV broadcast from the White House the other night it occurred to me there is an entertainer out there who, besides being a genius in his field, is also a national treasure and he should be appreciated while we still have him around.
Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 in Minnesota. His family was not well-to-do, but his working class upbringing in that part of the country would not stop him from pursuing a career in music.
At first, he became caught up in the life story of rail-riding folksinger Woody Guthrie, who at that time in early 1960 was hospitalized in New Jersey with Huntington’s Chorea. Dylan hitched rides across the country to visit his hero, succeeded, and began playing many of Woody’s songs, as well as many traditional blues and ballads as he made his rounds throughout the clubs of New York and elsewhere. He was considered a terrific mimic, but that was it. He did none of his own material and it never looked like he was going to be anything more than an idiosyncratic interpreter of others’ work.
This is where the genius part comes in.
Somewhere in his Midwestern brain, all of those influences -- Guthrie, Hank Williams, Little Richard and others -- coalesced, and almost overnight songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War,” and others were flying off the pages of his typewriter.
The timing of Dylan’s blossoming was in sync with the height of the civil rights movement. Dylan’s eloquence quickly made him the musical face of the movement, but he was still an artist in transition. While the folkies embraced him as their own, he tired of being pigeonholed and began writing songs of another type, long, and some say “chemically influenced” masterpieces like “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Desolation Row” and hundreds more. He faced hostile audiences around the world in the mid-sixties for going electric but it did not stop him. In the 1970s he released Blood on The Tracks, still one of the greatest albums ever made, and he has continued to record and tour since then, winning an Oscar and several Grammies in the last decade alone. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his arrival in New York. His influence on popular music and culture in the past half century rivals that of Shakespeare in his time and cannot be denied.
The other night he performed “The Times They Are A-Changing” at the White House, in the faces of the very people he was singing about: “Come senators and congressmen, please heed the call. Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall, for he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled—the battle outside is ragin’. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a changing.”
Strong stuff for a little Jewish kid from iron ore mining country.
It’s not just the brain we are born with; there is also the factoring in of a certain amount of self-discipline and striving to improve one’s intellect, or their talents in one area or another.
Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking are geniuses in the traditional sense, just as Michael Jordan was a genius basketball player and Muhammad Ali was a genius in the ring. We appreciate their abilities and recognize them as such.
During a TV broadcast from the White House the other night it occurred to me there is an entertainer out there who, besides being a genius in his field, is also a national treasure and he should be appreciated while we still have him around.
Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 in Minnesota. His family was not well-to-do, but his working class upbringing in that part of the country would not stop him from pursuing a career in music.
At first, he became caught up in the life story of rail-riding folksinger Woody Guthrie, who at that time in early 1960 was hospitalized in New Jersey with Huntington’s Chorea. Dylan hitched rides across the country to visit his hero, succeeded, and began playing many of Woody’s songs, as well as many traditional blues and ballads as he made his rounds throughout the clubs of New York and elsewhere. He was considered a terrific mimic, but that was it. He did none of his own material and it never looked like he was going to be anything more than an idiosyncratic interpreter of others’ work.
This is where the genius part comes in.
Somewhere in his Midwestern brain, all of those influences -- Guthrie, Hank Williams, Little Richard and others -- coalesced, and almost overnight songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War,” and others were flying off the pages of his typewriter.
The timing of Dylan’s blossoming was in sync with the height of the civil rights movement. Dylan’s eloquence quickly made him the musical face of the movement, but he was still an artist in transition. While the folkies embraced him as their own, he tired of being pigeonholed and began writing songs of another type, long, and some say “chemically influenced” masterpieces like “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Desolation Row” and hundreds more. He faced hostile audiences around the world in the mid-sixties for going electric but it did not stop him. In the 1970s he released Blood on The Tracks, still one of the greatest albums ever made, and he has continued to record and tour since then, winning an Oscar and several Grammies in the last decade alone. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his arrival in New York. His influence on popular music and culture in the past half century rivals that of Shakespeare in his time and cannot be denied.
