A Dunkin' Donuts is coming...and the sky is falling.

So a couple of weeks ago I’m reading a letter to the editor of our daily newspaper from a retiree in Wellfleet lamenting that a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise had snuck into town on the main drag, Route 6A. This, he tells us, is the beginning of the end for Wellfleet, a place formerly of great scenic beauty and historic charm. And, apparently, a place where you couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee! This guy must drink tea with the little finger elevated.

We have no WalMart on Cape Cod. Instead, we can buy every cheaply made product from China at the dozens of enormous Christmas Tree Shops, a “local” outfit! The smallest Home Depot in America is located in an old defunct store front in Hyannis. A larger store would have been the end of the Cape for sure. There is no Lowes.

The airport in Hyannis is expanding as are airports everywhere. If more people fly, airports will get bigger. This, too, is reported to be a sign that the end is near. The hospital in Hyannis uses valets to park patients cars because there is very limited parking on site. Parking garages would cause us to think we were in a “city” and who wants that. A developer proposed a five story Hilton hotel for the airport only to be turned down flat. Imagine, five whole stories! Meanwhile, dozens of homeless drunks wander the main street of Hyannis lured there by the enormous shelters set up for them.

I have lived on and off on the Cape for going on 50 years. Twenty years ago this stopped being anything other than a suburb of Boston with salt water. The busiest business here is the bus company, with dozens of buses taking Cape Codders to Boston every day for work. Get over yourselves.

Do Good, Don't Pay Property Taxes?

In my humble opinion: It’s time for property taxes to apply to everyone, including non-profits of all stripes, governmental, religious and otherwise. I was listening yesterday to the Mayor of Harrisburg, PA and she mentioned that 45 % of the property in that city is property tax exempt. Harrisburg, of course, is the state capitol and the state burdens it with all those governmental buildings. And all the other “non-profits”, real or imagined, have to have a presence in the state capitol.

I can remember hearing that same lament from the Library Director in Concord, NH, also a state capitol. Even in Nashua, NH, the two hospitals that paid their chief execs millions of dollars avoided property taxes. Colleges are at least as bad, charging enormous tuitions and fees, paying football coaches millions and skipping property taxes. And don’t get me started on Churches, again real or imagined. Property taxes might even give some of them pause before they decide to build another gigantic monument and scale back to a more practical building.

In Boston, tax-exempt non-profits were encouraged to make payments to the City in lieu of taxes. Some did, some didn’t. In all these cases, I assume someone making an emergency call expects a City department to respond. I don’t care if it is arranged through some sort of sliding scale. It is time for these institutions to begin to routinely pay their fair share for municipal services for the buildings they own.

OMG, is that snow?

It’s raining on Cape Cod. Apparently it is snowing lightly throughout the interior of Massachusetts. It’s eight in the morning. Since day break all four Boston stations have been broadcasting nothing but weather related reports. No Today Show or any other news for us. We are not sufficiently alarmed: after all, the sky is falling!

This is what I refer to as “weather hysteria”. Every school in New England is canceled for little or no reason. Probably because Superintendents are advised by Public Works Directors, and worse yet lawyers, that the television station is reporting the end of the world as we know it. Children better not venture out although I would bet every parent in New England will shortly tell the little shits to put on a snowsuit and get outdoors before they kill them.

Why do the TV stations do this? Because people, hearing the end is near, will then tune in to hear the weather report and advertising dollars will rise.

As these things go, this storm is a fairly modest little affair. No real accumulations, roads a little slippery but quite usable. Everyone should be going about their business. This is not Whittier's "Snowbound". 

Just another indication that, without even thinking about it, we have become weather wusses, pushed around by the proclamations of a 12 year old weather girl with a nice figure. Unbelievable!

Olivia Grace, Age Six, Always Thinking…

Sitting in the master bath with her mother to have her hair combed out after showering, Olivia was full of questions. Daddy had just returned from Tae Kwon Do class and was changing out of his gear in the same area.

“Mommy, why did you marry daddy?” she asked.

“I love daddy.”

“I know, but why did you marry a boy?”

Daddy looks up, slightly startled expression on his face.

“Why did I marry a boy?” asks a surprised mother

“Yea, they’re so smelly”

Daddy looks up again, obviously offended

“Daddy”, she says loudly, “Why didn’t you marry a dude?”

Daddy looks so startled that a little spittle forms at the corner of his mouth. He is unable to say a word.

“Olivia, why would daddy do that?” asks mother.

“Well, if he married a boy at least they could pee the same way!”

When Olivia broke her arm, grandpa Joe sent a teddy bear to her with a cast on the same arm. Yesterday, Olivia asked her mother.

