Wonka, a Review

Tonight I went with my wife and son and some friends from church to go see Wonka, a PG movie that was a thinly-veiled re-imagination of the drug wars of the 1980s.  Young and idealistic Wonka comes to town to move his product, a drug that is far better than anything anyone has ever seen, causing people to get high in a delirious kind of way.  But the drug cartels that exist plot to have Wonka put out of business, robbing him of his initial profits and confiscating what remains of his stock.  They did this because they know his product is far superior and fear what might happen if Wonka is allowed to push in their territories.  Eventually, Wonka finds himself destitute and working in a sweatshop under the cruel terrors of local profiteers.  

Yet Wonka won't give up, and with the aid of a young girl and others who have been imprisoned, he finds a way to get his product out on the street, once again driving its consumers to ecstasy, so good is his drug. Eventually through various slights of hand, he becomes a 'legitimate' dealer alongside the more established pushers in town, but seeing how their profits have gone down, the cartel seeks to have Wonka decimated.  They utilize Wonka's former sweatshop masters to poison his product, and bribe various corrupted police and religious entities to do their bidding.  Eventually Wonka himself gets discouraged, and having won the release of his fellow prisoners (or so he thinks), he leaves town.  But the cartel owners know that Wonka will eventually return, so they plot to kill him by blowing up his boat.  

Wonka discovers in a nick of time the plot, and miraculously survives the assassination attempt.  As he makes his way back to the city, he plots his revenge.  With the help of his former fellow prisoners, he exposes the corruption of the cartel and the police.  His plan works at first, as he is on the verge of finding their secret records.  But the cartel leaders quickly discover the plan, and Wonka is captured and left to die a terrible death of drowning in the drug mixture.  Fortunately once again Wonka is saved by somebody he had once thought to be his blood enemy and he escapes.  

Finally out in the town square Wonka confronts the cartel leaders and corrupted authorities.  The drug bosses think they have the upper hand, but soon are hoisted upon their own petard because they had so enjoyed Wonka's product.  Wonka is now free to be the sole drug kingpin in his new adopted city, and everybody lives happily ever after.  

Oh, and there's a giraffe and an orange midget and a lot of great song and dance numbers along the way.

7/10

Why Not Drive A Bus?

Yesterday I was in another town and I saw on the side of a school bus an advertisement begging people to come be bus drivers.  Since I already am a bus driver and have been now for almost 7 years, I know something as to why a lot of people don't want to become a driver.  Every district is hiring, but there never seem to be enough to go around.  And since the purpose of this blog is to get stuff out of my head, I thought I'd list out some of the reasons why there are never enough bus drivers.  

1)Imagine a job that you arrrive at before dawn but don't get done with until late afternoon.  But you only get paid for 3-4 hours of work.  There's a reason I tell people that it can be a great second job if your first job is flexible.  But it can really suck if you don't have that...and most people don't.

2)Most jobs work and pay for 250 days.  Bus drivers, because of the school year, only work about 180 days.  This is OK if it's not your prime source of income or like a lot of days off.  But if you need to work like 99% of the population, this is sub-optimal.

3)School districts, even the wealthy ones, don't want to pay bus drivers as it is not one of their core prcoesses.  If they wanted to pay us what the market really bears, we'd make a lot...but if I wanted to go drive for private industry and be a unionized delivery driver, I could likely make twice what I'm being paid now (and work full-time as well). 

4)Bus drivers have to have a Commercial Drivers' License (CDL), and they are not easy to get.  I have multiple endorsements (student, passenger, air brakes) on top of the license as well.  DMVs don't make it easy to pass the test, and since we have random drug tests, bi-annual physicals, and can easily lose our license for various infractions, it's not always easy to keep them for some people. 

5)This coming week I will be out in the dark starting my bus in temperatures in the teens.  This comes only a few weeks after doing afternoon routes in 100+ temperatures on buses that are not air conditioned.  Not only is this not the most comfortable thing in the world, for people with certain health conditions this can be dangerous. 

6)Oh, speaking of working conditions, my old school district has most of its routes on terribly maintained dirt roads that went from being extra dusty to extra soaked.  As a rookie driver I got stuck in the mud multiple times.  But what is worse is the daily vibration of those roads, which I think took some years off of my life.  

