Here's how to end a drought

(Friends in Texas, please don't laugh at that title, cause it's been right dry here)

No wonder they’ve cashiered poor Bill Proenza, the National Hurricane Center’s assertedly incompetent boss after only six months: No hurricanes where it counts, on the Atlantic Coast.

Maybe that’s why Stafford has been so thirsty this summer. After all, Virginia often benefits from the heavy rains spun off from hurricanes coming up the coast and losing their ferocity but not their moisture before getting here.

Or perhaps it’s global “warming.” That was blamed for the spate of big hurricanes in 2005 by many alarmists, who subsequently looked dumb when Katrina spawned no offspring the following year. In an earlier era, they would have blamed our drought and record-high summer temps on “Atom Bomb Testing.” If you’re too young to recall those irrational fears, look it up. Speaking of irrational, we’re now being urged to sacrifice—even our plastic grocery bags--to the Sun God to make him back off and instead freeze us.

Regardless of the imagined culprit, we swear our drought this summer was really, really bad. Maybe for here, but elsewhere it wouldn’t even get a footnote mention. (Brace yourself for the obligatory “when I was growing up” tale. To wit:)

In west Texas a drought lasted over three years in the 1950s, with one stretch of over 30 straight days of 100 degrees or worse. I had to haul city water to my dad’s cattle, which finally resorted to eating scrawny mesquite tree foliage above their heads. He soon sold them all to a farmer in Tennessee.

Here in Stafford, besides often getting relief from a dying hurricane, things usually start improving anyhow once our water department issues mandates. One surefire edict that worked some years ago: No serving of water in restaurants. Come to think of it, most still don’t.
My solution this summer was to buy a rain gauge, only one hour before it rained an inch and a half , on Aug. 20. Soon another couple of good showers came, ending the "emergency."

So, goodbye to dry lawns and shriveled azaleas; the changing seasons are nigh, heralding another of our fine autumns and falling leaves. Otherwise, nothing much is new around here.

* Oh, yeah? Think again. Just look around. Stafford County keeps attracting more residents. For my money, that’s no blessing for two reasons.

One is that our real estate taxes next year will surely leap again regardless of the influx of home owners. Perhaps you’ve hoped, because of the sharp declines in home values recently, that the reassessments next spring should result in your owing less. Dream on. Here’s a 2008 headline: Tax rate hiked again, sharply.

The other negative for our growing population is one I hadn’t thought of before. New reports say Stafford’s minority population has increased from 20 to 30 percent of our total in just the past half-dozen years. I haven’t grumbled about this trend before, for we’re still more ethnically lily-white than many other places nearby. Further, I claim much of our increase is surely due to the huge recent influx of oriental nail shops, undoubtedly a cartel run by some Saigon syndicate.

In any event, America’s increasing diversity—a trend hailed happily in every college classroom, it seems—may be bad news for another reason. Listen to Robert Putnam, a distinguished Harvard political scientist.

* Novel analysis: Putnam claims that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, he’s found, neighbors trust one another only half as much as they do in the most homogenous places. And virtually all measures of civic health are lower.

Well. For years we’ve been encouraged to welcome new neighbors for the good of everyone. Now this. But look at it another way. In Stafford, the trend might just help politically by letting conservatives retain control despite population trends to the contrary.

Now you must think I’m truly a heat stroke victim, grasping at the straws of a coming broom that will sweep out all our current conservative office holders. But consider a recent piece by Bruce Bartlett, columnist and former Treasury official:

* Wishful thinking? “…[T]he immigration issue opens some door for Republicans in the black community. Polls show that blacks largely share Republicans' concerns about Hispanic immigration…It stands to reason that they will increasingly become political rivals as well... the [Democratic] party will tend to side with the Hispanics down the road because they are a larger and faster growing population group. As blacks begin to perceive this, they could become receptive to Republican outreach, if the party is smart”

Alas, with that final caveat, he blew his whole idea apart. But we can’t deny those recent gripes from American blacks (potential GOP allies?) about their declining share of major league baseball players, due to the rising tide of superior Latino players.

Maybe it’s just the heat, the dog days of August, and the dread of having to watch sainted Joe Gibbs’ Redskins again come up short.

*****

Revisiting "that old gang of mine"

Remember those school days way back when? When graduation drew nigh, we vowed to keep our group of close friends together, despite all. Well, despite all, it didn’t happen.
But in rare instances, it did. Not, I would venture, for any guys I’ve known. For girls, though, their bonding might even outlast new jobs, marriages and transfers--even those beyond the old neighborhood.

For how long, you might wonder. Try half a century. And counting. That’s the story for a hardy group of charming young ladies who bonded early and then lived to celebrate a joyful reunion this summer in Stafford.
I know, for I was their de facto tour guide. A burden? No, in this case I must admit it was a distinct if not macho pleasure, made easier since I belong to the hostess of their “Big Seven-Oh” event—three days of chatter plus sight-seeing, but more chatter than anything else.

Their early bonding had happened in 1950-ish Chicago. These six girls shared an upbringing closely monitored through grammar school by nuns in a little Catholic Church building in that poor South Deering neighborhood. It sat right next to a huge, soot-belching steel mill that’s now history, but back then was going full blast (along with two or three others) on the far south side of Chicago.

It was as if the pupils had never left, at least for those three days they spent here. When they first arrived at our home in Aquia Harbour, my wife was concerned they couldn’t all sit comfortably in our den. No problem. Four sat in an uncrowded row on the couch, like proper children in a church pew, happily reciting nonstop, and sometimes in unison.

