Tag Archives: border

An embarrassment of riches…

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If you checked in tonight hoping to find something witty or controversial, boy did you come to the wrong place. As much as I enjoy a good rant, I just don’t feel like I have one in me this evening. I wonder if that’s because there seems to be an embarrassment of riches lately when it comes to the vast number of issues loitering around that need a good calling out.

Just from my handy dandy notepad app, I’ve listed the following contenders in no particular order:

1. The southern border of the United States is being overrun while we’re busy watching the world cup.

2. The world medical community is racing to contain the largest-in-history ebola outbreak in Africa but is being chased out of “hot spots” by the local indigenous population who apparently aren’t keen on modern medicine.

3. The approval ratings for all three branches of the federal government are at or near all time lows again… and again… and again.

4. The media are acting surprised that there’s a hurricane forming in the Atlantic during hurricane season.

5. The great state of Maryland has a number of new laws that went into effect this week, among them an increase in the gas tax and grain alcohol prohibition… Because higher gas prices and banning one version of an otherwise widely available substance are clearly two of the most important things Annapolis needs to focus on.

These are just a couple of the notes I jotted down so far this week – not the items that have been specifically reserved for What Annoys Jeff this Week. Maybe my brain is too addled by the recent heat, but I don’t even know where to start ranting about this mess.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Using your outdoor voice. There’s a time and a place for the outdoor voice. When you’re sitting at your desk, in an office, with 8 other people in earshot is not the time to decide to communicate with one another by having a 20 minute conversation from one side of the room to the others. Life in cubicle hell is bad enough without trying to block out three simultaneous cross-room conversations. I realize it’s terribly inconvenient, but maybe get up, walk the dozen or so steps, and have your chat face to face instead of favoring us all with every detail at 103 decibels. As a rule, your colleagues shouldn’t be able to hear your conversation when they’ve got their ear buds turned up to ten with Van Halen’s classic guitar riffs beaming directly into their brain.

2. Illegal immigration. I’m all for having some kind of sensible immigration reform in this country. However, while Congress flails around with that issue, I’m more interested in seeing if we can stem the flow of people illegally crossing the border from Mexico into the US. Call me crazy, but I think the first step to reforming the immigration process in this country is to make it a hell of a lot harder to just wander across the border and a hell of a lot easier to send people back from whence they came if they do show up here illegally. I have no earthly idea why we’ve collectively decided that enforcing the laws on the books falls into the too hard to do category, but until we figure out a way to actually enforce the laws on the books, I have no idea why we’d bother passing any new ones that are just as likely to be ignored.

3. Iraq. The allies poured out a decade of blood and treasure to liberate, defend, equip, train, and support a government that looks like it will collapse at any moment. I dearly wish I could wake up in the morning to find a Patton or a MacArthur or a LeMay had risen from the dead to take command of CENTCOM. Instead, I fear I’ll wake up in the morning to find the mission failed while we were all busy wringing our hands.