What Is That Hat For?

I saw something the other day that made me wonder what is what.” What would that be?” you might ask. Well, I will tell you what, after I explain to you that I, at one time, was a young person. I’m sure that I did some things that made older folks scratch their heads in wonder. I grew my hair longer than older folks normally did. I have to say, however that it wasn’t necessarily because of The Beatles. For some reason, I liked the look of much older folks of the masculine persuasion, like Ben Franklin, Buffalo Bill Cody, George Armstrong Custer, Jesus…  I think you get the picture. The point is I was, maybe, different than others of my age.  Never-the-less, kids my age tended to have longer hair and, as soon as possible, would grow face hair, if they could, and even when they couldn’t. Older folks didn’t care for it so much and would make comments like, “Isn’t that hot for the summer?” or “Doesn’t that itch?”  The answer was “I like it this way!”

In my town (Topeka, Kansas), during a few years in the 60s, there was a very strange phenomenon concerning clothes that I don’t think went past the city limits. It was very popular for guys to wear “flag jackets” (a kind of windbreaker with a large differently colored rectangle on the back similar to a signal flag that sailors used to send messages), Adler socks and very tight high-water 501 Levis that came down, maybe, to the tops of their Adler socks.  If they felt dressy, they would wear wing-tip-dress shoes—they had to be wing-tips.  I must admit that I never had a “flag-jacket”—I just now tried to google it but the only thing that came up was “American Flag-jackets.”  I did, however, wear wing-tips to church and other dressy occasions. What can you say? Wing-tips are very cool. I actually had a nice pair of black and white saddle-styled-wing-tips. I was the envy. I would get some to wear on stage today, if I could find some. I also wore Adler socks, because they felt good.  You maybe couldn’t tell that I was being stylish, because I wore my 501 Levis (I wasn’t completely out of fashion) longer than most everyone else. My best friend admitted to me much later in life that when we first saw me in junior high school he thought I looked like some kind of dweeb (probably not the words he used) and he was tempted to kick my butt.   Obviously his hesitancy to go down that road saved him from a terrible beating, but the point is that I was apparently not following the crowd to any great degree.

Before I get back to my original comment about “What is What?”, let me say that I don’t get the sagging britches thing that has been going on now for a couple decades or more. Why do so many kids and some young men wear their pants like that? Even some men in their mid-twenties are still wearing. Usually they have their underwear sticking up to the waste, but their britches about 4 or 5 inches below that.  Sometimes you can see they are actually wearing a belt, but how do they actually keep the pants up? It can’t be that they can run from the police any faster, holding their pants with both hands to keep them from tripping.

Then there are all of the piercings in different places in the face and hoops in the earlobes that you could put a clothes hanger hook through.  I guess it’s an attention-getting-thing, but it would be more simple to have a tattoo on their foreheads—they likely have many tattoos everywhere else, so one more wouldn’t be a big deal--that says “Hey, everyone, I am an idiot.” Am I being unkind or disrespectful? Probably. But I digress…

Back to my original “What is What?” comment. I was getting back in my truck the other day, after buying a cheeseburger to eat on the road. It was a hundred degrees out and I see two young fellows going into the burger joint. They were both wearing stocking caps! What is that about?  I suppose that they may have both gotten ridiculous haircuts and wearing the woolen stocking caps to hide their shame. I know, there probably isn’t and such a thing as a haircut so ridiculous that some young folks would be embarrassed over, but if there were, baseball caps would most likely have covered that.  Or, they could have had a killer air-conditioner in their car and their heads were getting really cold—they had their ears covered.  Of course, they may belong to the Michael Nesmith Fan Club, or have just been trying to cover the “Hey, I’m an idiot!” tattoos they had gotten the night before, when imbibing illegal substances.   

Where Is The Outrage?

I have to ask, where is the out rage? Seriously, I don’t like being angry and pessimistic all of the time, so I haven’t blogged much of late. Well, there is also the fact that I just can’t keep up with the multitude of things these days that keep me angry and pessimistic. Just about every one of the things has to do with the anger-making and pessimism-making president we have. Every time I think he has gone as far as he can go, he goes a little (actually a lot) further in doing and promoting stupid stuff that drags us lower and  lower. Is there really anyone who voted for Obama that thinks he is not an Israel hater?  Who thinks it’s a good idea to make it easier for Iran to create nuclear weaponry and at the same time reduce the United States military strength to pre-WWII levels? Maybe they are the same people who think it’s a good idea to fund Planned Parenthood, while Margaret Sangers’s ‘brain child’ harvests body parts from aborted baby human beings to sell on the open market. They are human babies, people. The thought that they are anything but humans is trully outrageous.

I have blogged about the evils of Planned Parenthood before, but the recent revelations of traffiking in baby body parts and financial gain for the greedy killers makes me beyond sick to my stomach; and I need to vent. Incidentally, does anyone else find the name, “Planned Parenthood as ironic as I do? Shouldn’t it be “Planned Un-parenthood?” Margaret Sanger was a racist proponent of eugenics. It was Sanger’s view, along with many of the progressives of the 30s and 40s, that sterilization of the feeble minded—morons and idiots, in her view—should be compelled to be sterilized. She was successful in this in 30 states resulting in an estimated 60, 000 sterilizations. Not unlike Hitler, Sanger was for culling negroes and Jews by birth control, Sterilizations, she said, “do not go to the bottom of the matter.” (“Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Feb. 1919, The Birth Control Review).  She presented her beliefs to female groups of the Ku Klux Klan, and in a letter to Clarence Gable in 1939, Sanger wrote: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members” (Margaret Sanger commenting on the ‘Negro Project’ in a letter to Gamble, Dec. 10, 1939). If you are a big proponent of Planned Parenthood, as is Hilary Clinton, you get a Margaret Sanger award. 

Last evening I visited my daughter and my beautiful new grandson, to whom she had that day given birth. I looked at him and couldn’t help but think of the total number of abortions in the U.S. 1973-2013: 56.5 million. That is 219 abortions per 1,000 live births (according to the Centers for Disease Control); 1.058 million abortions every year; 2,899 Abortions per day; 120 abortions per hour; 1 abortion every 30 seconds. Is it not bad enough that we allow such carnage unabated in this nation? Do I have to help fund it too. Yeah, I’m angry and pessimistic about this nation’s relationship to God. So, I ask, Where is the Outrage? Soilent Green, anyone?