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Greetings from Guam "These are the times that try men's souls." "In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as the inability to read
plain print was the curse of earlier centuries." A double-quote opener! (The last time I used a double-quote opener was back in 1973 when I was working on an article with my old friends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. Those were the days, but they are bittersweet memories for me now. The three of us really had something special going, but then Bob started acting all bossy 'n' stuff, and then Carl started seeing Yoko Ono and she started to tell him what we should write about. It got too crazy, so I left the group. Carl later dumped Yoko and he and Bob continued on for a while longer and wrote some decent stuff and then they split. But you know the story - fame and fortune ultimately destroyed us just like it did Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ike and Tina Turner, the Muppets, and Donald and Ivana Trump.) Sorry about the reminiscences. You're probably asking yourself a couple of things right now like, "Aren't there any shrinks on Guam that could help this fruitcake?" And secondly, "What on earth could possibly deserve a double-quote opener?" Both very good and legitimate questions, but time will only permit me to answer the second question. The government of Guam is on the verge of a shutdown. It seems that we are running a little short on the old dinero for this fiscal year...like 40 million dollars short! Our government needs to come up with 40 million big ones within the next three weeks or else the government shuts down. And you know what that means - our government agencies might not function efficiently. My trash might not be picked up on time and it will spontaneously combust...oh wait, it's like that now. Okay, I will have to wait on hold for three hours as opposed to an hour when I call the Guam Telephone Authority to report a bad line. Now, that would drive me crazy. I am sure other kinds of chaos would occur, but I'm just too darned scared to speculate on the possibilities. I am not one to sit here and ponder all the dreadful scenarios that might occur. I am a positive thinker, a man of action. People don't call me Mr. Solution for nothing. So, here are some of my ideas as to how we can raise 40 million dollars in the next three weeks and avoid total disaster. 1. Let's locate one of the old Spanish Galleons that sunk off of Guam and recover the loot. 2. We could sell the hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants we have in our prison to the garment factories in Saipan. Okay, that would be a last case scenario...an 11th hour thing. Wait, I'm onto something here. China is the key. They have a population of over one billion people. What do we have that they want (nuclear secrets has already been done - Clinton beat us to that one)? The answer - FREEDOM! 3. We send a sales team to China and they sell tickets for a boat ride to sunny, beautiful Guam. We come up with a neat slogan like: "Guam - Where America's Freedom Loving Day Begins" or something like that. At a dollar a ticket, we could get 40 million in no time and it's not like China is going to miss 40 million people. Then our population would be 40,150,000 people and then we could probably gain statehood and get even more federal dollars. We might even make it to the Little League World Series too. 4. We trash the island ourselves and then tell FEMA that we got hit by another typhoon and ask for 40 million in relief funds. See what I mean? The possibilities are endless. The governor really should have me on his staff, I would find us the money. But here is a really radical idea. A few weeks back, I wrote an article on how I thought that Guam's public schools should make Economics a required course for all high school students. I now realize that that was a dumb idea on my part. Why do kids - our future leaders - need to know anything about economics? It's not like it could possibly help them later in life, especially if they grow up and become a senator or governor. I mean really, Economics is so useless and overrated. You're not going to believe this, but you know what they are teaching in economic classes these days (in the states that is, we know enough to not bother teaching it here)? They are teaching kids about deficit spending, fiscal policy, trade deficits and how to put together a budget - a fiscal budget for, say a business or a government. Imagine that? Budgeting smudgeting. Yeah, I agree, teaching Economics to the kids before we teach it to the people running our island's government is absolutely crazy. What was I thinking? You know, I really should go see a shrink. Hafa Adai. Copyright © 1999 |
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