I SAW YOU
NEVER IMAGINED... There's so many things that I need to say and so many things I have experienced in the past year. I looked forward to seeing you for a long time. I rehearsed the things that I would say and dreamt of us catching up over a candlelight dinner someplace we've never been before. Love you.CHEERS
THANK YOU FOR CDA SANTA CRUISE: To the couple who bought our daughter a unicorn Sunday at Dockside restaurant in Couer d'Alene Saturday, Nov. 19. You ended her first trip on the Holiday Lights Cruise on a high note. Sugar high, but so worth it. Thank you for taking the time to talk to her while we (Mom and Dad) ate. It was so special to see her engage with people, let alone the sweetest people who made her feel so special and loved. Thank you so, so much. We feel bad we didn't get your names but know you moved back from Spain to Deer Park. We appreciated your kind gesture.
ROAD MAINTENANCE: Cheers to the Public Works crews out there repairing our roads and building the North Spokane Corridor. Some may complain about the temporary inconvenience, but it needs to be done and you're doing good quality work. In the end, traffic will move more smoothly, we'll be safer, and your vehicles will suffer less damage. Thank you!
YOU GIVE ME HOPE FOR THE WORLD! A special cheers to everyone who is gracious to my 5-year-old whenever I'm out and about with him. Just this weekend, a guy at Page 42 gave him a free pen and notebook, a woman at Ladder Coffee gave him free cups of both hot and cold water and offered him a job in 13 years, and all the people at each booth at the Winter Wonder Market were all so gracious to him. I can get discouraged about the world, but then I see the kindness that he draws out of people, and I find a little hope that maybe we're better off than we thought.
MOSCOW HS FFA: Congratulations to the Moscow High School FFA National Championship Team. There are 8,995 FFA chapters throughout the U.S., Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands. They have a membership of 850,000+. Moscow High School's chapter — though small — won big. Be advised that every chapter and member is instructed in Robert's Rules of Order. Every city, county, state and congressional meeting is subject to these rules. What an Honor!
BIG HOLIDAY CHEERS: Big Holiday Cheers to Judge Mary Logan, prosecuters and public defenders involved in the "Spokane Community Court Program" for all their true dedication and concern for the community. Now I'm not a frequent flyer, but I have been thrown into the Spokane County Court system a time or two. In fact Judge Logan represented me as my public defender in one of my first charges (like 20 years ago). Recently I graduated from the "Community Court Program." During my time in the program, I witnessed a court system I had never experienced. Instead of being shuffled through like cattle just to get threw the docket and on to lunch, these people were asking questions and had concerns that were real. Questions about real-life problems and how they could help solve them were on the top of their lists, not just charges and punishments. They spent time with each person and really tried to get to the core of their crime, the problems that one might have that could lead them to commit the crimes they had been accused of. I've never seen anything like it before... It was very refreshing. So I say to Judge Logan and all the people involved in the Community Court Program, GOOD JOB! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
JEERS
DOG CHASING WILDLIFE: Downriver Golf Course, the person who allowed her dog to chase off the Canadian geese while they were peacefully sunning themselves. Shame on you.
RE: SHAME ON YOU INLANDER: Bless your heart. Maybe you shouldn't be so sensitive about criticism of a political ideology that is doing it's best to remove and/or restrict personal rights in the name of nationalism. If you're gonna be such a snowflake about this, take some of those supplements Alex Jones sells and follow some of the former president's pandemic medical advice, and that will fix you right up.
MR. BOSS: How can someone with such a beautiful soul be so blind to humanity, and to be raising another generation into that same bigotry and intolerance it's astonishingly sad. Your child cannot tell me why she feels or thinks the way she does. "I don't know it's just a bad sticker." No child at 7 should say a rainbow sticker is bad and not even understand why! It's a sticker, sir; girls like rainbows, unicorns and all pretty things. You allow games with magic, unicorns, fairies and the such, but not rainbow stickers and that one sticker in particular. I don't get it. Jesus didn't teach bigotry, hatred, judgment or intolerance. The "values" you hold yourself and your child to are not the values of Jesus or the Bible. None of what your "Christian values" entail are part of Jesus. This nation was not founded on the Bible, and if you think it was, you need to delve deeper into the history and the founders of our nation and then delve even deeper. Many of our forefathers practiced Deism NOT Christianity and certainly not built of bigotry and intolerance. I have faith, so this is not coming from some "left" field. We need to teach our children to be better then we are, not the same, not carbon copies. To love each other as God so loved his son.
JEERS TO THE INLANDER: I was going to submit a Cheers to some wholesome members of our community, but after seeing how toxic the I Saw You section has become, I decided it was no place for positivity. Jeers to the Inlander editor for turning a fun outlet for pent-up emotions into yet another political smear section. It used to be a place to jeer bad parkers and cheer Good Samaritans, but I cannot imagine any Good Samaritan willingly reading the Inlander nowadays.
JUST STOP WITH THE SELF-CONGRATULATIONS: Once again we are forced to endure the incessant self-congratulations for handing out food for Thanksgiving. Once again we are forced to watch the well-fed give bags of groceries to both truly needy families and merely greedy people in their pricey late-model SUVs. This annual display of faux, temporary generosity doesn't solve the year-round systemic problems of impoverished seniors and hungry kids. Let's call it what it really is — a way for the Not Needy to feel better about themselves before they go back to their overloaded dinner tables on Thanksgiving and the day after that and the day after that. This food drive (which ran out of food early — now, that's real news!) is at bottom a public relations gimmick.
WOULD YOU LAUGH? During a very serious scene about anti-Semitic threats in The Fableman's movie you laughed out loud in the theater. Your small worldview and ignorance are all too common around here.
GET IT BEFORE IT'S GONE: So more than $9 billion — an all-time record — was spent on landfills full of stuff on Black Friday. And airports saw their third-busiest day ever over the Thanksgiving weekend. What's the deal? We can't blame the really rich for this excess; they don't need to shop for sales and can fly on private planes. These buyers and fliers are solidly middle class and maybe below, the same people reported to be "crushed" by inflation. Apparently they aren't so strapped, or they're racking up debt they can't pay when the bill comes. One reporter described the airport mayhem as "revenge travel" — yeah, COVID, we'll show you! We're getting on stuffy oversold flights with hundreds of strangers who may or may not be carrying a virus or a box cutter. All this frenzied shopping and airport hopping is not a collective expression of determined optimism. At its empty core is a bleak nihilism. Get-It-While-You -Can-ism reigns. Temporarily. ♦