7)Even on good roads, the buses we drive are not all that reliable.  When they are being shaken apart by bad roads, it feels like it's a daily gamble to drive and hope that something does break off it.  I've driven several types and brands of buses over the year, and the one thing that they all have in common is that if they were regular car brands they would be considered lemons; the breakdown rates on these buses is astronomical.  Occasionally somebody I will hear somebody say they want to buy an old school bus and fix it up.  I always tell them that this is stupid...not only are you buying a 25-year old vehicle that has been abused (and probably not well-maintained in the past five years due to budget issues), it was probably not well-built to begin with. 

8)Then there's the problem of driving a semi-sized vehicle through small neighborhoods, trying to squeeze through cars parked on both sides of the road and vehicles pulling out in front of me and children running out into the street.  A colleague of mine hit and killed a child who had done such a thing several months ago.  This driver was at fault in no way...but the guilt she feels will stay with her the rest of her life.

9)Ah, the kids.  When I tell people what I do most people say, "Oh, I couldn't do that!"  Yep, you probably couldn't.  Everyday on my current route I drive 50 hyperactive middle school kids (main ingredients: snark, anxiety, hormones, and energy drinks) to and from school.  Now that I've driven them for awhile and have gotten to know them I know most of them are OK.  But kids, even good ones, by nature will test adult authority.  And that's why a lot of adults can't do this, because they are too insecure in themselves to have a hundred eyes on them at all times.  Once you built relationships and trust with the kids, this can get easier...but even a good bus will have a few knuckleheads on it.  

10)Far worse than the kids are the adults in school administration.  Since I started driving every once in awhile clueless school administrators will come and try to suck up to drivers, and one of the time-tested line they use is, "The job you do is so important...it's like you are in charge of a classroom on wheels."  When I hear that, I know they've never been on a bus, because a)school teachers can actually see their students, not just in rear-view mirrors and b)we're not actually teaching them anything...buses are only classrooms in that the kids are learning about life (good and bad) from each other.  Drivers have no idea what goes on with the kids when they sink down below the seats.  

11)There are some school administrations who will occasionally recognize that transportation is not in their skill set, so they farm their bus services out to independent contractors.  I've never worked for one, and don't want to, but sometimes I think they can't be more clueless than educational administrators who talk about desired outcomes and assessments.  Real-world problems, like how to finish an afternoon drop off while arriving at a school at the same time to take a volleyball team to another town, are things they have no clue about.  

12)Finally, being a bus driver means that you have to deal sometimes with other bus drivers.  And most bus drivers are...different.  Maybe it's the strange hours, the PTSD of dealing with future psychopaths, or any of a hundred other reasons.  But do this long enough and it will change you, and not always for the better.  

So after all these points, why do I keep doing it?  Because I'm one of the few people for whom most of these obstacles are not deal-breakers.  My first job is flexible.  I get along well with most people.  I don't go running with minor problems to clueless administrators who think they know my job better than me.  I'm healthy enough that extreme heat and cold are not problems (yet).  

Who knows how many more years I will do this job part-time.  But I fear that somehow it may well become a dying industry.  If they can't ever create enough drivers, maybe they'll figure out a better way.  I'm guessing that 20 years from now my grandkids will go to school on buses run by UPS or Amazon.  

The River of Ministry

I've been in a strange place in recent months.  I quit one bus driving job because I couldn't stomach a terrible administration and am getting ready to start one in another district, hoping that things will be better.  My kids are getting older, and rarely do they need me much anymore beyond just me being the 'provider' so they can do their own thing.  My body in recent months has finally started to feel older than the young man I thought I was, even into my mid-50s.  My heel has been through a period where insoles and stretching are necessities; my flesh continues to grow as my energy seems to wane; waking up in the morning do I rarely fly out of bed; even my libido seems to finally be slowing down.  

And my ministry, the thing that sometimes I feel has been my defining quality for almost three decades, seems to be in a strange place.  Church attendance is down everywhere: the amplifying COVID shutdown pushed people out of church, increasing secularism means that people realize that they have options that make it where they don't 'need' organized religion, and the realization that many 'Christians' are little more than MAGA acolytes means that genuine evangelism is getting harder all the time.  Even here in the heartland of America, where trends finally arrive years or decades after the begin on the coast, I'm seeing this more and more.  In my own ministry I've seen numbers go down, and even those who have come to our little church as the effects of consolidation mean we get members from closing churches have not offset the deaths of older saints and the indifference of too many others.  Far too often I wonder if my preaching and teaching and ministry is making a difference with people.

