Ignore Danger, Sleep Well

How do we, in today’s dangerous world, decide which perils to prepare defenses against and which ones to tolerate or even ignore?

Although I’ve never been a worry-wart, that kind of question has nagged at me on occasion. Every fall I have wondered what I should do if another big hurricane, like Isabel in 2003, were to again swipe at us here. I have looked many times at the displays in stores hawking those emergency engines a homeowner can crank up if we have another “outtage” –the electric company’s euphemism for power failure

Yes, but there’s a good chance we here in good old Stafford VA won’t get another bad hurricane in my lifetime. After all, Isabel was the only one of consequence I can recall in my past 30 years here. Further, those power generators cost money. Given my luck with complicated machinery, I probably couldn’t get one to work anyhow.

So here’s my plan: Power fails and we jump into the car, cradling Lollipop (the aging Yorkie member of our family), and drive to a motel outside the power blackout area. We could have done that when Isabel hit, but didn’t think of it.

I know. You’re thinking I’m being pretty cavalier. For there are a lot of what-ifs. Trees fall on our car, across our escape routes, or debility makes any travel impossible. Yes, but any power failure in my residence has been minor in the past, so why prepare for something unlikely to endanger us?

Another example of whistling past the graveyard: Several years ago during a drought similar to what we’ve had this fall, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to dig myself a water well to protect my home-grown azalea business from wilting. Then, when I learned doing that would be illegal in my neighborhood, I decided to wait out the drought and hope for the best, which arrived soon enough anyway.

So when faced with a problem, my gut reaction is that ignorance is bliss; ignore it and it will go away. Blessed Assurance!

Just like global warming. Seriously. To think that mankind can stop it, despite the overwhelming effect of the sun, is arrogance of the first order. Yet, I probably won’t be permitted to decide for myself whether to go along with the proposed remedies. Rather, some government will tax my tail off. (One doesn’t hear that old saying, “It’s a free country” much anymore.)

Unlike global warming, there are lots of things more likely to hurt us, and be defensible, given the kind of “contributions” politicians have in mind regarding climate change.

Take terrorism, for instance. Here’s columnist Michael Barone: “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."
We are learning that the Islamist danger isn’t exactly new. Try this from Winston Churchill (in 1918): "No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith…Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science…the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."
And, as President Bush has warned about radical Islam, combating it is “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”

Consider: According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, “[T]he number of mosques in America grew 60 percent between 1995 and 2000…One finds no reciprocity in Muslim countries, where churches, and especially synagogues, are either tightly controlled or banned outright.”

Something else, more novel but also likely to be more defensible than global warming, is heaven-sent so to speak. An ancient collision between two mega-asteroids spawned the killer space rock that slammed into earth and marked the beginning of the end for the dinosaurs, a new study claims. Scientists think one of the fragments crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago to form the Chicxulub crater

So it would be hard to rule out the possibility of another meteor hitting us. “But we are not enacting expensive legislation to erect retractable meteorite shields…No one is pressuring poor nations to sign treaties swearing they will dedicate a portion of their meager GDP to combat this potential threat. It would be absurd.” –analyst Mary Ellen Gilder.

Just so. Meteors have hit our globe. So has weather both as warm and much colder than we’ve ever known.

Here at home we adapt to drought by rationing water and building another reservoir, knowing the rains will come.(Update: 4 inches as of Oct. 25). So things change, as will the global climate regardless of the worry-warts. So sit back and enjoy the weather—with no hurricanes of course--or wildfires.

(Another update: A former Stafford resident and family friend, Greg Harmon, has long been a career FBI agent, most recently assigned to San Diego. Nice home, burned to the ground. Everything gone, but nobody in family hurt. If he had an evacuation plan, nothing would have changed, since everyone was away at the time of the fire. That's life.)

Those rotten Democrats

"The man who knows the truth and has the opportunity to tell it, but whononetheless refuses to, is among the most shameful of all creatures. Godforbid that we should ever become so lax as that." ---Theodore Roosevelt

Well, up to now in this political year, it seems I have been overly soft in referring to our fine Democratic colleagues and candidates. Sorry for the oversight. So, as a registered Stafford Republican, let me unequivocally blurt out the truth: Dems are all a bunch of dweebs.

The only problem you loyal readers of my columns may have with that observation is that I feel the same way about much of the GOP.

There, that should cool the fevered brows of some recent critics of this paper who have claimed that only one-sided commentaries supporting Democrats have appeared on this page. So? Opinions are what this page is for. Does it lean too far towards the left?

Hardly. Just check out our "Good, Bad and Wacky" whizbangers on this page beneath the editorial each week. They have featured many horselaughs at Democrats.

For example:

--Some of the Democratic presidential contenders at the recent Dartmouth debate voiced support for outright smoking bans by states and then argued whether it would be good to reduce the legal drinking age to 18. ( Oct. 12.)

--The U.S. Senate holds crucial all-night sessions on immediately ending the war in Iraq, then adjourns for an August vacation. ( July 27.)

--“This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.1 to 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forward another amnesty bill like this.”—Sen. Teddy Kennedy in 1986 (June 1.)

True, the paper has also covered the stumbling, GOP-led efforts locally to get a better intersection at Falmouth (right soon, but don’t hold your breath), the commonwealth’s silly new traffic law that shoves it to Virginia drivers but exempts visitors, and Stafford’s politically correct, everyone-in-the-pool exercise to update our comprehensive plan, a document so long in draft that it probably now needs revision (think Traditional Neighborhood Development). Oh yes, and our supervisors are fighting the surge in illegal immigration by forming a task force to study the matter. Kicking the can down the road in this case, though, may be prudent.

