My Thoughts, Exactly:

Here I go again, wondering about various things that affect our daily lives on both a micro and macro scale. So without further ado, I hereby submit the following musings of an easily distracted mind:

I wonder why we are told that recycling is a great thing to do and we should use three large trash cans to separate out regular trash, recyclables and yard waste. This results in three diesel-guzzling, exhaust belching Allied Waste behemoths rumbling through our neighborhood each trash day. How much extra fuel is burned by having three trucks on every street, every trash day, every week? Maybe they invest in big time carbon offsets.

Sure they do.

I wonder how Barack Obama’s white, Kansas-born mother (who passed away in 1995) felt about her son always being identified as “black” or African American. At what point did our society decide which genes trump others? And isn’t giving preference to a person’s minority blood a purely racist idea at its core? Will we ever be a truly color-blind society? Not this way.

I wonder why there was story after story in the media about this year’s annual National Day of Silence to protest what we are told is the rampant harassment of gay, lesbian and transgendered students. Curiously, you would have been hard pressed to find any mention at all of the National Day of Prayer less than one week later (and observed since 1952) when millions of Americans took the time to ask God’s forgiveness, guidance and blessings on our country. Oh, and in spite of official school pronouncements that the National Day of Silence was not endorsed by the Glendale Unified School District, I heard from many CV students that each one of their teachers used valuable class time that day to stress the importance of the event. Of course, not a single teacher said anything about the National Day of Prayer.

Thankfully, our educators and rabidly unbiased media have an opportunity to redeem themselves next year. I’d like to request the same passionate support and blanket coverage of the annual “Meet Me At The Flag Pole” student prayer gathering at all our local middle and high schools. Yeah, right.

I wonder if anybody but me has noticed that the term “global warming” is quietly being revised to “global climate change” due to the growing amount of contradictory scientific evidence, not to mention the recent record-setting winter temperatures and snowfall in many regions of the world, and thickening ice packs in some areas of the Southern hemisphere. Yes, they were skiing in Aspen this past Father’s Day weekend for the first time thanks to an early summer snowstorm.

I recently heard one media-anointed expert explain that we should expect significant cooling as part of the overall warming trend. Say, what? Then again, aren’t these climatologists the same ones who get next week’s or even tomorrow’s weather dead wrong time and time again? Yet we’re all supposed to radically and expensively change the way we live and work based on their predictions of what will happen 50 to 100 years from now. Seriously?

I wonder if nearly $5-a-gallon gas is supposed to radically change our driving habits, why were so many of the hundreds of bus-sized motorhomes I passed on Hwy 395 over the recent holiday weekend even towing SUVs behind them?

I wonder if the folks in the long lines at the UA theaters in Montrose, or at the Paseo or the Exchange know that our economy is supposed to be circling the drain with most Americans barely scraping by. I mean, how does a movie like Pixar’s “Wall-E” open to nearly $65 million in ticket sales in just one weekend? Holy hardship, Batman! I seem to remember that when my parents were “pinching pennies,” it meant flattening and folding aluminum foil to reuse a few more times before throwing away. Somehow, I don’t recall $13 movie tickets being an option during those lean times.

JIM CHASEis life long Crescenta Valley resident. He can be reached at jim@ wordchaser.com.