Tag: family

Thoughts on Immigration, Part 3 (posted 4/9/25)

I’ll start today by thanking everybody for your feedback on my Monday column. I normally respond to all comments, but I’ve had a lot going on the last several days, including watching the fightin’ Gators winning the NCAA basketball national championship! 

And that game went just the way we drew it up.  Have your best scorer play his worst game? Check.  Score the fewest points you’ve scored in a very long time? Check.  Trail by 12 points pretty late?  Check.  Lead the game for right around one minute out of 40?  Check.

But space that minute out wisely.  Take 17 seconds of lead time in the first half…and then the last 45 seconds of the game!

Also, it didn’t hurt that we played defense like Hulk Homan™ holding Gandalf’s staff at the southern border.  (“You shall not pass!  Or score very often…”) 

UF opened our basketball stadium and showed the game live on the big screen.  The place was packed, and it’s only half a mile from our house, so you could practically feel the ground shaking when the game ended! 

Anyway, I did read your comments, and I appreciate them.

This is the third and final part of my series of columns about immigration.  In the first part, I went through the evolution of our immigration laws, and pointed out groups who were specifically excluded from immigrating, including the stupid, insane, sick, welfare recipients and criminals.

In the second part, I discussed the reasons why many Americans were once either browbeaten or shamed into not deporting illegals, and how the lefties’ tactics to achieve that goal are no longer working.  Today I’m closing with a simple analogy, and a little analysis of how immigration rules should apply to visa holders and would-be naturalized citizens. 

The analogy is that a nation is like a house. 

Okay, I know that’s not especially deep or brilliant.  It’s no “faith is like a mustard seed.”  Or even, “Life is like a box of chocolates.”  But I think it can still be useful.

Your house has clear boundaries around it, i.e. its walls.  If we consider the slightly more expansive concept of “your property,” your house even has a series of exterior borders, such as your yard.  Often that is marked by a fence, or a hedge, or the edge of a lawn.  Sometimes there is another liminal space — a porch, a stoop or a patio – where you are not within the house yet, but you’re farther from the purely public space outside the yard.

If you’re a well-raised person, you feel a bit of natural reluctance to enter someone’s property without a prior arrangement to do so.  You might walk up to a door and onto the porch and knock on the door…if you’re delivering a package or you’ve told the resident that you’d be dropping by. 

But if it’s a stranger’s house and they’re not expecting you, it’s uncomfortable to let yourself in through a gated fence, and more so to walk up onto the porch.  Most of us, after knocking, will instinctively step back to the edge of the porch and try to put a pleasant look on our faces, so that the inhabitants can take a reassuring look at us from a safe distance before they open the door.  Most of us will be more polite than usual in such a situation.

Since you have the right to decide who comes into your house, and under what circumstances, you don’t even have to open the door. 

And only a sociopathic squatter, if nobody comes to the door, will just let himself in and make himself at home!

And if he does – and if the house in question is in a red state or smaller town where people have their heads on straight – he might be greeted with a warning gunshot to the chest or head.  Or at least the mind-focusing sound of a shell being racked into a shotgun.

If said squatter was lucky enough to find no one at home, and especially if it’s a big house, he would be wise to find a good hiding place, if he wanted to stay in the house.  Maybe an attic, or a basement, or the garage. 

You see where I’m going with this.  Illegal immigrants are the squatters here, and traditional, old-fashioned illegals at least had the good sense to hide, and make themselves as unobtrusive as possible.  Hence the saying from the good old days of 20 years ago which described illegals as “living in the shadows.”  They would hide from the authorities, work under-the-table jobs, and try super-hard to not be noticed.  When that didn’t work, they had the good sense to try to run.

But, like beleaguered citizens in a sanctuary city run by morons, we’ve created a new type of illegals: the entitled type.  In our lawn we’ve put up one of those idiotic signs saying, “In this house, we believe no one is illegal.”  And on our porch we’ve put up an even more idiotic welcome mat saying, “Welcome, MS-13!”

And beside our door we put a thrice-idiotic big plastic pumpkin filled with cell phones, hundred-dollar-bills, EBT cards and voter registration forms, and above that pumpkin a sign saying, “FREE!  But we’re on the honor system, so just take one of each.” (Spoiler alert: each day the first sociopath to arrive takes them all.) 

And for four years our demented grandpa who was in charge of the house – let’s call him Brandon – left the front door wide open.  And he’s the one who put the pumpkin there, because in his diminished state, he thinks every day is Halloween.

So now the squatters don’t even bother to hide in the attic or garage.  They raid our fridge, eat on our sectional couch, order pay-per-view imam sermons, and take over the master bedroom for themselves.

Sure, there are still some “nice” squatters, with the good sense to hide out in the garage with a hot plate and try to fly under the radar.  If they’re caught, they might offer to take care of the yard, clean and do our laundry if we just let them stay.

It’s no coincidence that in our blue cities and states we’ve had an unprecedented epidemic of literal squatters.  In a healthy country, no one would have the cojones to try to forcibly take over someone’s house, because they’d expect to be forcibly removed and jailed quick, fast and in a hurry.

But in recent years, squatters figured out that if we won’t enforce our borders and our laws, why would we draw that line at our houses?   And they weren’t wrong.

