Salvaged wheelbarrow, salvaged nightstand and salvaged material stapled over door opening
Salvaged microwave stripped of components with the back cut off makes a great means of keeping the cat food dry
Heavy rain and the cool snap last got me scrambling to give the cats a way to get out of the weather and keep the food dry. Looks as though it will serve, but I’ve got to work on several more shelters. They’re there, but need upgrading a bit.
I’ll confess I’m behind the curve on a lot of things. I should have re-wrapped that electrical tape around the busted phone line before the rain hit. Internet’s back in tin-can telephone speeds this morning.
Gale and Kay were working the Mesquite Show in Fredericksburg this weekend, so I borrowed Little Red today and went into town for necessaries. But when I’m on the road I always shop the grader ditches and investigate any potentially useful items thrown or blown out of vehicles. Today was great insofar as upgrading cathouses:
The top was missing on this, but otherwise it's in good shape
The cats will be fighting over which gets to sleep inside this
I find a lot of these lids in the ditches and this one almost fits.
Also found these rubber bungie cords near another bunch of trash in the ditch
So, call me a hypocrite. These are made in China. The top flashlight and radio were purchased in 2006 and the light’s been used frequently since then, including last night.
The crank side
Radio
Here’s how those came into my life:
Friday, September 22, 2006 Placitas, New Mexico
Winterizing
Today I was finishing up battening down the hatches on the old adobe for winter. The last week or so it’s been into the low 40s a couple of times, nights, so I’ve been pecking away at putting up plastic over the insides of most of the windows to cut down on the amount of wind blowing through the house. I came across some car-covers free a while back when the lady was wrapping up at the flea market and was going to haul them to the dump because they didn’t sell.
I’m cutting up those to staple over the plastic in hopes it will provide insulation. Last year it got cold enough in here to impress me with my pansyish non-pioneer spirit, even with Mexican blankets hung over all the windows and the front door on the inside.
Anyway, I ran spang out of staples and plastic, mid-job, so I toodled down to Rio Rancho Home Depot to buy more. The clerk asked me in passing, “Does it look like snow out there to you?”
I’d been asking myself the same question almost from daybreak onward. “Pretty early for it. Almost never get snow before the first of October. But it’s happened.”
Clerk laughed, handed me my bag, and I headed back through Bernalillo toward the mountains.
As I passed the Dollar General I was reminded I was running short of tortillas and a couple of other incidentals, so I swung in. I always take a look at their half-price clearance items, which are dirt-cheap and sometimes something a man could use.
There on the half-price clearance table was a plastic package with a hand-crank flashlight and a handcrank AM/FM Weather radio. $12 regular price. Hmmm.
Some little voice in my mind says, “Jules, old man, batteries are dead on your flashlight, and likely are dead on your radio. You need to buy that $6 package of flashlight and battery just in case the power goes out for a few days.”
So I put it in the plastic box hanging off my arm, picked up a few extra cans of canned fruit and fruit c*cktail, and headed for the checkout. Clerk knows me by sight and we’re amiable.
“You think it looks like snow out there?”
“You been talking to the guy down at Home Depot?”
Blank look.
“Guy down there just said the same thing. I think you might be right. That’s the reason I’ve picked that half-price radio and flashlight off your clearance table.”
Another blank look, then he squints at the plastic thingie with all that in it. “Was this on the clearance table?”
“Yup.”
He calls the manager over. “Is this half price?”
“No. The half-price stuff was all the summer stock… barbeque things and that.”
I scowl. “Okay. I’m not paying $12 for it. Don’t ring it up.”
“You’ll buy it for $6?” She grins at me. We clown around some when I’m in there.
“Five and a half.”
“Six.”
“Sold. Ring it up.”
Sooooo. I ended up with a hand-crank charging flashlight and radio.
The hosses are getting thick coats of hair. I’m thinking it’s going to be an early, bull-goose of a winter.
Mainly the radio and flashlight thing. I confess I haven’t gotten a good look at what the hosses are doing, hair-wise.
