Some Sunny Day

 The Gods of War are walking the Earth.

The bravery of the Ukrainian people, juxtaposed against the cruelty of the Russian would-be Empire, is historic in its scope and depth, resonant with emotion, dynamically awful.

I may have beefs with my local government, we have our differences, but I would never call it tyranny. Not compared to what we see happening in older parts of the civilized world right now.

I'm a Gen-Xer. We were raised on all of the things that existed before everything we have today. We didn't have e-mail; we had paper and pens and envelopes and stamps. Our parents drove us around in station wagons, not "crossovers" or SUVs. We didn't have a remote control... We WERE the remote control.

The telephone was attached to the wall. Reading material was generally printed. We weren't allowed to use calculators in school because that was considered cheating. There was no Google - some families had an encyclopaedia at home, and beyond that, we had to deal with the Dewey Decimal System and the stupid Index Card Catalog at the library. 

We adapted to all these changes, just as our forebears adapted from the slide rule to the computer. But one thing remained the same:

The threat of global thermonuclear war.

Having lost her young son in 2015, my sister has infrequently suggested that Charlie must have died in order to be spared some other horrific event... It's kind of hard to argue with that right now, with Russia's nuclear forces on high alert, their ICBMs aimed principally at us.

My dad, also a Charlie, is a retired geography professor, and he served in the Air Force way back when, as an officer. He has a pretty good understanding of which cities in America will be important targets to the enemy in the event of a nuclear exchange.

Kalamazoo is an unassuming rail and freeway hub connecting millions of people between major cities like Chicago, Detroit and Grand Rapids. Strike One.

We have an airport, a university (with a medical school no less) and two hospitals that serve the whole region. Strike Two.

And we have Pfizer, where the Covid-19 vaccine is produced, along with other drugs that enhance the quality of American life, such as Rogaine and Viagra. Strike Three.

In short: Kalamazoo's not gonna make it. The Russians probably have six, eight nukes with our general ZIP code on them (49oo1), maybe more. If the Gods of War decree it, none of us stand a chance.

Historically speaking, with the sand potentially running out of the hourglass, many bad people have sought to atone for their wrongs. They tried to get it off their consciences before the bitter end.

Not here. It's easier for them (and now, for us all) to stick our heads in the sand... As if that would save any of us from being flash-fried like toner on a piece of paper stuck in a copy machine.

pH 2.28.22

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On Potholes and Autopsies

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is running for re-election this year in a contest that may as well be called "Snow White vs. The Seven Dwarfs". Her victory is as predictable as the potholes that reveal themselves each year when the winter ice sheet recedes.

While Whitmer's first term was considerably derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, she ran in 2018 on a rather simple message, meant to appeal to everyone: "Fix the Damn Roads." She might as well run on that platform again, since the roads have most certainly not been fixed, at least not where I live.

While Kalamazoo itself is a joke, as cities go, poor road conditions in general are not. In India, for example, potholes are responsible for the deaths of 10 people per day. Michigan's motorists are more likely to pay with their savings accounts than with their lives, as their car suspension parts snap and buckle under the strain of unnecessary roughness.

So we don't invest in the roads here. Call it the Other Kalamazoo Promise: You will be replacing your tires, rims, shocks, struts, springs, ball joints, tie rod ends, wheel bearings and other parts on your vehicle on a regular basis if you choose to live or work here.

Is it somehow super-expensive to patch potholes? No... About $40 or $50 for the patching material, plus a couple of guys and a truck. Repaving the roads would be a much better solution, of course, and that costs anywhere between $300,000 and $900,000 per mile, depending on width and other physical factors.

So why wouldn't the city and the county want to invest in our infrastructure, even if the State government won't keep its word to do so? I guess we have other things to spend our money on around here. Lord knows we don't raise enough in taxes - if we did, we wouldn't have a bunch of billionaire patrons stocking the larder like we do (something very few, if any, other cities have ever done).

One of the projects that the wealthy have brought to our town is called WMed. If you have read this blog even a few times, you know that WMed has contracts with nearly all the counties in Southwest Michigan and beyond to perform coroner services. They perform about 1,000 autopsies each year here, at a cost of about $3,300 per corpse.

If you cheated and used a calculator, you know that comes up to about $3.3 million per year. That's enough money to patch hundreds of thousands of potholes, or to pave between 3 and 10 miles of road each year. So why are our roads so much worse than our neighboring city of Portage?

Perhaps we have other priorities here. Perhaps the county is too busy fending off lawsuits - from citizens and former employees alike - to budget its resources sensibly.

Or maybe they just don't care.

It's kind of easy for me to believe the latter, seeing the way WMed's Chief Pathologist, Joyce deJong, lied her ass off on my nephew Charlie's death certificate. Even after she changed her story, she still refused to change the document!

If I lie to my boss, I get fired. If you lie to your boss, you get fired. But the Medical Examiner in Kalamazoo gets paid whether she chooses to be honest or not and her salary alone could pave, what, another quarter- to half-mile of road. Depending on width. And other physical factors.

Nothing changes here. No matter what promises are made or who is supposed to keep them, nothing gets put right. Not the coroner, not the roads, not the parasitic clowns who live off our consent to be governed. You can think about this stuff the next time you're waiting for your car to be repaired... I tend to think about it a little more often than that.

pH 2.23.22

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