Obviously, we shouldn’t allow illegals to stay here, any more than we’d allow squatters to stay in our house.  Yes, we should prioritize removing the brazen sociopaths in the master bedroom first, but the “nicer” ones in the garage will need to go too, as soon as we can get to them.

People legally here on visas are more like house guests or roommates.  Some of them are here temporarily – on a student or working visa that is the equivalent of a one- or two-year lease.  Others are in a potential rent-to-own situation, with a green card that allows them to live here while they’re going through a process that they hope will eventually allow them to become citizens. 

But in those cases – and I cannot stress this enough – the roommates must be on their very best behavior.  Pay your rent on time.  Abide by all house rules.  Don’t make us sorry that we allowed you to move in!

That’s what’s been so infuriating about the entitled little Ivy League Marxists and junior jihadis, and the elite leftists who support and defend them.  We give them the amazing gift of allowing them to come to the greatest country in the world, to study at what used to be top-flight universities, and they immediately start acting like horrible roommates and entitled brats.

Khalid Mahmoud and many like him seem to double-major in anti-Semitism and campus disruption.  Helyeh (more like “Hell no!” am I right?) Doutaghi gets a professor gig, and then spends most of her time slandering America and the West as fascist colonizers, and promoting the jihadist ideology of our nation’s enemies. 

And when we cancel their visas and move to deport them, the usual suspects wail about it.  “They haven’t committed any crimes!  They haven’t gotten due process!  This is a free speech issue!”

No, it isn’t.  It’s a spoiled, horrible piece-of-crap squatting roommate issue!

They’ve done the equivalent of moving into my house, drinking all of my bourbon, then falling asleep on my best recliner and urinating on it in their sleep.  Then they wake me up in the morning by blasting some horrific Palestinian rap music (Lil Scimitar and the Infidel Beheaders’ “Throw the Jew Down the Well”).  When I go to the kitchen to make breakfast, I discover that they’ve eaten all the eggs and thrown out all the bacon, because it’s “haram.”  

Then, just when I’m watching the Gators celebrating the national championship, and our 7’9” redshirt freshman cutting down the net without the use of a ladder (that’s a real thing that happened on Monday night), they switch the channel to a Syrian soccer game.   

When I look at them with murder in my eyes, they inform me that Cassie the Wonder Dog is going to have to go, because Muhammad says that dogs are unclean. 

And then their first rent check bounces.

They’re in our house, and they’ve got no right to be here.  They’ve abused our hospitality, and they need to be thrown out, both because they richly deserve it, and “pour encourager les autres.”      So we’re calling our neighborhood cop to come over and give them a taser-and-billy-club-assisted eviction. 

And our neighborhood cop is Hulk Homan.™

Hamas delenda est!

Poison Ivy and Good Political News (posted 3/14/25)

Before I get into today’s helping of good news, I have to share a brief story, and only because it comes with a moral.

For the last 10 days, I have been enduring a bout of poison ivy that would kill a lesser man, and drive many men to madness.  I received this affliction because I tried to do a good thing for my community. 

Our little neighborhood has a small and charming pond in it, and a few weeks ago, our neighbors called for a community “clean the pond” day.  We would have happily joined in, except that they scheduled it on a Sunday morning, and I was in church on Sunday morning, repenting of my vicious mockery of Democrats that you have all witnessed many times here in CO-ville.  Along with many other sins which are not important now, so tend to the log in your own eye and mind your business.

Anyway, when the clean-up was over the neighbors had piled limbs and pond fronds and other debris around the pond, and I took several truckloads of that stuff to our local dump.

But because I like to go above and beyond, and because my wife bought me a chain saw for Christmas – after 35 years of marriage, that woman really gets me – I offered to cut down two dead crape myrtles that were leaning precariously over the pond.  And apparently, concealing some of the most virulent poison ivy known to man.

Before I realized what was happening, I had scratched both of my forearms, one side of my neck, one cheek, and a spot a few inches below one eye.  And then the blisters and the maddening itch came, and after 5 days of what turned out to be totally inadequate doses of steroids, I am now on a much stronger regimen.

The facial outbreak has kept me from shaving for a week, so I’m rocking a scraggly hobo beard that only partly distracts your eyes from the angry red blistering.  And my forearms are tough to look at.  They would easily win a “Worst Forearms in a Leper Colony” contest.  And that description still doesn’t do them justice.

The closest I can come is, if Maxine Waters’ melting face was a pair of forearms…

Yes.  Exactly.

I told you there was a moral to this story, and there is: Never do good deeds for your community.

HA!  I kid.  The real moral is one of the offshoot benefits of an optimistic outlook: Having something taken away for a time makes you appreciate it much more than you otherwise would.

Growing up without money can make you appreciate hard work and thus getting a little money.  Being lonely for a time can make you appreciate finding a good friend or good spouse.  Being bullied can make you stronger and more empathetic, and inclined to intervene when others are bullied. 

And being sick for a little while makes you appreciate good health in ways that you never would otherwise.

For example, I normally have a regularly passable face and two normal forearms, none of which I’ve given much thought to.  But in a few weeks, when this hideous cup of disfiguring hives and scrofula has passed from me, I’m going to look in the mirror and wink at my suddenly handsome self, and then go out in public and look for an excuse to point to things in front of other people, just to show off my pristine forearms.    