I still love to preach.  But I wonder if my life of being a Preacher is coming to an end.  I'm starting to think about what my next decade looks like, and more and more I can see that perhaps the other aspects of my life change are just preludes to a different career altogether.  Lots of churches would still need me to come and fill on occasion, as there are less and less people willing to preach almost everywhere now.  But the adminstrative side of being a preaching minister may end sooner than I once thought.  I don't have any desire to move to a new full-time ministerial position, as I don't know if I could start all over again.  What has been my second job for the last few years may well now be the first job or the gateway to some other kind of career entirely.  

So what does all this mean?  Several times this summer I have been taking days to pray and spend out in the wilderness to consider this question.  Today I went down to a place near the river that has a bunch of nice hiking trails, and I spent a few hours in consideration of the Future.  Through the heat and the spiderwebs I made it down to the sandbar and saw that the river was very low, as it has been around here for almost a year.  Even as we have had some summer rains and it is surprisingly green almost everywhere you look, almost a year of drought meant that the river remains low and slow.  

But I took time to watch it, and yet it continued to move.  Slowly, without any sense of urgency the waters continued to flow.  The mosquitos and water bugs would make little indentions in the water, small branches would float by, and patches of riverbeds that are still uncovered continued to sprout green grasses that normally are drowned.  And it hit me in this that perhaps this is my stage of ministry.  I've never been much of a raging river like some preachers, crashing down like a mountain stream or even at times flooding so much that destruction followed in its wake.  I've prided myself on always been a simple, steady kind of mature river that never got much out of the banks but nourished everything.  Maybe now, in my later middle ages, after years of spiritual drought of COVID, exhaustion with aging and family and driving, and just the increasing apathy of American culture when it comes to the Lord, slower and drier is now the norm for my life.  Maybe I shouldn't get so upset that the expectations of a young man to do great things are no longer realistic.  Like the river, I'll be low and slow yet perform a vital function in ways that may not be awe-inspiring yet are vital to the health of everyone.  

I don't know what this means for my life as the Preacher.  But I trust that somehow the Lord will find a way to use me to his glory.  I just wish I knew what that is...

What's Next

Summer 2023.  Much of the country is locked into a heatwave deathcycle brought on by climate change, or it's just a hot summer.  I don't really know, but it feels like nothing ever seems to change this time of year.  We're just hanging on until the start of the school year, hoping that then we'll be so busy that when the inevitable cooldown happens, we'll not even notice.  

Of course, like the hellish summer we have endured so far we're continually stuck in the cycle of Trump.  He never went away, not even after trying to get his armed acolytes to ransack the halls of Congress because he got his butt kicked in the 2020 election.  The indictments are piling up, the force of law and order are finally breathing down his neck, yet his 38% continues to hang on and glorify his Orangeness.  It's pathetic to be honest, but I don't really fear the man.  I fear what comes next.

A year or two ago I read a book about Mussolini, the awful fascist dictator of Italy who came to power in 1922.  He was a horrible leader but probably not as horrible as he could have been.  Filled with personality and charm, he made some great speeches to bring out the worst in people but seemed to more content to bang a series of mistresses before going home to his overbearing wife every night.  His squad of thugs would beat up dissenting fellow Italians for the sheer pleasure of it and used nationalistic and Catholic fervor to give a voice (and some substance) to antisemitism.  But for his incompetence, he could have been far worse.  

Perhaps one of the biggest legacies about Mussolini was that he was an inspiration for one Adolf Hitler.  Hitler liked Mussolini's style, as well as his fervent nationalism that saw Jews and other minorities as objects belittle, persecute, and eventually destroy.  Eventually he started a world war that led to the death of millions and destroyed his own nation, all because he lived in a world of Aryan resentment that found nothing constructive to create.  

