Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected.

    I honestly cannot count the number of times over the last 20 years, that I was out covering a story when I thought:  “This situation calls for a Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected, fully armored vehicle."   That’s probably because I have never once thought that our community needed such a vehicle.  So you can imagine my surprise when I was driving by the Sheriff’s office here the other day when I spotted this monstrosity.

What you are looking at is just that, a mine sweeping fully armored, six wheel drive transport vehicle.  It is, for all intents and purposes the property of the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.   That vehicle retails at just over a half a million dollars and it was paid for with your tax money.   The MRAP is one of nearly 180 of these units that the Department of Homeland Security has been handing out to local law enforcement agencies around the country.  For those of you who are math impaired, that comes out to about 90 million dollars worth of Mine Resistant vehicles.  I have been told that the Sherriff’s Office is leasing this vehicle from DHS for the grand total sum of zero dollars a year. 

    Now, I want to get it out off the top here that I am not taking a swipe at our Sheriff.  Quite the contrary, I don’t know too many people who would turn up their nose to the keys to a half million dollar vehicle.  I could certainly see myself being the envy of all my drunk neighbors down at the Redneck Yacht Club by showing up in that bad boy.  But I digress.  I am getting away from the point here.  I understand that the Sheriff intends to use this vehicle for his SWAT team.  For that to happen, the vehicle needs to be retrofitted.   I am not sure what this particular vehicle needs, but according to Undersheriff, Paul Trudeau in Jefferson County, New York, who also received one of the vehicles, retrofitting, will cost about $70,000.  That money is also coming out of your pocket. 

   Back in February, President Obama told the nation: “Weapons of war have no place on our streets”.  I guess he meant that weapons of war have no place on our streets unless he puts them there.  I would certainly agree that this particular vehicle does not belong on our streets. According to manufacturer specifications, this vehicle weighs 58,000 pounds.  It is so heavy that it has a very well documented history of destroying the very roads it is using to get around on.  If you read my blog, you will know that quite a few residents in this area pay for their own roads. Who exactly would cover any damage to roadways caused by this thing rumbling through the neighborhood?  Are we going to put that back on the residents again? Has the county even thought that through?

   Earlier this year, my son Alexander Robinson was home for a few weeks before he was deployed to the front lines in Afghanistan.  While he was home, he made it a point to purchase new uniforms.  YES we make our soldiers buy their own uniforms now.  He also ordered a bunch of gear online to have it sent to his deployment area.  I asked him why he was buying his own gear if the Army supplied them.  He told me that the gear they were being assigned was generally not very good and that to be well equipped the only way to do it was to purchase equipment for yourself. 

   So there it is.  We as a nation are failing to provide for our troops who are deployed, overseas, in a war zone, to give them the tools they need to stay alive and relatively comfortable on the fringes of hell.  Yet at the same time, we can afford to be sending half million dollar vehicles around the country to communities that neither want or need them.  I should think that these vehicles would better serve our troops fighting over seas.   Now, once this vehicle is retrofitted exactly what do we intend to do with it?  Are you going to load up your heavily armed officers and go blazing out to the next complaint of loud music?  If you listen to the tin foil behatted, the whole idea is to be prepared to strike down potential civil unrest in the future.  I just hope they don’t plan on driving down my road to do it. 

The fourth arm of the Government.

    Throughout my career as a journalist, I would occasionally stumble across a story that I did not want to do.  The worst moments for me were the ones where I would have to do a story about an elected official that I held some degree of respect for, which I knew was going to cast them in a negative light.  In those moments, I would turn to my father for guidance.  He would always tell me the same thing: “Son, the media is the fourth arm of the government.  Like it or not, it is your job to keep them honest”.   I made some of the toughest decisions of my career based on that advice and some of those days, the ride home was pretty solemn.

     Over the last 5 years or so, I started to see a trend in the news industry that really frightened me.  I need to quantify the statements to follow by giving you guys some back story about the television news industry.  Contrary to popular belief, TV news reporters do not make a lot of money.  Quite the opposite,  News Reporters are usually paid on par with fast food workers.  The lion’s share of the monies go to the main News Anchor, the Weatherman and the News Director.  This is a trend that really developed mostly over the last 20 years or so.  The end result of this is that most of the employees at news stations are typically in their 20’s, green behind the ears, and not very familiar with their own industry or what it represents.  They meek out a living on a paupers wage and focus all their energy in the struggle to get to the next job in another market, hoping it will pay a few more thousand dollars a year.  They are not concerned with the market where they work, only getting out of there as fast as possible.  The easiest way to do that is usually by finding the most sensational stories they can to pad their reel. (resume)

Newspapers and Television have been struggling for years now to stay relevant in the digital age.  With the advent of the internet, information started to become available on demand.  For the news industry that relied on deadlines and news programs at a pre set time of the day, the internet was a blow to their way of life.  News organizations that once focused on quality pieces done with care and precision were now dropping standards to a quantity over quality strategy.  Previous efforts on fact checking and accuracy fell victim to the need to turn 3 stories a day to feed the machine to generate revenue.

