Do You See It?
Krayton Kerns
7.3.07
Do you notice things? My wife and I are debating just how observant different folks are. (Actually, it’s more of an argument than debate as the later implies someone is judging the event. There were no judges. If there were they probably would have been wrong too.) Either way, here is what happened:
Druann and I were out for a run to the top of the big butte behind our house. We have a jeep trail we follow on a 5 mile route that climbs up a rocky gully to the summit.
It was 5:30 on a brisk May morning with the temperature shivering around 40 degrees when we reached the sage brush summit and trotted along the trail that traverses the top. I was a couple steps in the lead scanning ahead when I spotted a rattlesnake coiled in the wheel track about 10 feet in front of my wife. “Freeze,” I screamed as I threw my arms out to stop her. Druann doesn’t do snakes. She doesn’t freeze very well either because she jumped straight in the air, spun around and landed 20 feet east from where she launched. (I still don’t know how she did that without a propeller and a rudder.)
The next few moments confuse me. My wife shouts great obscenities at me like it was my idea to have a rattlesnake coiled in her path on this particular morning. I rummaged around and gathered a dozen rocks with which to dispatch the snake. (For those of you Animal Liberation Front types, ‘dispatch’ means I coaxed him into the safety of the sagebrush.) Because of our reptile encounter, running the butte with Druann is done until snowfall.
Later that week I was home frantically searching for the charger to the GPS training watch my family had given me as a birthday present. I was frustrated because I knew it had been on the kitchen counter where the cell and telephone chargers were but it wasn’t there. I looked again, it still wasn’t there.
I was spouting off like a crazy woman who just had seen a snake as I walked to the garage and grabbed the storage bin where we hoard outdated electronic chargers, dragged it to the kitchen and dumped it on the floor. Digging through the devices I was softly mumbling at the top of my voice that perhaps Tyler had taken it to school. Druann walked by. She stopped, looked at me, looked at the mess on the floor, and then picked the GPS charger from the counter where I repeatedly searched and said, “Is this what you are looking for?” Her tone was so demeaning. “If it was a snake it would have bitten you,” she added.
“If it was a snake I would have seen it,” I shot back. Thus began the argument. After much discussion we concluded both men and women are equally observant; we’re just observant about different things.
This brings me to my point and explanation as to why this story is presented in a political column. There is a subtle dialogue change occurring amongst the followers of the global-warming religion. Did you notice it? References to global-warming are diminishing. The concern is now directed towards global climate change. With this new terminology it doesn’t matter if the temperature goes up, down, sideways or backwards, all weather disasters fall under the umbrella of global climate change and thus are the fault of western free market economies. The solution to the impending ice age in the 70’s, global warming in the 90’s and climate change in 2007 is always the same; greater and greater regulation to slow the economy and expand the dependency class. The subtle exchange of freedom for socialism creeps onward. Do you see it?
