Things are getting curiouser and curiouser
Feline companion Zenger might be jealous, but while curiosity kills cats, it is the lifeblood of journalists — even if it occasionally results in catty comments about us.
This week’s news is full of curious developments. We aren’t wise enough or presumptive enough to tell you what to make of them. That’s up to you. We just let you know about them and let you make up your own mind what they might mean.
When we heard, as we did Monday, that almost no Marion firefighters responded to a fire call and that a group of them had just met — without their chief — to discuss “personnel matters,” we had to wonder whether there was a connection. Later that same day, although they weren’t needed, a typical number of Marion firefighters responded to a gas station’s canopy on fire. So maybe it was a fluke. Or maybe it wasn’t.
When we learned, as we did Thursday, that the nearest ambulance was 17.3 miles away when a highly regarded rural Lost Springs man collapsed and stopped breathing at far too young an age, we worried about his fate. We took comfort in the fact that dispatchers instructed those who called in how to perform CPR, but we became curious when there was no immediate answer to pages for Lincolnville first responders and Lost Springs firefighters to help. The first responders eventually did arrive, but in the meantime, Marion firefighters had to be summoned from just as far away as the ambulance.
The situation became even more curious when a county commissioner complained Monday that the county needed agreements with neighboring counties that might have ambulances closer in a rural emergency. Most curious, the county already has such an agreement with Dickinson County, which would have been nearer, but the commissioner, the ambulance director, and apparently dispatchers were unaware of it.
Experts tell us if a heart stops beating for even four or five minutes, it’s probably too late to save the victim. We don’t want to seem cruel, but living more than four or five minutes from an ambulance is a risk people need to understand they are taking, not something that government can mediate.
Closer to home, we tend to use Cenex gas because it’s sold by a locally owned cooperative, but we nonetheless were pleased this week to see that Casey’s General Store in Marion once again was able to sell its lower-priced regular containing ethanol. It’s been able to sell only higher-priced, ethanol-free fuel for nearly two months while its ethanol fuel tank went through what we were told at the time was routine cleaning and maintenance.
Now, curiously, that tank has been shut down, and pumps have been reconfigured so that cheaper gas with ethanol now comes from the store’s old ethanol-free tank. In the words of a store clerk not authorized to speak for the store, the ethanol tank has been “condemned.”
We spent quite a bit of time this week trying to figure out what that meant but were unable to reach anyone in authority. So, it remains another curiosity that readers will have to consider, particularly in light of recent efforts in the area of the store to isolate the source of leaking from past or present underground tanks.
Then there’s the story of THC beverages at Carlsons’ Grocery. Police saw them and seized them. THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is for the most part a controlled drug in Kansas. Were they right in doing so? Neither the police nor the newspaper — nor, in all likelihood, Carlsons’ itself — seems to know.
A maze of regulations governs marijuana-related items. Some THC may be legal if it’s kept at a very low level and if the THC came from hemp instead of cannabis, but no one has been able to provide a clear answer. And several dozen bottles of the beverage now sit in police custody awaiting clarity.
All the nuances about THC actually seem pretty curious in themselves. If people are looking for a marijuana “high,” they probably won’t get it from something with such a low level of THC. But advertising that a beverage contains THC — just like ads for lotions and other products containing another marijuana component, CBD — seem to base the product’s appeal on its daring to contain trace amounts of pot.
We also learned this week that our new state representative curiously has been posting on social media some of the more bizarre and widely disproved conspiracy theories that seem to circulate among the ultra-right. Truth be known, it doesn’t surprise us that he seems to harbor these opinions. What surprises us is that, unlike others, he didn’t take time to clean up his social media feed before becoming a public figure.
We typically avoid talking national politics. Just look at the level of disgusting discourse from both sides on anti-social media whenever we do. However, we find it curious that one of our U.S. senators bragged about cutting funding for NPR and PBS as a way of getting rid of socialist media.
That’s not to say there aren’t concerns about networks that bill themselves as non-commercial. Programs that used to contain nothing but calm recitations of the names of foundations that supported them now air breathless product claims and slogans almost identical to those in commercial media.
Criticize them on those grounds if you must, but not for being socialist, which they most definitely are not. Government is forbidden to base its actions on the opinions anyone espouses. The First Amendment means government can’t reward news organizations whose coverage it loves and penalize those whose coverage it hates. Those who love the Second Amendment curiously don’t seem to respect the First.
What we find even more curious is the number of generally sane and responsible politicians — including our other U.S. senator — whose voices have fallen mainly silent as such things as President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is shoved through.
What’s better? To be represented by an uncaring bully or a caring coward? That Hobson’s choice is a curiosity that may not kill a cat but could very well kill democracy.
— ERIC MEYER