The other night he performed “The Times They Are A-Changing” at the White House, in the faces of the very people he was singing about: “Come senators and congressmen, please heed the call. Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall, for he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled—the battle outside is ragin’. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a changing.”
Strong stuff for a little Jewish kid from iron ore mining country.
Immigration column
A couple of weeks ago, a reader called Hello, Butts County to inform us all that illegal immigration has destroyed the health-care industry in this country. I regret to inform you that the health-care industry in this country has, like many other institutions here, actually been destroyed from within by that good old byproduct of unregulated capitalism. Yes friends, I’m talking about greed.
I like telling stories, so here is one: A long time ago, around 1982, before things got so out of control, I went to a dentist. He was recommended to me by a teacher friend who told me that the dentist, a few weeks after doing work on his teeth, had actually given him money back, with the comment, “You can pay your union dues.”
So I went. Had work done. A little later, got money back. Huh? How’d that happen?
Here’s what was going on: Dr. So and So was charging 200 bucks for a root canal. Fair enough, but when he saw that my insurance company was willing to pay a maximum of 400 bucks, that’s what he billed them. He then split the extra two hundred bucks with me, as he had with my teacher friend before me, and who knows how many others. As far as I know, he wasn’t even breaking any laws. Since the insurance company was willing to pay that much, he was well within his rights to charge that much. What he did with the difference was up to him.
That was one little dentist in one little place in upstate New York, a small fish in a big pond. If you multiply him by thousands, or maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of health-care professionals over the last 30 years, all billing the insurance companies for extra money, and then for extra services, the numbers increase exponentially.
Time passed. Insurance companies quickly began realizing that too much money was bleeding out of their hands, into the hands of the doctors and hospitals who were billing them for aspirin at the rate of 10 bucks a pill, sometimes, as well as five-dollar Band-Aids, 10,000 bucks for an overnight stay in a hospital, and so on. You get the picture. Insurance companies seemingly didn’t even look at the bills and ask, “Isn’t 10 bucks for an aspirin too much?” They just paid it, and passed the cost along to us later, like a store owner who has to raise prices to make up for shoplifters.
No one begrudges health-care professionals the right to earn a great living -- they work very hard to get where they are and they perform an important and life-saving service, but there is no law that says that the doctor always has to be the first guy on the block to have the yacht AND the Ferrari. At least not in his first year of practice.
Medical fraud is the biggest reason the health-care industry in this country has gone to the dogs. The doctors and hospitals (not all, of course, but some) overcharge the insurance companies. The insurance companies raise their premiums to keep their profit margins status quo and they raise their co-pays to ridiculous levels. Employers can’t afford to provide health insurance for free anymore, so they start taking the premiums out of your pay. Now you have less money for everyday living. It is all connected. Six degrees of fraud and deception.
Illegal immigration has nothing to do with it. While some illegal immigrants do seek and receive medical care here, they have nothing to do with the destruction of the health-care industry in the United States.
And you can take that to the bank (if your dentist is like mine was.)
I like telling stories, so here is one: A long time ago, around 1982, before things got so out of control, I went to a dentist. He was recommended to me by a teacher friend who told me that the dentist, a few weeks after doing work on his teeth, had actually given him money back, with the comment, “You can pay your union dues.”
So I went. Had work done. A little later, got money back. Huh? How’d that happen?
Here’s what was going on: Dr. So and So was charging 200 bucks for a root canal. Fair enough, but when he saw that my insurance company was willing to pay a maximum of 400 bucks, that’s what he billed them. He then split the extra two hundred bucks with me, as he had with my teacher friend before me, and who knows how many others. As far as I know, he wasn’t even breaking any laws. Since the insurance company was willing to pay that much, he was well within his rights to charge that much. What he did with the difference was up to him.
That was one little dentist in one little place in upstate New York, a small fish in a big pond. If you multiply him by thousands, or maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of health-care professionals over the last 30 years, all billing the insurance companies for extra money, and then for extra services, the numbers increase exponentially.
