We Must Protect Our Schools

                                                This Has Got To Stop!

                                                        by Wilbur Witt

                           Please watch this news clip from ABC News:  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/atlanta-school-shooting-woman-tells-alleged-school-shooter-20032499

     This is a familiar story. A school, an AK-47, and a nut. This time a very brave woman, Ms Tuff (I think the name is appropriate, don't you) saved the situation and the lives of up to eight hundred children. This pattern is becoming dominant, almost scripted, where some idiot, whom everybody knows is an idiot, acquires a gun and storms off into a school to kill babies. They do this because they've seen it play out in the mass media so many times. They have images of "glory" in their fruitcake minds, and they're not so much interested in shooting as they are in the cameras they know will surely come afterward. 

     Forget about gun control. If these people couldn't get a gun then they will get a knife, a bomb, a sledge hammer, anything! Forget about mental health. When you put this vermin on pyschitrophic drugs they just go crazier. No, we have to find another solution, a "final" solution. Let's agree on some principles. One, there are people in the world that are totally useless, indeed, less than useless because not only do they use oxygen that other people need they actually endanger decent people by the very act of using said oxygen. Two, these idiots have "rights." When they paint themselves up like Geronimo, masturbate, and take off to Brigham Young Elementary they have the same rights as Bishop Franklin down at Ward 5 of the local church. I think a little common sense is needed here. 

     Most people with mental illness never hurt anyone. A depressed person traditionally withdraws into a world of lonely sadness, and psychotherapy with proper medication tries to bring the, back to happy times. The people I'm referring to are Narcissistic individuals bent on killing your children if need be to get on the nightly news. They are completely absorbed in the fifteen minutes of fame sub-culture that has grown exponentially in the last fifty years. The opposite, normal reaction to the glare of the lights is the man who saved the three girls in Ohio and then wouldn't even take a free hamburger. 

     Something has to be done to convince these personalities that the end game of their actions is not glory but inglorious death! It should be that when a SWAT team rushes in the primary goal is to execute the shooter with or without his hands in the air and absolutely NO questions ever asked of the police officer that dispatches him. Are you shocked? Take a look at what an AK-47 will do to a five year old little girl. Such a gun uses a 7.62/39 bullet. It is designed to penetrate and destroy. I was cleaning my SKS which uses the same cartridge some time ago on my porch when it went off. Now, I always point my gun away or up, but the bullet went through the ceiling, tore a two by four support beam in half, and blew two shingles off the roof. Do you really want to worry about the civil rights of a man who fires such a weapon at a school child, because if you do then you need psychotropic therapy! 

     It won't cure things all at once. These people are stupid, but in a while it will become clear to them that the best way to commit suicide is to storm off in a school with a gun. Also, with these animals prowling the streets we need to face the grim reality of "gun free" zones. When you have a gun free zone that means the active shooter has the only guns and the children and their teachers are the proverbial fish in the barrel. If you don't want teachers to have a gun then at least consider this. Any police department if any size, and folks I'm including Florence, Texas in this model, has at least one officer they can spare for school duty. What's more important, keeping our children safe, or giving tickets. Schools are becoming more secure, and entrance is almost always obtained by going through the office to gain access to the hallways. The officer could have a desk right there, near the rear so as to obscure him and yet give him full view of anyone coming into the area who just happens to be carrying a machine gun!  And when the shooter appears just kill the bastard. Don't yell, "Stop," don't worry about his mental state, just shoot him in the head and then remove the body quickly so as not to upset the children. And don't use a school crossing guard for this duty either. Use a seasoned police officer, a member or a SWAT team would be perfect because this duty is most important. And if anyone says this is cost prohibitive THEY have lost THEIR mind!  They just put a cost on children's lives. 

     My method is harsh, I'll give you that. But something must be done to let these degenerates know that the only thing that awaits them down at the school house is the flash of a muzzle, not a camera. I'd like to conclude this article with a piece of poetry I hold to, and remember, I'm just a simple ol' boy from Austin. And if you don't think the mass media lure is a factor, without looking on the net, see if you can recall the name of the Sandy Hook shooter . . .then name a child that died that day, just one. 

                      Grand pappy told my Pappy, "Back in my day, son

                  When a man had to answer for the wicked that he done

                          Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree

            Round up all of them bad boys hang em RIGHT in the street

                                              For all the people to see!"

