At a time earlier I would worry for the future of us. I would. What’s to become of us?

Now, now I have to tell you, I think maybe for the best if we depart. Maybe. Possibly. Perhaps a good idea. I mean, how many tons of assorted proverbial brick needs fall? Hmm? You ever wonder, “My gosh, that IS dumb. Who came up with that?” One of us no question of it.

Such as not too many years past there was a windstorm along the famously valued Gunflint Trail, a name hardly anyone does two plus two about, but beside the point just now.

So, big windstorm, lots of damage and guess, just guess, what. Why would you believe all those people who built or bought lakeshore cabins among the trees gasped in fear.

“O My Golly Beans! Those trees now on the ground we celebrate as Mama Earth, those trees could burn. What O What Shall We Do to save and protect our innocent selves?”

I mock for good reason. Deserved, in my book which for a long while knew trees would burn, leading me to take steps-pains to keep such away from the cabin, along with underbrush and etc.

OK, so my 16 X 16 cabin wasn’t the nice place others up The Trail had. Went 15 years before I had winterized water. Not once did I presume to hold the State on Minni Soda responsible for fixing the nature of things, such as the flammability of wood.

See, I thought people buying or living among trees would know beforehand and accept the burnability factor.

Instead, o what a howl was heard for State help with individual firefighting systems.

Not on The Trail where weeping was more glorious and accepted, I had my own such pump, only without the subsidy provided by all of us.

Now you have got to be rock solid dumb to not have known the things you burned in your pretty fireplace would burn outdoors just as nicely, if not better.

And how dumb does a State have to be to take pity on folks so dumb and help provide fire pumps to put out wildfires fueled by wood everyone knew beforehand was a match away from “poof!?

I mean gosh.

Political correctness is one thing. Political acceptability is yet another, and it is what we get when politicos (aka vote prostitutes) try to fix everything that comes along. Gosh. That’s a big job. Maybe what they want, you think? Maybe so.

Now look here, says grumpy old, there is M. Politician and vocal crier, a difference, exactly as in difference between a need to address a municipal water system outside the scope of the happy owner of home and a cabin owner crying “I’ll be burned” by a fire nowhere in sight.

To me these are/were not comparable issues. One’s a public issue. The other a private sorrow. I give more weight to one than the other. Guess which and also guess why.

In the current Fauci mess, I sorta feel the same.

First, the early maudlings about pangolins and bats meeting in a Chinese wet market was to ignorant old me a lot less likely seeming than a viral event coming from the Virology Lab down the street.

But if you recall, we were almost yelled at to accept as gospel the natural origin version.

And know what? Was more gospel than science as turns out.

I will wager any number of readers will have held certain suspicions from the get-go. You did, didn’t you? I know. We’re mostly stupid as they’ll require of us. The tragedy is letting them.

Don’t have to travel the trail of Fauci bashing. The man had a long career of service. And while he, in my suspicious mind, strayed, he had a hell of a lot of help. A hell of a lot. More than that, really if you start counting.

Even with a calculator it’s too much. The thing is, and I try to think this way in general, is arguing for or against a cause instead of arguing over fact.

And O Golly Gosh that’s not easy. Want to keep prices down? Make stores charge less OR have more police to keep theft and vandalism from running up the costs?

My decentralizing mind says each of us is a decentralizing agent, if allowed. You will decide who to buy from and what to buy. You. In a way that’s like voting, and it sort of works. In a tourist town folks know not to buy from the places that sucker tourists, don’t they? I did. I’m sure you did, too. Or at least you learned same way I did and do saying “Never go there/buy that again.”

Nothing stops you or I from patronizing the high price shop. We’re free to do so. But, haven’t a lot of us also put cheaper first and in the process shut out smaller local shops who can’t compete?

In the long run what’s best? I won’t try to say, but I do suspect I’m suspicious of what drives big business getting bigger, in much the same way, you might say, as big government grows larger. We make choices. Enough of one sort of choice dooms a local business. Enough of other choices sets up something else.

But, well, to stay current and topical I should throw in something about the latest of fashionable terms, socialism/communism.

Don’t noise it around too much, but I grasped the benefits of socialism in Central Europe following WW II. Made sense when dealing with as much disruption and devastation as the war brought.

But then, centralized control by a people’s dictatorship made for a stagnant place with people, prices, products, and possibilities stuck around 1950. Only a generation behind, but centralization didn’t like to budge. Too difficult. Don’t change. Something to think about, but so is the more exciting side of those times when you watched every word and looked over your shoulder for the local snitch.

Exciting. Fun. Not the kind to enjoy or admire, however.