The Canaries of Ohio

If you’re lucky enough to catch our junior Senator speaking at a public event you’ll hear him tell of the significance of his canary in a bird cage pin. He’s been telling the story for a long time. If you live in Ohio you’ve been seeing a lot of dead canaries lately.

I look out for them. They’re not living in cages, so they’re usually hiding in plain site.

For years it was listening to my teenage son regale us with public high school tales of fights, theft, black markets, and police lock downs. I’m waiting for the enterprising young video blogger that sneaks a camera into school to film it. I don’t see how any administrator could survive the scandal.

A lot of people need statistics. All I need is the Trotwood Wall-Mart closing its doors.

This month two of our three next door neighbors had their houses foreclosed. The other one has been foreclosed multiple times over the past few years. We got the news that our house value has declined 10% destroying any equity we might have accumulated.

At night I listen for the semi-automatic gun fire. We’ve had several murders near my house in less than a month. Last Christmas we cowered in the dark as a gang related gun battle raged across the street from our house. One of the bullets went through a nearby house missing a sleeping baby by a few inches. The family moved to Michigan.

The thing that scares me the most are the book stores. I program for a living. Every month or so I go to Borders and Barnes & Nobel and check the technical shelves. They used to be bustling with Java and .NET titles. Over the last year and a half they’ve been cutting back more and more. Today I went into the Dayton Mall Borders. Two rows for Java, and the book shelf in the middle has been replaced with a table for reading. You have to be paying attention to notice that the table is a bird corpse.

It’s been getting awfully hard to breathe in America. In a matter of days we’ve been collectively bound into indentured servitude, our children’s children damned to working off the balance from the great con called “The Free Market”. Ohio knows all about this. We’ve been paying for “The Free Market” for decades.

Welcome to our world, America. We’re all canaries now.