Mowed the lawn tonight, for my evening exercise. The grass was kind of wet. I don’t like to mow wet grass as a rule, but they’re predicting more rain tomorrow and Friday, so if I don’t do it now I’ll have to hack my way through it with a machete (or my new saex), like Ramar of the Jungle.

Anybody out there remember Ramar of the Jungle? I actually recall it from re-runs, but it got re-run a lot. My primary memory of the show is how the characters would be hacking their way through the jungle (with machetes, not saexes), and somebody would pause and point off to the right or left. Then the film would (with extreme clumsiness; you could almost hear the projector clunk) switch to stock footage of lions or giraffes in the savannah. It appeared that they almost never went anywhere in the jungle except along the edge, where it bordered the savannah.

Which raised the question, why not just walk through the savannah, and save yourself all that hacking?

I wanted to link to this post by Gaius over at Blue Crab Boulevard. Partly because I think it’s a pretty clever comic pastiche of Conan Doyle, and partly because the news story that sparked it just makes me mad.

This, in my opinion, is the real problem with increasing government “compassion and care” in our lives. It put this kid’s parents in an impossible situation.

The law allows parents to do only one thing to discipline a kid – talk sternly to him. That’s it. Anything more would be child abuse and get them into Really Big Trouble.

So the only thing the neighbor who found the kid a nuisance could do, in a situation where Stern Talks weren’t working, was report him to the police.

And the police have only one weapon – they put people in jail. Which is what they did with this kid. It was insane, and I’ll bet everyone involved knew it was insane. But the law – the law intended to protect the child – left them with no other option.

This is what happens when the government becomes the parent. The world is full of horror stories about traditional families that abused and mistreated children (I have a story like that of my own). But that’s how freedom works. You get a small percentage of excellent homes, a large middle of middling homes, and a small percentage at the bottom of very bad stuff.

But when the government raises the kids, Churchill’s description of economic systems kicks in. He said Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, and Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.

Traditional families are an unequal distribution of good nurturing. But government parenting is the equal distribution of dysfunction. Has anybody raised in a government institution ever grown up well-adjusted?

I missed a step yesterday. As I re-read my post, I thought, the transitions here, from Elvis to Rock ‘n Roll to my personal navel-gazing to fear, aren’t flowing properly. But I had other things I wanted to do, so I let it stand.

But now I remember I’d wanted to say something about fear. Something positive, difficult as that may be to believe.

First of all, I was going to say that, in case you were wondering about my problems with book orders in the bookstore due to the internet being down, that it all got worked out. The IT guy came up and burrowed under my desk a while, and then went down to the server and discovered that the problem was there all the time. So I got my service, and all the orders were placed on Thursday (except for the orders of that one instructor who never gets his orders in until just before classes start. I figure if he can live with it, I can live with it).

I employ a mixed media approach in ordering books from publishers. I use the internet to research the books, learn the publishers and ISBN numbers, and after I’ve transcribed all that information on a spread sheet, I call the publishers’ 800 numbers to actually make the orders. It seems to work best for me that way.

And that’s remarkable, under the circumstances. Because I hate calling people on the phone. When I first took this job, the phone calling was one of the duties I dreaded most. It’s related to my Avoidant problem, as you’ve probably guessed.

But I got past it. After I’d done it a couple times, I learned that if I was prepared, making the calls with my orders wasn’t all that difficult.

I need to highlight this in my mind, which is why I highlighted it above. Within my personal scenario, the warped lens through which I look at my life, there is no place for improvement. I see my life as a place where everything is going downhill. Nothing ever gets better. Instead, the inevitable slide takes me, eventually, to the place where I lose my job, my home, all my friends and family, and end up wandering the streets yelling at imaginary enemies.

But this got better. I actually improved at something. I overcame a fear.

I’d better stop now. If I write any more, I’ll find a way to sabotage it.

Have a good weekend.