A Bad Case of the Too Much Caffeine Not Enough Snoozin' Blues

I have slept through one night – last night – since, I think, Thursday. I’m too old for this. Really it didn’t used to bother me but does it ever now. I recall my father once saying, “I really noticed myself going downhill after sixty.” We are not better than our fathers – I noticed it after fifty. I am too worn out and short on time to finish the third part of my myth series right now, so I think I’ll post something that doesn’t require much thought, i.e., politics.

If my one-time guest blogger, Joe, were available, I’d let him share his thoughts. He has some wisdom to impart with regard to parlor-ticks, but, alas, he is busy getting in his winter wood, between shooting – I mean, scouting for deer. Since construction is down, the logging business is not doing that well, and Joe has a lot of mouths to feed – mostly hounds. The kids can always be put to work and boarded out to the neighbors and kinfolk.

As I was working last night, I kept checking the election news. I would say that the only race the people lost last night was in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. The loss would have been as bad, if not worse, had the establishment Republican candidate won. The contest was really been the establishment and the people.

For my part, I am getting a little jaded when it comes to someone like Newt Gingrich – whom I have always respected for his intellect – his character, not so much. I’m also a little weary of Mr. Steele and the rest of the beltway Republican crowd. They have misunderstood what we mean by conservative. It does not mean getting Republicans elected, and it does not mean a defense of the status quo.

The reason people like me adopted the conservative label was as a reaction to the socialists’ adoption and subsequent tainting of the word “liberal”. I don’t want things to stay the way they are. I want freedom. I want the statists to go back in the closet. I want the government to SHRINK. If I succeed or if I fail, I want it to be in a clean game. I don’t want life to be a variation of professional wrestling. I don’t want to be protected from myself. I don’t want to have to hire a damn lawyer every time somebody is in need of an ass-whoppin’. And if I’m the one who gets my ass kicked, then I want to be able to be man enough to get up, shake the better man’s hand, and buy him the beverage of his choice.

I don’t want to have to worry about being arrested for a hate crime or sexual harassment for opening a door for a female, calling her a girl, or telling her she looks good. I want to be able to get on an airplane with my Swiss Army Knife again and not be stripped searched so nobody will think the government is profiling. We all know how many planes have been hijacked, flown into buildings, or blown up by old, blue-eyed hillbillies – especially as a percentage of the population.

I want the border closed. How hard is that? I can’t get a job without giving my resume, college transcripts, and SSN, having a criminal background check, getting fingerprinted and giving a stool sample. Don’t tell me employers can’t figure out that a guy who understands no English word except “Cheby” but somehow has Ralph Kramden’s Social Security card might just be here illegally. The government can’t find and deport them? Really? The government wants to register all the cows in the country for fear some farmer will make a buck they don’t get fifty cents of. How about they register all the illegals who are in this country stealing, murdering, and raping before they worry about Bessie the Heifer?

You want to know what really pisses me off? I’m going to tell you anyway: government schools. I am sick of being economically raped every year to support the schools then having them send the urchins out like a chorus of “Oliver” to sell me Christmas wrapping paper as a fund-raiser. What the hell do I need with wrapping paper? The only Christmas present I’m buying is the local high school’s giant new gee-whiz electronic billboard. Maybe if the high school drama class used the gym instead of having a dedicated “performing arts” building, they could afford to buy their crepe-paper decorations and inkjet cartridges without sticking me up again.

When I went to school, we had around thirty kids in each classroom for eight years. That was all the kids there were in the district. If we had had more kids, we’d have had more in class. My parents and older siblings attended one-room schools. Amazingly we can all read, write, balance a checkbook, make change without a calculator, and manage our finances. I know it wasn’t the Germans who bombed Pearl Harbor. How in the world did we manage to make it without two teachers for every ten students, a building full of administrators drawing six-figure salaries, tennis courts, a pool, counselors, and sensitivity training?

I know I’m an old fogey now, because I officially long for the days when there weren’t too many problems that couldn’t be fixed with seven hundred dollars and a thirty-ought-six.