We Really are a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts!

How often have you heard your family member or friend say, “I love people watching.”?  If you are honest with yourself, you may realize you are also a people watcher.    And, really there is a good reason for it.  As far as sideshows go, people are, and do the strangest things. Sometimes funny, sad, heart warming and in many cases, just plain stupid.

If we take just a seven day period it is interesting what we find people doing. So in order to run my people watching experiment, rather than sitting at an airport and looking like potential stalker, I decided to see what has been reported by other people watchers.  What I found was sick, funny, weird, stupid and even heart-warming.

First the sick.  In the world of strange romance, a South Carolina man,  Rodell Vereen was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty to buggery. A judge also ordered Vereen to get counseling and to stay away from the Lazy B Stables when he is released.   You see, he was charged with having sex with a horse that was being stabled at Lazy B.  Being particular in mates, Vereen had a penchant for one member of the equine species.  The owner noticed her horse acting funny, so she decided to install a hidden video camera.  In the middle of the night she caught Vereen consummating the relationship.  This was not the first time he was caught with this filly; two years earlier he was found sleeping in her stable snuggled in the hay.  Odd, Vereen, is an anglicized spelling for the German word Verein, which means a union or association.  With what, the courts are still trying to decide.

As weird as some animal lovers are, a 39-year-old man is approached and asked,  “Is that a ferret in your pants or are you just glad to see me.”  With that Rodney Bolton pulls out his weapon from his drawers and points it directly at a 17-year-old pet-shop workers face.  The animals hisses and bites the young fella.  Since this happened in Florida where they take their personal protection seriously, Bolton is charged with brandishing a concealed "special” weapon and shoplifting.  I wonder if the ferret was loaded?

Then from the world of weird we go to just sad.  On Halloween night, a man dresses up for a party. He takes himself out for what is going to be a night to remember.  Wanting to send a message of responsibility, he dresses himself up as a roadside breathalyzer complete with a reading warning all drivers of the legal limit.  Four hours later, he is pulled over by the police still in costume.  He is arrested, and within 40 minutes blows over the legal limit, still dressed for success!

Not to be outdone, a woman only 100 miles away, in Granston, Wisconsin, 49-year-old Mary Strey, after an evening of binge drinking is driving down the interstate.  Worried for her safety and the safety of others on the highway, she picks up her cell phone and calls 911.  She connects and states, "someone really drunk is driving down Granton Road." When asked which direction the drunk is traveling Mary says, “they are going, um....”  The operators says, “are you behind them.” to which Mary replies, “I am them...” With that the 911 operator finally convinces her to pull over, stop and turn on her four-way flashers so the police could find her.  A few minutes later, the police arrive and arrest Mary for drunk driving.  She is booked into a cell next to a funny dude wearing a breathalyzer costume.  We really have to get these two together.

Two days later stupid checks in for action.  In Cyprus, a Moreno Tavares Lizason was arrested after leaving a commercial airline.  No, he did not quit a job as an airline steward, Moreno just got up from his seat on an Airbus A320, a 150 passenger jetliner, and decided to deplane.  The problem was the jet was already heading down the runway for take-off when he opened the rear emergency hatch and decided to slide down the chute.  Once on the ground Moreno ran, jumped a fence and was arrested on the other side.  His excuse, he says he wanted to test the aircraft's safety features.  Everyone needs a hobby.

But the heart-warming treat for the professional people watcher come to us from Colorado Springs. Two weeks ago 88-year-old Martha Michel, who has been walking around a nursing home in memory of her deceased husband has hit a milestone. Martha and her husband Lester Michel were the perfect couple and spent much time just walking.  You see, after his death in 1998 she dedicated a daily routine of walking, as her and her husband had made a point of doing each day around the Namaste Alzheimer Center.  Her dedication and love for her husband resulted in Martha clocking in her 10,000th mile this weekend which is the same as walking across Canada nearly three times.