Jules
Edited in:
As I re-read this entry I noticed the censor had edited out the nasty part of the word c*cktail. So here I was claiming I’d bought some fruit tail, which I might if I ever come across any, but this wasn’t the day for it. That old censor’s always catching me out when I try to use that nasty word, full-c*cked pistol, c*ck fights, and now fruit c*cktail. Lucky thing for me that old censor’s on the job. Otherwise I’d be saying just awful stuff.
2011 observation regarding automatic censoring out of nasty language: Me, I’m sorry that’s gone away. Having a computer perform the job of straight-man instead of having to wait for some commenting reader to do the job’s a lot more 21st Centuryish. I’m old fashioned that way.
Turned out I was so impressed with that flashlight I included it here: SECTION 10: SURVIVAL AND EMERGENCY SUPPLIES and if I were writing the book again I’d say a lot more about it, including what’s in this post. I have a lot more experience with these now than I did when I wrote the book.
2011, I still use the flashlight frequently and it still does a good job at what it’s supposed to do. The radio was up on a shelf until I began writing this, hadn’t been turned on in a couple of years, dust covering it. I cleaned it up, cranked it for a minute, turned it on and picked up several stations immediately. These things are ‘way too good to be made in China.
—————————————-
Here are some others I’ve picked up over the years. They’re good too.
A number of you readers are experimenting with alternative energy sources. I don’t have one of these assembled yet, though I’m gradually accumulating the pieces.
The group is composed of a lot of back-yard experimenters who are putting them together and testing, altering, testing, etc. The group site has hundreds of helpful pictures of the work members are doing and how they’re doing it, what results they’re getting.
I’m not saying it will work, but the people working on them are continuing with it and expending a lot of energy communicating what they’re doing. Evidently they’re devoted because what they’re seeing is sufficient to convince them it’s worth the effort.
I’m thinking a couple of you I’m aware of who read here might be interested in going over there for a looksee.
I’d wondered when something of this sort would happen without actually believing it ever would.
Someone keeping better track of current events than I do will probably see this as a yawn. . old news. But when someone sent me an email after talking to me on the phone about it yesterday you could have knocked me over with a feather. After pondering it a while this entire grassroots Occupy [fill in the blank] thing strikes me as rhyming a lot with what happened during the early 1990s when the Eastern Block, the USSR, and Iran all fell to pieces in less time than it takes to tell it.
Rich, a close friend, sent me a link to a site, We Are the 99 Percent, which if there’s any substance to it, might be the beginnings of something unpredictable enough to keep it interesting for a while. I suppose I didn’t think there was enough of that left in the world to even consider. My initial reaction was a bit of a ho-hum. These seem to be peaceful folk demonstrating peacefully, which, while gratifying to see going on isn’t likely to undo anything.
But then, in walks someone, or some group called ‘Anonymous’ and joins hands with the Occupy folk.
PC Magazine Article
Here’s the transcript of the latest Occupy Wall Street video from Anonymous:
Greetings, institutions of the media.
We are Anonymous.
The events transpiring within Wall Street have caught our eye.
It seems that the government and federal agencies enjoy enforcing the law a little bit too much. They instate unjust laws as mindless automatons, blindly following orders with soulless precision.
We witness the government enforcing the laws that punish the 99 percent while allowing the 1 percent to escape justice, unharmed, for their crimes against the people.
We have observed this same government failing to enforce even the minimal legal restraints of Wall Street’s abuses. This government who has willingly ignored the greed at Wall Street has even bailed out the perpetrators that have caused our crisis.
We will not stand by and watch the system take over our way of life.
We the people shall stand against the government’s inaction.
We the people will not be witnesses to your corruption and ill-gotten profits.
We will not labor for your leisure.
We will not assist you in any way.
This is why we choose to declare our war against the New York Stock Exchange. We can no longer stay silent as the population is being exploited and forced to make sacrifices in the name of profit.
We will show the world that we are true to our word. On Oct. 10, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet. On Oct. 10, expect a day that will never, ever be forgotten.
Vox Populi, Vox Anon.
The Voice of The People is The Voice of Anonymous.
