Old Classics

I'm sure that I have posted both of these stories in the past, but we never get tired of those old classics.

Back in the 70s, I was involved in the founding of the Cheboygan County Humane Society.  At that time, there were three national organizations with which we could have affiliated,  the Humane Society of the United States, which was anti hunting, the American Humane Association, which was pro hunting, and the ASPCA, which was neutral on the issue.  In between meetings, our president got us affiliated with the HSUS without consulting any of the board members. (I was the vice president).  The first I heard about it was when I got one of their newsletters in the mail.  In that newsletter they explained their whole plan of eliminating hunting and trapping bit by bit, first the trapping, then archery hunting, then hunting with high powered rifles, then low powered rifles, and finally shotguns.  They went on to explain that, when hunting was gone, there would be little justification for private citizens to own firearms, so that could also be banned which, they confided, was their ultimate goal.  I got so mad that I tore the newsletter up into little pieces which, in hindsight, was the wrong thing to do, because now I had no evidence to present at the next meeting or to the esteemed colleagues that I would acquire decades later.  Nevertheless, I raised hell at the next meeting and made a motion to disassociate our local chapter from this commie group.  My motion died for lack of a second, and I resigned from the Cheboygan County Humane Society in protest.

It was also in the 70s that they started closing most of the mental institutions in this country, but the studies that justified it were done in the 60s.  These studies determined that many of the people inside those institutions didn't need to be there, and that many of the people on the outside really needed to be on the inside.  Rather than sort them out, they just opened the gates, let them all run loose, allowed them to breed, and now we are dealing with their grandchildren.  I only remember reading about one mass shooting before the institutions were closed, I believe it happened in Texas, and it was long before ARs became so popular.  In those days, if a person started acting crazy, people would tell him, "You keep that up and the men in the white coats gonna come take you away.", which frequently inspired him to clean up his act.  Nowadays I suppose they say, "You keep that up and they gonna make you see a counselor.", which I doubt has the same impact.