You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
I’m still trying to figure out why my little city’s police department needs a $240,000 armored truck, courtesy of Homeland Security.
A better use? Sell it to buy hay for the mounted patrol’s horses.
I can personally attest the horses blocked a speeding car that was about to hit me as I stepped out in a crosswalk. Let’s see that armored truck do that!
Some folks in Washington are all too happy to approve $240,000 grants to buy armored trucks for little ‘burgs like Dover – while trying to derail health care for all Americans as too expensive.
Huh? These things add up … quickly.
Why does Dover need a BearCat when the Seacoast Emergency Response Team already has one parked just down the road?
And when was the last time it was really needed?
I’m beginning to think the vote was a result of this long, weird winter we’ve had. Not that the truck would do any good with a plow attachment.
Homeland Security’s grant of $240,000 to my placid city of 30,000 to purchase an armored truck for the police department illustrates one thing:
Those folks in Congress who keep harping on government spending aren’t reticent when it comes for doling out the big bucks for items that do little or nothing for the common American.
Since Dover is an unlikely spot for terrorists to attack, could we use some of that money to pay off student loans? For starters?
You know, the $240,000 grant to buy our police department an armored truck would go much further in local classrooms.
I know of a local public charter high school that could really use it, with plenty to spare, just to approach the per-student spending of the neighboring high schools. Not that they don’t need that kind of infusion, either.
It’s a common urban street scene, abetted by sympathetic, feed-bearing humans. This one was outside historic Faneuil Hall in Boston.
Homeland Security’s grant of $240,000 to my placid city of 30,000 to purchase an armored truck for the police department has me concluding:
Anyone who thinks this is fighting international terrorism has a lot of explaining to do. This place is the epitome of calm vanilla, even with all the college students and nightlife.
Until I hear otherwise, the conclusion continues: if those officials see this town as a hotbed of terror, it’s time to abolish the Department of Homeland Security. Even if it means starting over.
I’m waiting to hear from the right-wing of the political isle on the latest local issue of government waste. Yes, I know this one adds nothing to the city’s property tax bill, but it still comes out of our pockets.
I’m referring to last Wednesday night’s City Council vote on a $240,000 Homeland Security grant to purchase an armored truck for the police department.
That’s for a relatively quiet city of 30,000 residents.
It’s not the kind of place we have riots, much less terrorists.
Well, there’s some talk of using it in domestic-violence disputes, but honestly, I don’t see how a truck of any size is going to fit in a bedroom to calm things.
As for drug raids?
What do those have to do with fighting terrorism, anyway?
No matter how you slice it, this is government waste – from a federal agency that obviously has way too much money on its hands. Money approved by a Tea Party Congress.
I’ve previously posted on my distaste for art that cloyingly celebrates artists as geniuses. Too often, I simply find these to be self-pandering and incestuous, even before we get into the reality that many great artists are seriously defective humans, at least in their interpersonal relationships.
But I’ve found myself swept up in two music-related video encounters that prove the exception to the rule.
The first is Amazon’s 10-episode sweep of Mozart in the Jungle, which despite my initial misgivings of the heavy sex-and-drugs emphasis, moved on into an often surreal criticism of the classical music industry as well as a fantasy of its artistic and life-enhancing possibilities. Equally impressive, its increasingly engaging characters are refreshingly cast warts and all – knocking ’em off their pedestals despite their sycophant handlers. I’m anticipating a second season.
Likewise is Dustin Hoffman’s top-flight directorial debut, the 2012 movie Quartet, set in a retirement home for musicians on a lavish British country estate that is in financial peril. Here, the real drama pivots on issues of aging and relationships sustained or damaged over the decades more than the concert hall or opera house itself. Success, as we see, often comes at a high personal cost.
What I love about both entries is the way the stories can be extended to universal experience rather than setting the musicians apart as an Olympian class. Indeed, the charismatic young conductor of Mozart, Rodrigo, moves repeated to take music to the streets and working-class neighborhoods – his people and roots – with magical turns in the idiosyncratically constructed story.
Here’s to people, then, as they are, no matter their field. And to the down-to-earth insights and discoveries we share along the way.
One set of my poems of return, discovery, and loss is centered on the Leonard Springs which were hidden a half-dozen miles from the university I attended in my first sustained leap from my native Ohio.
On my return, we lived at the edge of town rather than on campus, and the springs were in a ravine just over the edge of our view from the kitchen. Few knew of their existence. Now, as I find online, they’re a public park and treasure.
~*~
Much of southern Indiana sits atop a thick limestone bed, some of it quarried for the construction of large-scale buildings worldwide. Over the ages, the bedrock has been riddled as slightly acidic water chiseled passageways and cave systems below the ground surface. Learn to read the landscape with this awareness and you come to recognize the widespread karst features, including sinkholes where cavern roofs have collapsed – some could easily hide a large truck or even a barn. There are also the sinking streams that vanish back into the earth as well as open mouths concealed in fields and forests that would swallow an unwary trespasser. So this hardness is laced with underground mystery and motion.
I already possessed some familiarity with this terrain from childhood camping and hiking trips, and had even crawled through some small caves in nearby state parks. Commercial caverns had also instilled an awareness of the otherworldly character of underground chambers and passageways. But this time, as I now lived off-campus on Leonard Springs Road, far to the other side of town, I was newly married and free to explore. After residing and laboring in the foothills of Upstate New York, the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the flats of what had once been the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, I had come back to Bloomington as a research associate. This sojourn would be all too short – a little more than a year and a half, though not by design – but long enough to acquaint me with the hardscrabble backcountry and its peculiar character.
Our garden sat in one sinkhole, and our waste water probably flowed into another (there’s no accounting for our landlord’s septic system). While I’m not a caver (as many spelunkers prefer to be called), I did become intrigued by the meandering channels beneath the meadows and woodlands beyond our house. From what Roger Pfingston writes more recently of his neighborhood on Stouts Creek, a similar locale a few miles to the north, I can suspect that much of the Leonard Springs terrain has since been ripped up and developed into housing.
What I leave, then, are field notes of the layering I experienced then, and a testimony. The poems in Green Repose present these. For your own copy, click here.
Jnana's Red Barn 