Okay, now on to good political news: the Democrats are continuing to shoot themselves in the feet in various and sundry ways. 

For example, for a day or two, a succession of MSM talking heads tried to argue that Trump was hiding from or avoiding the press because he didn’t want to take questions about the stock market downturn.

Exhibit A was CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, who I find intriguing, mostly because of an odd, chameleon-like quality she has.  From some angles, she looks like an attractive woman, but then the camera moves slightly, and she’s got a mannish transgender thing going on. 

On Tuesday, she did a snarky little segment about Trump “keeping the press away.”  Which was ridiculous, as many commenters immediately pointed out, by way of giving the numbers of press questions answered in their first month in office by Obama and Biden (a little over 100 questions each), as compared to Trump’s… wait for it… 1006!

Then, within 30 minutes of her criticizing Trump for avoiding media, he took questions from the media for 30 minutes!  D’oh!

Speaking of biased media figures, there are a lot less of them still employed lately.  A partial list of the resigned or fired includes Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Norah O’Donnell, Chuck Todd, Jonathan Capehart, Lester Holt, Chris Wallace and Andrea Mitchell.  In addition, the inaccurately biased polling outfit 538 has been shut down, and the entire NYT editorial board is out. 

Which reminds me of the old joke, “What do you call 1000 Hezbollah terrorists getting blown up by pagers?”  Answer: “A start!”

In a story I missed the other day, Rosie O’Donnell has deported herself to Ireland.  Which is great news for us, but a tough break for the Irish.  First the potato famine, then the Troubles, and now this!

Other Europeans are also coming to some well-deserved grief.  Recent stories came out that would shame many virtue-signaling Ukraine supporters, if they were capable of feeling shame.  Polls of 7 nations show that they all strongly think that Ukraine should receive more support – in numbers ranging from 52% up to 66%.  But the same polls also show that they think that THEIR COUNTRY should pony up support for Ukraine by much lower numbers, ranging from only 11% to 29%.  Hypocrites!

Reports also show that the Europeans who trumpet their support for Ukraine most loudly have also been giving more money to Putin – buying Russian natural gas and oil – than they’ve given in support to Ukraine.  Which is something that Trump warned them about 6 or 7 years ago, and they laughed in his face. 

My favorite example of those with delusionally high opinions of themselves is an Austrian economist named Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn.  Partly because of his ridiculous name.  “Gunther” is a perfect start, followed by what sounds like a hyphenated term for a German sex crime.  (“Und vat vere you doing when Gretchen accused you of fehling her jahn?”)

But mostly because he said this in an actual tweet that I swear I am not making up: “I call to confiscate all American military assets in Europe and hand it over to our emerging European Army in case of America leaving NATO.”

Oh, is that what you’re calling for, Gunther?  I’d love to see you try it. 

I picture a battalion of whiny Greta Thunbergs being whacked in the head with rifle butts by a battalion of Pete Hegseths. 

Meanwhile, in blue cities in America, Democrats continue to make bad choices.  While they actually have an opening to hit Trump over his ad-hoc-seeming tariffs and the falling stock market, they decide instead to focus their attention on… wait for it… defending Hamas supporting antisemites like Mahmoud Khalil, garden variety criminals, and illegal aliens.

Within the last two weeks, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (as in “woo doggy, is she stupid!) has championed the latter two groups, in what looks like an ambitious campaign to single-handedly debunk the stereotype that Asians are all really smart.

On March second, one Lemark Jaramillo – 32, with a criminal record dating back to his high school days – chased two terrified people into a Boston restaurant with a knife.  Luckily, an off-duty Boston cop was there, and after Jaramillo wouldn’t follow orders to drop the knife, shot him.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible for anyone to say anything more idiotic than what his girlfriend, Jennifer Geddes, said after Jaramillo assumed room temperature. She said, “Lemark was a good guy.  He didn’t deserve this.”

A local story reported, “The two had been dating for a decade, and Geddes said he was loving and close to her children.”  

Then… wait for it…

One.  Sentence.  Layter…

“Geddes had however taken a restraining order out against Jaramillo in 2018 after he was charged with assaulting her…and pulling out a knife.” 

Because of course he did.

So how did Mayor Wu top that clueless statement?  By giving a press conference in which she said, “My condolences and all of our thoughts are with the family of the individual whose life has been lost.” 

Perfect.

Ten days later, in a Boston Public Radio interview, Wu blew off criticism that she has also been releasing criminals wanted by ICE, because ICE hasn’t presented her with completed warrants before she can release the miscreants back onto the streets. “ICE is choosing not to go and get these criminal warrants, [and then claiming] so and so was extremely dangerous and a threat to the community.”  

You had arrested them and were holding them in your jail, which we know you are generally loath to do, and ICE then identified them as wanted illegals.  But that wasn’t good enough for your tender sensibilities, so you released them, forcing ICE into the more dangerous situation of having to chase them down and arrest them in public.

But as grim as this story is, I’m an optimist, and can look on the bright side.  

Someday soon, my face and forearms will be returned to attractive good health.  But these Democrats will be self-beclowning, rake-stomping boneheads until the day they die. 

Hamas delenda est!

