Holiday Catch-Up

Happy Memorial Day everyone! I hope you all enjoy the time with family and friends and please stay safe.

It is time to clean out the folder of half baked ideas and random thoughts before I start to celebrate the day myself.

I have written about this guy before but with the Preakness run last weekend it brought back memories of, In My Opinion, the greatest athlete in my lifetime, Secretariat. I will have a link at the end of this segment of his historic 31 length victory in 1973 at the Belmont Stakes. It may be the most jaw dropping thing I have ever seen in sports and I would argue that if we had not landed on the moon five years earlier it would be the most jaw dropping thing of all time.

Fifty two years later and I still get teary eyed watching him run on video. Whether or not you are a fan of horse racing it is still beautiful to watch an athlete so special that we will never see another like him. Enjoy watching.

https://youtu.be/AG_27cCW5bw

If you are of a certain age you might remember this symbol. It was worn to show support and hope for those infected with one of the most evil diseases in our lifetime, AIDS. For my entire life I have been in the company of people in the LGBTQ+ community. I have several extended family members, living and dead, that are/were gay and I have worked in industries that had a large proportion of gay people working in it so it is something that has been in my world forever.

To be honest I never ever thought, or think, about it because for me it was a complete non issue, like picking out a shirt each day but even less thought went into it. That is not to say I am denigrating anyone in the LGBTRQ+ community, I am just saying it never crosses my mind because I find it a normal part of my life.

However in the early 1980's I started to pay more attention as twelve years after a teenager died in 1969, by the name of Robert Rayford, the CDC published, quietly, a report of five gay men in the Los Angeles area becoming infected with an unusual lung disease. This report was in their June 5, 1981 issue and it ultimately became more commonly known as HIV/AIDS.

Since then almost 800,000 Americans have died from AIDS and while it is nowhere near the peak that we had in the mid 1980's, we are still seeing people die from it today. It has hit the gay community much greater than the rest of us but plenty of non gay people have died from this also.

Anyway, I was watching a special on Elton John last night and the whole AIDS era came up and it reminded me of how much it effected me emotionally. Like many people, I thoughtlessly made jokes about it at first and brushed it off to something I didn't have to worry about because I wasn't in the high risk category. I found it tragic but out of my sphere of worrying about it.

Then my cousin, a former Navy sailor, came down with it and died from it.

Suddenly it became real and hit close to home and I decided that I would start wearing this red pin every single day until something was done to help these people and stop the spread of this horrible disease. I have to say I was greeted with a mixed bag of looks and comments from the business community when I started wearing it. In fact, one company I worked for during this period asked me to stop wearing it during work hours or when I was in front of customers. I told them to go pound sand and started looking for another job which I found soon after and left them and wished horrible things to happen to them.

The current climate of this regime to throw away vaccines and science makes me wonder if we are headed back to a dark days of widespread disease and deaths. Please don't ever forget those that died and those that are dealing with this today.

These three pictures above are all intertwined in what has become a cult of stupidity in our politics. If you attend any rally the felon in chief holds, you will see some version of all three of these signs, and idiots, in his audience.

Here is my question. If these fools hate the country so much that they are willing to embarrass themselves, and destroy it, for the sake of whatever crazy idea is in their pea brains, why don' they just pack up and leave the rest of us alone and go find a new place to live?

Like most of you, Linda and I are celebrating the official start of summer weekend by enjoying the traditional holiday fare above. Saturday we had homemade meatball sandwiches. Sunday we continued with Italian sausage sandwich with pepper and onion. Today we will close out the holiday festivities with that all American meal of taco's with refried beans, and guacamole. Nothing screams made in America like these three delicious meals.

I hope you are eating as well as we are. Enjoy the day.