Let Us Return To Shady Grove . . . By Bishop, Special Excentric Intuit
Is the world bring run by smart people who are putting us or, on the other hand, by imbeciles who really mean it? Mark Twain
Seems that all of Sedona have gone gaga about some planet my friend Alice calls Mercury. According to an intuitive cosmological friend, this distant planet is in the process of reversing itself in the great beyond. It is sending weird vibrations everywhere. People are cleaning out their garages, hiding file cabinets concealing timeworn love letters and swearing off coffee of any kind from Starbucks. The word at Rene’s is that Mercury may just stay in retrograde for a while – elections are approaching.
Shattered daily, some say hourly, are beliefs and dogmas that have been reliable fundamentals since the buffalo roamed and way before timeshare-owners from Chicago came west. Truth be told, ever since the days of Greek philosophers all the way up to the Reagan years, facts were facts, they did not disappear if some leader or CEO decided to ignore them- or worst yet tolerate a world where facts cannot exist.
Are we in that New World already?
Take a certain politician and seeker of the White House named Rubio, who told a nationwide audience: “whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or in 7 actual eras, I am not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that.”
The question looms like a Goodyear blimp; what about dinosaurs, perhaps they are not extinct after all? Beyond that, water is not rising in Florida and left-wing anti-oil liberals are putting out reports of melting glaciers.
How long can a nation remain a world leader in a science-based, technological when poetry and the arts are steadily slashed from public school budgets by the Visigoths? And little is being heard or said about food banks that are in need of help from one end of the Verde Valley to the other. How many would-be politicians have actually been confronting the reality of poverty among us?
· At least 46 percent of all Arizona households are close to falling into dismal poverty reports ASU. A finding most media failed to report.
· Twenty seven percent of Arizona’s children live in poverty, and nearly 500,000 are food insecure.
· Sixty-one percent of Arizona consumers have sub-prime credit ratings.
“Half the work that is done in the world is to make things appear what they are not.” E.R. Beadle
Along the way, something has gone seriously wrong with the daily press, otherwise now known as the Media. Case in point! Cries of protest have been printed in some of our most honored newspapers and magazines about the recent federal plan to counter climate change by getting states to cut power plant emissions.
Unchallenged cries from opponents saw a future of “millions of Americans freezing in the dark” and unemployment lines will be everywhere as coal production ceases, and top executives are sent out to pasture. True or false?
Shockingly untruthful! A smidgeon of research lurking in this sheet’s noble library reveals that on the scale the federal plan is proposing—a 30 percent reduction in harmful power plant emissions from our nation’s electricity industry by 2030—has already been reached in ten states, while others will meet that goal two decades before the new deadline. Truth be known—and not widely reported—what is occurring is not the government’s “war on coal” as so much of the media has been reporting. Instead, as several unbiased sources tell this scribbler, natural gas is better all-around in the marketplace, including climate impacts, than coal.
Closer to home, in our own bailiwicks, our outgoing governor, when she was incoming, pledged to make Arizona the “solar capital of the world.” In the course of that euphoria, she paved the way for ensuring citizens that property taxes would not increase as a price to pay for solar. Five years have passed, and guess what? All of a bloody sudden she announces that she has no power over the Department of Revenue she staffed which is preparing legislation to impose property taxes on roof-top solar systems.
Where is the highly paid media on this story? What about real gumshoe reporters, are they stuffed in museums, somewhere?
Is it any wonder that people, including this wretched scrivener, are looking for a route, a path, a dirt road to a place called Shady Grove? I hear tell that it is a place where men trust one another, where women’s cheeks are red as blooming roses, where a kiss from one of them is sweet as brandy wine.
Here tell, too, that no permits are required to build homes in Shady Grove. But there is one rule demanded from the leaders, who are also citizens—arguments and verbal spats about politics or religion are forbidden, violators will be required to spend countless weeks taking notes on the varying IQ levels at Cottonwood council meetings.
The final blow has received almost no publicity. No executives or high-powered regulators have been held accountable, blamable for actions or for inactions, which led to the Worst Recession since the 1930s. Almost to a topsider they are living large, but not so for citizens that lost their way of living and providing by falling for those dangerous securities and mortgages.
