Over the past month, I probably watched about three hours of MSNBC and CNN.....mostly covering the Rittenhouse court case. So it's an odd thing that they dragged out and verbally hyped....at least twenty times....that Rittenhouse had crossed state lines.
So I pulled out the map eventually.....thinking he must have driven 300 miles by himself, and crossed the state line.
Well...NO, from where he lived....it was a 1-minute drive (1-mile) to the state line. Kenosha, the city? After you pass the state line, it's a three-minute drive (I-94) and roughly a 3-mile distance to the city limits.
This hype....over and over about crossing state lines? After you reflect upon the drive....it's like some 9-year-old kid trying hype up the idea of dragons possibly existing in the woods.
As a kid....living 3 miles south of the Tennessee state line....I had probably crossed the line about a hundred times myself (on my Honda bike) by age 15.....without parental consent. With a car, between age 16 and 18.....I probably crossed another 200 times by myself, without parental consent.
In the Air Force, I got to talking one time with a guy who'd gotten dragged into a family issue....someone had to go across four states and pick-up Grandma....to retrieve her. No one in his family (father, mother, older siblings) wanted the duty (Grandma talked an awful lot). So this guy volunteered....driving from the south part of Missouri to Miami. His age at the time? Sixteen (he'd had his license for three months).
In the minds of these CNN idiots....all this state crossing of lines is just terribly serious for some juvenile kid.
From the kids I knew in 1977....you could have entrusted any of them to drive from Bama to California....by themselves. Some might have gone a thousand miles out of their way, on some weird route. But there's no chaos in some kid crossing state lines.
1968.
ReplyDeleteSixteen years old.
A bunch of us caravaned from the mountains east of Sacramento to Baja beaches.
.
Based purely on our discovery of fish tacos, this necessitated many more excursions over the decades.
.
.
An aside:
During those years, kayaking the richly diverse Colorado River estuary was a magical time, filled with mystery and stunning visuals, millions of migratory birds feeding their new families.
.
As early as 1998, that estuary was dismal, dust-devils swirling across a hundred miles of dead sand.
.
The immense drainage from the Rocky Mountains, diverted to Phoenix golf courses, south California toilets, los vegas motels.
.
These days, nothing feeds the northern Sea Of Cortez, the plankton blooms gone, the fisheries a tiny fraction of their glory, the great migrating whales just window-dressing in an empty desert.
.
So, 'yes', I am familiar with the way it used to be.