Time passed. Insurance companies quickly began realizing that too much money was bleeding out of their hands, into the hands of the doctors and hospitals who were billing them for aspirin at the rate of 10 bucks a pill, sometimes, as well as five-dollar Band-Aids, 10,000 bucks for an overnight stay in a hospital, and so on. You get the picture. Insurance companies seemingly didn’t even look at the bills and ask, “Isn’t 10 bucks for an aspirin too much?” They just paid it, and passed the cost along to us later, like a store owner who has to raise prices to make up for shoplifters.
No one begrudges health-care professionals the right to earn a great living -- they work very hard to get where they are and they perform an important and life-saving service, but there is no law that says that the doctor always has to be the first guy on the block to have the yacht AND the Ferrari. At least not in his first year of practice.
Medical fraud is the biggest reason the health-care industry in this country has gone to the dogs. The doctors and hospitals (not all, of course, but some) overcharge the insurance companies. The insurance companies raise their premiums to keep their profit margins status quo and they raise their co-pays to ridiculous levels. Employers can’t afford to provide health insurance for free anymore, so they start taking the premiums out of your pay. Now you have less money for everyday living. It is all connected. Six degrees of fraud and deception.
Illegal immigration has nothing to do with it. While some illegal immigrants do seek and receive medical care here, they have nothing to do with the destruction of the health-care industry in the United States.
And you can take that to the bank (if your dentist is like mine was.)
Column following State of the Union address
Never have so many looked so foolish.
I was prepared to slam President Obama in the days leading up to his first State of the Union address. But his speech last week hit it out of the park, and it was truly enjoyable to see all of those fat cat Republicans sitting on their pudgy, un-calloused hands, putting on their best Cheney-esque scowls and shaking their collective heads when they disagreed with something they heard, which was often.
Still, invigorating and full of promise as the speech was, I have reservations about which “union” the president was referring to.
It’s hard to believe that any of the senate members have ever known what regular life is like for the vast majority of this country. Two unions, divisible…
In one union everyone wears an expensive suit, drives a Mercedes or BMW.
They “work” behind a desk, live in houses with so many rooms that the state of Wyoming could move in with room to spare. Family meals are often prepared by “the help” and dinner discussions revolve around stock investments and their next vacation in St. Barts, or skiing in Aspen.
When they get sick, the doctor comes to them.
Their kids’ college education is secure.
That union is in good shape thanks to huge government bailouts and they even get their yearly mega-bonuses as well. All this while they complain about the president spend-spend-spending us into extinction.
Then there is the small matter of the other union, comprising about ninety-nine percent of the country.
They wear jeans and overalls, work in farms, factories, fast food joints, and supermarkets, and make less in an hour than what the suits might spend for a martini at the club. Stock is just part of chicken soup.
They live in mobile homes, cheap duplexes or big empty new houses that they were conned into buying with fancy language and small print and are now on the verge of losing to foreclosure.
Their houses are empty because they have sold what furniture they had to try to make that mortgage payment, or they never had enough money left to buy any furniture after the closing on the house. They drive used cars, or buy a new one and have a monthly car payment that is as much as their rent.
When they get sick, they can’t get treatment because they don’t have money for it, and they suffer in silence.
When it gets cold, and the cost of heating their homes is so high that they can’t afford it, they suffer in cold silence.
They can’t take a vacation where it is warm because while oil and gas prices have risen to stupidly high levels, their paycheck has not increased at all. Instead, they stay home and read about how the other union spends their holidays in St. Barts and Aspen.
Even schoolteachers are being made to work several days a year for free. Can you imagine?
They elected a president who they thought was like them, from humble beginnings, who worked hard and made good, and who promised change. The only change thus far is what is in their pockets. And they suffer in silence, but not for long.
Dogs bite back when cornered. The majority of regular people in this country feel cornered. They will bite back, because they are not happy with the state of their union.
Good speech, Mr. President. As they say, though, actions speak louder than words. See you next year.
