The first frost is due Tuesday night. I’ve heard there could be snow or freezing rain. That’s Halloween, so everyone is hoping it holds off until the kids are home from their candy raids. Of course, a dusting of snow would be alright but freezing rain would be awful. I remember many years ago when my children were still small and I walked them through the sidewalks of the small town common where we lived at the time when a freezing rain began. Their plastic pumpkin candy containers filled up with rain and ruined their treats. But worse still they were frozen to the bone by the time we walked home. Truly a miserable end to an exciting night for the young.
I had the family over today for a kid’s birthday party. Amazing. Remarkable how much good will and high spirits can be created with some pasta and meat sauce. Well, there was ice cream cake too. I guess that could be an extenuating circumstance. I also learned that a pool table will turn into a Nok Hockey table if you allow for the inventiveness of small children. Instead of a pool cue they use billiard balls as paddles to shoot the other balls back and forth at each other. Of course, it was probably a little dangerous. Some small hands might have been pinched while they played and more than a few times the balls came flying off the table and bounced and banged their way across the room. But they had a good time. Later on, we had a couple of normal games with the older kids and I tried to teach Princess Sack of Potatoes how to use the cue to make a shot but let’s just say that her way of clearing the table seemed to make her happier. So, all good stuff.
And we found an old book of “Scary Stories” that I had read to my kids all those years ago. And I heard about how scary my delivery had been. And some approved of those convincing dramatics and some had been too afraid. And I remembered the occasion so many years ago and it surprised me that they still remembered the details. And so, I offered the book to the children’s mothers and told them to use their own judgement as to when the children were old enough for the story of “The Big Toe.”
So, kids are still kids. Even with all the nonsense that’s been introduced to ruin them. They still enjoy being scared by a ghost story and misusing their parents’ toys and all the same things that we did. You can still enjoy being a parent and grandparent and a kid. It’s just a lot more expensive. But that’s nothing new.
But something has changed in the last fifty years. Our government doesn’t want any more kids. At least not ones whose parents were born here. Nobody is planning for them to have jobs and lives and eventually kids of their own. Slowly but surely. Methodically and cold-bloodedly, they’ve strangled off the world that produced all that living. All the jobs that were located in factories and plants that produced everything from shoes to phones to washing machines no longer exist. Or rather they exist in China, Thailand and Malaysia. Our kids and grandkids are out of luck. They’re not needed. They’re not even needed as engineers, architects, managers or accountants. Even those things have been outsourced. The message is we’re not needed and we’re not wanted. There’s no room for us and certainly not for any of our kids.
And yet the American people haven’t said no. Well, some of them have said no. But there hasn’t been an upswelling of anger at seeing their country chloroformed. I find this remarkable. Are we that blind? Are we that stupid? I guess we are. What seems obvious to me is that unless this changes very soon there won’t be much left. Just the managerial elite and their servants. And I’m sure they’ll keep squeezing even that fraction down to a minimum.
So human capital is no longer the thing. Well, we’ve been told over and over again that “our democracy” is a precious thing. If the powers that be aren’t careful, they may find out what raw democracy means when it goes looking for the hand that shut off the work that used to keep it busy. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.