If you’re reading this, you survived the “snow of the century,” or just January in Missouri. As I write this on Sunday, we are predicted to get either a dusting of snow or more snow than you have ever seen, somewhere in the middle of that range. Congratulations for surviving, give yourself something nice.
I’m worried about Foley. The news cycle in Platte County is on overdrive. Guys getting shot, robbing banks and he’s the only news outlet that has sniffed out the controversy at Platte City’s City Hall. Dude is breaking news daily. He’s also a hell of a free throw shooter, but that’s another story.
Anyway, verified news and gossip usually collide and I spent a few hours in Platte City’s Tanner’s Bar and Grill a couple of weeks ago and the Platte City controversy seems legit, cause when the guys at the bar are talking about it, it’s real to me. I trust Foley, but you get late afternoon day drinkers talking about government, sex and the new City Hall and you know there is fire underneath all this smoke. Lawyers, guns, and money are most assuredly involved.
I just threw that lawyers, guns, and money comment in because I like Warren Zevon music. Wait, checks notes, I guess it does involve lawyers, guns and money.
Speaking of Tanner’s, I got invited by a prominent Platte Countian to “cover” a fishing event at a farm in Daviess County. Felt a little “Deliverance” type invite, so I never accepted the offer. Documenting the escapades of a bunch of old, rich white guys fishing and drinking whiskey is above my pay grade. I’m more a participant in that type of endeavor, except I don’t like fishing or Daviess County in July.
I don’t bunk up with dudes at this point in my life. I quit that when I bailed on Bible School camp in the 70’s. Once I classified the Bible in the fiction section of my personal Dewey Decimal system, it seemed silly to keep singing Kumbaya in the summer heat when my parents had air conditioning back home. I was born this pragmatic, can’t help it.
You probably saw that some city official in St. Louis threw a mask mandate out last week for public employees, which was quickly drawn back after backlash from the community and other officials. I’m comfortable with the knowledge that masks did not help anything during the “pandemic” and any orders or mask mandates that are floated are simply the continued government “flexing” the power that we surrendered during COVID.
It’s not political to me, it’s practical and legally obvious the government has no right or power to mandate such things and we need to quit letting it happen. We have surrendered so much ground to government overreach in the last 20 years I barely recognize this country. It started on the federal level and has completely infiltrated local level at this point. Both parties of political leaders have pushed our personal freedom aside for their agendas.
Don’t “it saves lives” at me. If we wanted to save lives we’d abolish cigarettes, liquor, and Little Debbie snacks, but it’s ok for us to kill ourselves that way, but not by communicable disease is the premise of that argument I suppose.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or shoveling out of the Snow of the Century)