twin cities liberal

 But isn't he a Twin Cities liberal? This question from a newspaper reporter who went on to mention her time in a bar hearing liberals painted with every abomination and ill known to man.  This prompted me to reply that indeed he is but that didn't make him a bad person.

This response gained me a certain notoriety, I guess, but to me it was merely a reflection of my lived reality.  The occasion was a meeting in western Minnesota featuring Attorney General Keith Ellison about efforts he is making to hold machinery companies to account for their efforts to withhold vital technical information from independent repair shops.

This is "liberal" I suppose, in that it reflects the typically liberal desire for a level playing field for all.  But it also speaks to the need for openness in the marketplace which is, or certainly should be, essential to a conservative view. 

Increasingly, we allow our political hatreds to drive our commonsense underground and this is very detrimental to our lives together.  Grandson Andrew, who farms, was there to tell about the difficulties we were having with a tractor, trying to get it repaired and keep it running.  This is something nearly every farmer has experience with and it matters not at all who he voted for in the election.  We should be able to say that and act accordingly.

And indeed, this is detrimental.  If we must ask who our neighbors voted for before we will agree to stand together on a matter that impacts all of us, then we have truly left behind the rural life that I came back to in the late seventies.  That rural life meant that if my barn was burning neighbors would show up offering what help they could without ever considering who I voted for.  

If we have already left, or ever will leave that attitude behind in favor of making sure my political bunch drives out your political bunch, we will have given up most of what was good and right about our lives together.

That would be a tragedy!

vaccinate

 Did I miss something?  My seventy plus years spent mostly on this farm dealing with livestock has resulted for me in a healthy respect for vaccines.  It has gotten to the point with our overproduction of pigs in the upper Midwest, that I do not know if it is possible to produce pigs at any scale here without vaccines.

So why do we have our Secretary in charge of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, a known vaccine opponent who also is a Kennedy, now say, after a lifetime of denial of vaccine usefulness, that he will make measles vaccines available in view of the situation in Texas, but will do nothing to require them.  Why?  This runs contrary to virtually everything I have been taught, in large measure by veterinarians

Vaccine effectiveness relies mostly upon uptake.  The more casual the use of vaccines in a situation, the less well they will work.  I think I am right here.  Anyone who wishes to argue against that belief can start discussion by making a comment below.

I think the real controversy about vaccines is due to the ascendancy of libertarian thought and action.  Due to the success of this philosophy over the last half century, we have difficulty doing anything that helps the neighborhood or community, even if it would benefit us as well.  Our minds just no longer work that way.  We think that for us to succeed others must fail, as Gore Vidal said.