Clarifications….??

First, let me post this picture:

I’ll explain this in a little bit but I wanted to explain a few things about myself first.  I have been blogging here on and off for the last 6 years are so.  I have wanted to quit many times and have in fact pulled the site a few times.  I guess it’s a funk kind of thing.

Some of you who read think I’m dead on target and others think I just an ass bag.  An opinionated assbag at that.  I’ll admit I have some fans and when people say so, it tends to get to me as does the ones who post and think I’m full of shit.  One needs a thick skin at times to be sure.

First and foremost, It is MY blog and these are my opinions.  You can read them, like them, or hate them and I really don’t mind anymore if you tell me either way but the thing is, you can simply click away and ignore me all the time.  Fine.  I write to relieve my own tensions and it works. I don’t know why but when I vent, I feel better most of the time and sometimes I feel a little sad, especially when I dump on someone extra hard.  Yes, I have feelings.  We are humans after all.

I am a born and raised Peorian, lived here most of my life.  I have travelled half way around the world via the US Navy and lived in Hawaii where my dear aunt and uncle resided since they bombed Pearl Harbor. I really like Peoria and the area of the country we are in and although as I get older, I tend to hate the winters more and more.  Maybe that’ll change when I retire and won’t give a shit about snow because I won’t have to work in it. My Navy duty was during the last stages of the Viet Nam war.  I was on a ship that serviced destroyers and cruisers coming off what was then known as the gun line.  We were anchored in a harbor of Taiwan and that was considered a hazardous duty location.  I saw Viet Nam from the sea as we sailed up the coast and hit many oriental ports.

What I’m getting to is this: I don’t know all the answers to our local problems, crime, budgets,  police or lack there of, taxes, fees, and Civic Centers.  I do know common sense (at least I think my years of living and working make that so) and I do know that although I could go out tomorrow and buy a brand new BMW, it would most likely be disastrous to my budget in the long run.  This is why I can’t see how our city leaders can spend money, on the backs of our future and our kids future, and say it will be good for Peoria and then turn their heads and in another breathe say we have no money for police, fire, and city services, so these things will suffer.  In that respect, crime will go unabated, streets will crumble with age, and fires will burn longer.  Who wants to stay in a town with high crime, bad streets, and no businesses to speak of except bars and strip clubs?  No hotel can survive that and it has already been proven our Civic Center couldn’t attract flies with a dog shit show.  It was in the red this year, what, $4 million dollars and our city leaders were glad?  Glad it wasn’t higher?  And I’m called an assbag.

I have always believed that if you have a good police force, that has the tools and the funds, crime will decrease. Remember New York city in the early 70’s? The rotten Apple it was called and then a mayor stepped in and figured out that no matter how many shiny buildings a city has or how many neon signs there are, if crime is out of hand, if the streets are dirty, people aren’t coming.  They changed and it worked.  So, what’s with Peoria? 

Our city council hasn’t had a good track record when it comes to using taxpayer money for investments and loans. The ball park cost us $3 million to move a street and what, $5 million to settle a law suit?  Mid-Town Plaza where they force people out of their long term homes, tore them down and built the plaza to end all plazas.  Nobody came and we are paying today. Then there was Firefly, the battery company that promised 100s of jobs. They skipped town owing us and no jobs. How about the Gateway building that was to revitalize the riverfront.  If people knew what taxpayers pay each year to keep this building, they would burn it down and collect the insurance money.  The museum?  Really?  The most valuable piece of real-estate in Peoria and we build a glorified Lakeview on it? Nobody goes to Lakeview now.  Why? Nothing to see and poorly run and yet, we use taxpayer money and give it to the same people to build yet a bigger museum to be poorly run. There are many more to cite including the new hotel which for some reason, our praying Mayor and many on the council voted for against public wishes and even people who do finances could see this was a high risk investment, but hey, it’s not their money, it’s ours.  How sad.  Yet these same people bent over backwards to make sure a millionaire gets his strip club re-located.  Sodom and Gomorrah did it better and we know what happened there.

Our priorities, at least from our civic leaders are all wrong.  I believe if you have good police, fire, and city services, make the city clean, and safe, people will come.  Businesses will want to be here and the schools will improve.  But as long as we have crime and our leaders thinking build it and spend it and tax it, people will leave and they are, in droves.  Since when did this business of cities using taxpayer money for private investment take hold?  Where has it worked? For the short term maybe, but it has never worked.  Yet here in Peoria, we pour taxpayer dollars into developer projects, the latest to be the warehouse district, and the only people to benefit will be the developers, the construction trades (short term) and the wealthy that happen to own the property they bought in the first place for 10 cents on the dollar.  The working taxpaying person who tries to support his/her family, buy groceries, and try to own a decent home suffer from the fees and other garbage these elected idiots dream up for us to pay.  Remember the $2 flush tax?  That was all it was going to be, 2 bucks.  Now look at your sewer bill. 

Now for the picture above.  I took this today. This guy’s SUV is decked out for a football player on the Philadelphia Eagles NFL team.  Quarterback Michael Vick,  A millionaire ex-convict and this guy worships him.  His car says so.  This is what is wrong with this country.  Too many worship athletes. Many of whom are paid millions a year to play a game.  Kids in our schools will tell you the hell with college, I’ll play in the NBA or the NFL and make millions.  When bats fly out my ass. Yet as a society, we will watch a pro game and let people starve.  We will turn our heads at wars but don’t fuck with my football team. We go to church and praise God on Sunday as long as we are home by kickoff. Then all week we will shit on our fellow humans only to sit in a pew and ask to be forgiven.  It’s no wonder 3rd world countries despise us.  They can’t believe we value an X-Box over proper housing and clean water and food.  We stand in lines for an iPhone at $500 to be told it only works on one carrier and at Apple’s discretion but we will pay anyway because Vick had one on his ear on TV.  Christ we are becoming soulless.  Yes, I am cynical and yes I get mad at our civic leaders for what I perceive as bad policy but damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead anyway.  It’s easy to say that if you are lucky (some say blessed) enough to have the money and resources to leave and go elsewhere if it all fails.  Many of us don’t and we are stuck here, to pay for it after the party crashes. That is why I blog. I have to stay and by God, I will want to drag as many of those SOB’s down with me as I can.

Keep plugging because if you give up, there is no chance ever. 

To my many co veterans (we VN vets were not welcomed home even though we all served because by law we had to) I wish a wonderful veterans day tomorrow.  Remember those who have died also for our freedoms not only because of the wars, but because of the bad decisions our political leaders have made that put so many young men and women in harms way.