Tuesday's With Merle

Today there were big doings here in our fair city. We had the second annual Immigration March and today was also the day that the statewide smoking ban went into effect.

As circumstances had it, I was working in the vicinity of the starting line for the big immigration march today. It was quite a sight. Marches are funny things because they tend to attract a lot of strange people with time on their hands. When the march is large you don't notice them so much, but when it is small, as ours was, the oddballs stand out. Vegans for immigration reform. Who would have guessed?

Someone decided that large drums were in order, so there was a lot of banging accompanying the chanting, yelling and singing. The most curious thing was that the march moved at glacial speed. I guess since the turnout wasn't so good, they figured that moving slowly would make the crowd seem bigger.

The march began with 1000 participants but had grown to 2000 five miles later. Evidently some folks figured that as long as they crossed the finish line there was no point in marching to the march too. Five miles, five blocks, all that mattered was they were there when the speeches were made.

We had the Bikers for Immigration. Two Hispanic guys on Harley's riding up and down the block with no apparent motive, apart from just riding back and forth. I suppose that they had to ride back and forth simply to avoid toppling over, given the one mile per hour forward motion of the march itself.

One interesting thing (at least to me) about the march was that almost 4000 high school students didn't show up at school today, but only 2000 people participated in the march and they were mostly adults. On a normal day about 1000 high school students are absent. Three thousand must have been holding private demonstrations of solidarity elsewhere.

Another interesting thing was that not very many recent immigrants blew off a day's pay to march and few Hispanic-owned businesses closed. Last year must have been a lesson in the economy of protests. No work, no pay. It's all a part of the American dream.

At least our fine government workers were out in force. The marchers were overrepresented in the categories of public and quasi-public employees, at least based on those folks interviewed on the news. Several of our Congress people flew in for the event, which for at least one day made Washington D.C. as slightly saner place.

Anyway, no one got violent and things went smoothly. The anti-immigration nuts mostly behaved themselves and the marchers marched. I am all in favor of a good immigration policy that lets people access the American dream in an sensible way. Too many die in the desert trying otherwise.

The other big news was the smoking ban. Today was the day when the world was supposed to end, according to the fans of lighting up. It is now illegal to smoke in most places in our fair state. Your home, your car and the great outdoors are all still okay, but that is about it. Employers who allow a smoking area outside must insure that the smoke cannot get into the building and to facilitate that, there is no smoking within 20 feet of the door to a business.

The Future Emphysemiacs of America meet throughout the day behind our building and they are none too happy about this development. Yesterday some of the less mature members lit up giant stogies to commemorate the last day of their inalienable right to annoy others with their disgusting habit. Today the same boneheads were carefully calculating a 20 foot distance from the back door and taking up position at that mark. They talked boldly about how there was no way to enforce the ban and that they might just ignore it altogether.

Fortunately, the building management has made it clear that they intend to comply, with or without the cooperation of the knuckleheads bent on resisting it.

This like the other incremental steps on the road to ridding the US of tobacco, will be old news next week and the smoking addicts will get over it. I'm convinced that they would comply with orders to strip down to just their skivvies and socks in order to be allow to smoke, if it came to that. Nothing gets between a smoker and the cigs, until they are as fed up with it as the rest of us.

Anyway this is my very judgmental analysis of two cataclysmic events in our town. As always I may have some of the fact wrong or my opinions may not be so well-reasoned.















Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky


Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor