Cleaning Up

So the sound of hail bouncing off the steel roof woke me up. I looked at the clock – 10:30. I’d been asleep for 30 minutes.


The hail was replaced by a driving rain. At 10:45 the power went out, but because of the constant lightning, it was brighter than most of the afternoons we had this spring.

The wind roared, and the trees whipped around wildly, contorting like acrobats performing in a Cirque du Soleil tribute to nuclear fission. I worried that one of the big lodgepole pines might snap and come crashing down on the house.

After a while the storm calmed, and I went back to sleep. There were 2 more gales that blew through during the night like herds of stampeding buffalos. At one point, the rain poured down in sheets so heavy that I couldn’t see the trees beyond about 50 feet.

When I got up, it’d turned into a beautiful morning. The sun was shining and the birds were chirping. And there were limbs and debris everywhere.

I made some coffee, had breakfast, and read my e-mail. It was obvious that I didn’t want to go outside and survey the damage.

Eventually, I ran out of excuses, so I got up to check on the condition of the property. Maybe because I’d braced myself for the worst, it didn’t seem so bad. Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of trees down, the porch furniture was halfway to Dillon, and the whole place looked like a mess. It was time to start cleaning things up.

That got me to thinking.

There are a lot of messes in this country that need to be cleaned up. Take fer instance, the oil spill in the Gulf. President Obama should be all over that like Al Gore on a Portland massage therapist. Instead, he’s purposely letting it get worse to put pressure on Republicans to vote for his cap-and-trade and energy bills.

Since the day he got in office, the President promised that he would focus on creating new jobs. So far, he’s hired a bunch of census workers who get paid for not showing up and thrown billions of dollars at temporary road construction jobs. Now we have out-of-control spending, massive debt, 14.6 million folks unemployed, and the President wants to shut down drilling in the Gulf, putting millions more out of work.

The economy’s in the toilet, and Obama wants to pass a finance reform bill that will limit the ability of banks to provide lower rate loans to home buyers and business. Illegal immigration is rampant, and the President refuses to do anything to secure our borders until he gets his immigration reform passed, creating an easy path to citizenship for 11 million potential new Democrat voters.

The other day, Vice President Joe Biden walked into a Wisconsin custard shop, with cameras in tow, to show everybody that he’s a man of the people. He received a cone of frozen custard with what looked like some kind of chocolate topping. When he asked the store owner how much he owed, he was told it was on the house. Then the owner joked that if Biden lowered taxes, he’d “call it even.”

Biden replied angrily, “Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time?”

First of all, they’d never met before, so how does Joe know if the guy’s a smartass “all the time.” Secondly, the VP just got a free frozen custard. He should appreciate it, rather than chewing the feller out for making a legitimate request, especially since it was made jokingly.

But that’s the attitude of this government. They want us to give and then give some more. And we’d better not complain or make any noise, because if we do, they’ll smack us down.

They forget that they work for us. There’re a lot of messes that we want cleaned up, and we don’t see the government doing anything about them. The politicians don’t care about fixing problems. They see those problems as opportunities to increase their political power.

It’s no wonder that Larry King called it quits and decided to return to his home planet.

As far as the mess in my backyard goes, I’m going to take the chainsaw and deal with it one branch at a time. Before you know it, I’ll have a nice stack of firewood.

I don’t know, I guess I think too hard about these things.

Copyright 2010