I was prepared to slam President Obama in the days leading up to his first State of the Union address. But his speech last week hit it out of the park, and it was truly enjoyable to see all of those fat cat Republicans sitting on their pudgy, un-calloused hands, putting on their best Cheney-esque scowls and shaking their collective heads when they disagreed with something they heard, which was often.
Still, invigorating and full of promise as the speech was, I have reservations about which “union” the president was referring to.
It’s hard to believe that any of the senate members have ever known what regular life is like for the vast majority of this country. Two unions, divisible…
In one union everyone wears an expensive suit, drives a Mercedes or BMW.
They “work” behind a desk, live in houses with so many rooms that the state of Wyoming could move in with room to spare. Family meals are often prepared by “the help” and dinner discussions revolve around stock investments and their next vacation in St. Barts, or skiing in Aspen.
When they get sick, the doctor comes to them.
Their kids’ college education is secure.
That union is in good shape thanks to huge government bailouts and they even get their yearly mega-bonuses as well. All this while they complain about the president spend-spend-spending us into extinction.
Then there is the small matter of the other union, comprising about ninety-nine percent of the country.
They wear jeans and overalls, work in farms, factories, fast food joints, and supermarkets, and make less in an hour than what the suits might spend for a martini at the club. Stock is just part of chicken soup.
They live in mobile homes, cheap duplexes or big empty new houses that they were conned into buying with fancy language and small print and are now on the verge of losing to foreclosure.
Their houses are empty because they have sold what furniture they had to try to make that mortgage payment, or they never had enough money left to buy any furniture after the closing on the house. They drive used cars, or buy a new one and have a monthly car payment that is as much as their rent.
When they get sick, they can’t get treatment because they don’t have money for it, and they suffer in silence.
When it gets cold, and the cost of heating their homes is so high that they can’t afford it, they suffer in cold silence.
They can’t take a vacation where it is warm because while oil and gas prices have risen to stupidly high levels, their paycheck has not increased at all. Instead, they stay home and read about how the other union spends their holidays in St. Barts and Aspen.
Even schoolteachers are being made to work several days a year for free. Can you imagine?
They elected a president who they thought was like them, from humble beginnings, who worked hard and made good, and who promised change. The only change thus far is what is in their pockets. And they suffer in silence, but not for long.
Dogs bite back when cornered. The majority of regular people in this country feel cornered. They will bite back, because they are not happy with the state of their union.
Good speech, Mr. President. As they say, though, actions speak louder than words. See you next year.
Graduation column
This column is for all of the fine young men and women who will be graduating this week. Congratulations on a job well done. In a world where there are so many distractions and speedbumps in your way, you have persevered.
Take a breath, and feel good about yourself. You've earned it. You are not, however, finished. You have a world to save.
The world you are heading into is just as full of obstacles, so you want to be as prepared as possible to take on all challenges. This means college, of course, and lots of it. Just a generation ago, there was still a chance to make a life without much education beyond high school, but the growing world and the fierce competition in it demand more and more. Now, even an associate degree isn't enough, and a bachelor's degree is essentially the bare minimum that is needed to get you in on the bottom rung of many companies.
This isn't your parents' world. This is your world, and if you don't like what you see, don't like what the future seems to be holding in store for you, then it is up to you to do something about it. Take charge of your destiny. One look at the current state of affairs in this world is enough to tell you that it's broken, and needs fixing. It's up to you, youngbloods, to get it straightened out.
This you will do, first by observing the world in a clearheaded manner, free from booze, drugs, and other pollutants that fog the mind and prevent wise decisions. You will then make your own informed opinions based on what you see and hear with your own eyes and ears, not what some talking head says on the television or radio or even in Internet blogs, which are the worst of all. Our precious freedom of speech has allowed way too much nonsense to be spewed by all sides, making your job even more difficult. But you will use the great minds that you have developed over the years to filter out all of the junk coming your way, and you will act on what you have determined are the problems and ailments of society.
