The Obama strikes back and the coal age

Oh Obama made a mighty proposal. It has nothing to do with letting more immigrants in, what he said was that if you are an immigrant in this country, and you have been here for five or more years, and you have a child who is a citizen, you get sort of a temporary green card for I think about three years.

Well it’s really not that big of a deal, these are guys that nobody was going after really, those 11 million who almost everybody, except the wingiest of the wingnuts, and reps running in a primary, said well we can’t send them all away. It was just guys who worked hard and kept their noses clean (a criminal record makes you ineligible), and who were probably going to stay here anyway, but now they no longer have to sweat that a burnt out taillight will send them back across the border.

I watched the Sunday morning talk shows last Sunday, and the reps are, as I earlier observed, hopping mad. But they have no alternative plan, they have pretty much no way, except trying to get elected in a couple years, to fight it. And this sort of thing is what most Americans are for anyway, and now Obama gets all the credit.

It helps to ease our pain after that awful election.

There is the problem about how it was enacted, that is what had all the reps hopping mad on the shows, they scarcely said a word about the bill itself, but it is apparently legal, and has been done by all presidents, maybe not to this extent, but so what?

I do know about creosote. I remember when those contractor guys would cruise the neighborhoods and just happen to notice that your chimney looked a bit askew and unless you let them fix it your whole family would likely be dead in the morning.

Growing up in Gage Park it seemed like everybody burned coal. On the hottest day of the summer a coal truck manned by huge sweaty black guys would pull up in front of your house. Just seeing black guys close up was exotic enough, but then they would fill their wheelbarrows with coal and push them down the narrow gangway, and dump them through a window by your backyard. The coal bin. A whole room in your basement.

It was Dad’s job to fill a shovel from the bin, haul it maybe ten feet to the furnace, open those awful doors like the gateway to hell with its shimmering redness and blast of hot air. First he had to take out the clinkers which had passed through a grate, and I think that they were taken out to the alley.

It was a big day, well it was certainly a big deal for Dad when we got this gleaming new stoker. What it did was take the coal from coal bin and feed it into the furnace, and then I think it took out the clinkers. I’m not sure if that’s what happened because even as it was a tremendous ease on Dad, it wasn’t as exciting as seeing the furnace open it’s fiery mouth to be fed.

Later still it was natural gas, which was really boring, except that there was something very sneaky about gas and you never knew when it was going to explode and blow up the whole house, but outside of that there was nothing to see.