Looking Forward to the New Year, While Enjoying the Last of the 12 Days of Christmas (posted 12/31/24)

I hope that you all had a great Christmas!  I’m still enjoying the holiday, since the 12 Days of Christmas don’t end until January 6th, with the Feast of the Epiphany.  This January, I’ll be combining the religious and the secular, when I celebrate the Feast of the Righteous Schadenfreude on the 20th.

If the bourbon holds out, I’ll probably compose a speech for the occasion.  I’ve already got a title (“Our long national nightmare is over!”) and a first line (“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this Orange sun…”)

We had Christmas here at home, with both of my wife’s brothers and their wives coming over.  Among my favorite gifts were two coffee mugs: one with a pic of Trump and Vance on it (from my wife), and one from my liberal brother-in-law with the words, “I love when I wake up in the morning & Donald Trump is President.”

You know my bro-in-law is a good egg when he’s willing to go against all his instincts to buy that mug for me!  I don’t know if I could have brought myself to buy him a Que Mala mug if 11/6 had gone horribly wrong.  (And if I did, it would probably have been sarcastic and mean-spirited.  Like, “Nice job!  You’ve ruined everything.  Thanks for destroying the country!”)

My wife, daughter and I drove up to Tennessee the day after Christmas to spend four days with my mom, sister and her husband, and we really had a great time, even though there was a melancholy undertone because of mom’s progressing Alzheimer’s.  She is still herself, and sweet as can be, even as time has become a winding current that she enters and emerges from unpredictably.

Not long after we arrived, she asked me when her brother Joe was going to get there.  (She’s the last survivor of four siblings, and Joe’s been gone for almost 10 years.)  My sister tells me that at least a couple of times in the last month, mom has come out of her room early in the morning, nicely dressed and worrying that she’d be late for work.  One morning she said she hoped she hadn’t missed the bus for school.   

But her maternal instincts are still there, as strong as ever.  Regular readers may remember that after she’d had a small stroke last year, my sister had told her that she’d sleep in mom’s bed with her for the first several nights back home, since she was still unsteady on her feet and would need some help getting to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

By bedtime mom had forgotten the conversation, and as Rhonda was tucking her in, she had to remind her that she was sleeping in her bed that night.  Mom said, “Oh, okay.”  After a pause, she said, “Did you have a bad dream?”

Each night we were there, mom got up after she’d gone to bed, and pulled a bunch of blankets out of her closet and carried them out to me, asking if we were going to be warm enough.  Two nights she did it twice, 10 minutes apart.  The last time, as I was putting her back into bed, she looked unhappy with me.  She whispered, “Who was that woman in your bed?”

Because I’m still basically a child, I said, “How can you expect me to remember all of their names?” 

For just a moment she started to scowl, but then her expression changed, and she slapped my hand, saying, “Oh, that’s Karen.  I know!”  And she giggled like she used to when I was a kid, and she was a young mother. 

It’s like watching a loved one walk into a foggy twilight.  With each step, you see less of her, and she of you.  The fog cyclically thickens and thins, and one moment you can look into her eyes and she’s fully present and clear, but you know that with each step, the fog may be swirling or lifting, but evening is steadily advancing.

Still, we really did have a great time.  One of the gifts we got mom was a big puzzle made from a picture of all of us at my daughter Katie’s wedding two years ago.  She helped put the puzzle together with my wife, daughter and sister, but her focus ebbed and flowed.  They left the last three pieces for mom to put in, completing the puzzle, and she loved that.

We played a game of Christmas-themed charades that had us laughing ourselves to tears.  (To get the flavor of the game, you can go to the old picture of mom and me on my site, Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  Yes, she’s wearing a party hat and I’m wearing a turkey hat, and it wasn’t anybody’s birthday, or Thanksgiving.  I have no explanation.)

At one point Karen drew the card, “The ghost of Christmas yet to come,” and she chose to do a Yeti impersonation to get to “yet.” (She got up on her toes and did a lumbering walk that was half Frankenstein and half Joe Biden, if he had better posture and longer arms.)  And my daughter got it!

At one point I drew “Holiday Inn,” an old Christmas movie that nobody else had heard of.  So I was reduced to trying to act out a mid-range hotel chain that has nothing to do with Christmas.  (Nobody got it.)  Later I got “Away in a Manger” and for some reason started by indicating it was five words.  When they finally got that one and pointed out that it is actually four words, I counted again, then pointed out that I’m a hilarious genius, not a math genius.

Once when it was mom’s turn, she was laughing so hard that she had to go to the bathroom before looking at her card.  Did I already mention that I am basically a child?  Because I looked at mom’s card – “snowball fight” – and told everyone to yell it out as soon as she started to do anything.

She came back from the bathroom, looked at her card, then put it back down. As soon as she started to cup her hands together, we all yelled in unison, “Snowball fight!!” 

And she looked as shocked as she had been when she momentarily thought I had stashed a mistress in my bed in the guest room at Christmastime!     

We’re back home now, and looking forward to a new year more than I have in quite a while.  I’m still so relieved and grateful for the election results, and I hope that you are too.

Happy New Year!

Christmas, Losses, & Remembering My Dad (posted 12/13/24)

This column will be an unusual one. 