To do this, you will be required to travel. I meet too many people every single day who have never been out of Georgia -- too many people who don't know how vast and varied this world is. I've been fortunate enough in my life to have visited many lands, including Africa, Europe, Canada, the West Indies and more. Don't just take it from me, see for yourself. It's a big world, and every place has its own characteristics that make it unique. Visit these places, and learn from what you see. You'll be all the better for it.
I don't want to put too much pressure on you, though. You know what you have to do. The other thing that is a must, though, is the most important: Live for yourself at the same time you are saving the world for everyone else. Whether you believe in God, or evolution, or the stork, you are lucky to be here for this shot at life. So make the most of it, and have fun, be careful and most importantly, have a great life!
Take a breath, and feel good about yourself. You've earned it. You are not, however, finished. You have a world to save.
The world you are heading into is just as full of obstacles, so you want to be as prepared as possible to take on all challenges. This means college, of course, and lots of it. Just a generation ago, there was still a chance to make a life without much education beyond high school, but the growing world and the fierce competition in it demand more and more. Now, even an associate degree isn't enough, and a bachelor's degree is essentially the bare minimum that is needed to get you in on the bottom rung of many companies.
This isn't your parents' world. This is your world, and if you don't like what you see, don't like what the future seems to be holding in store for you, then it is up to you to do something about it. Take charge of your destiny. One look at the current state of affairs in this world is enough to tell you that it's broken, and needs fixing. It's up to you, youngbloods, to get it straightened out.
This you will do, first by observing the world in a clearheaded manner, free from booze, drugs, and other pollutants that fog the mind and prevent wise decisions. You will then make your own informed opinions based on what you see and hear with your own eyes and ears, not what some talking head says on the television or radio or even in Internet blogs, which are the worst of all. Our precious freedom of speech has allowed way too much nonsense to be spewed by all sides, making your job even more difficult. But you will use the great minds that you have developed over the years to filter out all of the junk coming your way, and you will act on what you have determined are the problems and ailments of society.
To do this, you will be required to travel. I meet too many people every single day who have never been out of Georgia -- too many people who don't know how vast and varied this world is. I've been fortunate enough in my life to have visited many lands, including Africa, Europe, Canada, the West Indies and more. Don't just take it from me, see for yourself. It's a big world, and every place has its own characteristics that make it unique. Visit these places, and learn from what you see. You'll be all the better for it.
I don't want to put too much pressure on you, though. You know what you have to do. The other thing that is a must, though, is the most important: Live for yourself at the same time you are saving the world for everyone else. Whether you believe in God, or evolution, or the stork, you are lucky to be here for this shot at life. So make the most of it, and have fun, be careful and most importantly, have a great life!
Facebook column
It’s official: Facebook is scary good.
When I first heard about Facebook it was from a guy in England (kinda the way it should be) telling me I should set up a Facebook account because it was going to make the world a much smaller place, even better than MySpace was at the time.
So I dutifully set up my account, threw up an old handsome pic of myself and waited. And waited.
Impatient, I began searching for people from my past. At first, it was just old school classmates, since I still have my old yearbooks around and used them as reference material to figure out just who I might want to have be my friend (again).
A slight problem presented itself immediately: I had very few friends that I cared to find again, and the ones that I did had fairly common names.
One thing about Facebook now is that if you are looking for someone with a fairly common name, you might well end up having to search through several hundred accounts looking for just the right Robert Johnson.
Then there was another problem: Deciding just how much you want people to see. As someone who recently turned 50, and who has had a fairly adventurous life, I decided to undertake a huge project: Scanning every pre-digital photo I have and putting them, if not all, then most of them, on Facebook, along with at least some apt description so people will know what they are looking at. Once the pix (Facebook jargon) were up, all of a sudden people began wanting to be my friend. Old shots of an intact Main Street in Kerhonkson, NY, now almost completely torn down, have elicited the most response, as have a lot of old family pix of my dearly departed dad and sister, both gone too soon.