That seems to shine an entirely different light on things. I don’t know whether anyone’s actually able to jiggle remote computers in a way that allows them to shut down something like Wall Street Stock Exchange, especially after giving warning ahead of time they plan to do it. But I think making the threat is bound to have every capability in the kingdom concentrated on keeping them from doing it, first, and hauling their butts off to the slammer as soon as they can slap a pair of handcuffs on them.
Gutsy stuff, or a level of confidence surprising from the perspective of a person who figures the powers-that-be can do anything they want to do with impunity. If they manage to do it the resulting power-shift leverage would inevitably seem to make a sharp turn in favor of the people calling themselves the 99 percent. But do or don’t, it pulls things out of the realm of peaceful demonstration and gives the powers the excuse they might have been wishing for to drag out the machine guns against the 99 percenters.
The people posting on the 99 percent site appear to be just regular people with a lot of justified bitterness about how things are going and a determination for legitimate change. But thinking back on the history of revolutions, the signs and banners walking out in front of the parade have always been followed back in the baggage train with enough guillotines to separate a lot of fact from fiction after the dark underbelly of human nature is exposed.
What comes out the other end tends to look a lot different than anyone thought it would going in. If this isn’t just a flash in the pan it sounds as though the people in the collateral damages zones might be in for some interesting times. But, hell. I guess we’re all in the collateral damages zones.
No monsters, no drug-crazed uglies, no cancer from second-hand smoke, no cops kicking down the door with guns drawn interrupted your sleep-path to set you loose from this reality.
It’s another day, and all those things you feared haven’t robbed you of getting to plod through it as best you can.
There’s something to be learned from that.
All that worrying and fretting you were doing yesterday, being scared of germs, or bosses, or cars running over you, or terrorists from somewhere else in this madhouse crawling up on the beaches of America with butcher-knives clenched in their teeth didn’t come in and set off a bomb to destroy you, didn’t poison your water because they’re jealous of the perfect existence you have.
The economy didn’t collapse during the night, dissolving the value of that plastic card with the strip on back telling whether you like cream in your coffee and other essentials about you.
Chinamen didn’t quit working three shifts manufacturing toasters for your breakfast, hair-dryers so’s you don’t have to use a towel instead of wasting a megawatt, sneakers to keep your foots off the carpet, rubber monster toys to give the kids something to do while they eat their burgers. Their factories are still cranking out US flags for you to wave, and rubber SUPPORT OUR TROOPS magnets you can put on your Japanese car.
They’re still believing the imagination of your plastic card means they’ll get something back for their labors eventually, so civilization’s still alive.
All’s well with the world. The things you worried over yesterday didn’t happen.
_________________________________________
Ho hum.
_________________________________________
You might conclude all that worry and fear you allowed to sneak into your life yesterday to influence your thoughts and choices was wasted.
No. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
All that fear caused you to project negative energy and anger all around you.
It helped you make lousy choices to give you more challenges for this life and gave you a leg-up to just keep on doing exactly what you’ve been doing so’s you can keep on doing it while the back of your mind keeps whispering something’s going to go kerplunk. It kept your antennae waving around listening to the airwaves for which monkey wrench is going to stop the flow of rubber monster toys, keep the commode from flushing, or raise the cost of whatever you’re putting up your nose.
But the sun’s up for a new day. Time to decide whether to repeat yesterday, or leave some of that fear behind and try something else. Worrying about getting an ulcer over worrying about getting an ulcer’s not the answer.
Niaid was curled up on the bed, [I double-checked] so whatever else that critter was, it was an outsider. The chickens were ranging free and I couldn’t hear any alarm from them, but this guy just looked too big to have roaming around without interruption.
As I came around the cabin where I could see him better:
It was obvious the feline was operating out of a different reality. Which didn’t necessarily mean he didn’t need to be the focus of protective measures. But how does a person protect his chickens from a shadow-cat? I’ve done some websearching on the various news sites and checked out the methods incorporated by the US Government into programs to avoid having shadow-cats disrupting citizen-like critters such as these:
The consensus seems to be you have to get one of these:
No matter what the cost.
