Not long ago, myself, my wife and 3-1/2-year-old son ventured out for a morning of collecting aluminum cans, plastic bottles and glass for recycling. Being out of work at the moment, I use this “canning” money to fuel our car and assist my wife with the common necessities of life.
On this particular day, we headed towards the W.I.C. and sheriff’s office. We approached a dumpster in front of the county fire department, and I proceeded to retrieve the recyclables out of it when I noticed a firefighter walking towards me. I assumed he was going to tell me to leave, don’t make a mess, or get out of the trash.
Not at all. The firefighter, who was later identified as “Cameron,” brought me a bag of recyclables he had saved. Furthermore, he gave my son a toy fire helmet, stickers, and turned the sirens on for him. I was deeply touched and grateful for the professionalism of the Station No. 1 staff.
You don’t read too many appraisals of thanks to the firefighters who risk their lives in order to save ours. “Cameron,” I just want to say thank you for putting a smile on my son’s face and being a hero to him and my family.
Victor Williams,
Madera
The big shots at the big banks are being told they can’t pay themselves more than $500,000 per year in cash, and no doubt that is causing quite a lot of heartbreak among those execs.
I must say, I am happy I do not share their problem. As it happens, I am free to make more than $500,000 a year anytime I want. However, I have decided that this year I I don’t want to be bothered making that much.
There are two reasons for that decision. The first is that I don’t want to work that hard. The second is that if I started bringing home paychecks like that, Mrs. Doud would start wondering what was going on.
She and I have never starved, thank the good Lord, but we have always had to watch our nickels. Actually, she is the one who watches the nickels. She picks up each one and turns it over in her fingers, polishes it and locks it in a little box on her desk. That way, we can pay the bills every month.
I, on the other hand (in her opinion), drive down the street throwing dimes out the car window, like John D. Rockefeller used to do, the big show-off. If I feel like having a cup of coffee, I’ll stop and buy one — and pay cash. If I feel like going to Walmart and getting a pair of socks, I might come out with three or four pair — if they are on sale. A spendthrift.
But if I started bringing home $9,615.38 paychecks every week, it wouldn’t be long before Mrs. Doud would wonder what I had done to extort that money from the company that employs me — a company that thinks $1 an hour is still the minimum wage. Had I taken up immoral activity? Had I turned to vice? Was I selling drugs?
It would never occur to her that I deserved that much money. She knows me too well.
“Who super-glued my eyes shut this morning? Did someone reset my alarm?” I yawn; then open one eye against the early-morning sunlight. At exactly the same instant, I read the alarm clock and sit erect in bed.
It is 7:20, and I should have left for work 10 minutes ago.
Now, I must make a critical decision. Do I rush like a madwoman around the house and try to make it to work on time anyway? There’s always the “train tracks” consideration with the potential to make me even later, or to take all the blame.
No, I haven’t made this kind of slip-up since I was in high school. I’ll be honest, call the boss and tell her I overslept. I’ll be in just as soon as I can get cleaned up and coffee, with of course, my apologies.
I hang up the telephone stunned. She offered to let me make up my time at the end of my shift. Wow. I didn’t expect that! Now, I won’t be docked pay either.
I believe I hear a songbird telling me there’s hope yet for this day.
In the kitchen, the coffee brews. I grab my favorite mug from the cupboard and reach in the fridge for the … I’m out of creamer.
I heave a sigh, turn off the coffee pot and rush through a shower. With a light glaze of make-up and my “old faithful,” least favorite work clothes outfit, I start for the car.
I must have coffee this morning.
As I drive past the mom and pop coffee shop, I think: really should help out the little guy, but you never know what you’ll get. At least at the corporate coffee shop, I know exactly what I’ll get for my money, and I’ll like it. Anyway, they give their employees health insurance. I can feel good about supporting a company like that.
With the economic crisis, I’ve found myself rationalizing an awful lot of the most simple decisions.
And, with every single one of those decisions, especially those which must be justified in my own mind, I build the stone walls of my glittering, gilded cage a bit taller. Like when the feeder lays down the food in the aviary at the zoo, the birds’ immediate desire is satiated. The birds are free to roam and continue uninhibited within the well-defined borders determined by outside forces. The birds enjoy sunlight and blue sky filtered through a net. They know what to expect. Risk eliminated. The net which barricades their experience of freedom becomes the warm blanket of protection from outside forces.
Outside forces, corporations, are dictating borders and safety nets within which we the people will continue, and we love to have it so. We know exactly what to expect, and when the roaming area is reduced by budgetary constraints, we grumble, gripe and complain. Nevertheless, we conform, for we know what is safe.
As we have been “saved” from the “prattling” of “old soldiers” in the “great war,” we have lost any glimpse into a time when our present was rehearsed in just two generations past.
I made it to work that day just 35 minutes late with my corporate coffee in my right hand, but a heavy heart was left.
