B.S. for short

Dear Editor,

Sometime ago I wrote to you about brainstorming [ B.S.for short] ideas to help produce solutions or ideas to help make this a better place to live. That article covered several subjects from brain drain (b.d. for short) to water issues and prison crowding.

Now other problems of the world or maybe just the area near us have gone through the brain storming (B.S. for short) process. A recent headline in the local paper stated that Chase and Hitchcock counties were declared Livestock Friendly. That sounded all well and good but a little B.S. (that's short for brainstorming) does bring out several issues.

First off, is the livestock friendly? The county may be, but will the livestock be a partner to that idea? You take a poor little animal and work him over and under, give it the needle and take it away from its mother. Haul it off to a fenced-in yard and hope it stays friendly. You feed and water it and then take it to the slaughterhouse.

Are you still friendly? Or rather should it be friendly during this process. Just a B.S. thought. You think about it too. The vegetarians might have a different way to be friendly. I love that beef so hope the friendly livestock people keep doing it this way.

With the political season coming on, a lot of B.S. (remember that's short for brainstorming) will be in the news. Tax cuts were discussed and B.S'd. (short for brain stormed) by the group.

We are all in favor of a tax cut but would not like to share our tax cut with some of the other people. Remember the politicians who earmarked a lot of money for dumb projects. We think a cut is in order for these projects. A walking bridge over the Missouri river was one of these.

No reason, if a person wants to get to the other side of the river they can't swim. Some people do it in the Rio Grande. If it works down there, why not in Nebraska?

I suppose if a lot of people did that you would call it ethnic cleansing. Get it? The B.S. idea was to just float a barge across the river and if it got loose, the riders could get off at one of the riverboat casinos.

Maybe win enough money to hire a ride back home. Kind of got off the politicians back on that B.S. issue. Not all ideas work out.

On the local scene, we have a lot of B.S. ideas on our form of city government While B.S.'ing this problem, of those against and those for our method of running the city and the county, a lot of things were said.

Recently it must have been tool-sharpening time. If anyone had an axe to grind they came out of the woods. Better now than later, as it's not quite time to elect new representatives. We'll do that soon enough. The leadership job is "heck if you do and heck if you don't." So give them them all the heck you have so they will have something to work with.

During one of our B.S. session some of the group were singing the song "Going to build a fence around Texas," some of the others were singing the song "Don't fence me in." Sen. Ben is a friend of ours but we think he has a bad idea about building a fence along the border. Several things came up in the B.S. session.

First, the fence would probably be made in China. They have all the cheap scrap iron we send them. Remember when we sent it to Japan before World War II?

Of course they sent it back to us, but not in a friendly way. So if the Chinese sell us the fence, who will install it?

Your guess is as good as mine. Our guess is the Mexican laborers would like the job, it being close to home.

Maybe Halliburton would hire them. To keep from being an illegal worker, they would have to stay on the south side of the fence to work.

This might be hard to do when you are tamping fence posts.

That is another thing to think about, what kind of post to hold up the Chinese fence.

Maybe more Chinese steel or trees from Canada. Using trees could raise the price of lumber so high it would cut down on the new housing business. That could cause a layoff of workers that would want to go back home. They couldn't get back because of the fence.

What to do? Better brain storm (B.S.) some more. It was some feeling that in a few years, nearly every small farm along the border would have a new chicken pen, made from the fence. Not everyone would want to cross the fence but could use parts of it for their poultry raising. You probably have heard of midnight requisitions, or maybe you have heard of the iron and steel family. The wife irons in the daytime and the husband steals at night. The B.S. people thought this might apply.

This B.S. (short for brain storming) session has just about finished their early spring work on the problems of the world. I suspect we will be invited to study the coming election. That is if they let us out for a few days. Remember that the groups that B.S. together probably don't have any thing to hide, or much to do.

Respectfully submitted as minutes of the Non-Strategic Planning Bored. (Not to be confuse with the Strategic Planning Board).

John Hubert,

recording Secy.         

McCook