I’m not certain I want to have one of those running around here loose, even when I have dangerous shadowcats skulking around peeking at my holdings.
Once something of that sort gets a foothold there’s no predicting where it will end:
Sugar pills in toy jars
Candy counter cures
For the sensory deprived
For the spirit that yearns hardship
Facade struggle for the
Stagely frightened
Sedentary soul
Living a reality
Where gangster boss of fantasy
Celluloid deeds and words
Are worth repeating;
Gladiator wars in plastic armor
Oaken clubs and pigskin missiles
Pudding danger jello struggles
Hard and real inside the mind
Inside the molded plastic
Toy of the mind
Man who cleans the windshield
At the signal is an actor
In the show last night
On MTV or HBO
Sexy girls dancing
In the background
As he postures
Rag and bucket
On the glass
Toy hero pushes button
In the Kevlar coated dragon
Of the field
Sees the enemy extinguished
In a prophylactic
Box of evening news
Before and after
Old war movies
All the same
Any loss is accidental
Cost of war’s
In higher taxes
Salaries for heroes
Fuel bullets
Not in blood
Not in blood
Sterile sealed
In plastic baggies
Plastic baggies
Hold the artificial
Flavor
Of the life
When life was real
Yet the sickness
Needs a remedy and cure
Sugar pills in toy bottles;
New candy counter pudding
For the soul.
Three of these four worthless felines are getting a bit long in the tooth, two longer than the next in line. It’s been a tough summer with the drought and heat wave, so I’ve had to take some measures to give them some relief I couldn’t provide for myself.
Shiva’s not one of the two oldest, but she had a health event a couple of winters ago that’s taken a long time to recover from, and she has a special job here if the cows ever come back. She’s Shiva the Cow Cat. Loved chasing cows back when they were bothersome. [ Artful Communications – White Trash Repairs 3 ]
I might add some other meanderings here today as other things come to mind, but what’s on my mind this morning is I need to start working on the front porch cat houses I put together last fall to give them all places to get out of the elements. Now that the heat’s bending in the other direction I wouldn’t be shocked to see a winter rearing it’s head before I’m ready for it.
Old Jules
————————————-
7:45 AM – Escape Route Possibilities – Fridge and trailer
Another issue that’s been on my mind a lot lately is creating myself a place to live if anything intervenes to insist I get the hell out of Dodge. The whole thing’s complicated by the contract I have with these cats, all but one of them, to take care of them until they die off, or I die off. I’ve talked with them about it, and they have some strong views about minimum living conditions, etc, which I’m obliged to consider. A tent or under a bridge doesn’t meet their minimum criteria.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m looking around for an old travel trailer I can get for a price I can afford, and the new truck up there Gale’s going to help me pull to town to let an honest-to-goodness mechanic fix the wiring mess, inspect it to get it legal, and eventually pull whatever I come up with for it to pull.
While I’m scouting around looking for an old travel trailer I’ve also been looking at this, considering whether it mightn’t offer an alternative:
Of course, if I select this option I’ll be building it from salvaged recycled materials.
This trailer below has been sitting there with that load on it from the time Gale and Kay moved here from Pflugerville. His shop building was full and he didn’t have anywhere to put all that stuff, so it’s stayed there, everything on it getting ruined by the weather and the tires going flat.
another view:
That lathe, left rear, is troubling to see. But so’s a lot of the other once-useful items on there.
another view:
another view:
If I can think of somewhere to put that junk, protecting whatever’s left worth protecting, I just might be able to talk him out of the trailer if I decide the building a house on a trailer option seems the best after everything’s considered.
On the other hand, the fridge is now a sure thing. I was talking with Gale while he was doing some jewelry work the other day and noticed this, down there bottom center:
Turns out it’s the gas/electric fridge out of an old travel trailer I gave him about 30 years ago. He says it’s mine if I want it.
Edited in Preface: Someone’s told me this post is a bit grim, which floored me. That is NOT what this is all about. I might well be the happiest man on the planet, the most joyful and grateful for the roof over his head, for the animalcules, for every moment of this life I’m blessed with. I am sure as hell not complaining about the way I live in this post, not poking around looking for sympathy from anyone. There’s not one of you I’d trade lives with.
