#994 Just People

You often hear one side of the aisle or another complaining. The right rails about the excesses of government and how many mistakes they make. The left whines about the crimes of big business, and how they screw up Main Street by sliming up Wall Street.
The truth is it’s the people in those organizations that screw up. Little people like you and me, but without either common sense or a moral compass. A government worker is as likely as a robber baron to mess something up.
In the final analysis, we’re all just people and our actions are not always just…or just right.
Take the big ballyhoo recently about the VA hospitals that were reusing un-sterilized colonoscopy scopes. Didn’t disinfect the cameras.
Oops.
It’s bad enough picking stuff up off toilet seats. But to have a crack team of highly trained personnel actually medically introducing bacteria deep into your colon…
On the list of HMO approved procedures, that’s at the bottom.
But what a creative cost-cutting measure. Why spend all that money sterilizing something you’re just going to put in what is essentially a biological sewer pipe? I’ve heard of anal-retentive behavior, this is the first example I’ve seen of anal inventive behavior.
Speaking of anal retentive, annual exams, and examining annuals. It’s interesting to note how people’s personalities are reflected by their choice of landscaping plants: Fragile exotic tufts of grass or hardy native groundcover. Reliable evergreens or changing deciduous. Last minute annuals or highly planned long-term perennials. Anal-retentive perfectly edged lawns or laidback scattered beauty bark. Just people expressing themselves.
Landscaping is pretty inclusive of folk’s foibles. When I see a yard in the Pacific Northwest with a pink flamingo, it teaches me a little lesson about acceptance.
Still, you can accept too much. The Postal Service recently issued a new stamp series. It’s of the Simpson’s, America’s iconic cartoon family—the perfect example of “just people.” But...
A word of caution when you send your next sympathy card to someone who’s had a relative that’s passed—do not put on a Homer stamp.
Homer is known for a different kind of passing.
America, ya gotta love it.