Too pooped to scoop after the election?
Blame it on climate change. No, not the seemingly hundreds of hundred-degree days we’ve been sweating through. The change I’m talking about heats things up in a different way, making our political climate increasingly extreme.
Like El Nino sweeping in through a hole in the ozone layer, the war of MAGAts vs. Commies has created an atmosphere in which we mere humans, particularly those addicted to antisocial media, find silver linings so obscured as to never shine through ever darker clouds of sloganeering.
That’s not so for the purring furball that tolerates my visiting his house nightly (provided I keep food and water bowls filled, allow plenty of furniture clawing, and subject my moving hands and feet to random attacks worthy of the Iran war).
Feline friend Zenger has found a dazzling silver lining inside the dense clouds of election campaigning. All those slick cards anonymous billionaires mail out every two or three hours, supposedly without candidates’ permission, finally have developed a much more practical purpose: They’re perfectly sized and just stiff enough to be used to scoop out litter now that they no longer litter our mailboxes with stuff they try to scoop onto unsuspecting voters.
Shoveling fecal matter into trash bags seems a lot more fulfilling than trying to determine what small fraction of what the cards say is actually true. The shame is how much anonymous powerbrokers are paying for these and the every-five-minutes commercials that wear out fast-forward buttons on our TV remotes.
Instead of making promises that never will be fulfilled, perhaps politicos could take just a small portion of the fortune spent on campaign ads and actually do something — like fill a few potholes, patch a few sidewalks, plant a few trees, or maybe create decent driveways for homes at the county lake.
What’s more dire — the state of bickering in Washington and Topeka or the state of pavement on Remington and 290th? Imagine how much just a few pennies out of every ad buy could accomplish if only the people who pay for them were willing to pay to make society better instead of trying to better themselves over others who want to run it.
Like blind squirrels occasionally finding a nut, county commissioners have done the right thing by at least going through the motions of thinking about a comprehensive plan, as required by law, before trying to weaponize zoning against businesses they don’t want.
Alas, the light that went on in a meeting chamber a block south of Main did not shine into a meeting chamber a block north of Main. There, despite unanimous opposition from the city’s experts on planning and zoning, city council members voted to adopt what most assuredly will be an unnecessary, overly vague ban on competition for St. Luke Hospital.
Too many politicians seem to believe their electoral mandates allow them to rule out the rule of law and rule in the rule of loopholes, making bespoke judgments on the fly in ways that often favor personal biases. Instead of signs warning that our area is zoned, perhaps we should be posting signs saying anything goes with a conditional-use permit.
Part of the reason for the intractable MAGAt vs. Commies war is that both sides believe that, when in power, their power is absolute. Tuesday’s election will do little to quell the battle unless those of us whose votes politicians depend upon insist on all views being respected and considered, never simply dismissed with glib slogans.
We may not have had much to say about that in the primary, but we sure will come the general election this November.
— ERIC MEYER