I don't wake up grumpy. Sometimes I wake up sleepy; mostly I wake up cheerful. This morning I woke up cheerful, then went out in the freezing wind (official temperature when I left the house: 15 degrees Fahrenheit, warming to about 20 F. after daylight) and subjected myself to a crowd of militantly grouchy and abrasive people.
If you want a special challenge, try writing anything amidst a crowd of people who despise themselves, for valid reasons, and go out in public just for the purpose of spreading their hostility around. That type of person has no experience of how it feels to smile because a line in the ditty you're composing either is or is not funny, assumes that any variation on a smile means the other person is laughing at them, and sets out to ruin the other person's fun. I'm not too charitable to enjoy composing light verse in spite of these people's nastiness, but I think more of them should be more closely confined and supervised, anyway.
What surprised me was that so many of that type of people came out this morning while so many more pleasant people stayed home. Most of the people I saw this morning had obviously eaten far too much of "the bread of idleness," food subsidized by federal handouts, and most of them acted as if it disagreed with them. This is not surprising. This web site repeats: We need a federal policy whereby anyone who is able to walk in and apply for any kind of public benefits is required to spend eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, holding up a list of their work skills and experience, on a day labor site. No roaming around and loafing and gossipping. No shopping! If they can walk, talk, and/or write, they don't need more money than they ought to be able to earn.
So far this year, although I've earned more, I've actually collected a total of $14 in cash. That cookbook sale didn't pay all of the winter's heating costs, nor did it pay the property taxes, which another family member is in theory able to pay but hasn't paid yet.
Similarly, in theory the Big Freeze, during which an open-air market could not function, gave people time to save their money, so they had more to spend. Ha. Ha. During the hour and a half before sunrise, I sold one hat, the vendor on my right sold one antique garden tool, and the vendor on my left sold nothing at all. The vendor on my left got into a truck and idled to run the heater in the 20-degree-Fahrenheit-with-a-wind-chill. The vendor on my right, like me, just stood there in the cold.
Something is deeply wrong with a country where welfare cheats waddle around laughing at people who have a solid work ethic. Maybe we need a policy requiring all recipients of public handouts, if not institutionalized, to touch one knee to the ground and thank any working taxpayer they encounter. Maybe we need a hotline where people can report any ungrateful noises made by welfare cheats, including able-bodied retirees (they may have paid into Social Security, but hello, our money is what they're drawing out)--and documentation that a welfare cheat tried to be "funny" when addressing an Honorable Taxpayer should cut off all payments to that welfare cheat during the next year.
Not that I'm at all unsympathetic to people who go into Friday Market thinking things like "All I can really afford to buy here is one orange, though if I see an A for the amount X or a B for the amount Y I might buy it and pay only half the electric bill this month." I have sooo been there. But when I'm there, I don't mouth off at the vendors from whom I'm not buying things. I don't harass people with pathetic efforts to be funny. I look with my eyes, not with my hands, and move briskly, and don't make eye contact unless I have something worthwhile to say.
Then after I left the market, one well-known welfare cheat...Attention local lurkers: People who get away with even calling out my name on the street in a polite-but-inappropriate way--the way it would be all right to do if we were sitting around a table with other people--get away with that sort of thing because they are old, or have been certified insane, or both. I owe this particular old bat nothing and could easily do her harm (no, I'm not talking about a street brawl, though that, too...). She got away with what she said because she's obviously too senile to realize how stupid she was choosing to be.
Still, I think we could use a hotline...whip out cell phone, record the kind of noise that was spewing out of the mad old bat, hit "send," watch the mad old bat forage in garbage cans and pick crumbs off of picnic grounds for a year!
Those who call themselves "conservative" need to be more mindful about how they encourage people to maintain, or in some cases form, a Work Ethic. We don't care what you do with your face, and we know your words are cheap; by "encourage" I mean "pay cash." If any amount of money above US$14 has crossed your hands so far this year, don't tell me about your heating bills, I have those too, you should be supporting this web site.
If you really want to "Make America Great Again," start by encouraging people who have less money than you have to work rather than begging for handouts. Thank us! Get your shabby selves out to the Friday Market, local lurkers, and make sure the whole marketplace hears you saying:
* "What a fantastic bargain! It's so wonderful that people like you are willing to offer better prices than Wal-Mart! Please may I have a dozen?"
* "Please forgive me if you ever leave this marketplace with less than a hundred dollars in your pocket. I know your time is worth at least a hundred dollars. Please forgive me if I don't know how it's possible for me to afford to spend that much--I pray to God that other people will make up for what I'm failing to do."
* "Thank you for your hard work and honesty! Thank you for your public spirit! Thank you for your kindness and forgiveness, for still offering good bargains in a town so full of ungrateful, undeserving, worthless welfare-cheating trash!"
Until you're saying those things, with the appropriate actions--which include a bare minimum of $20 passes from your hand into mine--you're not entitled to call yourself either a conservative, or a patriot, or even a Christian. And I will call you out on it. And that includes wearing "message" hats or shirts.
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