Yes, many people tend to show us their bad side as these former examples of Darwinian science have proven, but if you 'people watch' long enough you are able to separate wheat from the chaff as exampled by Martha Michel.

Maybe Mr. Vereen's better half can run laps for him.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Bertrand Russell once said that, “War does not determine who is right - only who is left” and with those cold words one is left with a chilling proposition; ‘Good does not always prevail over evil.’ Sobering thoughts because modern society is indoctrinated to believe that when faced with true evil, good will prevail. This indoctrination takes place through pop media. We see it in our movies, Saturday morning cartoons and pulp fiction. Every action hero of the silver screen that fights the bad guys, in the end they either walk off into a lonely sunset secure in the belief that everyone who witnessed the action are pumped for the next sequel, or, they get the girl, while the villain lies vanquished.

Four generations have passed since World War II, and another since The Great War, and in this country where military service is optional, many people today just don’t have the appreciation or the understanding of what the foot soldier has given them.

Jane Fonda, the half naked “Barbarella” of the 60’s and daughter to Henry Fonda, was only a child when World War II broke out. She lived through the threat of Nazi expansionism and the threat that Hitler and the death camps promised. But even though she had the opportunity to at least read and see in “Film Reels” these threats, she rallied her celebrity status to openly denounce not only the wars of the day, but the also the individual soldiers fighting. In an open rally she is quoted as saying, " If you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that one day we would become Communist.”   Later she would regret many things she said in the face of veterans. She asked for forgiveness when she said, "It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless." Today at 72 years-old she speaks a different tune, "When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed."  But the influences of like-minded individuals and the softening of the society has a way of diminishing or even trivializing what the war veteran means to society.

And there you have it!  As Fonda said,“When you can’t remember why you’re hurt.” This is precisely why we must don the poppy and take at least a day out and gather in remembrance.

Many people do not remember the fear of a world at war, and for that matter my generation does not live with that memory. Only recently with our Canadian military fighting in Afghanistan, do some families feel the effect of war, but the consequences of a military failure today has not been made very clear to each Canadian.

The veteran whose failure would have had dire consequences has either been killed in action, lived out his life or is languishing in a nursing home.  Very few people even take the time to ponder an alternate history, where men and nations run by despots would have won the largest military conflict the world has ever seen.

There were many villains in the theater of World War II. Our foot soldiers fought longer and harder than their American counterparts since that country stayed neutral for the first three years of the conflict.  By the time the Americans woke up to reality and joined the Allies, Germany's expansionism and doctrine of hate had spread to neighbouring nations.  Their sights clearly aimed at England and their submarines patrolled off the coast of Newfoundland.  Everywhere they went, they gathered citizens and interned them to labour or death camps.  And, it was our foot soldiers that were fighting and dying in battles slowing the progress of Nazi policy that was being executed by the Wehrmacht.

Time was not on the foot soldiers side, and every man that jumped out of an airplane, or landed on a beach knew that they were running headlong into their doom.  To say that the foot-soldier does not feel fear is naive.  They were put into a situation where they had to overcome their fears with a sense of purpose and duty.  War is not glamorous for when a mother nurses her baby, she looks lovingly into the child's eyes with no knowledge that in a short 18 years that same child would be fighting for it's life and the livelihood of people he had never met.  The war veteran is just that.  Someone's son, grandson or even father.  The war veteran is a person who has given so much and yet was given so very little. The war veteran is the soldier that made it home, while they live with the memories of their friends calling out to them from the mist of a battlefield in agony. They live with the understanding that when they left for war as a innocent teenager, they came back only a few years later with their innocence ripped from their soul.

So when you see a senior citizen pushed in a wheelchair dressed in their uniform, remember not only their sacrifices, but what that veteran has tucked away in their minds.  When you shake their hands and thank them for giving us this soft life, remember that in order to do that, the veteran had to shake off all that made him human and become something that his own mother didn't even see. For in the end, the war could have been been lost, for war does not determine who is right - only who is left.