“Mom, my arm is all better so teddy’s arm must be too, so can we take the cast off teddy’s arm?”

Mother said, “Of course, bring him downstairs.”

Time passes.

Mother, now upstairs, sees Olivia and asks, “Do you want me to take the cast off teddy’s arm?”

“No thanks. I think I’ll keep him just the way he is until I break something else.”

Bullying politics

In my life time, I think real bullying entered politics with the National Rifle Association on behalf of the gun manufacturers. This was probably 30 years or so ago after Reagan and Brady were shot and a real movement to restrict handguns started. The NRA simply beat up the groups favoring gun control by spending more money than anyone could imagine and never relinquishing the podium. They used the tactic of the broken record that has since become so popular with conservatives: simply stating something, whether true or not, over and over again until people assume it must be true and come to accept it as fact. They also out-shouted everyone else in the debate, another tactic used by O’Reilly and Hannity and others afterward on FOX.

I’m sure Dick Cheney and Karl Rove watched this with great admiration because they soon adopted the same tactics in electoral politics. Clearly, history shows there was no justification for invading Iraq except that Bush II wanted to as did many of his Neo-Con aides so Rove and Cheney made it possible by lying, exaggerating and sticking to it in a loud, bullying manner. To this day, people like William Kristol have never been brought to account for foolishness like “we will be seen as saviors by the Iraqi people” and “we will have a safe base in the Middle East forever” and “this war will pay for itself with the oil money the Iraqi people will give us in gratitude”. In part, they have gotten away with it because people in the media are still scared to death of these particular talking heads, these bullies.

Rove made it clear that his only goal was to elect George Bush II. The ends justified the means, a bullying approach if ever there was one. He led the second campaign with a hate gays mantra despite his affection for his gay father. The joke about running over your grandmother to win election isn’t so funny when you see Rove and Cheney in action.

Soon nitwits from South Carolina were calling the President a liar during the State of the Union address, something that Cheney would have had a Representative “disappeared” for trying with Bush. And complete lunatics are still buying guns so as a society we have to deal with seven or eight mass murders per year.

And yet we wonder why kids bully kids in high school when their parents shout each other down in the public square, post rifle cross hairs on political opponents names and demand that we “reload” in our efforts to defeat the Democrats.

Two things converging

in the shooting of Representative Giffords that I do not understand.  

Guns. I don’t think for a moment after re-reading the Second Amendment to our Constitution that that language has anything to do with an individual’s right to carry a weapon except in the context of participating in a state sanctioned militia. Furthermore, if it is not possible to ban hand gun ownership outright, why then can’t we as a society take the time to consider the implications of issuing a permit to someone to own a gun. If someone sensible had met this crazy bastard before he was given a gun wouldn’t they have suggested he not get be allowed to get one.

Which brings me to my second point: everyone seems to have known this guy was crazy. One lady from a community college class even wrote about how he was likely to appear in the news for killing people! She asked that he be removed from the class. The army, for Christ’s sake, wouldn’t take him! His parents certainly must have known he was paranoid and schizophrenic. Do they live under a rock? Why was there no record of how crazy he was so that he could have been stopped from buying a gun. More importantly, why wasn’t he locked up? Perhaps because deciding such unpleasant things doesn’t appear to be anyone group’s responsibility. Certainly the community college he attended and that asked him to leave and not come back until he had undergone mental health therapy didn’t feel they should report that to anyone and maybe, in the current framework, there was no one to report it to.

This society is terribly afraid to offend nuts who insist on the “right” to own guns and just plain old nuts in any context. The gun lobby, on behalf of gun manufacturers, is a big political bully. Probably the first and worst of the groups to start this intimidation approach to politics. We listen to sophistry like “guns don’t kill people, people do” and allow that foolishness to cause us to give every crazy person in America who wants one a gun. We decry the violence by drug gangs in Mexico but praise our gun laws that allow all those machine guns to be sold to the drug cartel’s straw men in Arizona and Texas and New Mexico!

We eliminated the State Hospitals for the mentally ill because they did such an awful job. Everyone in future was to receive care in their community. But at the same time we developed this mistaken notion that admittedly crazy people should be the only ones making decisions about their care, medication, lives in general. A noble, very noble thought, but ridiculous on the face of it. Crazy, even.

One of our current failings as a society is this general, immobilizing feeling that to infringe on anyone’s civil rights, even for a moment of reflection, even when the right claimed is exceedingly questionable, is wrong. Whether the person in question is a Muslim at an airport, an obviously deeply disturbed student in a classroom or an angry person demanding a gun, we fail to take a moment to discover if any danger exists. And then we wonder why nine year old children get shot outside a supermarket.