As I sit in this solitude and dwell upon my life and the few moments of joy that I have experienced, I realized that the yesteryears of my childhood constitute the only true joy and happiness that there ever was for me, and every other point and time truly lacks. I must ask myself, is it me, or is it just life?
It seems that there has always been a void in my life, a loneliness that I can never fill, a peace of mind I could never obtain. Always thinking that the drugs would fix the problem and not wanting to accept the fact that they were the problem. It’s a manipulation that is so overwhelming it’s mind boggling. Drugs tell you everything is perfect, when the truth is you’re on a path of destruction. I truly believe that addiction is a disease of the mind that, when active, denies a person of any true sanity.
I believe an addict can’t suffer any greater pain of loss than what he deals to himself, although the courts and the lawmakers sure do try. I truly feel that having a disease should never be a crime.
I can write a long list of things that society can take away from me, but the one thing they can’t take away from me is hope, a hope that one day I will recover and that addiction will truly be treated as a curable disease and not a crime.
Prop. 36 was a great idea but a failure. There should have never have been a limit on how many chances you have to recover before society considers you hopeless and doomed to a life of insanity. Ask yourself this, what if Jesus said you had three chances to be a Christian or you’re going to hell?
Raymond Clinghan,
Madera County Department of Corrections
The fuss being made over the Colorado man who apparently made up the story about his 6-year-old son floating away in a balloon shows how easily gulled a lot of us can be by an “Oh! Wow!” happening, especially when that happening seems credible.
It also helps when something like that actually has occurred. In the case of the “balloon boy,” in 1964, 11-year-old Dan Nowell had volunteered to help launch a hot-air balloon in Mill Valley. As the San Francisco Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius tells it in the Oct. 20 issue of that paper, the balloon abruptly lifted off at the same time Dan’s fingers became entangled in the tether rope, and before long he was dangling and drifting 3,000 feet in the air over Marin County. He eventually came down safely, but not before a lot of people had experienced a lot of panic.
Nobody was arrested in his case, but in the case of the Colorado Balloon Boy, the father and mother may face charges of lying to the police, filing false reports, etc. They’re even being investigated by the FBI.
But more than anything else the parents have shown us the underbelly of these so-called reality shows that pass for entertainment these days. Apparently the parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, wanted to sell their own reality show based on whacky experiments.
But the reality show they got is not the one they wanted. Instead of being shown as curious and resourceful experimenters, they are coming off as barely functional parents and disgusting egotists.
We all know — I hope — that reality shows aren’t reality at all. They are scripted first as story lines, and if necessary scenes are shot over and over again to make sure the story line is kept going.
Some of them are slick, but most are pathetic. Maybe with the Colorado Balloon Boy, they have hit bottom.
An odd recent news story was the one about astronomers in Europe finding 32 new planets … or perhaps we should say claiming they found 32 new planets. What they actually observed were barely detectable wobbles of stars that they say indicate the presence of planets. The bigger the wobble, the bigger the planet.
One of those astronomers said, “I’m pretty confident that there are earth-like planets everywhere.” Another said planets the size of earth are “extraordinarily commonplace.”
The European South Observatory, where the discoveries were made, even distributed a drawing of how some of the 32 planets might look. The drawing looked a little like a cantaloupe that had gone bad.
In spite of the declarations of joy from the astronomers, two things seem fairly certain: They didn’t see any actual planets, and if they had, the planets would be too far away to tell what they looked like.
Astronomers being astronomers, and also very smart, want nothing more than to discover another earth, one populated by people who build cities, fly airplanes, send up satellites, sail boats and argue over politics. That is why they are astronomers.
But we have to remember that astronomy grew out of astrology, which assigns powers to the stars that can be seen with the naked eye. If you were born under a certain astrological sign, it would mean that your fate could be read in a certain way, or that you could be destined for a particular thing.
People like Gallileo and Copernicus, among the first to use telescopes, expanded the knowledge of the heavens a hundredfold from astrology. And ever since, astronomers have puzzled over what they see in the heavens.
But many folks still read horoscopes, believing that the positions and movements of the stars have at least something to do with their fates. My question: which are doing the most dreaming?
President Obama has helped to create more confusion in the country’s marijuana culture with his new “don’t bother” policy — especially in California, where so-called medical marijuana has been legal since before the turn of the new century. Most of us could go to Oakland today or tomorrow with a prescription and a card, visit a dispensary, buy as much as we could with maybe a little extra to sell on the side and come home and use it legally.
Until the Board of Supervisors put the kibosh on it, you could have bought your marijuana in Madera County.
Meanwhile, back on the streets, the illegal marijuana trade continues to flourish. Deputies are always busting growing operations in houses, in cornfields, in forests and wherever else people can plant a crop and harvest it.
Meanwhile, the drug gangsters from Mexico come north and push their way into the growing and selling ends.
Yes, law enforcement does nab a few of these growers and a few of the sellers. We do stories about the raids, especially those on foothills plantations of 20 or 30 acres that, if harvested would have yielded more money than a 500-acre almond ranch. But many more of those grows go unraided.
