A professional baseball player goes up to the plate. A hulking six foot man goes up on a little mound and hurls a stitched horsehide sphere at him, ideally around ninety miles an hour, hoping to throw it past him three times, or, failing that, coming close enough to his head that he forfeits the next two. If the baseball guy swings his hitty-stick at the ball and smacks it into the field in a place where nobody can catch it three out of every ten times, that man will soon be a millionaire if he isn’t one before swinging the hitty stick for the first time.
As a public school teacher it was my job to teach kids how to read and write. It is a lot harder thing to do when you consider how teachers are expected to do that job. You are in a classroom of up to thirty kids, no more than ten per cent of whom are self-starting and self-maintaining. The rest are problem-filled haters of reading and wordless when it comes to writing. You have to lead them into the land of joyous literacy. And when you step up to that plate, if you are getting a hit only three times in every ten at-bats (as measured by beloved state tests that are inherently biased in a multitude of ways) you will lose that lovely teaching job. You are expected to hit 8 out of 10 or higher. And that is just to keep your job year to year even though you make less money per year than a city garbage man. No chance you will ever be a millionaire. And they don’t even let you use a hitty stick to do your job.
But I promised you this rant was about farming and farmers.
My roots are in the farmlands of Iowa. I am the result of the union of the Beyer family farm and the Aldrich family farm. I know what farming is all about. And we do the job of feeding the nation, and possibly the world. But it is not an easy job. You gamble each year that you will be able to produce corn and soybeans and possibly beef or pork, and when the harvest comes, you have to hope you can sell it for more than it cost to produce it. Tornadoes, hail, floods, and droughts get more than their fair say in the outcome.
So, why isn’t what the farmer does worth more?
The answer is simple. People with money and power are the ones who control who makes money and who doesn’t. Through speculation and commodity trading they control the price of corn and beans, and they control who makes the profit.
We do the majority of the work and take the majority of the risk. We don’t get the majority of the rewards. Other people than farmers decide who does, and only rarely do they decide those matters fairly. But thus the world is. Or rather, thus we have let it become.
The Darkest of the Coming Darkness
Egghead might be slightly batty.
I do not claim to be prescient. But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens. Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie. Sometimes eerier. After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.
One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics. I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie. Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.
This is what the great orange rooster looks like in black and white.
The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed. Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.
Senator Ted Cruz grinning about taking away Obamacare
And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.
So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.
What people like me will look like in the future. That’s me in the middle.
I won’t live to see it. My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu. I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me. There is a family history of heart disease. And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for. (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)
What a lovely oxygen-free environment we will have!
As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls. Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.
Kiss me, Baby!
Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first. The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.
You’ve never had a friend like me. And I can always eat you later if need be.
So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog. The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them. Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon. Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand. Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.
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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, horror movie, humor, monsters