Is It Just ME ??

Is it just me??

Am I the only one?

Or do some of you out there feel it too?

I'm talking about the feeling I get when I'm sent the emails, one after another, day after day, and sometimes several in the same day. The emails telling me about how proud these people are of our Soldiers and Sailors and Marines who are serving in some faraway hell-hole, laying their lives on the line for our way of life.

I don't think you quite understand yet.

These people feel that if we don't support 100% of what our sometimes clueless leaders do, and where they send these young warriors, then we are lesser Americans, less patriotic than they. They apparently don't understand just how much I really do support our troops, including my own son who just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq a few weeks back.

But then maybe it is I who doesn't understand.

I don't understand the self-righteousness of these people, whose own sons and daughters are too busy going to college or making their first million or simply drinking beer and making babies to be a part of our fighting forces. I don't understand how they can see me as being less patriotic than they are, when it's my own son, my firstborn, flesh of my flesh, who volunteered and filled that spot in our military, so that THEIR son or daughter didn't have to "waste" a year of their life, a year apparently better spent climbing the ladder in corporate America.

Oh, I know very well that my son volunteered to join the military. And I know that my son has made a choice, the same as their son or daughter. But I don't understand why these people can't see this in the same context as the relative commitment of the chicken and the pig in their Egg McMuffin in the morning. Their situation is comparable to the chicken, who is merely involved in bringing you your breakfast, whereas the pig is committed.

So I guess it's all right, then, if these folks look upon my son--and, by extension, me--as the pigs when it comes to supporting our troops...as long as they accept that they deserve to be called the chickens that they are.

I think I've earned the right, through my son's service to our country, to resent the implication of their self-righteous "patriotism" via email...as their own sons and daughters are too busy, too important, or too valuable to corporate America to defend our nation. In my point of view, these people don't have a dog in this fight. They DO have a stake in the outcome of the war in Iraq, but only to the same extent that all Americans do. If they had a son or daughter who'd served, them I might be open to the idea that they have a right to preach patriotism to anyone else.

Now I have friends and relatives who DO have sons and daughters who are serving in the military, and who have served in Iraq. Oddly enough, they are the ones who DON'T feel the need to preach patriotism. NO, I only get those self-righteous emails from the folks whose sons and daughters are too busy to get involved in the military, and who therefore [in MY view] have the LEAST reason to preach patriotism.

Am I out of line to feel this way?

40 Years Later...Dr. King DID Make A Difference

As I write this, today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the past 40 years America has come a long way towards a society in which equality is more than just the inspiration for an "I have a dream" speech. But to understand where we are today, we need to know where we've come from.

I was born and grew up in Corydon, Indiana, and the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and I both came into this world in 1954. I entered first grade in what was then called "the Annex," but which had been the old one-room "colored school" on Summit Street. There weren't many black children in the entire county, but I didn't have a problem with being in the same classroom with them. I don't claim any points for righteousness for that fact; it's just that, up to that point, I hadn't been taught to hate anyone.

But that's not to say that there weren't any prejudices in our little town. The hill on Beechmont Drive in South Corydon, where many of the blacks in the community lived, was more commonly called "Nigger Hill." Even into the late 1970's, when the Indian Creek Convalescent Center was built at the intersection of Harrison Drive and Beechmont Drive, the name lingered; the whispered nickname of the convalescent center was NHNH, or "Nigger Hill Nursing Home." Old habits die hard, I suppose...but at least the words were being whispered, and not shouted as they might have been a couple of decades before.

I remember a story my grandfather told of Brother Hodge, a black minister who had conducted a tent revival at the local fairgrounds. The services had lasted well into the evening, and as Brother Hodge began walking home, he found himself surrounded by a number of white men, some of whom may have meant him some physical harm. "Brother Hodge," one of the whites asked him, "do you believe you're going to heaven when you die?" Brother Hodge, aware of his situation, answered, "Yessir, I do believe I'm goin' to Heaven--but I'm in no hurry!" The laughing crowd, I was told, dispersed as quickly as it had formed.

When I was growing up, there were other blacks in the community who did their part to fight racial stereotypes by simply being part of the fabric of society. They bought homes and cars and trucks, they worked respected and respectable jobs, they didn't get into trouble fighting and drinking and gambling and stealing. They didn't work at being anything but good, honest citizens...and in Corydon, they were generally allowed to do so without being singled out as being "uppity," or as not knowing their "place" in society. They bought groceries at the same two stores as the white folks, and paid the same prices as the white folks. They were simply our friends and our neighbors.

