Egregious Idling and Junk Mail
I engaged in egregious idling this morning for the first time this season. Say what? Well, that means that approximately 10 minutes before I left for work, I went out and faaarrrred up the Ninja, turned the heat up high and activated the front and back defroggers. When I need to engage in egregious idling, I do it just before I change into whatever bizcaz outfit I’ve managed to cobble together for the day. When I get into the Ninja to go to work, it’s nice and toasty and the windows are de-iced enough that I usually don’t have to scrape [much].
I know this is a wasteful use of gasoline. A couple years ago, our city council, in its infinite wisdom, toyed with making it illegal to engage in Egregious Idling. They weren’t only thinking about lazy people like me who hate to spend time scraping ice off of windshields. They also talked about the Lincoln Navigator Moms picking up their kids over at Forsythe and various truckers, etc. Fortunately, that idea eventually got the ki-bosh but it has recently resurfaced, repackaged as an “education campaign”. I dunno. I spend a lot of time idling at intersections EVERY day. I think that overall that idling adds up to much more than the 10 minutes of Egregious Idling that occasionally takes place in the Landfill Driveway. How else could a measly eight mile commute take a half hour?
I found myself kind of annoyed at all of the stuff posted on facebook on Veteran’s Day. I get annoyed in general with memes and re-posts, especially those that are not fact-checked, but that might be a topic for some other day. (Note: I would NEVER un-friend someone for doing that. It’s FACEBOOK, fer kee-reist!) Back to Veteran’s Day. It’s not that anyone posted anything objectionable. But here’s the thing… I enjoyed looking at real photos of real people that my fb friends knew in their lives and reading some of their stories. I grew tired of people re-posting content that somebody else created. I’m not sure where some of these memes originate or whether their creators get paid for their efforts but I have to wonder why someone would spend the small amount of time it takes to add crappy looking text to a photo (for one thing) if they were not getting paid to do it.
My dad, his brother Don, my uncle Duke, and my father-in-law served in WWII. (Duke did Viet Nam too). Just to name a few. I *am* eternally grateful to all of them for their service and I also appreciate the service of today’s soldiers. But when someone posts a random meme that someone else has created and doesn’t even make a personal comment about what it means to the poster, it feels like junk mail to me. Honestly, I would rather know what you had for lunch!
So what I am wondering now is how much all of these junk posts will help our veterans. My relatives who were in WWII came home and built really good lives for themselves. What about today’s veterans? Do they have similar opportunities? Are facebook memes going to help them?
November 12th, 2013 at 10:17 pm
No, FB doesn’t really help anyone. You already know my story about being unfriended; it was incredibly stupid and involved a lack of fact checking, as well as the person’s anger about being called out on it. (in a very polite way, I swear) I try to make my Vet Day posts pretty personal. My dad would probably flip out if he read what I wrote about him–but he has said numerous times that he was terrified to have to discharge his weapon on the prisoners he was escorting to the brig. (who were fellow Marines)