Everything in the Dallas-Fort-Worth area is shut down today by ice and the threat of ice. Texans don’t like to drive on ice. You can’t drive friendly… and fast… on ice. And Texans don’t like to be cold. 100 straight days of 100-plus heat is okay for Texans. Three days of freezing weather is the end of the world.
A year ago the world was frozen like this in DFW. The electric grid failed and people froze to death. Emperor Greg Abbott blamed the windmills because they froze and stopped turning. But in Iowa they go through the same thing every year and the windmills are properly winterized. Only the really stupid people and the spectacularly unlucky people freeze to death in Iowa. Mostly when they are stuck on the highway. Some froze to death in their bedrooms in Texas. But in Texas the real problem was the natural gas lines freezing and breaking down. Those can be properly winterized too. But Emperor Abbott doesn’t know that… or doesn’t want to know that. He still hasn’t winterized anything… or forced corporations to spend money to do so.
My wife’s religion actually makes her hope that Armageddon will come soon. They think the end of the world is the only way to get to paradise. Now that Russia is invading the Ukraine, Armageddon may be about to happen. All that Gog and Magog crap has been going on throughout the twentieth century. So far we’ve managed to avoid it actually happening, by war, by nuclear war, by nuclear winter. We have been feeling that the world is in danger of ending since long before I was born in the middle of the 20th century. The Bible says the 1st Century Christians would still be alive when the Day of Judgement would come.
They were wrong about that. Maybe they are still wrong now.
If the world is not going to end in fire and ice in the next week or two, we have to realize that things need to change. We can’t be frozen in place. In politics it is basically a matter of choosing to be progressive and not be stuck in the ice of being conservative. We need to change, not stay the same. We need to determine that world maps change by diplomacy and compromise, not by combat and killing civilians. And we need to convince Russia of that. We also need to change the way we treat the environment and the economy. We need to invest in technology and changes to the consumption of practically every product. Production needs to occur without polluting. We need to spend more, a lot more, on clean energy like solar power, wind power, thermal energy from the under-earth, and we need to stop spending so much of our capital on tax breaks for billionaires and corporations. And we need to convince millionaires, billionaires, and corporate executives of that.
We could even change schools to give Louisa her wish and create naturist classrooms in school, letting kids learn in natural environments, and having the school uniform be nakedness. And we would have to convince parents and teachers of that… Of course, that last one is a joke, and even Louisa might not really want that. Especially since it is really, really cold today.
But if you were serious about changing education to provide nude classrooms or even nude schools, you would have to change it slowly. You would start small. Kindergarten and first grade would go first, and only with kids who would actually choose to be nude in school (probably a lot more of them than parents think would choose that.) Then you would move them up a grade every year until you reached high school. Of course, you would have to be flexible. Some students would not thrive and have to be moved to textile classrooms. And nude classrooms would have to be expandable as textile students begin to see the changes in their nude friends and want to be transferred into the experiment.
Of course, I know that joke idea is still just a joke and always will be. But the point is, the Diplomacy/War question and the Save the Planet/Profits over People question would have to be answered the same way. The younger ones make the actual changes and the gas-and-oil, pro-war dinosaurs would be responsible for going extinct themselves or taking everybody else with them.
So, I am basically confined to my bedroom today with considerable arthritis pain and trapped in the middle of a frozen world. And as I have nothing better to do than solve all the world’s problems today, even Louisa’s… I am still faced with the fact that solving these problems involves changing people’s minds. Especially conservative minds who will likely have a gun and want to kill me if I try to change their minds. So, there it is, a simply-stated theme… and now I need to look at bullet-proof vests on Amazon.
Catch a Falling Star 
Cranky Old Coots Complain and Don’t Care
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epicly bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” a lot, especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot never-the-less.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, grumpiness, gun control, humor, Liberal ideas, oldies, Paffooney, teaching
Tagged as coots, gun control and coots, obnoxious coots, old coots