Today my wife and I are heading down for my daughter Emily’s graduation from college on Saturday.  We’ve got a four-bedroom Airbnb through Tuesday, and we’ll be joined by Katie and her husband, Karen’s two brothers, and one of my cousins.  After the graduation, we’ll be having an early Christmas with Katie and Ryan, since they’ll be back in Denver and working on Christmas Day. 

In other words, we’ll be making rather merry for the next four days, and I won’t be posting my usual column on Monday.  But I’ve got some things on my mind that I thought I’d share before leaving town.

December is my favorite month of the year, and after the relief of Trump’s win last month, this has been an easier year than usual to get into the Christmas spirit. 

We’ve got the tree and lights up, and last weekend we saw the town tree-lighting – with carolers, horse-drawn wagon rides and luminaries lining the streets – in an old hotel where Robert Frost spent his last winters, in one of our town’s oldest neighborhoods.  The advent services at church have been great, and the weather has cooperated by giving us enough cold nights to justify having a few fires in the fireplace.

But I’m also reminded of the bittersweetness of the Christmas season for many, especially older people.  The sweetness is obvious, especially for Christians, for whom the holiday marks the pivot-point of human history.

But the bitterness is there too, because for most of us Christmas is the most nostalgic of holidays, and nostalgia always combines happy remembrance with the ache of loss.  If you had a reasonably happy childhood, some of your best memories invariably involve Christmastime and the traditions and people you loved, magnified through the rosy lens of your own innocence.   

The older we get, the greater the chances that the holiday also carries bad memories of tragedies that happened around the holidays, the pain made sharper by the jarring confluence of a happy event – a birthday, an anniversary – with a devastating loss.  After you’ve lived a while, you’ll inevitably have some poignantly empty chairs around your Christmas table.   

I’m thinking about this now because tomorrow is both Emily’s graduation day, and the tenth anniversary of my dad’s death.

Ten years seems like a perfect amount of time to illustrate how strangely time works on us.  By the time you’re middle aged, events from a decade ago alternately feel like they happened eight months ago, or in a different lifetime.

(It’s disorienting.  I mean, I’d guess that Kurt Cobain died around 10 years ago, around the time when Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race.  But no.  Cobain died thirty years ago, and Biden was still in the race 6 months ago!) 

I think it was C.S. Lewis who cited this kind of alienating strangeness in the way we perceive time as, if not dispositive proof of the soul’s immortality, at least a persuasive indicator of it.  He used the analogy that fish are not constantly surprised by the water they live in, but we are constantly surprised – fooled, and vexed, and startled – by our experience of time.   We are created for immortality, and this current life hints at that fact constantly.

So on the one hand, I wish dad could be there to watch my astrophysicist daughter walk across that stage tomorrow.  And on the other, I know that he will be.  And that the only reason he’s not as proud of her as I am, is that it’s not possible for anyone else to be as proud of her as I am!

Okay, I said that this would be an unusual column, and I think I’ve delivered on that.  So I’ll finish the same way.   

I wrote a remembrance of my dad for Father’s Day in 2017, which now seems like 6 months ago.  (See what I mean?)  I’ve re-posted it on a couple of Father’s Days since then, and I’m happy to say that thinking of him these days brings back nothing but good feelings. 

I’m reposting it here for one last time before retiring it for good.  Whether you’re a newcomer to the CO site and haven’t seen it before, or you’re seeing it one more time, I hope that even though it’s not the least bit Christmas-y, it will help you to appreciate the time you’re able to spend with your family this Christmas.

From June, 2017:

“As this Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad.  He died not long before Christmas in 2014, and time has been doing its work, to the point that thoughts of him have shifted over to a mix of many happy memories of him, to go along with the pain of his loss.  I’m a father to two daughters, and have known hundreds of other fathers as friends, relatives, co-workers and acquaintances, and off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who carried out that role any better than my dad.

He was born into a family of four boys and four girls to working class parents in Illinois in the late 1930s.   He married my mom not long after high school, and had me and my younger sister, and raised us while working at the Northern Illinois Gas Company, until he was forced into an early retirement at the age of 57 by injuries.   He operated a variety of heavy equipment, and he took great pride in his work.

When I was little, I can remember him pointing out subdivisions or houses that he’d run services to, and whenever we’d pass a parking lot with heavy machinery, he’d brag that he could operate anything on that lot.  My mom had to explain to an excited young me (at maybe age 5 or 6?) that no, she was not going to let dad scratch my back with his backhoe.  (He’d assured me that he could do so, no problem.)

He was not perfect, as none of us are.  He could be short-tempered and impatient, for example.  But even then, he was the most unusual of people: he was a short-tempered man whom I never heard swear.  Not once in my life.  Not when he bounced a hammer off his thumb.  Not when the Bears or the Cubs went O-for-a-month.  Not when a Democrat got elected.

He used ridiculous euphemisms to avoid cursing – “son of a buck,” “dirty rip,” and the like – but as a grown man who rarely makes it across town in heavy traffic without dropping at least one trenchant Anglo-Saxonism at one of my many brain-dead fellow citizens who cannot seem to master a turn signal or figure out which lane is for passing, that’s almost more than I can comprehend.

People are freaking idiots all the time — I am too — and my dad was surrounded by them his entire life, but he never swore in front of his son!