As far as relations with the black students in our school went, they were very much part of the gang. We were in Boy Scouts together, and we camped and swam and hiked and ate and joked around together. We played sports together, and they were our friends. It was the out-of-town blacks, the ones that were rioting and looting in Watts and Detroit and other distant places we knew about only from the nightly news programs, who were the "niggers." Our fellow students, we had discovered, were just like everyone else. It made no difference whether you were black or white, we all still sweated out Mr. Fluhr's algebra tests and Mrs. Elam's English class, and Mrs. Enlow's geography tests and Mr. Windell's chemistry class and Mr. Cato's government class. We were all chasing after the American Dream, and we were all trying to figure out where we fit into a world that we didn't make, but one we'd all surely inherit.

I realize now that it was probably a lot harder for our black classmates to find that spot, in a world where some folks still looked down upon you because of your race. As a kid I was too caught up in my own struggles to be accepted to give much thought to the struggles of anyone else. But I always tried to judge folks by "the content of their character," in Dr. King's words, rather judge them by the color of their skin, because I always got along better with a friendly, helpful person who just happened to be black than I ever did with someone who was consistently a jerk but who happened to be white..

Now, I wasn't any kind of a saint while I was growing up. I was a reflection of the society around me, and I occasionally said hurtful things to my friends...and that included my black friends as well as my white friends. While I'd like to go back and erase all the wrong things I've ever done, I have tried to apologize for any time my ignorance led me to heartlessness. I can't totally undo or unsay the wrongs that I've committed, but I've tried to "go and sin no more," as Jesus Christ admonished those he forgave a couple of thousand years ago.

Perhaps the blacks who grew up in my generation have a radically different point of view than mine. The 1960's and early 1970's weren't easy for any of us, and dealing with the backlash from whites who watched their nightly news and read their newspapers --and who decided that "these niggers are all the same"--couldn't have been easy. I wish now I'd have been less self-absorbed, and more attuned to their struggles. But it's simply not the nature of kids and teenagers to think of the universe as being centered anywhere away from the self, and I was no different. That doesn't absolve me of guilt; it just makes me a typical kid when I was growing up.

Dr. King didn't come to our community and march or preach. But his words were carried by the national media, and there was a ripple effect even in our small town. His admonitions about our Christian duties toward our fellowman left a mark on all but the hardest of hearts, and we began to see the blacks among us were our friends, our neighbors, and our fellow Americans, and just as deserving of a chance at the American Dream as any of us who weren't born black. Our town wasn't alone, and in similar small towns across America the same realization began to occur.

As a nation, we have come a long way. Forty years ago blacks were just beginning to come to the polls to vote, with longtime roadblocks like poll taxes and restrictive voter registration laws keeping them from exercising the right to vote. Today a black candidate is a legitimate contender for the presidency of this nation. It is a direct result of the efforts of people like Dr. King and his dream of equal opportunity. In the 1960's it was hard to imagine a black having the opportunity to attend an esteemed institution such as Harvard; on January 20, 2009 a Harvard graduate who just happens to be black may be taking the oath of the highest office in the land. If that does come to pass, I can imagine that Dr. King may be somewhere smiling, knowing that his dream has come to fruition and that perhaps the discrimination and bias of Dr. King's era will remain buried within the pages of history.

For the sake of the next generation of Americans, I sincerely hope and pray that equal opportunity continues to bear positive fruit within this great nation, and that a return to the discrimination of the past is unthinkable.

Hospital Makeover Leaves "Orphans" At Our Door

I recently watched the episode of the "Extreme Makeover" TV show in which the Design Team built a new home for a Louisville family, and the joy of seeing a deserving family move into a new home more suited to their needs warmed my heart. The special "apartment" within the new house custom-tailored for the needs of the blind and wheelchair-bound Patrick Henry Hughes was especially well done.

But what if the Design Team had intentionally not built the rooms for the other Hughes brothers--and the parents had approved the design? Wouldn't that have been unthinkable?

Effectively, that's what the administrators and designers of the new Harrison County Hospital have done. While the new hospital was sorely needed, and while it's much more suited to its purpose than the hospital's old campus, the hospital designers and administrators intentionally left out any space allocation for either the Harrison County EMS or the Harrison County Health Department...and only mentioned their omission to the County Council after the new hospital building was essentially complete.

Think about that for a moment. That move is the fiscal equivalent of leaving two "orphans" on the council's doorstep while moving the rest of the family into a new home. Historically, the health department and the hospital have always operated together. That's only logical, since the business of the hospital is related to the health of the community. And since its inception in the 1970's, Harrison County EMS and the hospital have literally and figuratively been joined at the hip. Now, suddenly [and unexpectedly, for the taxpayers of Harrison County] the hospital board has decided that providing a home for these unwanted stepchildren--for whom the taxpayers of the county must still provide a roof over their heads--isn't their responsibility. Apparently the taxpayers didn't need to know about that until after the new hospital was completed.