Let’s come back around to the green reporters that are now covering our local stories.  Let’s combine that with the fact that the government agencies, which are a great source of news stories, have also jumped on the digital age train.  These agencies have learned how to use computers to restrict the access to information previously available to journalists.  They have also wised up on how to use the use these new tools to clamp down on tips passed on to journalists by employees of respective agencies by tracking employee phone calls and busting down on people who speak with the media. Here is a good example   The end result of this is a parade of young reporters that are happy to take whatever a government agency feeds them without question and pass it on as breaking news.

I want to cite two frightening examples of this behavior that have been headline news in the Unites States recently.   Let’s start with George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.  Everyone knows the case.  But let me point out a few things that you may not have realized.    The media started reporting immediately that a defenseless Martin had been shot and killed in cold blood by a zealous Zimmerman for no reason.  They fed the flames of racism by running this picture of Martin.

Cherub Martin at 13

Over the course of two years, they never once attempted to show you the picture of the 17 year old martin that had attacked Zimmerman.  By the way, yes they did have access to this picture, they chose not to show it.

Now, let’s take this a step further.  The media reported that Martin had bought an iced tea and some skittles at a local quickie mart before being “ruthlessly and recklessly gunned down by a racist neighborhood watch captain”.  Well, the problem with all that is that he did NOT buy an iced tea.  He bought Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail.  This item combined with the Skittles and  Robitussin created a cocktail called “lean”.  It was a cheap high that Martin had bragged about on his facebook page.  The media chose to ignore this fact in the light of political correctness and instead told folks that he carried an iced tea. 

Now, we have already uncovered two very blatant lies perpetuated by the media that were very easy to see.  I am going to throw the third one at you.  Throughout the entire Zimmerman trial. (Almost 2 years)  The media kept zeroing in on “Stand Your Ground” laws.  More specifically how the whole ordeal would have been different were it not for that law.   Here is what the new age journalists did not tell you:  Zimmerman relinquished his right to argue stand your ground during pre-trial.  During his entire trial, he argued self defense, not stand your ground.  Yet, after the trial was over, every major news network had specials about how we needed to revoke the stand your ground laws.  By this time I was screaming at the television to no avail.   My opinion about Zimmerman remains my own, but the coverage of this event is diabetic at best.

Let’s move forward to the bombing of the Boston Marathon.  The coverage of this event chilled me to the bone.  The bombing itself was horrible and catastrophic.   But the events that followed sent me to the store to stock up on ammunition.   You see, the 48 hours or so following the Boston Bombings, I watched as TV stations showed us video of SWAT teams going door to door in the Boston area “rescuing” people from their homes at gunpoint.  Subsequently the officers would search the homes of the “rescued” without a warrant.  I watched this unfold with horror as the news reporter rang out about how the police were rescuing people from their homes. 

I want to be perfectly clear on this point.  If you, or anyone comes to “rescue” me from my home with a Bushmaster AR 15 in hand with a black mask around your head, wearing all black…. Not only will I not be opening the door, but blood will most probably be shed on that day.  Produce a warrant or get the hell off of my land.   This notion is protected by the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.  It is most certainly the responsibility of the media covering these events to question these events.  Yet, none did.

Being evacuated "voluntarily" 

Yep, It's voluntary. 

More SWAT Voluntary action.

Once the suspect was caught,  I watched as the news station showed video of drunk college students partying in the streets, chanting “USA, USA, USA!"  I watched as CNN dropped back to an anchor who proclaimed:  “I saw someone this morning telling a Police Officer thank you.  We should all thank a Police Officer today."  Now, I am married to a Police Officer.  Yet, I do NOT appreciate my news anchors telling me what I should be thinking or doing, it’s not their job.  News Reporters should be questioning why the military state militia was going door to door and pillaging people’s homes in the name of terrorism.   Their job is to question why it happened in the first place.  But we all know that isn't going to happen.  They are no longer the fourth arm of the government, they are a puppet of the government.  