Please allow your mind to read what follows with a smile. I love this crap. This post is me laughing at myself, laughing at whatever life might throw at me, telling life, “Do your damnedest! I’ll keep coming.”
“Science,” Hydrox the jellicle cat insists, “You observe, you formulate a premise, you test the premise and revise it, then you test again. Just make damned certain it’s right this time.” Hydrox is one of the two felines indoors during cool, and especially during inclement weather. “If science isn’t cutting it try some engineering.”
He takes a jaundiced view of hiding under something to get away from thunder only to get drenched by a lousy roof repair experiment. Hydrox is attuned Level 3 Reiki.
“Reiki Masters,” he assures me, ” At least cat Reiki Masters, don’t appreciate being interrupted from doing high-minded things by getting sloshed because of criminal negligence on the part of a human being.”
Back when I was attuning him several people thought this mightn’t be a good thing. It’s been a mixed blessing.
That chimney pipe was leaking badly back when it still rained. But this repair job hasn’t had the test of a good rainfall yet.
Edit: This larger diameter stovepipe came from Habitat for Humanity Thrift Store [toward the bottom here: Curiouser and curiouser ] for a couple of bucks. If the current fix doesn’t work I’ll cut the down-end with the angle cutter to match the slope of the roof, cut the top shorter than the chimney vent and sleeve the chimney with it. I thinks it will block of a lot, if not all the pesky intrusion of rain into the chimney pipe.
As you can see, I’ve smeared tar all over the the joints in the sheet metal roof, in addition to the customized chimney. That didn’t work too well, I’ll confess. Got some other things to try though. The light brown or tan you see is the foam you get at the hardware store that is touted as being able to plug large leaks by expanding into them to fill in the space. No joy on that.
The chimney problem’s crucial. Water hitting the side of it goes inside, runs down to the elbow in the bedroom but doesn’t slow down much:
[The gray hat’s a XXXXXX John B Stetson I picked up at a silent auction a few years ago for $10. Man who owned but never wore it died and left it to me, though we never met.]
Naturally there’s a backup plan to keep water from coming down on the bed in the unlikely event it rains:
This has worked pretty well in the light rain arena. Hasn’t been tested in a bull goose honest-to-goodness wind blowing rain sideways daddy-long-legs storm.
But we didn’t reach a consensus, the felines etc. on the matter of roof repairs and leaks. Shiva the cow-cat argues, “What the hell! Here’s a perfect spot for both those indoor cats in a thunderstorm. What’s the big deal? If they don’t like it throw them outdoors with Tabby and me.
“I’m sick and tired of all the age discrimination around here in favor of geriatric cats.”
You survival and preparedness-oriented readers might find something you didn’t already know in here to be useful. The Introduction section to the book Desert Emergency Survival Basics explains my purposes for writing it better than I can today:
The potential range of human experience includes finding ourselves in unanticipated dangerous situations. Most of those situations have been examined minutely and described in print in the form of survival manuals. Desert survival is not an exception. Excellent books are available to explain primitive survival in the desert southwest duplicating lifestyles of Native Americans a thousand years ago. That is not the intent of this book.
A few decades ago I had an acquaintance with a man named Walter Yates. Walter had the distinction of surviving a helicopter crash in the far north woods by jumping into a snowdrift before the impact. He managed to survive winter months with almost nothing except the clothes on his back when he jumped.
Walter’s experience was a worthy test of human potential for emergency survival in extreme conditions. The margin for error was microscopic. The reason he survived rested on his ability to quickly detach his mind from how things had been in the past, how he wished they were, and accept completely the situation he was in. He wouldn’t have made it out of those woods if he couldn’t rapidly assess his new needs and examine every possibility of fulfilling them. “It’s all in the mind,” he once told me.
The margin for error in the desert is also narrow. That margin is dehydration. Extremes of temperature are also a factor, but they are more easily managed than the needs of the human body for water. Anyone who survives an unanticipated week in desert country did so by either having water, by carrying it in, or finding it.
