Will Sarah win the contest tonight for the most imitated person on Halloween? Her masks sure seem to have been selling out like crazy. And god are some of them butt ugly! Even Sarah deserves a better mask than that.
Letterman is good in his own way. Leno is boring. But Carson… oh lord, watch some of the retrospectives of his best work and you see why he was king - and always will be.
Just about the same time that Sarah Palin was opining in the Oct. 16 National Review that, “Electric cars might work in Los Angeles, but they don’t work in Alaska, where you can drive hundreds of miles without seeing many people, let alone many electrical sockets,” I was drafting some material for Ilisagvik College in Barrow. Interestingly, part of the background material I received included the fact that an instructor and students at the college celebrated the successful conversion of a car to electric power by driving the car from Ilisagvik to downtown Barrow.
According to the information I received, the car averaged 35 mph. The electricity powering the car came at a rate of $.09/kilowatt hour as opposed to $4.70/gallon for gas. This is the equivalent of the car averaging 125 miles per gallon on the jaunt down the road from campus to town. I may not be a great mathematician, but that sure seems like a good deal to me.
Alaskan villages have very limited road systems. In Barrow, for instance, you can drive from Barrow to Duck Camp, Barrow to Fresh Water Lake or Barrow to the end of Gas Well Road. Anyone who ever lived in Barrow knows that claustrophobic mid-winter feeling that creeps up on even the hardiest of residents. Taking a car ride down one of those roads is sometimes the only relief available.
Given the cost of gas per gallon, I think electric cars would be an amazing boon in the Bush. People wouldn’t have to choose between groceries and gassing their car so they can take that needed mental health break to the lake.
OK, you say, but what about Palin’s other concern, the one where you can drive hundreds of miles in Alaska without seeing many electrical outlets.
You can probably find a similar statement made in the days when automobiles were first starting to replace horses. Sure, said many op ed pieces of the day, they’re good in the city where you can get gasoline but they’ll never be practical on long trips because there are simply not enough places along the way to fuel up. Between New York and Chicago, there are no gas stations.
We all know what happened next. Cars became more and more popular and people started traveling farther and farther into the heartland using them. And canny American entrepreneurs thought to themselves that here was an opportunity for a whole new enterprise… gas stations along the roads of America that would meet the needs of those horseless carriages.
And so an entire business model was created to meet the new demands of the nascent car industry.
I think Americans are every bit as much the entrepreneurs at the turn of this century as they were at the turn of the previous century. Given a perceived need, they will create an industry to meet that need. Where once we had gas stations springing up with astounding rapidity on what had been dusty country roads, we will now have electricity stations springing up along our highways instead.
I realize that electric cars will probably not replace gas or diesel vehicles with quite the speed that cars replaced horses. Like with anything new, we probably need to go through a few more variations to get to the one that will work best. But to totally discount the idea of a cleaner, cheaper alternative to what we are using today, especially in view of the mounting evidence of the destruction global warming is causing, is simply foolish.
The people in Barrow are on the frontline of global warming – sea ice is disappearing, permafrost is melting, plants once only found far south of town creep closer. They have a vested interest in protecting this earth because its continued warming threatens their entire way of life. So the students at Ilisagvik built an electric car and showed that it can be a safe, cheap, environmentally friendly alternative.
Maybe Palin needs to move back to Alaska for a while and reconnect with our reality. Electric cars will work just fine here and the new businesses that will spring up to service and charge them will be a boon to our economy. Clearly a win-win for all.
Because I can see my doctor as regularly as recommended to keep my health problems under good control. And because when he asks if I’m having any difficulty paying for the prescription meds, I can smile and say it’s not a problem because I have a wonderful plan.
My dream is that someday all Americans will be able to answer the same way because we will have seen the value, compassion and ethics that make health care coverage for everyone a no-brainer.
... what an absolute little freak Glen Beck is. Only in America… or maybe Nazi Germany....
Those of us of a certain age can remember when plane travel was considered glamorous. Only the rich could do it. You were served like royalty, even in coach. Your bags went along for free. No one strip searched you behind a screen that wouldn’t hide a birth mark from the public gawking on the other side as they pray they are not the next to be pulled out.
Sigh.... those terrorists have a heckuva lot to answer for.
I think any parents who put out a baby with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder should have their reproductive organs removed by court order.
No, not the Easter Bunny but someone just as cuddly.
Are you like me? Do you feel that trying to follow the booze wars in Bush Alaska is like trying to watch Australian Rules football – it looks like something you should be able to understand; yet you can’t quite figure out what the heck is happening. And just in case you weren’t confused before, you have the spectacle in Bethel of the same group who pushed a vote for going wet now opposing anyone actually getting a liquor license.
Villages can vote to have their communities exist in one of three states: Wet, which means anything goes from liquor stores to bars; Damp which means you can possess and drink liquor in the community but not buy or sell it there; Dry, which means no liquor, no how, no time, no where. The fact that decades after these options were put in place there is not a village in Bush Alaska that doesn’t have significant drinking problems says a lot about the intractability of addiction.
I lived in Barrow for 27 years. During that time I watched the village go from wet to dry to damp with sometimes dizzying frequency. In the early ‘70s, the city opened its own liquor store figuring if people were going to drink anyway, you should keep the profits local. I still have an old newspaper from those years showing then City Mayor Jake Adams and Borough Mayor Eben Hopson Sr. cutting the ribbon on the city liquor store with Oliver Leavitt as the honorary first customer.
Things change, life happens and twenty years later, Jake was president of ASRC and firmly behind the sobriety movement that tried to take Barrow dry and led to the 1990s booze wars in Barrow.