So we’ve got balance, folks.

But personally, I could care less. Maybe it’s age, boredom, or all three. Whatever, today’s political wars are so juvenile that we voters may as well stay home. What difference will it make? All politicians are much the same.

Granted, once elected, they work hard to legislate and govern and win again. But what they produce seems so seldom to make any difference. Maybe it’s because of the huge, costly labyrinth that perpetual bureaucracies at all levels have become.

For example, tune in on TV to the Stafford planning commission’s drawn-out meetings. You couldn’t pay me to be a member. I don’t know how much they get, but their meetings last so long that I’m sure it equates to slave wages. I suspect the school board regularly gets bogged down similarly, for similar chump change.

I admire those citizen members who have given so much of their time to accomplish so little. They undoubtedly would do more, except for the bulging bundle of bureaucratic rules and laws they must abide by.

It all starts with the legislators. The elected people in Richmond and Washington seem to labor mightily, but they’re up against the lawyers and the special interests, and they are losing. So are we. Apparently Sen. John McCain agrees, recently saying, “The American people no longer have trust or confidence in our government…”

Governing is futile, often wacky. Va. Gov. Kaine courts the teachers lobby by proposing state spending to provide pre-kindergarten education. How dumb: Raise taxes to give parents paid daycare. Have you seen a child that young lately? Putting them in a class must be like trying to herd cats. They’ll grow old enough to be teachable by nonparents soon enough. We pay so much for so little. Two stupid examples: USDA is passing out $20 million in grants to study gas emissions from dairy cows to determine their contributions to “global warming.” Worse, bureaucrats are spending $27 million to see if there really is a single ivory billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct, but perhaps still extant somewhere in Arkansas.

Of course, today’s candidates will straighten such things out once they get in office. If you believe that, then vote for the one you hate the least.

As for me, wake me when it’s over.

Growing up during "The War"

“The War,” that impressive new historical series by Ken Burns on PBS TV, stirs vivid memories of growing up in small-town America during World War II.

Fortunately I was much too young to be drafted but old enough to be awfully excited by it all. Several factors made things particularly relevant in my town of Abilene, Texas.

Even before our nation’s “date that will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt put it the following day on Dec. 8, 1941, in asking Congress to declare war on Japan for having bombed Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack, my parents’ generation in Abilene was already feeling the effects of America’s war preparations in reaction to Germany’s European conquests and Japan’s battles in Indochina.

Our little town was doubly impacted directly. For one thing, the Texas National Guard had already mobilized in preparation for war. The unit from Abilene ( Battery E of the 131st Field Artillery, 36th Infantry Div.) got sent to far-off Java. Shortly after Pearl Harbor our local troops were captured by the Japanese and became the “Lost Battalion.” Part of the infamous Pacific island death marches, they also helped construct the Bridge on the River Kwai, of movie fame. (For more details, you can Google "Texas Lost Battalion.")

Also, a few miles outside our town a new army base, Camp Barkeley, had been established several months before Pearl Harbor. It trained soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division (a National Guard division mobilized from Oklahoma units). Before the war was over, the base housed as many as 60,000 troops.

That is significant, for when the war began, the town’s population was only about 25,000. Oh yes, and it was legally “dry,” banning beer and liquor sales, which benefited a very large cadre of citizen bootleggers.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the 45th Division left to fight the Nazis in north Africa. Then the 90th Division came to train at Barkeley, which also would house a prisoner of war camp in the latter stages of the war.

My family directly felt the effects. My dad had been exec officer of that ill-fated National Guard unit. He waived the age maximum and tried to go with his unit, but a health exam prevented it. Then he commanded the area’s home defense guard. More significantly, he also headed the local draft board.

That volunteer task brought great grief, since his draft board had to decide on appropriate classifications of all the county’s age-eligible males. 1-A meant almost certainly an assignment to combat in some form or other. Deferments were sought on health, sole-son, religious and other grounds. The hearings were understandably contentious.

As a pre-teener I could care less. I was too busy ogling the huge trucks and tanks that regularly rumbled past on a nearby street, building airplane models and helping with our town’s frequent scrap metal drives.

My closest brush with wartime danger came one afternoon in our neighborhood school. In class, just as we were about to be let out, we heard this awful crashing sound. I ran outside to the only vacant lot nearby where a crowd had already gathered. A military training plane had crashed head-first right into the heart of the lot.

Once, while strolling home from somewhere, I saw this young private gazing intently at the ground beside the sidewalk. His question, in Yankee dialect, was whether the ugly lizard on the ground might bite us. I laughed and picked up the harmless little horned toad and offered it to him. He shied away, still awed over our strange wildlife in the sticks.

In the sixth grade late in the war, we students bought war bonds and sang “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Every afternoon after school I delivered newspapers on my bike. After finishing one evening I got an urgent call from my route manager. I had to come back downtown and distribute an “extra.” Why? The Japs had surrendered!

I picked up my stack of 50 papers but didn’t try to deliver them. Traffic was way too heavy by then. So I merely strode over to the town’s main intersection, where cars were inching along, celebrants blowing their horns and hanging out of windows, waving flags and bottles. And the tips!

It was the biggest payday of my budding career. I counted out the change after biking back home that evening, and bragged to my dad: $37. So to me, that made the whole war a blast.

Such quaint recollections are as nothing compared to the war’s real woes, as endured by our Sun cartoonist Frank Lewis, who fought in hand-to-hand combat to help free Manila in the Philippines, or my brother-in-law Rufus Grisham, who piloted B-17 missions over Germany and later was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Still, thanks to relative youth plus the kind of luck I’ve been blessed with, I’ll probably outlive ‘em both, God bless ‘em.