Over the years I’ve followed a number of search and rescue accounts and discussed the issue with searchers. The general thinking among those workers is that a person missing in the desert southwest should be found or walk out within three to five days. After three days the chances for live return spiral downward. Returns after five days are lottery winners. When a missing person isn’t found within a week, it’s usually because he’s been dead for five days.
This book is to assist in avoiding situations that lead to the need to survive those crucial three days, and to provide the basics of how to walk out and how to find water in the desert southwest. If you need the emergency information here it will be because you became lost, stranded by mechanical failure, or physically incapacitated. I won’t address the bugs and plants you might find to eat. If you have water you’ll survive without eating until rescue.
When this book was written I had a close association with New Mexico State Search and Rescue (SAR). I was also writing a book about a lost gold mine at the time. The State Search and Rescue Coordinator (SARC) knew about the book. I had a special arrangement with him because I was spending a lot of time in remote canyons searching. If something delayed me there I didn’t want them to send out the SAR guys to look for me.
One day in the coffee-room SARC asked me about my progress in the search and the gold mine book. I explained the lost gold mine search to him and how the information available in the past was sketchy.
“So you’re writing a book that’s likely to cause flatlanders to go out into the desert searching for this thing?”
I thought about it a moment before I answered. “It might. A lot of people would have tried anyway, but this book might bring in some who wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
SARC glared at me. His whole world revolved around flat-landers getting lost in the mountains or desert. Several times every month they’d scramble the forces to try to locate someone misplaced. Sometimes it’s a brain surgeon from Houston who got himself mis-located mountain climbing on the east face of Sandia Mountain within sight of Albuquerque . Other times a physicist from California gets off the pavement in the desert and loses his bearings. Sometimes SAR arrived in time to save their lives. New Mexico back country can be unforgiving.
“If you’re going to publish a book that will take a lot of idiots out where they can get into trouble you’d damned well better include some warnings on desert survival and how they can stay out of trouble! I don’t want to spend the next five years dragging the bodies of your readers out of the arroyos in body bags.”
That conversation ultimately resulted in this tome.
Over time it’s been expanded and rewritten numerous times to eventually become what’s posted here. Here’s the link, but there’s a new page for it on the navigation bar at the top of the page. Desert Emergency Survival Basics
Lose the God-Damned Bigotry or Quit Calling Yourself an American -You’re Walkin’ on the Fightin’ Side of Me
on
Paid for by Americans to Restore Freedom, Austin, TX 1970
A word in advance: About the time Merle Haggard was reaching the top of the charts with “The Fighting Side of Me”, and “Okie From Muskogee” a war over forced busing was being fought in cities all across the country by good Americans. The poster you see appeared on telephone posts, taped to the outside of doors, windows of public places, scattered on the streets.
In 1970 a friend and I came across a guy taping one of these up near the University of Texas. He had a ream of them beside him on the concrete. We discussed it with him and his noggin required surprisingly little thumping to persuade him to give us all the posters and swear he would not do it anymore. He didn’t have the strength of his convictions.
I suppose I kept a few of them boxed up with other curiosities from over the decades.
The administrator for this blog found a few of them among some boxes of scribblings and asked what it was all about. Merle’s had a change of heart, repudiated a lot of what he said and did during those times, says we all make mistakes and we all eventually grow from having made them. But interestingly, instead of vanishing from arena of public bias, the past two years has seen a re-emergence of surprisingly similar material intended to assist in denouncing the US president.
Being a good American and a good human being isn’t about waving a flag, hating Democrats or Republicans, Muslims, or people who say ugly words about political leaders. It isn’t about fear, hysterical dialect, consumerism and waste.
Being a good American and a good human being is about personal responsibility. About having enough confidence and courage not to feel threatened by every little thing. About assuming the responsibility of not being part of the problem any more than is absolutely necessary. About self-reliance.
Sometimes it’s not obvious how a person might accomplish those things.
