A Good Day and Some Ranting!

Having a good day today!

I cranked out another 3,000 words during lunch, which brings my total to 162,633 for "Clans"! (Yay for me!!) Also managed to sneak in a Crit over on the Forward Motion boards and I did a solid twenty pages of editing on GS last night. Good bit of writing for the last 24 hours.

Watching TV last night and my poor wife had to listen to me go crazy over a story that made network news out of my old High School. There was a kid who caught his teacher on his video phone, yelling at the students to stand during the playing of the national anthem. Now I have to tell you, that I have no problem with this at all. It's not gong to hurt these kids to stand up for a few minutes to show a bit of respect for the nation they live in.

In general, I'm pretty liberal -I don't even have a problem with flag burning- but I realy get worked up when I see parents on TV threatening to sue because their children have been "traumatized" by the cruelty of the teacher. What a crock! The worst thing this teacher did was pull a chair out from under one lazy SOB's ass and make him stand up. Here's an idea: how about these parent's teach their kids a bit of respect for their teachers? If I had ever refused to do what I was told by a teacher and my parents saw a video of it: my old man would've kicked my ass to the moon and back, then draged me by my left testicle to the school to apologize to the teacher for being a smart ass!

When did the U.S. become a nation which teaches our children to accept no responsibility for our own actions? How did we go from being the independent cowboy to being the whiny brats who are going to sue the world because someone hurt our feelings? My God, people! have some self respect and behave like you're an adult! Yea, I know the H.S. kids are just being kids - and I'm not pissed at them. The parents are the ones who get under my skin. Stop looking for a pay day and raise your kids correctly.

While I'm ranting, Let me toss another story that went up my butt last night. NBC Nightly News did a story on rural Law Enforcement and how overworked they are because their communities are growing too rapidly and there aren't enough police to cover the needs. They highlighted a district in Colorado where one officer was required to cover some 1,800 square miles of territory (an area bigger than Rhode Island!). Now, that's a big concern and I support whatever measures need to be taken to correct it. The thing that had me screaming at the TV (yea, I do actually do that a lot) was that they were interviewing the local people who were demanding federal aid for this. The man sat their with a dead serious face and said: (paraphrasing) "There's no money in our budget for more police and the locals keep voting down tax increases, so we have to turn to the federal government."

Are you friggin' kidding me? Up the damn taxes! If the people who need the protection refuse to pay for it, too damn bad, live without it. Federal money comes from my taxes (of which I pay quite a bit to be sure I have enough police in MY community, thank you!) We've become completely greedy and short-sighted as a nation. We want everything under the sun, but we refuse to pay for it. I pay some serious taxes here in Jersey, but I don't really care because I can see them at work in my roads, schools, services, etc. if these people need more police, loosen up on the purse strings a bit, folks! The kicker to this whiole story was that the P.D. is being sued by an irate local because it took them over an hour to get to his wife after she was attacked by a pit bull, and the woman died. Now, I am very sorry for the man's loss, but I would not be a bit surprised to find that he was one of the folks yelling: "You're not raising my damn taxes!" before his wife's accident.

Come on folks, let's get back to a little personal responsibility and some common sense!

Ok, done ranting now! Thanks for listening in.

Later!