About Dawson County news. (Dawsonville, Georgia) 2015-current | View Entire Issue (July 3, 2019)
PAGE 11A Send a letter to the editor to P.O. Box 1600, Dawsonville, GA 30534; fax (706) 265-3276; or email to editor@dawsonnews.com. DawsonOpinion WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, 2019 This is a page of opinion — ours, yours and others. Signed columns and cartoons are the opinions of the writers and artists, and they may not reflect our views. Political wingnuts having problems distinguishing friends from enemies Politics keeps getting weirder by the day. That must be frustrating to the wingnuts on both extremes of the political spectrum who think a middle ground doesn’t exist. Witness Gov. Brian Kemp. He pushes through the Heartbeat Bill, banishing abortions after six weeks which thrills conservatives and throws the pro-choice crowd into a frenzy. Then he sets about making his appointments to gov ernment agencies. The governor appoints the first Hispanic to serve as a constitutional officer and the first black (and female) as Cobb County’s district attorney. Of the eight Superior Court judges Kemp has select ed, five are women and three are black. Roughly 80 appointments he has made since taking office are female and about a fourth of those are minorities. At least three — maybe more — are LGBTQ. Even Democrats begrudgingly praise the governor for his appointments thus far. I am sure they will hyperventilate if he appoints a white guy to anything. While some conservatives scratch their heads at Gov. Kemp appointing females, blacks, Hispanics and gays to prominent roles in state government, Weenie World has its own issues. The bunch of wannabes running for the Democratic nomination for president thought they had found the perfect issue to rein in front runner and former vice president, Joe Biden. Biden says that as a senator he had worked well with known segregationists like Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi and Georgia’s Herman Talmadge. Just as the wannabes began their collective wail of condemnation at Biden’s comments, up steps Georgia Congressman John Lewis in his defense. Whoops! Lewis, whose leadership role in the civil rights struggles of the ’60s is beyond question, said, “During the height of the civil rights movement, we worked with people and got to know people that were members of the Klan, people who opposed us, even people who beat us, arrested us and jailed us. We never gave up on our fellow human beings, and I will not give up on any human being.” A word about Sen. James Eastland, of Mississippi. When I showed up in Washington in the late ’70s as director of public affairs for AT&T, I thought I was political expert. In fact, I was a neophyte. I learned quickly that politics — and politicians — do make strange bedfel lows. Mr. Eastland was one of the most powerful and respected members of the U.S. Senate. He was a go-to source for new senators of both par ties on how that body worked and the arcane ways in which it did. In the evenings, the senator and a group of his colleagues would gather in his hideaway office in the bowels of the Senate for adult libations and conversations. One of the senators he took under his wing during that time was a promi nent young liberal from the Northeast who con sidered Eastland a mentor. I will leave it to you to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Junior E. Lee, the general manager of the Yarbrough Worldwide Media and Pest Control Company, located in Greater Garfield, Georgia, and a pest control profes sional, recently pondered in this space what would be the role of candidate Pete Buttigieg’s male partner should Buttigieg get himself elect ed president. Would he be first husband? A fair question, Junior thought, but one that engen dered the predictable spate of sputtering. Junior doesn’t handle sputtering well. Most pest con trol professionals don’t. Junior suggested his critics go waggle their finger at the Rev. Rodric Reid, a black pastor in Buttigieg’s home state of Indiana, who told the Indianapolis Star that the South Bend mayor’s marriage to another man “is going to be an obstacle. That is really still a touchy subject, specifically and especially in the African American church.” In fact, it was due in part to the strong objec tions of the African churches that a recent effort to approve gay ministers and gay marriages in the Methodist Church failed. So, here we have a conservative Republican governor making a lot of non-traditional appointments, a civil rights icon defending the actions of a presidential candidate who worked with segregationists and a black minister show ing his political incorrectness by publicly ques tioning the lifestyle of a gay candidate for presi dent. If you are a political wingnut, it seems to be getting harder and harder to distinguish your friends from your enemies these days. I men tioned that fact to Junior E. Lee, who was spraying for ticks at Arvel Ridley’s bam. He just grunted. I have a feeling Junior doesn’t care much for political wingnuts. I can’t say that I blame him. You can reach Dick Yarbrough atdick@dickyar- brough.com; at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, GA 31139; online at dickyarbrough.