The Day The Modem Died

                                          The Day The Modem Dies

                                                      by Wilbur Witt

     There used to be two things that were certain, death and taxes. These two events came for us all. The human experience has grown, people. Now we all will experience that third phenomenon. The morning you get up, make coffee, light your first and your iPad tells you, "Your iPad is offline. Please check your connection." Internet is down! Of course, first you run to the modem, and router, do the usual restart . . .nothing! Do that again. Nada! Ok, check the bills. Paid! You know better, but you finally call the provider. You must climb the call tree.  After pressing one for English, two for problem, and three to simply SPEAK to someone, Mohammed, wherever he is, answers the phone. 

     You begin to describe your problem in your best Rush Limbaugh voice, and he, of course, tells you to restart the modem. Rather than argue, you do it. Who knows, maybe Mohammed has some secret power Allah has given him that will bless your modem. Nope! Dead as day old beer. Thanks Allah! Now he says he must schedule a technical trouble call with all the usual warnings about cost should this turn out to be your fault. Of course, the date is a week out!  Their system is so screwed up they're a week behind just fixing all the problems? You thank him, end the call and face a brave new world. 

     Your life has become a vacuum. You don't subscribe to cable itself so you can't even turn on the news. You know what the weather IS because you can stick your stupid head out the window, but you don't know what the weather will BE! Of course, If you live in Texas the forecast is most likely hot, hotter, hottest, so that's no big deal. The hurricane season usually brings a break to this. When your hoping for a hurricane that's a whole new level of screwed. 

     You find your way to the porch. It's very quiet. You have absolutely no idea what's going on in the world. You know Obama hasn't screwed the pooch too bad because the nukes aren't raining down, but what if some girl just got kidnapped and you don't know about it? She could go through the entire ordeal without your knowledge. What if some movie star put their house on the market? What if, OMG, George Zimmerman got a parking ticket in Austin and you were never told? This is not good. You hear a distant train begin to roar in your head. 

     Ok, ok, calm down. Restart the modem again. Maybe it just had a bad hair day and it's well now. Nope! Check the wires, CHECK THE WIRES! No. It's dead that's why the little lights aren't blinking. You give it a little kiss on its dead cheek, and take your iPad back to the porch. You wonder why you even took your iPad to the porch in the first place.  I mean, it can't DO a God Damn thing! Practically everything of any value must have an Internet connection to function. All but that dumb ass deer hunting game, so you hunt deer for about fifteen minutes. After playing a computer shooting game for fifteen minutes you begin to realize how stupid kids are these days. You also realize that any kid who is dull witted enough to do that all day will never have the testicles to shoot a real gun at anyone. 

     There are a couple articles on the iPad you always meant to read, but just never found the time. Now you have the time. Some of the pressure begins to come off. That train roaring in your head begins to subside. Amazing! You read the articles and then search your documents folder for more. Nothing. The panic starts to rise again. The train speeds up. Your mind races. What to do? You go into the house, feverishly hunting for diversion. You must outrun the train. In the distance you see a book shelf. Slowly, almost sloth like, you open the glass doors and pull out one book. You blow the dust from the cover and it's Dr Phil's book, "Real Life." There's even a picture of Dr Phil with his shit eating grin right on the jacket. Some years ago you paid twenty six dollars for this book at the supermarket and always meant to get around to reading it. Well, you're holding the Round Tuit right in your sweaty palms. 

     You return to the porch. After checking your Internet connection one more time you open the book. You settle on the chapter about stress. Lo and behold there is actually a part talking about how stressful it is when the Internet goes down! Dr Phil understands your pain. God bless you Dr Phil, God BLESS you! Spurred on by this spiritual connection you devour the book, and a bottle of wine for most of the day. One of the nice things is that after reading about all the things that CAN go wrong in your life you discover that the dead modem is just about the only thing that DID go wrong in YOUR life. By now that rushing train in your head is pulling into the station. You notice that there are birds in the yard. You think that just maybe there may be rain on the way, and it's so simple, there are clouds blowing in from the north. When you were a child you knew that this almost always brought rain, yes, beautiful rain! 

     The day passes. Friends come over. The real kind, you know, the kind who bring wine and eat bread and cheese with you and talk. There's even a girl, who, while not as pretty as the pictures you get from Nigeria, is not that bad, and she's WARM! At the end of the day you retire. You fall quickly asleep. The next week the man from the provider comes and replaces your modem. Overjoyed you rush to the porch and sign into Facebook. You are very behind in pokes, and pictures of everyone's dinner, and trivial arguments, and, and, and . . .and you suddenly realize the most poignant acronym the Internet has ever produced is W....T....F! 

