Monday Short Takes

Today's Baby Blues, if I were the cartoonist, would have had a fourth panel in which the other shoppers cheer.

Savvy shoppers can spot, and avoid, these Coupon Queens by the little accordion folders they carry, full of coupons, as Wanda says, organized and color coded and obsessively catalogued so that they only take an additional 15 minutes in the checkout lane instead of the 45 it would take otherwise. 

Though true obsessives make up for that by filling out their own check instead of letting the cash register do it, and waiting for a final total before writing the name of the store and the date, and then balancing their checkbook on the spot and zipping it into the correct pocket of their purse.

But they saved 20 cents on the Del Monte diced tomatoes, or, to put it another way, they paid three cents less than if they'd bought the store-brand tomatoes, which are canned by the same packer who does the Del Monte run.

Everybody should have a system, but most of us aim for efficiency. When I was an at-home dad, I did my grocery shopping on weekdays, avoiding the noon hour when the amateurs were off work and, especially, the day the coupons came out in the paper and the Coupon Queens did their shopping. 

The point was to get a week's worth of groceries into the cart, through the checkout and back home into the fridge during the brief period when younger son was cheerful and did not need a nap and older son was in his half-day pre-school.

Getting behind the person with a folder full of coupons would seriously throw that off.

(Coupon people will counter by telling you how much they save, which ignores the time spent compiling all those coupons, during which hosting a lemonade stand in their front yard would likely have earned as much.)

Phew. Wasn't expecting that ancient rant to surface on a sunny Monday morning.

Onward ...

 

But speaking of personal economics 

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal notes the rising cost of college with a proposal that is both ridiculous and practical enough to earn my admiration.

For all that the Millennials annoy me -- starting with the fact that they're so co-opted that they embrace a Madison Avenue marketing label -- they have a good point in that we've accepted that a "college education" is necessary without accepting that therefore we should provide it, and, further that cost of college has gone over the moon.

I'm not sure this is the solution, but I am sure they need to be strategizing rather than simply falling into the trap, because, yes, something has gone horribly wrong.

Acquiring a selection of exotic cats is not the answer, but neither is it practical to borrow massive amounts of money. And whatever is in the middle seems a duct-tape-and-baling-wire solution.

I suspect the real answer has something to do with registering to vote, then reclaiming the system. 

 

However, as today's Barney & Clyde suggests, there's some futility in expecting to restructure a system built on contributions.

With the exception of some kingmakers, most corporate donors spread the wealth around as Pillsbury suggests, and, while stalemate serves him well, the result of his balanced contributions is friends in the capital regardless of who wins or whether they accomplish anything.

The Republican party's loyalty to the Trump/Putin cabal is an easy target, but there are some interesting rumblings on the other side of the aisle, where young insurgents are challenging the old guard.

It's a little early to sort out what's happening with that (potential) Senate seat in Cali, but we've got an interesting skirmish under way in New York, and, much as the Anti-Soviet faction needs to regain control of the legislature, they won't do it by squabbling, because the old lions aren't going to just slink off into the desert without a fight.

 

But then this

I'm breaking the Prime Directive, not to mock Ted Rall's cartoon, but to point out a central fatal flaw in his argument, and to expand that into a constructive point.

It's not just Ted. This cartoon exemplifies an issue I've seen in several cartoons by young artists as well: A fundamental lack of knowledge of how things work.  

There are places where a well-written federal law could resolve and withstand the Court's objections, when the Court has ruled that current law is silent, flawed or unclear.

But the idea that a pro-choice federal law would not be readily swept aside by a pro-life Supreme Court seriously misunderstands the structure of our government and the history of this topic.

It's hard to challenge a law that allows something, as opposed to a law that prevents something, because it's difficult to establish legal standing, to show that you were harmed by someone else's private actions.

However, it would be easy for a state with abortion restrictions to challenge the law on the basis of states' rights, and, given the likely makeup of the Court, to prevail.

It would take a pro-choice amendment, and that ain't gonna happen.

Here's what we've lost:

My generation ended a war, but the only reason we were able to do that is that the older part of our cohort had been the younger part of the Civil Rights Movement.

And the reason the Civil Rights Movement worked was because youngsters like Martin Luther King and John Lewis were schooled by old-timers like James Farmer, who had been laying groundwork for a whole generation before them.

There was a mentoring in both how the system works and how grass-roots movements succeed that had at least half a century of experience behind it.

Most of those teachers are gone, and their history wiped out with fairy tales about tired seamstresses and some great spontaneous moral awakening.

No, it was work, hard work, smart work.

Maybe we should skip the exotic felines and spend that money on tutoring from whatever mentors are still alive.

 

Comments

[Sean Martin]

I know that every generation arrives with a sense of self-important arrogance, but it seems the current one really has outshined the rest... and I cant help but feel that the internet, in large part, is to blame. You can go online and find support for any crackpot theory you want. You can go online and find an echo chamber for your terribly hurt feelings. You can go online and do or say or hear just about everything that will convince you you're completely and utterly right and everyone else is wrong and so there... (written with a stamp of the foot and a sticking-out of the tongue).

I've endured (and there is no other word for it) conversations with people like this with alarming frequency of late. They know everything there is to know about changing the government and making the world safe and creating something where everyone will love love love everyone else — and if you disagree with their ideas, even because of sheer practicality of process, youre clearly a troll and a "HATER!" and the level of the conversation descends to one appropriate to middle school, if not lower.

Folks like that dont want mentors because they dont need mentors. They can change things through sheer force of social keyboard justice warrior action. They will post to Facebook! And Twitter! And it will be done! Because they said so! A lot!

Honestly, people like that make me almost giddy knowing my time on this rock is almost over.