Wuss Nation

Recent events show us that America is a nation of frightened people. But we are frightened of the wrong things.

For example, some of you pointed out a problem with “open carry” revealed by the recent shootings in Colorado Springs. Someone spots an apparently unhinged person walking around a residential neighborhood with a firearm, and sensibly calls police. But the police can’t do anything, and won’t respond to 911 calls, until the gunman actually starts killing people. Because in Colorado, open carry is legal.

So, because there are wusses who can’t so much as drive to a suburban Home Depot without being armed for self-defense, we’re all in more danger.

Here’s another one for you:

You all know how it is. You’re in a Sanford, Florida, Cracker Barrel on Sunday morning with the after-church crowd. A patron carrying a legally registered firearm is getting up to pay when his gun slips out of its holster, hits the floor, and “discharges” one round into your lower leg, requiring you to seek medical care for “non-life threatening injuries” before you can so much as finish your gravy-covered meal of gravy-fried gravy.

Yum, gravy-fried gravy. I hope that comes with biscuits. And the best part, which makes this just all-American perfect, is that because police decided this was an accident, it’s unlikely charges will be filed.

So, because this wuss and others like him are terrified that criminal elements are hiding along the Interstate somewhere between the Econo Lodge and the KFC, going out for biscuits and gravy can send you to the ER, and not because of e coli.

Chalk this one up to Teh Stupid — Houston voters rejected an equal-rights law, by all accounts because it would allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms. Opponents even were calling it the Bathroom Ordinance. Those of us d’un cer·tain âge might remember how the ghastly specter of unisex bathrooms helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. We Americans care deeply about keeping people using restrooms properly sorted by genitalia type.

Opponents of the bill shrieked that it would allow pedophiles and other perverts to molest women in restrooms. From the Dallas Morning News:

Apparently, when you take a routine civil-protections measure and feed it through the big anti-LGBT scarification machine what you get is the possibility that men might pee in the ladies room.

And not just any men, either. We’re talking about scary demented sex predator perverts, sharing the very same stalls with sweet little pig-tailed girls in their little plaid schoolgirl uniforms, or with modest elderly grandmas who use their lavender-scented hankies to avoid touching germy toilet handles with bare hands.  …

… “No Men In Women’s Bathrooms”! is the overwrought rallying cry around which opponents have gathered, like frightened cavemen huddled around the safety of the campfire.

The bill was about equal protection in matters like employment and housing, of course. I don’t know what the wusses think they’re accomplishing with barricading the restrooms, because frankly there ain’t nothin’ sexual predators could do in a restroom that they aren’t already doing elsewhere.

Anyway, the real issue is women in men’s restrooms. We are tired of perpetually standing in line while the menfolk breeze in and out of men’s rooms and don’t miss any of the game or movie.  We should just go where the line is shortest. Or make all restrooms unisex, and when the menfolk get tired of standing in line maybe they’ll see the wisdom in building more public restrooms.

Kentucky, one of the two southern high-poverty states that has visibly benefited from Obamacare — the other being Arkansas — just elected a governor who pledged to end Obamacare and shut down the state health insurance exchange.  Getting health care is scary. Apparently the election also was decided by issues such as “school choice,” meaning the dismantling of the public school system, to be replaced by corporate for-profit McSchools; against the federal government and its dastardly safety and environmental regulations that cut into coal mining profits; against secularism that demands public employees actually abide by the law; and against President Obama and his nefarious blackness.

In other words, Kentuckians just shot themselves in the foot, big time. Good luck, you poor fool wusses.