So now county leaders, already faced with the daunting task of finding a buyer who will take the old hospital campus off their hands [and who will put that property onto the county tax rolls], are handed the task of finding new digs for EMS and the health department, essentially at the eleventh hour. In my view, the actions of the hospital board border on duplicity. As a taxpayer, I'm outraged that the disposition of EMS and the health department "never came up" when discussions of building the new hospital were going on. So now even more tax money will need to be allocated for a new building for EMS--for which the hospital board has already "allotted" a space on their new grounds. So don't think for a minute that the hospital board didn't "plan" for this "emergency" to occur. And the net result is, the taxpayers didn't see it coming because the hospital board apparently intended the taxpayers be blindsided.

Of course, the health department doesn't have to be located at the hospital. Their function encompasses a lot more than just birth and death records, and I'm sure that office space can be found at a number of places within Corydon, the county seat, that would suffice. But had county officials been aware of the need to seek a new home for the health department from the time that the new hospital blueprints were completed, a smooth transition could have been well underway by now. Why the hospital board chose to conceal from the taxpayers their plans to "orphan" the EMS and the health department is a mystery to me.

Of course, the hospital board has informed county officials that they already have a partner lined up to share the new unplanned, unbuilt EMS facility. SkyCare, a regional helicopter ambulance service, would lease part of this proposed new EMS facility, helping to defray some of the operating expense, if none of the initial building costs. But that's small comfort to the taxpayers who didn't expect to have to build a separate EMS building in the first place. And then surprising the taxpayers with the need to find a new home for the health department at the same time is a double whammy...and one that, in my opinion, could have been avoided had the hospital administration and board have been more forthcoming and pointed these details out in the meetings that preceded the building of the new hospital.

Now it's obvious that the hospital intended all along to separate themselves from EMS and the health department. But as a taxpayer, I think it would've been considerate of the hospital administration to have spelled out their intentions from the beginning. Sure, it's "only money"...but it's only MY money, and YOUR money and the money of the other taxpayers, that's being spent here. And if riverboat gambling funds are diverted to cover these "unexpected contingencies," those are riverboat gambling funds that are being diverted from other potential uses. And that means that the expenses for which those funds could have otherwise been used WILL come out of the taxpayers' pockets.

I just wish the hospital administrators would have been straight with the taxpayers from the get-go, and not left a pair of "orphan" departments on our doorstep just as the hospital triumphantly moves into its palatial new facility.

IN THE BEGINNING...

...there was the thought; the thought begat the word, and the word begat the sentence. One sentence begat another, and another, and eventually they formed an idea. As the idea took shape, it led to the formation of the opinion, and as the opinion evolved, it begat this blog.

By way of introduction, I am The Buzzman, koo-koo-kajoo. I became The Buzzman back in seventh grade, as a student manager for the junior high basketball team. Long hair was seen as a sign of a rebellious youngster in those days, and to become associated with the team I was required to keep my hair cut short. My brother, a year older, played on the team as well, and his haircut of choice was the flat-top. One of my brother's teammates noticed an uncanny resemblance between my brother's haircut and that of cartoon character Woody Woodpecker's nemesis, Buzz Buzzard...and henceforth my brother and I were known as "The Buzz Brothers." At first we were "Big Buzz" and "Little Buzz," but as I eventually grew taller than my brother, that evolved into "Old Buzz" and "Buzzman." Thus, I am The Buzzman.

I've always considered myself a writer, so this blog is something of a test. It will test whether I have the discipline to write on a regular basis; it will also test whether I have anything to say, and whether anyone will be interested in the thoughts and opinions of someone past 50 who's somewhere between open-minded and curmudgeonly, someplace between "out in left field" and stuck in the dugout. My aim is to write something to make you think...or something to make you smile...or maybe just something to make me feel like I've done something worthwhile.

Some of my posts here may be rants, and I expect many will be political in nature. But don't expect me to defend either of the major political parties, as I consider them to be two sides of the same "heads they win, tails we lose" coin. My political beliefs go back to those espoused by the Founding Fathers, who detested the idea of a Ruling Class, and whose visions of government were of offices being held for a term or two by civic-minded citizens who would then return to their roles in society. Perhaps that's a bit idealistic for some folks to comprehend, but I have always believed that the Founding Fathers were essentially on the right track, and that government is most flawed when it is most skewed from the vision of its founders.

But this blog will essentially be my commentary on life--MY life, as I see it. That's why it's called BuzzWords. I really don't know if I'll be able to entertain, or inform, or stimulate your thoughts. But without this blog, the odds of doing so are mighty slim. So it is what it is, and in the immortal words of Popeye, "I yam what I yam." And I am The Buzzman...let the BuzzWords go forth, from this day forward.