Another great (if you can call it that) result of this new toy is that I have, much to the chagrin of my wife, re-friended almost every girl and woman that I dated, back to when I was a 17-years-old, pimply high school kid. I must admit that this is the most enjoyable, if somewhat creepy, aspect of Facebook: “There she is, and there is the guy she ended up marrying and having kids with. Oh, those kids are homely. I wonder what our kids would have looked like…” and other, similarly immature thoughts run through the mind. ”Wow, did she pork up. Glad I got away from that when I still could!” You get the picture.
Seriously, though, Facebook is a blast. I have really enjoyed chatting with old friends and even some foes. I even was recently friended by someone I helped send to jail many years ago. They wrote to thank me for doing it, since it helped them get on the right path, a path they have not strayed from for 14 years. That alleviated some guilt I had been carrying around for a long time.
Mostly though, Facebook is just plain fun. I welcome any of my readers to track me down if they so desire.
Wanna be my friend?
When I first heard about Facebook it was from a guy in England (kinda the way it should be) telling me I should set up a Facebook account because it was going to make the world a much smaller place, even better than MySpace was at the time.
So I dutifully set up my account, threw up an old handsome pic of myself and waited. And waited.
Impatient, I began searching for people from my past. At first, it was just old school classmates, since I still have my old yearbooks around and used them as reference material to figure out just who I might want to have be my friend (again).
A slight problem presented itself immediately: I had very few friends that I cared to find again, and the ones that I did had fairly common names.
One thing about Facebook now is that if you are looking for someone with a fairly common name, you might well end up having to search through several hundred accounts looking for just the right Robert Johnson.
Then there was another problem: Deciding just how much you want people to see. As someone who recently turned 50, and who has had a fairly adventurous life, I decided to undertake a huge project: Scanning every pre-digital photo I have and putting them, if not all, then most of them, on Facebook, along with at least some apt description so people will know what they are looking at. Once the pix (Facebook jargon) were up, all of a sudden people began wanting to be my friend. Old shots of an intact Main Street in Kerhonkson, NY, now almost completely torn down, have elicited the most response, as have a lot of old family pix of my dearly departed dad and sister, both gone too soon.
Another great (if you can call it that) result of this new toy is that I have, much to the chagrin of my wife, re-friended almost every girl and woman that I dated, back to when I was a 17-years-old, pimply high school kid. I must admit that this is the most enjoyable, if somewhat creepy, aspect of Facebook: “There she is, and there is the guy she ended up marrying and having kids with. Oh, those kids are homely. I wonder what our kids would have looked like…” and other, similarly immature thoughts run through the mind. ”Wow, did she pork up. Glad I got away from that when I still could!” You get the picture.
Seriously, though, Facebook is a blast. I have really enjoyed chatting with old friends and even some foes. I even was recently friended by someone I helped send to jail many years ago. They wrote to thank me for doing it, since it helped them get on the right path, a path they have not strayed from for 14 years. That alleviated some guilt I had been carrying around for a long time.
Mostly though, Facebook is just plain fun. I welcome any of my readers to track me down if they so desire.
Wanna be my friend?
First column for the Jackson Progress argus
Allow me to formally introduce myself. I am, as you can see, Jim Abbott. What you can’t see is, as radio man Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. Although the wonderful Stewart Voegtlin had given me mention a couple weeks back, lauding me for having the “guts” to write a left leaning column in Butts County , I think I should tell you a little bit about myself since I will be coming into your homes on a more or less weekly basis.
I am not from Georgia . I was born in a small town in the Adirondack Mountains, in extreme upstate New York, four hundred miles north of New York City (I am surprised at how many Georgians don’t realize that New York is a very large state, comparable to Georgia, and like Georgia, is mostly all rural ) and lived most of my life in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, also upstate. Through a lousy set of circumstances, I was adopted, had a decent little kid life for a few years and when I was eleven my adopted family disintegrated in divorce and acrimony. For some reason I ended up with my father, who was gone most of the time, so I was pretty badly neglected, and basically had to raise myself from the age of twelve.
