9%

The first thing I do every morning is check the Rasmussen poll to see where our president stands among voters. This morning, after I noted that he is 18%—up (or down, depending on which way you want to look at it) 3 points from yesterday. Then I scrolled a little further down on the page and saw that 9% of adults rate the economy as good or excellent. So I toddled into the room across the hall, where my husband was holding forth before his computer, pecking out the latest in an ongoing series of government excoriations.

“Honey,” I said, “Do you know that 9% of the American people consider the state of the economy as good or excellent?”

He looked up from the keyboard and answered, “Yes.”

Huh.

So I pursued it. “Why would even one living person today think that?”

He took a breath and began: “Okay, take the guy who has a good job, whose wife is either incapacitated or dead, so she doesn’t spend all his money, whose kids have good jobs and have no kids in government schools. His house is paid for, his cars are paid for. He doesn’t have any credit card debt to speak of. Life is good.”

“But,” said I, “that means he doesn’t watch the news—any news—or read the newspaper—any newspaper.”

“Right,” he agreed.

Or maybe he’s a monk cloistered in one of those monasteries in a mountain. Or a spoiled starlet, who just had the world handed to her. But do they vote? Rasmussen only polls likely voters.

I guess there are people who are so self-absorbed that they have no idea what’s going on around them. They don’t listen to anyone but themselves; they don’t have any interest in what the government is doing because it doesn’t affect them yet. Their world is so small that the largest thing in it is their big screen TV, on which they watch only movies and MTV. Their favorite pastime is video games and many of them live in their parents’ basements. But again, do these people vote?

Maybe Cecil is right. It’s Mr. Happy Widower, pre-Medicare, with his job, his house, his grown kids, and his own world. But I’d like to meet one of the 9%, just long enough to ask him a few questions. Oh, that’s already been done. Jay Leno used to do it all the time.

The reason I left out the kids in school is that anyone who has children in a government school has to be at least peripherally aware of the creeping secularism and other perils over the past generation. Unfortunately, most don’t really care. But I’ll tell you this little story and then I’ll quit.

The church I attend has a Christian school attached to it. Many or most of the church kids are students at the school but a few are not. Our assistant pastor was recently invited to a “Winter Program” at our local government school (right here in the Ozarks) as a guest of one of the kids who attends our church. He reported hearing a number of secular songs sung by the students and then seeing a play based on “The Arabian Nights.”

Merry Christmas.

Love

Granny