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dickyarb. DICKYARBROUGH Columnist "Our forefathers sure were smart to sign the Declaration of Independence on a holiday!" It ain’t hoarding if it’s worth something I come from a long line of hoarders. It is in our DNA, our heri tage, a family legacy of sorts. Junk is passed down from one generation to another. And boy howdy, there’s been some junk. Granny, in particular, held onto everything she ever got. Fabric scraps, old pieces of furniture, newspaper articles, empty jars and every single button that she could find. All of it littered every spare square inch of space in Granny’s home. It was a by product of the Depression, holding on to everything in case you one day needed it. Granny rea soned if she didn’t need it, someone else might. “Why do you wash out these mayonnaise jars?” I asked her once. “Why don’t you just throw them away?” “I can use 'em,” was her reply. She did. too. The empty jars held her buttons and other small items that otherwise would get lost in a drawer or on a shelf. She never refused anything given to her. either. Someone offered her two huge boxes of fabric once, all end pieces from different bolts and she eagerly accepted it. “None of that is the same or enough to do anything with.” I commented as I looked through it, hoping for a pretty pattern for some curtains. “It will do just fine,” she said. SUDIE CROUCH Columnist And it did, with Granny making some lovely patch- work quilts and cushions out of it. She still had some of the fabric stashed back when she passed away. “I don’t think your grand mother threw away anything,” Mama said the other day. “And I think your uncle is just as bad.” She was probably right on both counts. Although. I will have to say. my uncle has started weeding out his stuff. Little by little, he has been giving some things to Cole that he thinks his great-neph ew will either want or that will be worth something one day. His old guitars, I under stand; they are cool and even if they may not work any more, they will still be nice to have. Old issues of US and People magazine. I am not so sure about. “That one’s got Princess Diana on the front,” he said. “It may be worth something one day.” I doubted it - one of the cats had chewed off all the corners - but didn’t say a word. “He’s just like Mama in that regard,” Mama said. “He thinks all this junk is going to be valuable one day. It’s not. We need to throw probably half of it away. Maybe all of it.” I agreed. A lot of it proba bly did need to be thrown away. “You know when we moved here 14 years ago, Granny didn’t throw the first thing away,” Mama contin ued. “She could have got rid of a ton of junk then but nope; she was scared to part with anything. It is all junk.” Mama was probably fussing because she has been cleaning up around the same junk for over 40 years. It was a pro cess she was increasingly frustrated with. “Maybe not all of it is junk,” Mama conceded, feel ing guilty. “I shouldn’t say that. We still have her old sewing machine. She made lots of things on that. And I think it still works.” Granny didn’t sew her quilts on the machine; those were sewn by hand. But she used her machine for things like curtains, aprons, and hemming up a pair of pants. “I bet the first piece of fur niture she ever bought is still here somewhere,” Mama mused. “It probably is,” I agreed. Mama chuckled. “I bet it isn’t worth even what she paid for it then. Granny loathed antiques, as you know; yet, she would keep everything for 100 years thinking one day it would be worth something.” That was Granny’s reason for hoarding everything - or so she claimed. “Maybe it’s not that she thought it would be worth something one day, but maybe it meant a lot to her when she got it?” I questioned. Granny was never extrava gant with her money; she never had enough to be. She was quite frugal and some how managed to stretch out her and Pop’s money to pay everything and then save a lit tle. When the old gal did scrimp and save to get some thing, she was quite proud and took care of it. Maybe that’s why she saved it. It had meant a lot to her to - small sacrifices, pinching pennies, and getting the most use out of everything so she could those little extras. To her, it was something special, even if it was not that big of a deal to someone else. We had always joked Granny thought her stuff was worth something just because it was hers. Maybe it was. Maybe it was worth the world to her and now, that made it valuable to me.r. Sudie Crouch is an award winning humor columnist and author of the recently e-pub- lished novel, "The Dahlman Files: A Tony Dahlman Paranormal Mystery."
