This morning was a beautiful walk through a mostly empty and quiet downtown. We love our Sunday walks, and now the morning temperature is just perfect even with our short sleeves, and there was just a hint of air moving – not quite a breeze – and the grass was wet with dew.

You’d think nothing was wrong in the world.

But there are a lot of things that are very, very wrong.

As we walked and watched the beautiful sunrise over Brownwood’s new Event Center and noted all of the new and exciting businesses getting their start downtown… at that very moment… parts of several states are under flood waters. Hundreds of small towns, and even some cities, have been completely washed away. Asheville, North Carolina, and most of western North Carolina has been completely cut off from civilization, and people are dying. Meanwhile, our politicians in both parties are rushing to the aid of strangers in Somewhereistan and spending billions of dollars to aid people in war zones (wars that we are funding.) Kids in colleges are marching and destroying property because the news tells them to be angry that somewhere, somehow, someone is suffering, while the college kids in Asheville don’t have drinking water and most of the people in a three-state area cannot even communicate their need for dire help. Will the kids at Columbia or in Berkely march and raise money for Ashville? Bet not.

Last night we watched some football and during a news break we saw a foreign leader pleading for more aid, and we saw nothing about the fact that Americans are dying on rooftops – in America – because help isn’t coming.

This isn’t supposed to be a downer column, but it may turn out to be one. We turned off the TV last night, even though the game featuring our Alma Mater wasn’t over because we needed a little human contact. We walked over (maybe a hundred steps) to the new On Time Cigar Lounge in the cool yard-garden across from Pioneer Taphouse and sat out in the cool evening and talked with some real people. Our Neighbors. Live music spilled from the Taphouse’s new live venue, and during the breaks we could hear music on the night air from the Event Center down the road. We want to help our neighbors stay in business, because in this economy everyone is suffering. Helping our neighbors is something we can do.

Did any of this help the people in Asheville? No. But we can help the people we can see and touch.

I would note that when strangers in Whereveristan need our money, the government steals it from us and sends it without our consent, but when the people in Asheville need help, we’re asked to donate. Something is interesting about this phenomenon. Give to the Red Cross. Give! Give! Give! That’s what they say. Well, after paying for gas, rent, and groceries (we can barely afford,) and after the taxes that are going to pay for missiles and graft, we find ourselves having to take our few available dollars and try to keep our neighbors in business. That’s OUR coping mechanism.

Inflation kills charity and makes government the feedbox of tyrants and scumbags.

Back on the TV and now it is THE POLLS! THE POLLS! The polls say this is the tightest election in a billion years, and the politicians say “send $5 or the other team is going to break everything and put your grandma on the street and don’t you know that the polls say that your five dollars is so important it is going to fix everything!?!”

Interesting things, polls. Since I love irony and cannot help myself, I put a poll up on my Twitter (now X) and it went something like this:

Have you been polled by any polling service during the current election cycle?

Yes — 0%
No — 50%
I am unpollable — 50%

You see? The smartest people are unpollable. By that I mean that we are not accessible by the major polling services. Smart people don’t answer their phones when they don’t recognize the number. The smartest people are not generally in the places where physical pollsters do their dirty deeds. We’re not standing outside the Orange Julius in the mall (does Orange Julius still exist?) That means only the dumbest people are responding to polls. The rest of us have lives to lead and we’re not taking ten minutes out of our day to respond to questions from unemployed cat moms who have been hired by biased political charlatans to formulate public opinion on the fly. Yes, that’s probably a run-on sentence LYNN, but I have a poetic license, and I can do what I want.

So, here’s how it works. The agenda-driven “news” organizations pay unemployable nitwits to sit around all day and call people, and only the dumbest people are accessible to the pollsters. Then they manufacture numbers, cherry-pick the responses, then tell us that ISN’T THIS A SHOCK! IT’S A DEAD HEAT! Your $5 is absolutely necessary to stop the other bastards from eating our aborted cats! Whatever.

I’m sorry. I went on a rant. Anyway, love your neighbor who you can see and talk to. Take a walk. Come downtown this week. Buy a sandwich, or a beer, or a cigar, or a book. Talk to a stranger. Love your town and be thankful.

That’s the best I can do.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.