It was a grim bunch down by the loading dock. It had been a Monday morning, traditionally a hard day for people who work, and different even for mostly retired professionals like the ones who smoked down in the remaining area it is permitted on Refuge Farm. We sorted through the emergencies confronting us and were hard pressed to find one that we could actually do something about without amending the Constitution. We decided to start with an easy one, which is the Federal Government’s intent to reduce the “gun crisis” in progress in America’s cities.
Picking out the correct crisis these days is a challenge, since they all seem to be curiously linked. There is a gun crisis, of sorts, as there is a Climate crisis, and the scourge of systemic racism. Not to mention our reliable Pandemic crisis. And they all seem to have a curious sort of relationship. Governor Newsom, under recall in California, has identified the fact that unvaccinated citizens are more akin to drunk drivers than people concerned with an emergency medical procedure.
We agree that unifying two distinctly different sorts of emergencies is a nice touch. We are considering comparing the illegals coming across the open southern border with impaired drivers who have taken a distinctly wrong turn. Footnote Insert: We are all vaccinated at the Loading Dock. One of the Interns went around and pricked the slow-moving members of the Writer’s Section. The Chairman had also announced that no one could use a company vehicle to get to Belmont Farms Distillery without vaccination. There was little opposition once that was clear.
The Gun Crisis debate slipped by quickly. We all agreed that the overwhelming number of shootings seemed to be between urban gangs or the leakage of gunfire from the same conflicts. It is a curious inversion of the Constitutional right to organize militias to fight Kings that might pop up. Instead, the Crips and Bloods and Zetas seem to have organized themselves into well-organized militia groups. The problem is that they seem to be organized against us. It is hard to figure out, since the thrust of Government action doesn’t appear to be about the gangs, but rather to impose added scrutiny to registered gun dealers who are already following the law, and to follow legal purchasers who are seeking to protect themselves from the gangs who are doing the shootings.
DeMille has a paper with almost 50 footnotes and citations from learned people demonstrating that the crisis is real but it isn’t about what they say it is. That appears to be standard operating procedure these days in a nation under constantly shifting emergency rule.
But we are in compliance with all new instructions we are aware of. The Chairman sent a strongly worded memorandum to the Compliance Department about looking extra hard. They reportedly looked all over the farm and failed to find any domestic terrorists. Or gang members, except some potential hotheads in Human Resources. On the plus side, we are all vaccinated. We have noted no dissatisfaction with “temporary” inflation that may have something to do with the two or three trillion already spent by the Government to rescue us from the Government. The next $4.5 Trillion dollar rescue plan has been announced with the specific intent to rescue us from the rescue plan.
That turned into a vigorous discussion about this particular crisis brand. In the old days, it sometimes took a decade of erroneous Federal policy to make everyone miserable. Even the Milennials appear to remember the last housing bubble in 2008. That was the one caused when the government decided that equity of outcome was what the Framers had actually intended, not equality of opportunity. It only took deletion of a few letters. Back when the century was new, they forced the banks to loan vast amounts of money to people who had no intention or capability of repaying it.
“It was about “fairness,” said Splash. “I lost a hundred grand on a place I owned in one morning, according to the paper. It took me years to get square, but it was fair.” “Poet and you don’t know it,” growled Loma. “You know the crisis legislation is equal to an entire year of all Federal spending. Made out of nothing except paper and ink.” Someone said: “Computer digits don’t need ink” and that was where the genius of the new plan was. Plus, the expansion of broadband service to the hinterlands under the Human Infrastructure Plan could enable us to stream more Netflix features without that crisis of irritating buffering.
We agreed to accept a Government plan that seems pre-destined to wind up with Weimar Republic cartloads of cash to purchase a single loaf of bread. Loma summed it up nicely after he lit up a Lucky. “We are all going to be millionaires,” he muttered. “It just isn’t going to be worth a sandwich, though.”
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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