There was an item on the long ballot I received here in Colorado that offered to voters the unique idea that sports teams in our schools should be populated as follows: Men’s teams are limited to those who are born with penises, female teams to those born with vaginas. Coed teams can have both.
I don’t know why we have to vote on this stuff other than to push back on an agenda being pushed from above. I suppose some district judge will quash the results. In case you don’t know, the courts are not the friends of regular people. They too are governed from above.
If I wanted to know how I should vote in various issues, I would not take a poll of people I know. I am 76 now, and it has taken me a lifetime to understand that I have only myself to credit or blame for all the good and bad of my life. I do not trust the wisdom of ordinary people and see much of what is going on around me as Mackay’s madness of crowds. Most of it is brought about by persuasion techniques researched and brought forth by the public relations industry, aka, propaganda.
So I learned long ago, maybe after the Reagan presidency, to turn off TV and radio news. But I still read (past tense) newspapers. I did not have a good reason for totally shutting them out, but you might find this story amusing:
When paper newspapers were still a thing, every morning a pickup truck would drive through our neighborhood and a guy would toss the Denver Post at the foot of our driveway. We had cancelled that subscription, but still, the truck went around, and for non-subscribers we were still given the Sunday ads, probably three times the size of the actual newspaper. Then we had a snowstorm. I, like many of our neighbors, am self-reliant and plow my own driveway, 330 feet (there’s that number!), using a two-stage snow thrower that has inside a turbine the spins at high speed. When I hit the bottom I sucked up the snow-covered ads and it completely clogged up the works. It took perhaps an hour to remove all that paper from the machine. I had to disassemble and reassemble it before I could complete my work.
Furious, I called the Post. This was in a time past when businesses often answered phone calls using human beings. A woman answered, and I complained bitterly: “What on Earth made you think we were not getting enough advertising?”
It never happened again. We no longer have a Denver Post, at least the one tossed out of pickup trucks. It is all digital now, paper versions only sold in grocery stores. I do buy it a couple of times a year, as I learned many years ago that newsprint is the best thing to use when washing windows.
How do I stay informed? I don’t. I can’t! I read constantly, but am always weighing the value of sources. I know newspapers, television, radio, and almost all of the Internet, are minefields. There are nooks and crannies, people who know more than me about things going on, and that information still gets placed in front of my eyes. At any given time, I am on a precipice and teetering. Life does not offer certainty.
We have only ourselves and our own brains. The best teacher around is, and always will be, our mistakes. Good Lord have I learned a lot over the years!
