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Are You Ready for the Country?by
Peary Perry | |
While
driving in some of the more remote parts of this country, I have often wondered
why anyone would want to move into some area that seems to be totally beyond reach
of our modern society.
I think I’m beginning to understand.
With
the deluge we are subjected to through newspapers, television, radio and the internet,
not to mention phone calls and person to person conversation, we process an enormous
amount of information each day. Most of it, in my opinion, is of the negative
nature.
Today, there is a report about some insane rider on a bus that
kills and decapitates another passenger. Hardly a day goes by without an execution,
multiple murders, or violence by some gang member against our society. Just when
you think it might stop, up pops some more from some other part of the country.
We’re still looking for Nazi war criminals from World War II. Toss in the bad
guys responsible for current atrocities and well, I think you get the picture.
It isn’t pretty.
The medical profession doesn’t help. One week, we can
drink coffee and it has some helpful effects. The next week, it’s bad for you
and will cause cancer. Sugar is good and artificial sweeteners are bad, or are
it the other way around? Exercise for thirty minutes a day or exercise for an
hour a day? Running is good for you, running is bad for you. Drink water with
Fluoride or water without? Drink water from the tap or use bottled water with
plastic bottles that pollute the environment? One glass of wine a day is good
for you but two may not be. Air is good for you, but where is it coming from,
and how can you be certain it’s really air?
I made the last one up.
Then on top of all of this, you throw in the crooked politician de’jure who has
just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar and is saying something inane
like… “I didn’t know it was against the rules to take money from contractors.”
Or “That couple of hundred thousand you found in my freezer? I haven’t any idea
how that got there…. someone is trying to set me up…must be my opponent.”
The
newspaper in my city comes in the morning and I might have to swear off reading
it altogether if my mood keeps going downhill. It starts my day off on the wrong
foot. I know that if you or I were to engage in a little illegal invoicing of
Medicare or sending invoices to the Pentagon for Iraq services we never actually
performed, we’d be in the big house very shortly.
But, you will have to
admit that if we work hard for fifty or more years to try and get some sort of
decent retirement and then have to read where some corporate fat cat stole a hundred
million or so and got two years probation, it does tend to make you wonder if
you could get away with it. Oh, and you’d probably have to pay a fine of twenty
five million or so.
Let’s see, I steal a hundred million, and have to
give back twenty five million and stay out of trouble (on probation) for a couple
of years. How hard is that?
Even so, maybe prison (at least at the federal
level) isn’t so bad at all. You get three meals a day. Free healthcare. Your clothes
are provided, free of charge. No dry cleaning costs. Chance to work on another
college degree and certainly could find time to workout for a couple of hours
at a time. You’d want to go to the federal place so you hopefully didn’t have
to share your cell with someone named ‘Mongo’ or ‘Killer’. Of course, giving up
your wife and kids would be hard, but I hear they have these ‘visits’ now days…so
I suppose it’d be like me traveling and then coming home. Every couple of weeks.
With my luck, I’d probably end up in the same place as all of the convicted
politicians and have to listen to them whine all day. I don’t think I’d want to
take a chance on that happening.
No, I think I’ll just stick to my current
plan and keep on going forward. If all turns out as I envision it, I might save
enough to buy me a place out in the country.
Way, out in the country…where
I don’t have to see or listen to anyone and can’t get good television or radio
reception.
Hold on, I think I answered the question I was asking myself
at the beginning of this column.
©
Peary Perry
Letters
From North America
August 6, 2008 column
Syndicated weekly in 80 newspapers
Comments go
to pperry@austin.rr.com | |
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