() Comments
IN MY BLOGYARD: Courtesy on verge of extinction at all ages
By Mike Moore
Journal Times
Your Honor, my generation has been unfairly singled out for its lack of respect.
Not that we’re pleading innocent to the charges. Just that there are accomplices of all ages.
I wrote a column last year, fed up over people ignoring party invitations. It’s popular to snort about “kids these days,” but that wasn’t my deal. I still consider myself one of those kids.
No, it was an across-the-board indictment of people’s sense of respect. Which pretty much sums up blogger Raytown Girl’s feelings after a recent graduation party.
The invitees had nearly a month to get back and, ahem, dozens of the “kids these days” replied via Facebook. As for the rest? The sounds of silence.
Better to plan for too many than not enough, the theory goes. Except when it’s way too many.
What honked off Raytown Girl wasn’t that so few came; that’s unavoidable with schedules packed tighter than airplane bathrooms. It was that so few responded either way.
That tweaked a nerve with fellow readers who had similar beefs after important milestone events. When the blogger known as Why Not? asked wedding guests why they hadn’t responded, they “figured that you would just know that we were coming.”
“I was in no way a bridezilla,” she wrote, “but that really got to me.”
Add your own stories at http://my.journaltimes.com
Feeling forced out
For the Burlington Web log, town resident Phillip Klamm talked about the fight he has had while trying to build houses for two sons on his Teut Road property. With retirement approaching, he’d like to bring the family closer.
The town had concerns about the extra runoff. A retention pond put in next to the Wal-Mart apparently isn’t big enough to handle a nasty rain.
“So I had the engineers check it out,” Klamm said, “and they figured out that if I put in, like, a 10-by-12 rain garden for each of these houses, that would more than make up for any water that gets displaced by a roof and a driveway and a sidewalk and a patio, whatever else you put in.”
Despite that, all but one of the neighbors signed a petition opposing his permit to build. The town said no.
“So I guess we just decided we’re going to go someplace else, because if the community doesn’t want us, then we certainly don’t want to be in the community,” Klamm said. “Because a community by definition is everybody working together. If they don’t want to work with me or if they think I’m working against them, then I’m obviously in the wrong community. Forty-one to one, it isn’t like it’s a debate.”
Discuss this at http://my.journaltimes.com/greaterburlington
A time to prey
A reader with the incredulous name “huh?” asked those “specifically in the Stewart McBride Park area” if someone “made the stupid decision to eradicate the coyotes that used to live near the marsh area?”
The blogger wants them around to snack on more bothersome critters. Like the new immigrant population of skunks.
“What happened?” the post continued. “I notice we have deer again and large hawks but no coyotes to keep the skunks in check.”
Wherever you are, Wile E., drop the Acme catalog and start sniffing out Pepe Le Pew.
Join this discussion at http://my.journaltimes.com/mountpleasant
Mike Moore can be reached at (262) 631-1724 or
mike.moore@lee.net
Special Offer: Get 5 Weeks of the Journal Times for $7!
 |
||
| MIKE MOORE: How Favre can keep the country in the boy |
