(Title condensed from a comment left yesterday by my uber cuzzint, The Grand PoohBah.) So, why are the good citizens of The Great Lake State forming their own Tahrir Square in downtown LansiPng? Well, yer fav-o-rite blahgger lives under a rock, so don’t come to ababsurdo fer advanced analysis of current events. Butchy’all already knew that, roight?

Part of this is that the Great Lake State has a new Republlican governor, a “moderate” businessman who has vowed to balance the budget. Here’s Rick Snyder on wikipee. I dunno. I can do things with Excel jspreadsheets that 99% of the population cannot and I’m kind of wondering if the new budget wasn’t created on some Excel spreadsheet, maybe during the guv’s daily state police chauffeur service from The Planet Ann Arbor to Lansing (for the record, I am not at all opposed to the chauffeur service — I think it’s better than taking a helicopter). But. Okay. You can move spreadsheet numbers around from here to kingdom come but what happens when you actually show them to the people who live in the state and work and pay taxes?

A part of this has to do with what many hard-working state workers may face. Another part is what teachers may face. A friend of ours drives from our loverly planet every day to teach pre-schoolers in the Detroit school district. She has been doing this for many years. Teaching in Detroit? It sounds like a war zone down there but there are children there and they have parents who care about their education. Those kids are no less worthy of our support than the privileged kids in my relatively upscale community full of over-educated people. The Detroit school system has been sliding downhill for years as the city loses population but it has gotten drastically worse in the last few years and, with recent legislation, I suppose it’ll get even worse. I cannot take time off work to stand with the teachers but, if I could, I would stand with the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

What do I think? I think that we have to talk to each other no matter what our professed political party is. In my case that’s nothing. Spreadsheets will help but they are only tools. We need to work together to decide what services our governments need to provide and how to fund them. I think it took a long time for the Great Lake State to get into the mess where it is now and I am not sure how to pull it out of that. I wish we could take our time and make slow, incremental changes… Can we do that?

And so. This afternoon, I walked into the Blue and Only Bathroom. I was just putting away clean, folded up towels but I caught something out of the corner of my eye. A BIG brown bird was sitting on a stack of wood in our backyard. What was it? I figgered it was a hawk of some sort but I am not much of a birder, so I didn’t know. I had been thinking about going for a short walk but I stood there next to the Blue and Only Toilet for something like 10 minutes waiting for that good old boy to do *something*. There were a couple squirrels running all over the place to the right of the hawk and a little chippy squeaked up through one of those logs. The hawk sat there forever. *Finally*, he took off and landed on a power wire in my back yard. I quit watching at that point.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 19th, 2011 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.