     It is for these reasons, along with too many other examples to cite, that I have parted ways with the career that I chose nearly two decades ago.  I started to find it hard to sleep at night knowing that the business I was working for was intentionally spreading lies into the homes of people who deserved and expected to have the truth.    

Uncle Boo Boo

     Over the years, I have grown much closer to my older sister.  In our youth, we had our knock down drag out fights.  As I recall, one of them even led to us not speaking for a couple of years.  But as age and wisdom fall on me, I have come to realize the value of family.  My sister Annie and I chose different paths in life and hers led her to a house full of kids and more recently grandchildren.   I had one child that I was unaware of until she was almost voting age. (that’s a story for another day)  I have come to covet the family that Annie has.  She has her problems no doubt, but the love that flows through her family is evident and every time I go home to her house in Illinois, I bask in the feeling of family that wraps me up like a hand knitted blanket.

 My sister Annie.

    Most recently, Annie has had the blessing of grandchildren.  Her 4 year old grandson Blaze is far and away the most engaging and entertaining of them.  Blazes (as we call him) is a spitfire four fifty four, four on the floor, full house—with a blower.  He is non stop, and fears nothing created by man.  It’s a pretty impressive trait in my opinion.   Now, around Annies house, I have always been known simply as “Uncle Howie."  Everyone, even my sister called me that.  It has always seemed fitting enough.  I was always the guy who escaped the family life and ran away and chased his dreams.  I know that a lot of the members of my family coveted the life I appeared to have.  I became the quasi popular, cool family member that everyone wonders about. 

     Blazes changed all of that in a single breath.  Last year, Annie called me and asked if she could come down with her husband and spend a week with us in sunny Florida.  I was delighted to say absolutely.  She called back a couple of days later and asked if it would be OK to bring a then 3 year old Blaze with them.  Melissa and I reveled at the idea of children’s laughter once again bouncing through our hallways and we both eagerly agreed.  So the date was set and we prepared for a week with the company of my family. 

 Blazes in Florida

True to his name, Blaze was a ball of energy.  He wanted to know about everything.  I would take him out to the barn in the morning telling him it was time to work.  “Werk! Werk!” he would exclaim as we were feeding the horses and the goats.  Despite his age, Blaze had some trouble grasping his talking skills, so even at the age of three and a half years old, he was still struggling with a lot of things he was trying to say.  When he got a word right he stuck to it.  Just ask our old neighbor Tim.  One night while we were sitting around the bonfire, Tim came home.  You could not see him, but we heard his truck pull up and the door slam.   I yelled into the darkness “Hey Tim."  Tim yelled back that he would be right over.

Blaze was aghast.  Did this man just yell the word Tim into the darkness and get a response?  So Blaze tried it.  “Tim, Tim, TIM!"  And Tim yelled back to Blaze.  “Yeah."  Then to Blazes amazement, a 6 foot tall burly redneck slid out of the shadows and joined us at the bonfire.  You could see it in his face that Blaze thought this was just the neatest thing ever.  He spent the rest of the night running around the fire yelling Tim’s name.  When he got tired of that exercise, he would come over and pull on my hand and say “Werk, Werk."  I had to explain to him that we had already fed the horses and it would have to wait until tomorrow. 

Now, up to this point, Blaze had not quite gotten my name down right.  Annie would ask him “who is that?"  Blaze would respond “ahgabhaha."  Annie would correct him “that’s Howie."  But he couldn’t seem to grasp it.  But that night, Annie had a stroke of genius.  She asked Blaze what happens when you fall down and hurt your arm?  She said “owie." “Owie” repeated Blaze.  She pointed at me and said “Howie."  “Howie” repeated the boy. Success! Annie repeated this a few more times to insure that Blaze had got the concept of my name down pretty well.  Then we put Blaze to bed and had a couple more beers before hitting the sack ourselves.

The next morning, my sister was anxious to put Blaze to the test and see if he could still remember my name.  As soon as we were all together in the kitchen, Annie looked at me and asked “who is that?" You could see Blaze was struggling to remember the previous nights lesson.  He looked at Annie and she pointed to her arm as a reminder.  You could see Blaze make the connection and at once jumped up and said “Boo Boo!"  The laughter was uncontrollable. I knew in an instant that I would be forever marked within my family. Word of the remark spread through my family like a fire.  Sure enough, from that day forward, I have become known as Uncle Boo Boo within my family circles. In my younger days, I may have found this a bit embarrassing, but now, it suits me just fine.  I just wonder if  Melissa understands, that this makes her Yogi.