I ran into an old acquaintance at one of the local grocery stores this morning.
The grocery stores do a land-office business on Sunday mornings. Families come to "town" for church and swing by the grocery store to pick up vittles for the week (or month if they are infrequent attenders).
I wasn't sure it was my acquaintance. "Marv?" I asked tentatively. He took two more steps and then turned around.
It WAS Marv.
Marv had been a liaison. He was a sacrificial hourly employee who had been selected to be the go-between for two, bone-headed salary (management) types. I was one of the two bone-heads.
The passing of twenty years had dimmed his recollection. He introduced me to his wife and said I was a "good-guy".
As often happens in circumstances like this, we tossed out names of people we might have known in common.
"Did you know a guy named Roger Miller? He grew apple trees."
Yes, Marv remembered him with great fondness. Roger used to bring bags of apples and Carpathian walnuts and passed them out to everybody who worked on his metal-press line...including Marv.
Roger was a great big brute. He did not need fork-trucks to move baskets filled with stamped, sheet-metal parts. He was paid piece-work. He could leave the plant (but not punch out) once he made his count. He was not going to wait for any stinking fork-truck.
Roger had been offered a full-ride at Michigan State to play football but he chose to enlist in the Navy instead.
He was stationed out of Jacksonville, Florida when the Cuban Missile Crisis went down. They were steaming around in circles, waiting to get into a knife-fight with Soviet convoys while Kennedy and Khrushchev engaged in brinkmanship.
Everybody was on pins-and-needles. It would take only three-seconds of ADHD to leave a safety interlock disengaged and trigger WWIII. Roger told me that he had to extract about a yard of sheets from his nethermost regions every morning, such was the pucker-factor.
Some things never change.
Biden's posture toward the Ukraine is a virtual mirror image of Khrushchev and Cuba.
Tell me I am wrong.
Khrushchev was far smarter than Branden. That Cuban standoff really had everybody on edge. I went to the grocery store with my mother and she bought two full shopping carts of canned food. Never saw her do that before or since. She had the radio on all of the time waiting for the bombs to drop. ---ken
ReplyDeleteI was a young kid in high school then. My best friend's father was building a bomb shelter in his back yard. It seemed serious but somehow unreal. Years later while working with an older man named Larry; he told me a story of how he was on a submarine, surfaced on the pacific coast of the Soviet Union while bringing a Matador missile's jet engine up to full power at night, within sight of a coastal town. Larry said he was never so afraid in his whole life. If the missile was launched they were to submerge, await the blast, resurface and fire the second missile. They would then head south and land on the Asian coast as "Pearl Harbor would no longer be there". Now I know how close we came.
ReplyDeleteYup. And we're pushing hard. Insane.
ReplyDeleteYou are not wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most folks don't know is that Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba in response to Kennedy putting missiles in Turkey. (Deja Vu, all over again) In the end, it was JFK who agreed to remove the Turkish missiles. It was Khrushchev that backed Kennedy down, not the story we were subjected to. (I was an elementary student in Houston at this time; learning to shelter under my desk).
But to your question: Yes, Putin is the one whose tail is being twisted here. He is righteous and, incidentally, has shown more of supposedly American ideals than the U.S. in the last 20 years.
Biden is trying to provide what he was paid for. Interesting enough, Ukraine seems to be having second thoughts as to the desirability of receiving what they paid Biden for.
Not the same...but there are similarities. The difference being Kruschev and Kennedy were intellectual equals. The situation today pits a clever Putin against a turnip....and the turnip's stupid handlers.
ReplyDeleteIt certainly has similarities ERJ. The biggest difference, of course, is that in the current paradigm we are never encouraged to question the background or wisdom of Our Political And Social Betters (OPASB) but only accept what they tell us.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting how the US would react were Putin to place missiles and ship arms to Mexico. In that case, of course, it would be "totally different".
Around the same time, I remember Sears was selling precast concrete bomb shelters that were being shown in their parking lot. Good times.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid any similarities (and yes, there are some) will become unimportant when Brandon steps on his male member once too many times.
ReplyDeleteI feel for the Ukrainians, while not perfect I think justice leans in their direction more than the Russians. But going all the way back to Bush 1 we've been making them promises we physically can't carry out. And we've just gotten more delusional as our leadership gets more delusional.
ReplyDelete