     

     

Thoughts On Retirement

                                                            Retirement

                                                         by Wilbur Witt

     I woke up four days ago retired. A thing like that sneaks up on you. One day you're fifty, and it seems like the next you're down at the Social Security office and they're saying, "No problem." Reality check!  Being retired has it's perks. I don't have to check for jobs at call centers any more. Electricity is always on, and that's nice. You tend to start wine a little earlier in the afternoon. Girls get prettier, too, but I can't make the connection. 

     I have noticed that the guy looking back at me when I brush my teeth looks a bit older these days. Also, I've seen a doctor four times in the last four months, compared to four times in the precious forty years. Doctors scare the piss out of me, always have. The difference in my blood pressure between the doctor's office and the parking lot can be fifty points! I guess I'm supposed to be wise. I don't feel wiser. Maybe it's the accumulation of years of screwing up that you draw on. 

     I'm going to put up with sitting on the porch being wise for about a month, and then I'm going to finish CenterVille. I remember Col Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken AFTER he went on Social Security. I have to research what happens when I get royalties. With my luck, now that I'm stable my royalties with balloon and screw it all up. I'll think about that tomorrow, I won't think about that today. 

     I don't think I'll get married again. For one, I'm not attracted to sixty year old women, and for another I can't do a twenty year old any good. Seems like all the young girls want a sugar daddy until daddy wants that sugar. I like pretty girls, but it's like hard rock candy. Some candy isn't for eating, it's just for looking through. 

     I refuse to use a cane or drink Ensure. I will use the power carts at the grocery store, but that's because I'm lazy. I hate Jeopardy on TV. I will concede box wine as opposed to bottled, but that falls back to too lazy thing. Also I'll most likely replace Bombay with McCormick's Gin. I honestly can't tell the difference in a martini made with either, but then, I'm just a simple OLD boy from Austin, and folks like me don't notice such things.  

Being Opinionated

                                                           Opinionated

                                                         by Wilbur Witt

     I recently submitted an article to the local newspaper in an effort to see if it would possibly run some of my articles. I don't like to submit locally, in fact I dodge it like the plague. When I left that garage studio in Harker Heights back in '84 and went to Austin I never came back. I quickly found out that there's a REASON places like Austin, L A, and New York turn out more publications than Ding Dong, Texas. But, I submitted, and patiently waited for the rejection. Notice how I knew that was coming. When it came the reason was that I was "opinionated." What, ME, opinionated? NO! 

     Well, I AM opinionated. Rejections from local papers don't affect me. I spoke to the representative and he told me that the paper was looking for a bit more of the mundane. We had a pleasant conversation, and I told him if he ever needed an article in my style please don't hesitate to give me a ring. He'll never call. He wants to keep his job. But I don't hold this against him. Life is like an airplane. Some planes fly under 3,000 feet and others, well, they fly a bit higher. 

     When I write on any subject I insert what I think. That's the whole purpose of writing. To communicate ideas to people makes the world connect, and when you have ideas that resound in the human experience that's that makes the world not only connect, but think. Frankly, I can't make myself get excited about writing a story about a girl scout cookie sale. Not that I don't like girl scout cookies, but I simply MUST stay awake while writing. 

     I've made a career out of stating the unstateable. I apply old time Texas rules to modern circumstances. The results are usually good. I'm a little politically correct, but not much. When correctness approaches stupid I do a right turn (and I do mean right) and just tell it like it is. I knew Jodi Arias was going to spit that hook when I saw her stretch in front of that jury full of men.  I knew George Zimmerman was going to walk when I saw that poster sized picture of the back of his head, and I'm telling you right now that Ali Baba out on Fort Hood will NEVER be executed for his crime. Why do I know these things? I know these things because I've got common sense. That, and I see the underlying issues. 

     Take for example the local paper here covering the Fort Hood trial. I glanced over the article briefly and all I noticed was how the reporter was very impressed with all the national media coverage. Frankly, he/she was star struck. Myself, I would have cornered one of the people involved in the shooting and got the rest of the story. I think this reporter simply copied the CNN story and went on about all the media trucks in the parking lot. And, yes, I would be "opinionated." Now look at this story. Religious fanatic murders unarmed people. As I've said before, and I'll say it again, I'm just a simple old boy from Austin . . .what do you think I'd like to do,to him . . .in your "opinion?"