That’s the thing about booze in the bush. It’s a topic of great controversy and great contradiction. When you start trying to use state laws to regulate it, you run smack up against a strange coalition of people who want to be able to drink freely but don’t want their community mad at them for promoting alcohol and people who want government to stay the hell out of their lives. Since you cast your ballot in secret, the former group becomes silent allies of the latter and you end up with a wet community and a group of people who wanted to make a statement but don’t really want to live with the consequences – ergo, the situation in Bethel.
Soon you will have a counter petition being circulated to put this issue back on the ballot to reverse the vote. Arguments will be made that despite years of these laws the alcohol problem remains, so prohibition is not the answer. This argument is countered by those claiming the laws at least lessen the severity of the problem. Both sides have statistics and anecdotes to back up their claims.
Alcohol’s destructive power is most especially felt in small communities where everyone needs to depend one everyone else to do their share to make life bearable. Prohibition, an idea that has failed miserably every time it’s been tried, is still one of the only hopes some villages see for controlling the problem. For village leaders frustrated by the intractability of this problem, and families being destroyed by alcohol, any thing that gives even the illusion of control is welcomed.
So expect the booze wars and the booze problems to continue in the Bush until we actually come up with a solution that works. So far, these laws don’t seem to be the answer. But if they even slow the problem down a slight bit, there are a lot of people who feel they are worth any perceived impingement on someone’s civil rights. And there are a lot of people who feel they are being punished for someone else’s problem by having the government pushed way too far into their personal lives.
I sympathize with the people who struggle to make their communities safe. But then, I also sympathize with those who think a glass of wine is not a sin. The people I have little sympathy for are those who allow their addictions to destroy their families, communities and cultures.
I used to have sympathy for them. Now, I just want them to stop. Help is available. Take it.
I don’t know about you, but I have a routine at bedtime. I put my glass of water next to my bed. I check to make sure all the doors are locked. I put the dogs out for one last time. I make sure the lights are out and the stove is cold. I make sure the thermostat is turned down to 65… though that’s really unnecessary unless I have company because otherwise it’s always at 65 all winter. Then I climb in bed and read until forced to go to sleep because of the late hour and how unlikely it is that I’ll want to get up on time the next day if I read any longer.
So last night I did all that. When I reached up to turn the light off over my bed and go to sleep, I thought how annoying it was that someone had left their dogs out and they were barking constantly and it was now after midnight. Yep… you guessed it. Even as that thought entered my head I realized I remembered letting the dogs out but couldn’t for the life of me remember letting them in. So I went to the back door and there they sat, their faces pathetically staring into the glass door, fear of the dark and cold writ large on their countenances.
Sigh… guilt, thy name is motherhood.
(This piece also appears in Dispatch Alaska)
There seems to be a generally held belief that some of those who choose to live “homeless” are deliberately living off the grid because they don’t want the strictures of society impinging on their right to live however they want, whenever they want. Kind of an urban wilderness man idea.
I find that concept belied by a recent news story. According to newspaper and police reports, a man and woman were arguing. When they wouldn’t quiet down, another homeless man went into their tent and beat the man up. The woman left. Then others threw gasoline on the tent and burned it down. The man, who is in a hospital due to the severity of the beating, will not have a home there to return to. Problem solved.
To me, this looks a lot like rules being enforced by self-appointed sheriffs. So much for living with total freedom. Quiet down or you’re beaten into quietness. And then, in a move not unlike something we used to call “Greyhound Therapy” back in my Brooklyn ER days, the tent is unceremoniously destroyed, thereby forcing the person to look elsewhere for shelter when released from the hospital. Back in Brooklyn, we used to just give the homeless person a one-way ticket on Greyhound to wherever it was they said they remembered coming from. Same result, though. The person was gone from our neighborhood and no longer a problem.
I can’t imagine choosing homelessness as a lifestyle. Having been in an abusive marriage, I can imagine choosing it over going home to the abuser. I can see where it might be the unfortunate result of job loss, relocation because life in the Bush is too expensive or generally the kind of bad luck that we all seem to experience in life at one time or another. But when that homelessness happens in a cold climate and frequently involves children being witnesses to the brutality that goes hand in hand with life on the streets, then we cannot call ourselves a civilized society unless we come up with something to protect the helpless among us.
Mayor Sullivan is to be applauded for tackling this problem and making it a priority of his administration. We should all be cheering him on towards success. We may never be able to eliminate homelessness from our society because we will never be able to totally eliminate its causes. But we cannot do anything less than our best to impact it as much as possible.
There are always families out there – families fallen on hard times, families running from a home that holds greater horrors for them than any homeless camp. They deserve our compassion and helping hand. They deserve a chance at rebuilding their lives. Because for them, the “choice” of homelessness wasn’t really a choice at all.
Every once in a while before the snow falls and between the constant rain storms, Anchorage gets some beautiful fall days… leaves gorgeous, sun shinning, cold enough to not have bugs but warm enough to not have ice… and we are so pathetically grateful. I walked the dogs last week on a couple of those days and kept passing other people who had completely idiotic grins on their faces who kept saying to me in voices of awed wonder, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I think they had to keep saying it out loud because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to actually believe we were having a non-rainy, non-snowy, non-icy, non-cloudy, non-grey day.
Yep, Us Anchorites (Anchorigians?) are very easily amused.
As I sit here in agony I must confess I can no longer absorb fresh milk or spoon sized Shredded Wheat. It’s one or the other.
I find myself wondering how I can have a checking account less than a year old on which all of ten checks have been written and yet I am still $300 out of sync with what the bank says the total is. And even after trying my best to add and subtract, divide and multiply, parse and diagram, I still can’t figure it out. So I accept the bank’s total as true and also accept that I am a math idiot.
As we age, we learn to accept these limitations more gracefully so I will now stop sobbing and go find some candy to comfort me.
RSS 2.0