Mussolini was bad, but it took Hitler to take fascism and transform it into a wholly destructive Nazi movement.  It took Hitler's 'competence' (I hate using that word as it sounds like I admire him but it's just descriptive of the effectiveness of his evil ideals) to grow this rage into something beyond a bunch of Angry White People with no outlet.  I wonder if history is repeating itself, not across international boundaries but in the United States itself.  Trump is the Mussolini in this analogy, something of a clown who screams a lot and glorifies himself and talks about the 'greatness' of America...but in fact he's not really serious about anything but his own power.  Just like he never could be bothered to actually march ahead of his minions on January 6th, neither did he really take seriously his power.  He was too busy playing golf and humping a flag and rage-tweeting while watching Fox News to really do all those things he ranted about.  Part of me believes that he never really believes anything he says; he'd parade with the Gay Rights people or feed the homeless if he thought it would be politically advantageous.  His incompetence, always real, found the full force of its might during the COVID pandemic as he mismangaged what could have been a triumphal event of his legacy and blew a winnable election against Mediocre Joe.  And even though he's trying to make a comeback, he's becoming an increasingly old man who even with his 38% is being marginalized for the things he has done through his legal troubles and through a death by a thousand cuts.  One of these days he'll have eaten one too many Big Macs, have a massive heart attack,and he'll be gone.

But my fear is that his movement will be taken over, just like Hitler eventually ursurped Mussolini.  There's already a gang of fools trying to position themselves now to be the Next, people like MTG or Ron DeSantis whose own idiocy makes Trump look reasonable.  These are people who scream and plot and stoke various resentments among people, but they just don't have IT like Trump.  Instead, they're transitional figures, whose weakness amplifies the stupidity of this whole movement rather than strengthen it and make those of us who groan at the thought of the Democrats ultimately vote for them.  One of these days, though, somebody else is going to come along and know what to do with this unruly mob.  The red hat dummies will be organized effectively into a modern version of the brownshirted thugs, who will actually have the discipline and organization to do those things that Trump could only dream of.  

I don't know who that person is going to be, but I'm guessing it's somebody who either we haven't heard of yet or is still totally unknown.  Maybe a Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who leads a state small enough that she isn't well-known except in political circles.  Maybe somebody like Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman from New York who started off as a reasonable republican but quickly turned into a Trump die-hard.  What both of these women have in common is that they are young, attractive, reasonably smart, and likely savvy enough to not tip their hands.  I fear that the Hitler that is to come will be somebody whom we might not expect, somebody young and attractive and seemingly a reasonable alternative to the madness we have seen.  But once they arise and seize their power like Hitler in 1933, their true evil will come out.  And when that happens, this country will really be in some deep s*it.  

Rock n Roll 17th Hole

I haven't played a round of golf since my honeymoon, and like a lot of other things I used to follow in my younger days, I don't really watch a lot of professional golf anymore.  But every few years the wife and I like to journey up to the big city as the Korn Ferry PGA tour comes to town.  Wow, that's really a terrible name, I know...but watching golfers on the AAA tour is still an impressive thing.  They're on the way up or on the way down or chasing a dream that will never happen, but they do it all so well.  Today we walked 18 holes behind a random guy who shot a 62, with a chip in off the green, a near-albatross, and most impressively an 18th hole 60-foot downhill putt from the fringe to save par.  I'm always in awe of people who do what they do far better than anything I do.  

But somewhere around the 8th hole as we were heading back towards the clubhouse I could faintly hear off in the distance Gettin' Jiggy With It.  At first I thought it was a loud car going by, then perhaps a stereo from one of the houses that line the golf course.  But it soon became evident that the music was pumping from one of the hospitality portals on the 17th hole.  Lots of loud music continued to follow, alongside occasional trivia questions, promotional reads for the tourney sponsors, and a DJ getting an increasingly drunk crowd (who likely never saw any of other 17 holes) hyped.  

Throughout the rest of the round from various spots on the course I could continue to hear the music and the DJ to varying degrees of loudness...all the while the golfers in our group were rock solid, one bogey between them through the first sixteen holes.  The seventeenth hole came about, with the giant grandstand holding thousands of drunk people behind the green paying no attention to the quality that was before them, the thing they were ostensibly there to see, and my golfers finally cracked: two of them bogeying putts that they had not missed all day as they tried and failed to concentrate amongst the dull roar of the drunks around them.  I really, really felt bad for them.  Yes, I know, all the golfers had to endure the same thing.  But why on earth does it have to be like this?  