The reason for all this is that the people want their pot, and if they must support a huge and costly illegal production and distribution network or frequent the legal marijuana market, they will do so.
It is a matter of supply and demand.
Not unlike beer. When beer was banned during Prohibition, it continued to flow. Bootleggers, importers and home brewers turned it out as fast as they could.
Now, we have beer everywhere. You can buy it in sleazy taverns, in upscale brewery pubs, in class restaurants, at baseball and football games, in grocery stores.
That eventually be the case with marijuana. The president has all but assured that with his new policy. It’s only a matter of time.
Many states are pushing to require online merchants to collect sales taxes from their customers and pay them to the states in which those customers live.
As you might expect, online merchants are objecting because they don’t want to be bothered collecting taxes and remitting them to governments and also because being able to sell products tax-free gives them a competitive advantage over stores which must collect and remit taxes.
And the customers don’t like it, either. They like having the option of paying no taxes.
But the fact is that untaxed online sales hurt local communities in many ways. When people spend money outside their hometowns, that spending is called “leakage” because the tax on the sale goes to the community in which the sale is made.
Maderans, for example, have repaired many a road in Fresno, paid many a public employee there, kept many a cop on the street there and have improved many a Fresno school with taxes on things they buy in Fresno.
Leakage of sales taxes to Fresno are estimated to be as high as 50 percent of all the retail money Maderans spend. Add to that taxes not paid on sales that are made online, and you have shoppers inadvertently cutting their own cities’ throats.
Taxes collected on local sales are what keep local government operations going. When people who live in Madera and Madera County complain about not having enough police or fire protection, they can to some extent thank themselves if they spend their money out of town.
Because Fresno is a larger city, and has many shopping options we don’t have, there will always be leakage to some degree from all the smaller cities around Fresno, and that is understandable.
But why should online sales be exempt from sales taxation? Local businesses do their part by paying taxes and helping support their communities. Online businesses should be held to the same standards.
I don’t know about you, but I am fed up with the regime we now have in our federal and state governments.
For the past 30 to 40 years, these career politicians have sat on their hands and done absolutely nothing for the good of the American citizens, while at the same time, giving more and more undeserved rights to those that do not belong in our country legally.
The regime we now have in office is all for this and they are slowly eroding our Constitution, destroying our economy, our way of life, ravaging our Treasury, while stripping Social Security, and trying to force a healthcare program down our throats that will eventually choke us to death.
They are lining their own pockets while working hard to make this a socialistic country and the American citizen dependent on the government for the very air we breath. If they succeed, we will no longer have the right to vote and choose who we want to sit in those high offices and running our country, until we forget what freedom really means.
Unless we begin to fight back now.
I’m asking each of you to register to vote as independents. As a registered independent, you will be able to vote out of office any career Democrat or Republican that has sat on his hands and done nothing for the past 30 to 40 years. In November 2010, our election year for the California Assembly, governor and Congress, we must rid our great country of those that mean harm to the American citizen.
When the 2010 elections come about we will then be set to elect only that person who can and will assure us he is for the American citizen only, and will not allow illegal aliens to stay in this country and drain our resources dry while they send billions of American dollars to their foreign homelands.
I strongly applaud any person coming to this country that learns our language, works hard and becomes an American citizen within the time frame set by our laws to do so. This is a brave individual that deserves to be an American citizen. It is time our government enforces those laws instead of giving them free handouts.
Register to vote as an independent and take back our country.
A cell phone company plans to build a “Monopine” antenna at 2001 National Avenue, near Harvest Community Church, and during a hearing on the matter at the Planning Commission meeting Tuesday, the representative of the phone company said the antenna had to be built because of the ever-increasing demand for cell phone service.
The tower is designed to look like an 80-foot-high pine tree in order to assuage the sensitivities of neighbors who wouldn’t care to have a naked cell phone tower as part of the view from their kitchens.
The man from the phone company said, essentially, that we could expect a lot more cell phone towers to go up before long, because while people might not care to have their views infringed upon by an artificial pine tree, they would care even less for calls to be dropped when talking on their cell phones.
Calls, however, are the least of the problems when it comes to increasing demand for cell phone service. With the advent of the iPhone and its clones, huge globs of cellular capacity are increasingly being taken up by Internet and e-mail applications, which are threatening to overwhelm the nation’s cell-phone infrastructure.
People who have the applications to enable it think nothing of trying to watch television on their cell phones, but it is unlikely they realize how much of the cell phone transmission capacity is being occupied by that activity. It can suck up as much wireless capacity as 100 ordinary calls.
The result of that, according to some observers who are smarter than I am, is likely to be that users of capacity-hogging applications soon may have to pay to play — the more capacity they use, the more they will have to pony up. Get ready for screaming.
Apparently, the experts say, the days of paying for large-capacity use at the same rate as one might pay for a simple phone call are about over.
Even at that, we are likely to see a lot more towers before too long.
