This blog includes essays about life, aging, humor, inspiration and creativity. These things capture my attention and I hope are worthy of yours. Sandra Enos.
Often enough, we can find ourselves in a place, both completely recognizable and profoundly strange. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’ve been there until we’ve see sand from the desert on our pants and fragments from the Rain Forest in our boots. Or we see what image emerges in our camera and wonder how something could have played out in front of our eyes while we were paying attention to something. It’s like playing that ‘“nobody saw the gorilla on the basketball court because we were watching the game” kind of phenomena. This doesn’t only happen in our material world. It happens in our social and political world, as well. We wake up in the middle of the night in anguish because we suffered an unaccounted for moral injury earlier in the day. We often take ourselves to task for living these privileged lives and those points are all well taken. The ways of the world are crazy. There is no arc of justice that bends fast enough toward justice as we’d like it to be. There is no denying that there are forces bending the arc the other way, perhaps towards a world they see as just. It should be noted that our complex interconnected world yields great fortunes for some of us but it comes at a great cost not only to others but ourselves, as well, in the alienation, the existential threats, the complex nature of matters around us. Perhaps, those are all diseases of modernity but it seems more than that recently. Like the photo above, I seem to be underwater, somewhat adrift, in a world less of my making and certain less to my liking. The world swirling and our struggle to gain footing. Perhaps, in our complex rapidly-changing world, the longer we are alive, the more alienated we feel. Unless, we take the long view — that we are members of a long lineage of creatures on the world, stumbling along and making the best of our limited and limiting view of what’s around us.
Few things are more American than bacon and eggs for breakfast. However, due to the malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence of the former administration, patriotic Americans are paying exorbitant prices for a dozen eggs. No one loves eggs more than the present administration. We feel your pain.
Effective today, we are declaring a national egg emergency. This situation threatens our country’s security, leaving us vulnerable to enemies within our borders and beyond. A country without eggs is a land with too much toast. This administration is taking the following actions, which are certain to make American breakfasts great again.
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First, as we dismantle the deep state, our executive team has discovered that in our great nation there are 130 million fewer egg layers than we had just three years ago. We believe that these formerly engaged freedom-loving birds have been kidnapped by the Chinese or another enemy, like the Canadians. We also suspect that because of the over-regulation of this industry, American hens have lost their jobs to the immigrant hens who will work for lower wages and nasty working conditions. These illegal hens, mostly mentally ill, and certainly dangerous criminals, have crossed our unprotected borders. This invasion of non-native birds has stolen the jobs that our American hens used to have — middle-class jobs with decent wages – and no unions or job protections. Our American birds can’t compete with these despicable creatures.
Given this national emergency, I am using my powers as Commander-in-Chief to direct our Armed Forces to seize as many productive egg layers as possible, no matter where they are located, even if this violates previous treaties where nations agreed to keep their hands off each other’s eggs.
Further, effective today, we are authorizing the admission into the U.S. of 200 million hens under temporary laying status. Most are French and Italian birds which if you’ve been to Europe, you know make great dinners.
Similarly, all border controls that prohibited law-abiding chickens from entering our great nation are suspended. Once this national emergency has ended, we will enjoy these temporary workers for dinner with the long-promised chicken-in-every-pot. It should be noted that we are the first administration to fulfill this campaign promise. Even George Washington didn’t make that happen. We are the greatest administration ever.
Second, it is within the power of the President of our great nation to define and control weights and measures without review by the courts or Congress. We are eliminating the archaic, French-inspired definition of a dozen. From here forward, a dozen will include nine eggs. Twelve eggs is really too many.
This simple change will immediately reduce the price of a dozen eggs by 25%, a huge savings to American consumers. This will also reduce the price of packaging and give the chickens a shorter workweek, which we believe will encourage American chickens to return to their jobs.
Third, effective immediately is the suspension of all DEI policies governing chicken flocks. Rooted out by our team in our hours-long investigation of the egg industry is our finding that these organizations are in bed with the chicken industry. We have also discovered that both enforce the radical far-left feminist policy of having only female chickens laying eggs. We are not certain which corrupt incompetent administration established this nasty practice in the first place but it ends now. The wholesale exclusion of male hens from egg production has long been a travesty and a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Effective tomorrow, when the rooster crows, we are putting an end to this practice.
This expansion of the labor force to include newly empowered egg-laying male hens (we refer to them as “hems”) will double our workforce, thereby lowering the price of eggs. We fully expect that these hems will quickly advance to management positions in our flocks. Our administration has observed that hens left to their own devices run around like chickens with their heads cut off.
Under the leadership of these patriotic hems, order will prevail in the barnyard. Like the hens, they will eventually be scheduled for termination and slaughter unless pardoned by our office, a privilege reserved for only the loyalist of all hems. We will know who they are.
Finally, we have also seen in some flocks that a huge number of chickens have been calling in sick with the flu. We are convinced these labor actions are meant to destroy our economy. Until this emergency is over, all hens (and hems) are on deck, no matter how sick they are.
Masking is prohibited in this population because we are concerned about masked hens and hems holding up banks. We’ve seen instances of these crimes on the internet, probably committed by gangs of illegally admitted immigrant chickens. We state without equivocation that all the fake news about bird flu is another radical left panic, aimed at making these freedom-loving birds subject to vaccinations. We will not stand for that kind of abuse. Just because they are chickens doesn’t mean they don’t have human rights, which we stand for sometimes. We will clarify that in our next executive order.
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Delight/ Awe and other things 