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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
The sky is falling.
The state’s bridges, roads, airports, train tracks, and about everything else are in dreadful shape, according to the report I was deciphering the other day.
Al Gore says the earth is just seconds away from a global meltdown. I think Al invented the Internet just so he could spread the bad news about global warming.
Thousands of children have millions of guns pointed at their heads while they are riding their bicycles without helmets and simultaneously getting fat, according to two scholarly reviews. I’m still working on how kids can get fat whilst riding a bike.
Terrorists are everywhere, with all kinds of nasty weapons, and they are planning on doing dreadful things with those weapons. Of course, no one actually wants to do what is necessary to destroy the terrorists, since that might get someone hurt.
The president is conspiring with aliens and OPEC and oil barons to drive prices up; then he artificially reduced them prior to the fall elections.
I shouldn’t eat the eggs from my chickens because they haven’t been irradiated or homogenized or sprayed down with chemicals. Store-bought eggs, however, have been irradiated and sprayed. Of course, eggs are bad for you anyway. My chickens try to tell me that every day.
Even spinach has turned out to be unhealthy.
Give me a break.
Although I’m sure the term has long since fallen out of usage, I am reminded more and more of a word from my childhood – sissy.
The monicker implied that one was a spineless, sniveling coward too afraid to cross the railroad tracks, much less climb a tree, swim in the river, ride a bike pell-mell down the long hill with the stop sign at the bottom, or explore a haunted house. To be a sissy meant one expected to be taken care of, preferably by one’s mommy, even if one wasn’t really sick and had no honestly earned broken bones.
Nobody wanted to be a sissy.
Shoot, even the girls didn’t want to be sissified, at least not when they were young. Later, when they got old enough to be interesting, they realized they wanted to be ladylike. There’s a difference between ladylike and sissified.
Our nation, it seems, has become sissified. I cringe when I hear someone whining on the news about how “something should be done” about one thing or another.
Well, if something should be done, I say, then do it.
But in the meantime, don’t try to conjure a black cloud over my day simply because you lack the red blood cells to realize there are a whole lot of things in this world that more than make up for the problems.
I call them simple things.
Things like the father and son I saw in a diner the other day, enjoying a day whose schedule was determined by the little fellow. Several of the things the tyke had planned were not only considered dangerous and politically incorrect by modern standards, but they sounded like fun. Kids know how to have fun, and they know sissies want to keep other folks from enjoying themselves.
But speaking of kids, there is nothing to compare to the simplicity of a child’s faith, or hearing a child lead a group in saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
There are simple things like a rooster’s challenge to the first break of dawn, his recognition that a new day has begun. Things like an old dog finding a sunny spot to warm his aching bones, and not minding when a cat decides to share his sunspot for a few minutes.
A lot of simple things are the result of complex plans and preparations.
High school football games, and church homecomings, family reunions and revivals – all are simple pleasures, but they require a thousand and one tasks to be made right. Of course, all four of those things are bad for you, either because of the physical contact, food, or practice of Christianity, but I for one am not a sissy, and intend to enjoy all those simple activities as often as possible.
There is a beautiful simplicity in a pretty girl who doesn’t realize that she is the final element in creating the perfect combination of light and color and movement.
There are few things as wonderfully simple as a handful of cane poles, a coffee can of worms, a lazy afternoon, and the bank of a pond. The only way to improve on that is to add a small child catching the first fish of a long career as an angler.
When old trucks run right, there is a noisy but stolid simplicity to be enjoyed in an old truck rattling down a dirt road, whether or not it has a particular destination.
So if you want to go worrying about the sky falling, be my guest. I don’t have time for the gloom and doom promoted by unhappy people who want everyone to be as miserable as they are.
There’s just too much simple stuff out there to enjoy to waste time by being a sissy.
Weaver is a staff writer at the News Reporter. He may be reached via telephone at 642-4104, ext. 227, or via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.
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