In the summer of 2014 dad had cancer surgery that we initially thought had been successful.  But a month or so later we found out that it had metastasized, and a month after that we learned that it would be fatal.  I spent much of the fall of that year with my mom and dad in Tennessee, and I’ll always be grateful for that time.  I recorded dad sharing a lot of memories from his life, and I saw the evidence of how many lives he had touched in the form of a steady stream of visitors who came to see him, and to see what they could do for him and for my mom.

He kept his sense of humor throughout his final illness.  One of my cousins was visiting not too long before dad died.  That cousin is known for sarcasm and smart-assery – even by Simpson standards – and he has some Scottish background on one side.  Dad was sitting in a recliner and drifting in and out of the conversation, and the cousin was joking that he was going to try to learn the bagpipes.  He promised (tongue-in-cheek) to play them at dad’s funeral.

Dad delivered his line with a perfectly dry tone: “That’s it.  I’ve changed my mind.  I’m not dying.”

Dad died on a Sunday evening, and he told me his last joke two days earlier.   He and I had both been Chicago Bears fans for life, and the Bears really stunk in 2014.  In the last couple of months in that season, they were on tv unusually often for a team that bad.  On the final Thursday of dad’s life they were on Thursday Night Football, and dad and I watched from our dueling recliners.  He was pretty heavily medicated and drowsed on and off; each time he woke up a bit, he’d ask me the score, and I’d report that the Bears were down by another touchdown or so, and he’d roll his eyes and make some comment before sliding back to sleep.

The next day, he asked me for a favor.  He had been unable to make it to church for a while by then, but his church made each week’s services available on DVD for members who had been unable to make it on Sunday.  Dad had several of those stored up to watch, and on that Friday, he asked if I could put a DVD in for him.  He seemed a little drowsy, but I put in the DVD and handed him the remote, asking if he thought he could stay awake for the sermon.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “But I don’t want the last tv I ever watch to be that stinking Bears’ game last night.”

To end his good life, he died a good death.   He had hospice care in his home, and my mom, my sister and brother-in-law and I spent some time with him every day in his final months.   He had the chance to tell everyone he knew how much he loved them, and that he was ready to go, and he was solicitous of others at a time when most of us can focus only on ourselves.  Because of great hospice workers and morphine (which by itself is proof to me that God exists, and that He loves us), he was able to die at home.

He slept for most of his final day.  In the evening, mom and I arranged a schedule; I would stay up with him, and give him morphine twice, and then she would get up early and administer the morphine while I was sleeping in.  She spoke to him the last time, kissing him and telling him that he had been a great father and husband, and that he could go.  Then she went to bed, and I’m convinced that he passed before she fell asleep.  I had some papers to grade, so I went down the hallway to get my computer, and brought it back to set up in the chair next to his.   By the time I got the computer plugged in and checked on him, he was gone.

Ronald Lee Simpson was born on January 22, 1938, and died on December 14th, 2014.  In between he lived a loving and generous life.  I think it is hard for some people to come to faith in a loving heavenly Father if they have an abusive, or neglectful, or absent earthly father.  I am a Christian because of both of my parents, but my path to God was made much easier by the example of a father’s love that I witnessed all my life.

I can’t wait to see him again.

I wish for you all that you have had a father like mine, or that you marry a father like mine, or that you are a father like mine.  Happy Father’s Day!” 

…and Merry (early) Christmas, everybody!

My Daughter is in the Hospital, & Little Else Matters (posted 10/17/24)

I am writing this from my daughter Katie’s hospital room in Denver, to update and touch base with those who have emailed or are wondering why I haven’t posted a column this week. 

Katie had a set-back this past weekend, but she’s doing better now, and I appreciate all your prayers and well wishes posted after my last column.

Katie continued to improve after her surgery, and last Saturday afternoon she was released after two weeks in the hospital; her husband and my wife were ecstatic to finally have her home again.  They got her settled in, and my wife prepared to fly to Vermont on Sunday, to join me and some friends of ours on a previously planned fall getaway.

Unfortunately, in the middle of the night Katie once again started experiencing a lot of pain, and she was rushed back to an ER, and eventually re-admitted to the hospital she’d left only 14 hours before.  Since then she’s been on antibiotics and pain meds, and the doctors have been watching her closely.  

She’s got an infection that has been responding to treatment, and the docs are doing various tests to diagnose the cause of the problem.  They’re fairly optimistic that they’ll be able to get her through this without another surgery, and she has been feeling a little better each of the last several days.

I flew to Denver, and we celebrated her 27th birthday in the hospital on Tuesday.  Which stinks.

On the other hand, she’s an optimistic young woman, and she knows that she’ll now have a birthday story that will make her extra grateful during all future birthdays.  Just like many people who had that one horrible trip – with the canceled flights and the food poisoning – that makes every subsequent vacation sweeter, or the WWII vets who never had a tough winter after that freezing Christmas of ’44 in Bastogne.  

It’s a cliché to say that tough times reveal people’s character, but I’m happy that this truism has been confirmed in our lives over the last several weeks.  My wife has been a doting mom at her daughter’s bedside, trading off night shifts with Katie’s husband, who has proven himself a stand-up guy. 