I did manage to get through high school, and later four years of college. In my 49 years I have been a dishwasher, a knife factory line worker, a rat breeder (!), machinist, postal clerk, deck hand on a tourist boat on the Hudson River, a UPS auditor, dog control officer, a schoolteacher, a newspaper reporter, (before that I had a 103 mile paper route for eight years, in the Catkills, where I hit an unbelievable twenty seven deer with my various cars over that time). I have also been an independent contractor/courier, taxi driver, music buyer for a book and music store, and now am a beauty supply store owner here in Jackson . I mention all this as a pre-emptive measure, so when one of y’all disagrees with me, as I am sure you will, you can call Hello Butts County and say, “Tell Jim Abbott to go back to breedin’rats!”, for example.
I grew up, as it were, in a Republican house, and when I registered to vote I did so as a Republican, often thinking that Democrats were just a bunch of tree-hugging do-gooders who were not realistic about the state of the country or the world. But then I noticed that Republicans, including those in my town’s Republican Club, of which I was a member, were by and large rather mean-spirited. Oh, they weren’t rude in public, but rather in the informal talk that went on at various functions that I attended, including some at a fairly high level, state-wise. I also noticed that there seemed to be an attitude of “haves” versus “have nots” and I watched and listened as they would make cruel comments about less fortunate people in our small town, a town roughly the size and makeup of Jackson, and I decided I had had enough.
That was 15 years ago. I still have not actually hugged a tree, but I do appreciate that they provide life supporting oxygen, are integral in maintaining the natural balance of the atmosphere and land, and sometimes are just nice to look at. Even right wingers will have to admit that beauty isn’t always reflected in a bank account, and that it shouldn’t take guts to speak out against things that are wrong..
I am not from Georgia . I was born in a small town in the Adirondack Mountains, in extreme upstate New York, four hundred miles north of New York City (I am surprised at how many Georgians don’t realize that New York is a very large state, comparable to Georgia, and like Georgia, is mostly all rural ) and lived most of my life in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, also upstate. Through a lousy set of circumstances, I was adopted, had a decent little kid life for a few years and when I was eleven my adopted family disintegrated in divorce and acrimony. For some reason I ended up with my father, who was gone most of the time, so I was pretty badly neglected, and basically had to raise myself from the age of twelve.
I did manage to get through high school, and later four years of college. In my 49 years I have been a dishwasher, a knife factory line worker, a rat breeder (!), machinist, postal clerk, deck hand on a tourist boat on the Hudson River, a UPS auditor, dog control officer, a schoolteacher, a newspaper reporter, (before that I had a 103 mile paper route for eight years, in the Catkills, where I hit an unbelievable twenty seven deer with my various cars over that time). I have also been an independent contractor/courier, taxi driver, music buyer for a book and music store, and now am a beauty supply store owner here in Jackson . I mention all this as a pre-emptive measure, so when one of y’all disagrees with me, as I am sure you will, you can call Hello Butts County and say, “Tell Jim Abbott to go back to breedin’rats!”, for example.
I grew up, as it were, in a Republican house, and when I registered to vote I did so as a Republican, often thinking that Democrats were just a bunch of tree-hugging do-gooders who were not realistic about the state of the country or the world. But then I noticed that Republicans, including those in my town’s Republican Club, of which I was a member, were by and large rather mean-spirited. Oh, they weren’t rude in public, but rather in the informal talk that went on at various functions that I attended, including some at a fairly high level, state-wise. I also noticed that there seemed to be an attitude of “haves” versus “have nots” and I watched and listened as they would make cruel comments about less fortunate people in our small town, a town roughly the size and makeup of Jackson, and I decided I had had enough.
That was 15 years ago. I still have not actually hugged a tree, but I do appreciate that they provide life supporting oxygen, are integral in maintaining the natural balance of the atmosphere and land, and sometimes are just nice to look at. Even right wingers will have to admit that beauty isn’t always reflected in a bank account, and that it shouldn’t take guts to speak out against things that are wrong..
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
