Raising the Bar

The libertarian part of me that doesn’t concern itself with things that don’t affect me directly sometimes comes into conflict with the part of me that likes to go tilting at windmills. (The husband has been known to leave for work in the mornings by giving me a kiss and expressing sympathy for said windmills on his way out the door.) I couldn’t help myself yesterday morning. I ran across such a badly-written article on a Spokane news station website that I felt compelled to e-mail the news director. The author of the article would not have passed my eighth-grade English class back in Avon, Ohio. The entire piece read as though it had been written by a child. The most egregious error was the use of the word “breached” to describe a buttocks-presentation birth. (Hello? Merriam-Webster? Google?) I did not receive a response to my e-mail but I saw, later in the day, that the errors had been corrected.

And now we reach the “get off my lawn” portion of today’s blog post. What is with people nowadays? Is it laziness? Is it ignorance? Is it sheer incompetence? Has the bar really fallen so low that some middle-aged woman in Kalispell, Montana, has to take a virtual red pen to an article on a regional news stations’s website?

This makes quite a statement (I would like to credit it but I can’t remember where I found it):

How many 18-year-old boys match this description today? My very attractive and accomplished younger daughter has a lot to say about the lack of maturity in the young men of her generation. I know that mediocrity is rampant among people of all ages, not just certain generations. I’m tired of it. And I am becoming far less willing to ignore it when I see it. Show up and make an effort.

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I planted more seeds yesterday and will finish up this morning. The husband and I also did a recon tour of the garden to formulate a plan of attack. The potatoes need to go in soon. If it’s too windy to burn today, we might plant. I have to decide if I want to leave the billboard tarp on the spot where I want to put an herb garden, out by the strawberries. That area is terribly overgrown with quackgrass and Oregon grape. It would be better to leave the tarp on one more season to make sure that nothing survives under there, but I’m itching to plant that section.

Our neighbor, Mike, came over and I gave him some bacon as a thank-you—he feeds scraps to the pigs because the pig pasture backs up onto his property. He’s on the fire department with the husband and also works as a flight medic on the ALERT helicopter. His garden was lovely last year. He grew enough kale for the whole neighborhood, LOL.