He’s been with her every day, making sure she has everything she needs, and reading one of their favorite Tolkien books to her every evening.  He has been bringing her things from home, including some kind of scent-diffuser – her hospital room smells like sage, instead of like a hospital room – which has to be the most thoughtful thing I’ve ever heard a straight guy do.

And something that I have to admit I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years!

I’ve got a lot to be thankful for.  In addition to the increasingly positive prospects suggesting that our nation might be nearing a return to political sanity in a few weeks – I’ll be posting about that stuff again shortly – our homes and hometown have survived three hurricanes in the last two months. 

And we’re living in a time of unbelievable advances in medicine, in a great nation that has helped to produce – and benefit from – those advances. 

It’s the middle of a quiet night, and I’m watching my beautiful daughter sleeping peacefully in a sage-scented room, surrounded by amazing technology in an impressive building filled with skilled professionals dedicated to returning her to health. 

My heart is full, and I can’t believe that 27 years have passed since my wife and I were watching her sleep in another hospital bed, her face as innocent and her expression as untroubled as it is right now.     

Getting Through the Storm, and a Daughter’s Surgery (posted 10/2/24)

This has been a hectic week for me, and I’ve been out of the loop re: both national news and the CO site and community.  You know it’s bad when the great and powerful CO himself texted me to say that some COers have asked if I’m okay, and he suggested that I provide a “proof of life” post for my “adoring fans.” 

Did I need to quote that “adoring fans” part? 

Probably not.  But I like the sound of it, so sue me. 

Anyway, I’m still here, and thanks for your concern.

I last posted in the early hours of last Friday, after I’d inadvertently left my wife to face the hurricane alone in Florida, while I went up to Tennessee to stay with my mom, while sis and her husband took a short trip to listen to some gospel singing in east Tennessee.     

Of course the storm had been stronger than we’d expected, knocking the power off at my house, and actually causing some flooding that devastated the Carolinas and east Tennessee, causing my sister and her husband to come home a day earlier than planned.  (By the way, our power came back on after around 30 hours, and our house and rentals and tenants were all unharmed.)

But it turned out that early on Friday, the storm became much less important to us, because that morning, my daughter Katie’s husband rushed her to the ER in Denver, where she had surgery later that day.

Regular readers will remember that Katie is the best pediatric nurse in the mountain west (references available on request), and that she is an apple of her dad’s eye.  I’m not sure how much I’ve written about this before, but she was born with Hirschsprung’s syndrome, a condition involving under-developed nerve endings in the colon, in utero.  She had a colostomy and half of her colon removed when she was three days old, and then another major surgery when she was three months old.

Thankfully, she takes after her old man, in that she is as tough as a $2 steak.  She fully recovered, and after some daunting infections and hospitalizations during her first five years of life, she has been blessedly healthy since then.

Until Friday, when it was discovered that she had many adhesions throughout her intestine, unwelcome leftovers from her long-ago surgeries and internal scarring. 

Before Friday, if you’d asked me, “What is the longest and most painful four and a half hours anyone can experience?” I would have said, “Listening to Que Mala Harris trying to answer a straightforward question.” 

But now I know that I was wrong.  Because my Katie was in surgery for four and a half hours, during which my wife prayed and worried in a dark house in Florida, and I did the same in rainy Tennessee.  While we were waiting, we contemplated how we were going to get flights to Denver from two different towns in the aftermath of a storm that had caused havoc at the local airports.

Then the news arrived: her docs were fantastic, and she’d come through the surgery like a champ.  They’d initially tried to do the operation laparoscopically, but when they got inside and saw the extent of the scarring, they realized they’d need to open her up more comprehensively. She’s got an impressive scar, but thank God the docs didn’t need to take out any more of her bowel.

Before the surgery she had been hesitant about my wife making the trip out until she saw how the surgery went, but afterwards, she wanted her mom there.  (Mom was chomping at the bit, and I’m not sure it would have made a difference.  Apparently there is a Norwegian-American rule to the effect that once you’ve given birth to someone, you have the inalienable right to go see them whenever they’re sick, and regardless of their feelings on the issue.  Or so she explained.)

So it was decided that I’d keep the home fires burning, while Karen flew to Denver on Saturday.  Katie will be in the hospital for another three or four days at least, with her husband and mom nearby. 

As always happens after a very bad scare, the world seems a little more vibrant now.  Colors are brighter, food tastes better, and politics seem like insignificant annoyances.  Our prayers have been answered, and our worst fears averted, and life is good!

Tonight, for the first time in nearly a week, I started paying attention again, and watched the VP debate.  I’ll have more to say on Friday, but when our opponent confesses on tv that he’s a knucklehead, and our guy does so well that the partisan moderators have to turn his mic off, you know things went well for the good guys. 

Speaking of which, if I were in the Iranian government, I wouldn’t be answering any phone calls, pages, texts, or radio messages anytime soon.    

Hamas delenda est!

How Did Squatting Become a Thing in the US? (posted 3/27/24)

Today’s topic is squatters. 

I’m not sure why there are suddenly a spate of stories about squatters in the news, but I’m sure of one thing: allowing strangers to help themselves to other’s houses is a big red flag warning that society is rapidly deteriorating.

At the risk of sounding like an old guy saying, “In my day, this never would have been allowed to go on,” let me say – as a youthful, vibrant 60-is-the-new-40 guy, “In my day this never would have been allowed to go on.”

