For many, many years, there has been a group of American do-gooders telling us that our cars are too big, gasoline isn’t expensive enough, and it should be against the law to build and sell SUV’s.
Today, General Motors has announced the closing of the assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin by the close of 2009, or sooner, if market downturns continue. The Janesville plant is one of the locations that GM builts medium duty trucks and SUV’s.
Just watch - the do-gooders will be ecstatic that the plant is closing. No more SUV’s, no more gas-guzzling GM vehicles.
Not long after the closing, those same do-gooders will be crying about the loss of 2,700 jobs in Janesville that will come in one fell swoop. They will decry GM for releasing all those workers and tell us there ought to be a law that says GM was supposed to keep the plant open, ignoring the fact that the plant no longer builds a product that customers want to buy.
Don’t scoff - it will happen. It always does.
June better go on a diet or buy bigger clothes.
This has always been my favorite month of the year. When I was a kid, it was always promoted with a spirited “June Is Dairy Month” in Wisconsin, with a farm breakfast in most counties, tours of dairy farms and the like. It was great that America’s Dairyland promoted it’s heritage product. Sadly, you don’t hear much about that anymore.
It’s also a busy time of the year, in fact, in our family, June always started in late May. We’ve always been overrun with The Old Man’s birthday, in late May and the previous day is the birthday of someone who was an important part of my life for a long time. It’s also the anniversary of…well, you don’t really want to know about that. But June is also full of anniversaries, graduations, car shows and other big events. If The Old Man were alive, he would have been 97 last week. How can such a young guy have a such an old Old Man?
Forty years ago this month, The Old Man, The Rocket Scientist, our uncle and a favorite cousin, and Your’s Truly, of course, made a pilgrimage to the ultimate shrine of fishermen - at least, a shrine for our family.
More about that in another post to follow.
For now, enjoy the month of June, my favorite month of the year.