Water

We received our notice yesterday. The 2008 irrigating season is upon us; starting this week. I will have to clean the ditches of leaves and old walnuts and give the orchard its second mowing this week. Then, next Wednesday, in the dark, I will make the trek up to the canal and open the valves that will send us our first allotment of water for the season.

The association that directs the agricultural water usage here on the Planet Orland has been cleaning their canals for the past few weeks, using labor from the Salt Creek Conservation Camp…a minimum level prison camp. I wonder if they would clean my ditches as well, for a fee? Somehow, I doubt it.

But, enough about agriculture… I did well yesterday, not even opening the book, The Three Trillion Dollar War. I went to the library and loaded up on less than serious works for a change. But, there is no avoiding the Iraq war news. I thought about that as I walked in the park yesterday, listening to NPR. Every day brings more and more reporting on the failures of this administration. And what’s so irritating about that is the fact that the news media went along with these bozos in past. The news media were the cheerleaders for war. They allowed themselves to be ‘embedded’ with the troops without significant complaint. They repeated the words/lies of bush, cheney and rumsfeld without question. Sure, it’s nice to have our opinions validated, now…but it would have been nicer to have had some support for a second opinion 5 years ago. Instead, the news media helped to spread paranoia; you were less than ‘American’ if you didn’t agree with the Decider. If you didn’t agree with the war, somehow that was construed to mean that you didn’t support the troops. And now we find out that it was actually this administration that was undercutting the support for the troops. But, it’s so much easier to blame the dissidents! And the press went along with it…