hello from Colorado

I. Friends Don't Let Friends Become Poets

Our children grow to adolescence with the feeling that they can become poets instead of working. Many an embryo bill clerk has been ruined by the heady knowledge that poems are paid for at the rate of a dollar a line. All over the country promising young plasterers and rising young motormen are throwing up steady jobs in order to devote themselves to the new profession. On a sunny afternoon down in Washington Square one’s progress is positively impeded by the swarms of young poets brought out by the warm weather.. . .

When once we have all become poets, the sale of verse will cease or be limited to the few copies which individual poets will buy to give to their friends.

The best part of the satire excerpted above is that the ending line I've quoted is exactly what's happened. Basically. One of my poetry professors at Syracuse even joked in class that only poets ready poetry. Wit often proves a prophet, I guess...

II. Me Being Very Gloomy About an Actual Slippery Slope

The unthinking alignment of most liberal/leftists with the right-to-die agenda is one of those occurrences that reveals to what depths we've all imbibed the mantra of individual freedom to the erosion of common goods. Cut the average American, whatever her party, and she'll bleed libertarian pathogens. But the individual anecdotes which make euthanasia (arguably) so compelling shouldn't wipe out the ugliness happening in Belgium:

Patients who asked for euthanasia because of “polypathologies”, comparatively minor and usually age-related illnesses such as hearing loss and incontinence, also doubled in the last four years from 232 cases to 444 cases.. . .

Dutch prosecutors [...] have launched an investigation into the possible “criminal euthanasia” of four elderly women. They include a woman who was drugged and pinned to her bed by her family after she fought to rip out the tubes administering a lethal cocktail of drugs.

Ahem. "Pinned to her bed by her family." That Belgian citizens are increasingly unable to differentiate between euthanasia as a (supposedly) merciful evasion and euthanasia as an efficient-because-terminal treatment should be unnerving, at minimum. If it's not, maybe we actually care about people only to the extent that they're legal precedents for our own team's point-keeping.

Or maybe we just want the old to die, and we're happy to force the issue at any cost. The number of elderly unwelcome in their children's homes might suggest such an attitude is a matter of degrees, not category.

III. Happy Ending

I now live in Colorado, where people are so Wild West they insist even their sedans become trucks. [Image below]