It finally happened. Even though beloved comrade Vladimir Putin said he had no intention of invading the Ukraine when he piled up his storm-troopers, artillery, and medical equipment on three sides of the country, his militia paid Ukrainians a friendly visit with tanks and anything capable of firing bullets and shells. It was the old “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” ploy. Nobody believed him except for Donald Trump and his single-digit-I.Q. cronies, the boneheads on Fox News, and possibly one person who writes in The Voice on a semi-regular basis.
Now these same individuals are saying that the neighborly invasion is not such a bad thing, just like what they said about the January 6, 2021 tourist visit to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.. Trump, the godfather of the GOP, who always manages to squeeze in something about a stolen election into any topic, said that if the election hadn’t been stolen from him, this invasion never would have happened. Of course not. He would have been right there hand in hand with his Russian comrade, walking Vladimir & Company into the Ukraine.
Unfortunately, some of you may have heard Donny Dum-Dum talking with Laura Ingraham on Fox when he misunderstood her comment on amphibious troops taking part in the Russian invasion. Being a self-confirmed genius, DDD had no problem blabbing about what a great force American amphibious troops were and continued until she finally cut him off saying he was mistaken, she wasn’t speaking of American amphibious troops. If you remember some years back in 45’s administration, he gave a Fourth of July speech and noted that, during the American Revolution, our great freedom fighters had taken over the railroads and airports from the British, as if that’s some kind of amazing triumph. The British had no idea what railroads or airports were anyway, so they just let the colonists have them. Yes, folks, and this Mr. Draft-Dodging-I-Don’t-Waste-Time-Reading-Books is the guy millions of Americans voted to be our president and hope will be once again. Donny never will gain the wisdom to be had from reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
As if inflation (shades of the Jimmy Carter years) wasn’t already bad enough, it will only get worse now, with gas prices in our northern Illinois area ready to pass the $4 per gallon mark. Even though I’m a highly-paid columnist and author, I hate the high cost of gas just as much as all of you dear readers. But I have to say high gas prices are one way to force us American types to conserve fuel and stop buying oversized, gas-guzzling SUVs. In the spirit of full disclosure, of all the cars I’ve owned, one of my favorites was a 1971 Buick Riviera with a 455-cubic inch engine. It got eight-to-10 miles per gallon around town and 12-to-14 on the highway. I loved that car, but times change.
Many of us will be dragged kicking and screaming into the use of renewable energy sources. It’s funny how we have to be forced in most instances, to do what’s good for us. Politicians on the right can squawk about too much government in our lives, but if the government didn’t make regulations to push us into developing alternatives for fossil fuels or getting vaccines or protecting our green spaces and wildlife, things for our own good, we humans would keep on extracting coal and oil until our planet caved in, paving and building in undeveloped land until the entire surface of the globe was covered with strip malls and parking lots, or spreading pandemics until the only moving things on Earth were Japanese robot dogs. There’d be huge profits made, but nobody or nothing left to spend them on. Except maybe a pack of stove bolts as a treat for the robot dogs.
Writing of gas prices, one of my early bits of writing for The Voice, indeed if memory serves me (and it usually doesn’t) it was my first, addressed the way we all get snookered on the price of a gallon of gas. For instance, say a dealer pays $1.00 a gallon (I’m keeping it simple) for the truckload deposited in his underground tanks, and sells it for $1.25 a gallon. Maybe a few days later, some oil worker in Texas gets a hernia thereby depleting the workforce by one. The future cost for the next truckload of gas to the dealer will be $2.00 per gallon. Word spreads and the price at the pump up here in the Land of Lincoln immediately goes up to $2.25 per gallon, even though the gas in underground tank is the same old crummy gas that cost the dealer $1.00 per gallon a few days prior. Why? Is the gas now better because it’s aged? Is it more prized because it’s vintage? Wouldn’t it be fair for consumers to continue paying $1.25 per gallon until the old gas is used up and then pay the higher price when the new truckload comes in? It’s American capitalism at work.
Oh, well. Let’s all pray for the Ukraine and its people. I have many shirt-tail relations and ancestors in that country. I only can hope this Russian invasion will end quickly.