Go to almost any sport now and there is rarely silence anywhere.  Between pitches or as the basketball teams walks the ball up the floor or as the centers face off, there always has to be those 15 seconds of LOUD LOUD LOUD.  It's like our world has told us that we aren't capable of enjoying anything on our own anymroe, that there has to be a pounding soundtrack to the moments of our lives.  I don't like it, but hearing this on a golf course knocked a bit of the magic out of the day.  These are top-level professional athletes (yes, even minor leaguers are unbelievable in their skill levels).  Why can't we be trusted to enjoy what they do without all the fake artificial noise?  As much as I loved watching our golfers today, I really hated that 17th hole.  

End of Job Limerick

Next week I will finish my 7th and final year of driving a school bus for our local school district.  I might go and keep driving for another district in the area, as I really do like the kids, I like the hours, I like the driving, and I like that for a part-time job it actually pays pretty well, especially in this time in which CDL drivers are finally getting paid what they are worth.  But I just can't keep driving where I'm at now.  

Several people who know that I'm quitting have asked me why, and at times I tell them at least part of the story, and other times I fall back on the old excuse, "I just need a change."  A part of me wants to write a 30-page screed listing each of the reasons why I want to leave (30 pages may not be long enough as these final few days wind down).  Another part of me thinks about expressing myself through a screenplay about the brave and honorable bus driver saving the children from the bogeymen of school administrators and road graders.  

But honestly I just don't think I want to spend my time doing something that nobody really cares about.  So today I came up on my 5th-to-last route a little limerick that I should pull out if I get asked again.  

There once was a driver from Mulvane.

The incompetent admins were driving him insane.

He thought about raising a mad mob,

But wisdom told him to quit the job,

Because it's just not worth the mental pain.

Why 'WE' Suck

Sitting here watching Sporting Kansas City lose yet again tonight, a long, perfect line in their quest for a winless season.  This comes after a weekend in which I watched my daughter's JV soccer team get outscored a combined 12-0 in three tournament games in 24 hours (miraculously we won one of those three in a shootout against a team slightly worse than us).  And I am a longtime fan of the 2015 World Champion Kansas City Royaals, who as of this writing are 4-15 and may break records for incompetence this season.  Yes, this is maybe the universe balancing out the fact that the Chiefs have won the Super Bowl twice in four years and I we get to watch Patrick Mahomes do amazing things every fall Sunday.  But right now the most of the teams that I can say that I genuinely support (Shrewsbury Town FC doesn't count as I've still never seen them live, thanks COVID breaking out in March 2020) are hot garbage.  

Yes, sports doesn't mean as much as it used to.  My favorite team for the past decade has been whatever teams my kids happen to be playing for.  And with anything besides my loved ones, I know that I'm rooting for laundry.  But still, sports helps shape our lives.  And so why does it have teo be so bad?  Why do I hate watch them with a special sports anger towards Khiry Shelton?  

So since it would be unkind to dissecte my daughter's soccer team, and the Royals I still have not watched in person, let's look at Sporting KC.  Why do 'we' suck?  

1. MLS is different than it was a decade ago.  It has almost twice as many teams, and investment in many teams, old and new, far outstrips what SKC is doing.  We still act like being a mid-major club is good enough.  That we still have this mindset now makes it seem like we can't compete.

2. We have done a poor job in turning over the squad.  Even as we haven't developed and then kept decent youngsters (e.g. G Busio, potentially great here but floundering in the Italian second division), we hold onto guys who have stayed around too long like Graham Zusi and Roger Espinoza, and we allow Khiry Shelton to think he's a major component of this team.

3. The guys we do bring in like Erick Thommy and Remi Walter are solid players (I mean, they are at least better than Khiry Shelton), but nobody that will really push the team towards greatness.  We need solid players, but when do ever sign somebody that really changes things?  

4. Khiry Shelton is still on this team.

5. Too many injuries for a small squad mean that when Alan Pulido gets hurt, Khiry Shelton plays a lot.  

6. We don't have the players for Vermes' 4-3-3, but we still continue to play it, just as we did a decade ago.  Formation is not the biggest problem with this team...but somewhere there needs to be a recognition that just because it worked in olden days, that doesn't mean it will work now.  

7. Finally, as I watch SKC try to chase this game tonight, we just brought Khiry Shelton on as a substitute.  Somehow I don't see this wroking out well. 

(10 minutes later, watching the end of the game)

Yep, we lost again.  Dang.