| Mike Pirtle: First buttercups provide hope; wanton mom, some motorists don’t |
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By: MIKE PIRTLE, Post Publisher and President
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Posted: Sunday, February 15, 2009 7:57 am
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They have a fancy name, but I can never remember which one is right. I call them buttercups.
Happily, some of the hardy harbingers of spring popped up in our yard last weekend. I was surprised because I realized I hadn’t seen them earlier this winter.
Usually, we will have enough warm days that the buttercups will stick their heads up several times before spring finally arrives and they go full out in growth.
Usually the bright green stems are seen once or twice wrapped in snow.
This year the weather has been consistently cold enough, the buttercups just haven’t made an appearance.
Last weekend’s shirtsleeve weather provided enough warmth and welcome to pull what are traditionally the first blossoms of the year out of the ground.
Hopefully their promise of spring won’t be long in reaching fulfillment.
•••
Moving yet again from the sublime to the ridiculous:
I can’t get over the story about the single, unemployed woman with six children having another eight kids by artificial means.
Do you reckon she came across the Bible verse that says go forth and populate the world and took it as a personal mission?
How a single person with six children under seven would even have time to think about having more children is mind-boggling. News reports seem to indicate her grandmother is providing much of the children’s care.
The woman clearly has a mental disconnect, as in she can’t seem to connect wanting children must be connected to being able to provide adequately for them.
Apparently growing up as a single child, she felt deprived in some way and wants to have lots and lots of children who will have sibling companionship.
She’s now got a classroom.
She can’t have given much thought to how she is going to feed, cloth and care for this brood, and certainly have no thought to what it would require in financial wherewithal to do so.
The woman has no income except for some disability pay that appears to be no longer forthcoming.
So, welcome to parenthood everyone. You now have eight new babies to care for, and due to the strange and arguably immoral circumstances of their births three of them will have special needs.
What really, really annoys me, and I suspect lots of others, is not so much the woman who would seem to have some very real mental issues.
What is dumb-founding is that a doctor would enable her in her misguided, bizarre endeavor.
At what point does a doctor counsel a patient that maybe they have gone far enough in a personal goal of highly questionable value, at what point does the doctor consider the cost to society and, most importantly, at what point does the doctor give some consideration to the probable future of the dear children brought into such a dysfunctional lifestyle?
This doctor should be called to account for his irresponsible actions. Maybe he should adopt the last eight and provide the financial support they will require for the next 18 years.
This is just insane.
We can only hope the best for the 14 little children left in this deplorable situation, but can’t help but fear they will in the future be in the news again and again, and not likely in a positive fashion.
•••
Geez, folks, we’ve got to be more cognizant of emergency vehicles on our roads.
Twice last week I witnessed scary scenarios where motorists simply weren’t paying attention and came perilously close to striking ambulances on emergency runs with lights flashing and sirens/horns/whatever sending out a gigantic racket to let drivers know they were coming.
The folks driving those vehicles are trying to save our lives.
Yet too many of us are racing along our streets totally oblivious to anyone and anything else.
Friday morning’s incident scared my britches off.
Sitting on Middle Tennessee Boulevard about four cars back at the red light at Church Street, the noise from the ambulance approaching the intersection was overwhelmingly obvious long before the vehicle could be seen, as it should be.
Then the ambulance pulled up to the intersection, lights flashing and warnings blaring, and paused to make sure it could proceed.
Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Three vehicles charged through the intersection at speeds way above the speed limit, I would honestly guess 60 mph easy, even with the big, old orange ambulance sitting there with all its attention-getters going bigtime.
Did the motorists not see or hear it? Or did they just not care?
Either way it is troubling.
Maybe we need to start helping police and ambulance personnel by honking at those who refuse to take into account the safety of all of us, or by taking down license plate numbers and reporting them to the police.
We could make it part of a taking responsibility campaign everyone seems to recognize is needed in a lot of ways.
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