“We girls were so naïve back then,” one recalled. It made me think back to my own public school experiences in west Texas, not quite so strait-laced, although a few of our teachers must have learned their craft from nuns.One of my female classmates from that era at a recent reunion marveled similarly over how innocent and naïve her own circle of schoolgirl-friends had been.

Were we boys like that also? I couldn’t vouch for young Chicago males at the time. As for my own buddies, we weren’t exactly naïve but not very adventurous either.In those days, one-piece bathing suits on babes were excitement enough. But enough about guys. This is about our lovely visitors.

Growing up had been no bed of roses, they all recalled. Following childhood’s trying times in modest households, one had become a nun for a while, and another had taken the first step towards being one. Both subsequently married and raised sizable families. Others had withstood early on the pains of childhood abuse, family split-ups, depression, alcoholism, the death of a child and, for two the challenges of becoming widowed.

But to hear them tell it now, they had hugely joyous times growing up together. Of their many recollections, one became surprisingly personal for me, for I had met them all before marrying Carole Lee, in the church they all attended in Chicago.

One guest (Doe Devitt) disclosed that she had espied me approaching Carole Lee on first sight as I made an effort to strike up a conversation—and possibly more--on a nearby Lake Michigan beach in the summer of 1955.

“When I saw him zeroing in on Carole Lee, I thought right then, ‘There goes Cupid’s Arrow.’” Right on. Sure enough, we got married six months later.

Between gossip sessions, the six former classmates saw the sights in the area during their stay. But guess where they enjoyed the most. Historic Aquia Church won hands down, for being so wonderfully well-preserved, so convenient, and so devoid of tourists.Stafford tourism promoters, take note.

And a final note: This wasn’t a unique celebration for the ladies. Their first, a Big Five-Oh, was in New York City. Their second, the Big Six-Oh, was in Cleveland. Considering a few recent infirmities that have arisen, they’ve decided they should celebrate the next one only a couple of years from now.

I must say, they have managed to get around quite a lot. Back in their youth, it was considered unseemly by their families for anyone to move out of the neighborhood, and surely nowhere beyond the Chicago area. Only two stayed.
Regardless, all have done very well from the look of things, and have much, including their close school friends (if only on occasion geographically) to be thankful for. We should all be so lucky.

*****

Like sheep, we only bleat

So a truck on Interstate 95 is sighted carrying a leaky 55-gal barrel. Maybe it’s leaking an acid. STOP THE PRESSES—and all the southbound traffic for over three hours the other day at mile 140.
Blame the lawyers. Otherwise the intelligent thing to have done was to disperse the liquid with a blast of tap water, just like when you wash the family car. If that had actually been done, drivers would have gone merrily on their momentarily disrupted way.

In your dreams. In no time flat, greedy lawyers would have rounded up “injured” citizens nearby to sue the pants off Stafford’s fire and rescue folks who responded. They had to perform the prescribed and oh-so-delicate “Hazmat” measures on the spilled puddles by the book, or else. For over three hours.

Then too, tub thumpers for Save Chesapeake Bay would have been right behind the lawyers, hollering for penalties against the state for allowing pollution near a precious watershed, or somesuch.

Perhaps I exaggerate? You judge. To me, it’s just one more example of how soft and impractical a society we have become.

And illogical. We pay exhorbitant prices for bottled water while complaining about the high price of gasoline, which is way cheaper. We blame oil companies while preventing them from exploring for oil or building more refineries. Our energy prices rise while we eschew cheap coal and prevent more nuclear power plants. We complain about illegal immigrants but spend more to fight global “warming” than to control our borders.

"Listening to the recent debates among the candidates.. one gets the impression that the Republican and Democratic primary electorates are living in two different nations…The Republicans want to protect us against Islamist terrorists. The Democrats want to protect us against climate change." --pundit Michael Barone

Back to our borders for a moment, please: I laud the efforts to make us secure, but I must admit I don’t know why we’re so vehement about fencing off Mexicans and at the same time sympathetic over Cubans trying to land in Florida. Aren’t they every bit as illegal?

Still on the subject of illogical stuff making softies of us all, what can be crazier than class-action lawsuits? They hike our medical bills, but mostly enrich lawyers. Here I must confess to having benefited (by $400) from a class-action settlement of a suit against Dominion Power a few years ago. My backyard has an easement allowing the electric company to string power lines overhead, which it did long before I moved here. Later it also strung some fiber optic cables. So, for its neglect in getting my permission to do so, I suffered greatly. Baloney. I did cash the check, though. Soft? You said it.

We see someone smoking and have a fit. But actually there are many more smokers among us than there are any ethnic groups. You know, the ones we bend over backwards not to offend? In doing so, let’s at least acknowledge that smoking isn’t—yet—against the law. But just wait.

As iconoclast John Stossel quips, “In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.”

By the way, no sooner had I heard the news of our I-95 traffic fiasco than here came a new announcement from the White House: We must not mistreat war prisoners so beastly. That includes deriding their religion, which apparently okays suicide bombing and chopping off opponents’ heads. Never mind that they also regularly preach that Jews are monkeys and so forth. We’re ever so much more delicate nowadays. To what purpose? Beats me.

Then there’s General Peter Pace. He’s history. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was interviewed a few months ago by the Chicago Tribune: “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” he said. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”

That did it.

How sensitive we’ve become. Or just scared? Here’s Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: “[W]hy is it that so many of us who know better about so much that we see around us cower and speak in hushed, mousy voices?"

Columnist Thomas Sowell, in a similar vein: “Whenever I hear terrorists referred to in the media as ‘militants,’ it is a painful reminder that we have degenerated to the point where we no longer even have the courage to talk straight.”

Well, those are my two cents for this week. If I offended anyone, tough toenails.