Misdirected Priorities

I received a phone call from a dear friend of mine yesterday afternoon.

"Did you see the front page of the paper today?"

"Yeah, I did..."

What she was referring to was an out-of-focus photo of a long parade of ambulances and other rescue apparatus taken from distance, maybe from a highway overpass. A caption under the photo read:

"A long line of EMS units snakes down W.Va. 16 toward Beckley Sunday night with their emergency lights flashing in memory of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks. The parade went from Coal City to Crossroads mall"

That's it. Nothing else.

I knew about this because my friend who called is one of those EMS personnel, and they've been doing it now every year since 9/11. I think it's great that they do it as not to forget all those who died. I knew she was proud of her participation, and also her role in getting it started in the first place. It's why she called.

I'm proud of her.

But what really pissed me off is what got more attention than the area's EMS personnel doing something out of the goodness of their hearts for the heroes and victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Just below that photograph was another story.

Get this...

Michigan couple spots strange lights in Daniels (wv) sky

Huh?

Now, including a really clear photograph, is a story twenty-one paragraphs long about a couple in Daniels, WV who for the last several nights have seen two strange lights in the southwestern sky... That come out at the same time every night and travel west across the sky... The clear picture I mentioned includes one of the "strange lights" to the right of the half-moon and even has a red circle around it to help the reader identify it.

The head of the Raleigh County airport was questioned, the National Weather Service was queried. They even contacted the National Radioastronomy Observatory in Green Bank, WV to find out what these "strange lights" were... The newspaper even sent a reporter out to do this piece and investigate this odd phenomena...

Know what these lights were?

Are you ready?

Please sit down...

Venus and Jupiter, two of our nieghboring planets in our solar system.

I'm not a trained astronomer, but even I could have told these two dumbasses what the were. It's the right time of year for them. If they had waited a little later in the night and looked east, they would have seen another strange light, tinged slightly red... It would be Mars, coming up around 11:30 pm.

Ok. I'm not going to go off on how stupid these two folks were for reporting this, because not everyone was a science geek in school like I was and didn't watch the Discovery channel all the time like I did.

You fucking dolts!

What pisses me off is that this bullshit story took up the front page of the paper, and over half of the back page of the first section, and those rescue and EMS people who risk their lives every day for us and was doing something really special to remember all those who've died on 9/11 gets two lousy sentences and an out of focus long shot.

That's just fucking wrong and it shows, in my humble opinion, a great disrespect for my friend and her colleagues and the thankless job they perform every day.

I think tonight I'm going to call the same reporter who wrote the story right after sundown and say I see strange lights in the sky... Thousands, maybe billions of them... Twinkling up in the sky! little tiny spaceships from horizon to horizon, holy shit! They're everywhere!

What are they? Aliens? Space Ships? Mothman returning?

It's got to be aliens! Then, early in the morning, this HUGE light comes up! I think it's the MOTHER SHIP! It's so bright I can't look directly at it! It's up there all day, travelling west sending harmful rays down into my brain!!!!!

Maybe they'll call the Air National Guard in Charleston or even get in contact with NORAD in Colorado, or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon for an opinion on those...

What the fuck...

Copyright 2005 Thomas J Wolfenden