But the issue isn’t just chronological, it’s also geographical, cultural, and political. 

I grew up in a series of small towns in Illinois, and while I can’t imagine someone forcing their way into one of my relatives’ houses and claiming it for his own, I can somehow exactly imagine the reactions of my uncles, dad or grandpa — and possibly my grandma, and one of my orneriest aunts – if that had ever happened.

It would go exactly like this: 

10-year-old me (bursting through my grandpa’s screen door):  Gramps, some guy let himself into Aunt Carol’s house and says that it’s his now!

Grandpa (putting down his mason jar of corn liquor): How big is he?

Me: Why?

Grandpa: Cause I need to know whether to get my axe handle or my gun.  Also, call your dad, Bob, Ray and Bill, and tell them to meet me at Carol’s.  Oh, and call Doc Johnson, too.

Me: Why?

Grandpa: Cause none of us went to medical school, so we don’t know how to patch up gunshot wounds or remove axe handles from arses.

And, scene.

But again, it’s not just chronological.  It’s also geographical – I’ll bet there’s no rash of squatting in rural areas or red states, unless it’s in a big blue city in a red state – and cultural – it’s not happening in areas with lots of cohesive families and an appreciation of the second amendment.

The umbrella stretching over all of those factors, though, is politics.  Squatting can only happen in an area where soft-on-crime, anti-gun, and coercive, sclerotic, big government policies have taken hold and created a backwards moral system that punishes law-abiding citizens and rewards law breakers.   

The contrast is clear from two recent examples.  You have probably seen the story of the middle-class Brooklynite who inherited her mother’s house, but found several squatters living in it when she went there.  So shooed a couple of them out and barely finished changing the locks when a third squatter barged back in, insisting that he lived there.

When she pushed back, he called the cops, and they ended up arresting her for changing the locks on her own house, and told her she’d have to go through landlord/tenant court to get him out.  Which will take months or even a year and cost her tons of money, while the deadbeat squatter just laughed.  

Meanwhile, in the free state of DeSantis-land, things went a little differently when a recidivist Biden voter (I’m guessing about that. But I’m also right.) named Brandon Harris was serially breaking into homes.  He had at least 17 prior arrests, plus multiple outstanding felony warrants at the time. 

As the cops headed for the neighborhood, one homeowner shot at Harris several times, but tragically missed.  The cops arrived and arrested Harris, and the local sheriff gave a press conference shortly afterwards. 

I swear I am not making up this exact quote from that Sheriff’s press conference:

“As to the person… we don’t know what homeowner—which homeowner shot at him.  I guess they think that they did something wrong, which they did not.  If someone is breaking into your house, you’re more than welcome to shoot him in Santa Rosa County.  We prefer that you do, actually.  So whoever that was, you’re not in trouble.  Come see us. We have a gun safety class we put on every other Saturday.  If you take that, you’ll shoot a lot better, and hopefully you’ll save the taxpayers money.”   

Yes!!  If Trump hasn’t settled on a VP pick yet, may I suggest this guy?

As a small-time landlord, this issue is especially personal for me.  Over the last 25 years, I’ve managed to buy and fix up three rental houses.  They’ve slowly appreciated, and now they constitute the bulk of our retirement income, and an inheritance for our daughters. 

I would never have bought them if I thought that after years of patience, work and hassle, some lazy grifter could squat in one of them, and I’d be forced to wage a court battle and watch while he tore up the place for months on end.  I’m not a violent person… but I’d be willing to learn.  

And then the cops would arrive, and I’d have to try to come up with an explanation for how the squatter fell down the stairs and impaled himself on that axe handle.

In that sense, the leftist instinct to empathize with and go easy on criminals leads to many Kyle Rittenhouses, and a lot of other vigilante action.  Bad government incentivizes vigilantes, and when it does, my sympathy is with the vigilantes. 

If you don’t like that – I’m talking to you, progressives who are very concerned about the civil rights of “protestors” (often rioters) – you need to support your police.  Fund them, train them, give them moral and legal support, and yes, hold them accountable when they behave badly.

But without funding and community support, the police will absent themselves – either actively, as when they quit or retire, or passively, as when they stay in their cars and allow social rot, especially in neighborhoods where they know they’ll be attacked by the politicians and populace no matter what they do.

I can’t see myself ever living in a blue state – to paraphrase an old joke about Texans, “I wasn’t born in Florida, but I got here as soon as I could.” – but if I were forced to (because of family or some other exigency) I sure wouldn’t invest in real estate there.   And because many millions of wise Americans feel the same, they are leaving blue states and counties for red ones.

As that shift happens, the quality of life in blue areas, on many fronts – crime, taxation, unemployment, lousy schools, etc. – is deteriorating.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Cause and effect, reaping and sowing, schadenfreude and karma – they all work, and they are mortal enemies of leftist governing philosophy. 

In the meantime, Florida just passed an anti-squatting law.   It preserves the rights of legitimate tenants to legally contest evictions, but in obvious squatting situations, it enables cops to immediately evict squatters and charge them with crimes.   Ron DeSantis is going to sign it shortly, and it goes into effect on July 1st. 

Man I hope we can someday have that guy as our president!

Hamas delenda est!