On a personal level your life will find itself a lot better place if you can recognize the fact you are going to die as a means of exiting it. Maybe disease, a car wreck, any of a thousand common ways that don’t have a damned thing to do with any foreign country, foreign leader, foreign war. You are going to die. No point in going into frenzies of terror and hate because the death you get stands a billion-to-one shot at being the act of a terrorist. Trust me on that. You are going to die, and I’ll only be the tiniest, most microscopic bit of a liar when I tell you it won’t be from anything any foreigner does to cause it.
On a personal level you’ll find it’s a hell of a lot better place if you can learn what is your own business, and what isn’t. If you can change it, it’s your business. If you can’t, it ain’t worth concerning yourself with, getting all worked up about.
On a personal level you’ll find your life’s a lot better place if you spend considerable energies looking at it, instead of other places, looking at what you like about it, and what you don’t like about it, and changing what you can. Looking in a metaphorical mirror at the sort of person you are and asking yourself if that is the sort of person you want to be. You can’t change the kind of person the prez of bongobongoland is, but you can change the kind of person you are into someone you have more respect for. No one respects a dishonest, hysterical coward, including you, when you see it in others.
If all of us could pull that off our own lives would be a lot better, and America would be a better place for it. But insofar as personal responsibility and being a good American, we can expand on that a bit. Here are a few things a good American might do without having to shout from the rooftops about what an admirable person he/she is:
Dependence on hydrocarbons is the ultimate problem of this nation you say you love.
Be conscious of your own energy use.
Every plastic grocery or garbage bag, every foam-plastic hamburger box, no matter where it was produced, drives up the price of oil.
Every time you fire up that hair-dryer you drive up the world-wide price of hydrocarbons.
Every made-in-China yellow ribbon ‘SUPPORT OUR TROOPS’ you buy to stick on your car drives up the price of hydrocarbons world-wide, increases the demand.
Every made-in-China flag made of nylon you wave drives up the price of oil and increases worldwide demand.
Every new plastic radio, CD player, computer monitor. Every plastic wrapper from that frozen pizza pie. Every cellophane cover and foam plastic bottom covering the piece of animal you’re having for supper and sending to the landfill afterward is driving up the world-wide competition for oil.
Sure, there are the other obvious things. The things Jimmy Carter used to beg you to do when he was prez, to help you quit relying on foreign petroleum products. Turn down the heater. Turn up the thermostat on the AC. Don’t drive anymore than you have to. Which, of course, you didn’t care for then and immediately forgot when he left office (which is part of the reason you’re in the fix you are in now.)
But there’s a lot more to being a good American, as opposed to a good human being. Here are a few more ways you could try to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem:
Quit buying ANY foreign product if you can avoid it. Even if it saves you a few cents. Just say no. Refuse and make it clear why you’re refusing. If US workers didn’t manufacture it and you can live without it, don’t buy it. If your old one’s broken buy a replacement used in a thrift store, garage sale or flea market. If it can be repaired take it to a local appliance repair shop and let a US worker repair it. Every dollar you spend on a new foreign-manufactured product reduces the value of the dollar you’ll get next paycheck because of the overwhelming trade deficit.
If this country is going to survive another century the population is going to have to begin manufacturing what it consumes, energy-wise and every other wise. Building hamburgers to sell back and forth to one another isn’t enough to keep a country sound.
Americans are going to have to produce products, and the other Americans are going to have to buy them. We can’t continue indefinitely sending our chunks of our trade deficit off to bongo-bongo land for petroleum, to China for plastic bags, television sets, seat covers and rubber monster toys. We can’t starve out our farmers by buying agricultural products from Mexico and Argentina.
Being a good American involves a hell of a lot more than getting angry when some foreigner says something ugly about it. Loyalty to America and Americans is about keeping America alive, productive, self-reliant, healthy economically.
If we can do those things we’ll find we’re spending a lot less time hurling empty rhetoric back and forth, hating the owners of bongo-bongo land oil, a lot less time bombing the hell out of foreign lands, a lot less angry and full of fear and hatred.
And we wouldn’t need to wave flags to prove we were good Americans.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 