A subtle leak in my bathroom and a conversation with a neighbor reminded me that, sometimes, things must get really bad before people understand that they must act. In other words, a crisis can be a good thing.
For months, I’d been bedeviled by a musty smell in the small entry connecting my garage to my kitchen. I obsessively washed everything in a 10-foot radius of the smell (e.g., kitchen towels, floor mats), scrubbed and re-scrubbed the nearby half-bathroom (which smelled fine), sniffed the coat closet and shoes like a bloodhound to see if they harbored a patch of damp, tapped the drywall to see if it felt mushy...but all to no avail. Making things worse, I was the only one who smelled it. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t do a darn thing about it.
On Friday, the half-bathroom ceiling came down. It turned out there’d been a slow leak in the pipes above the half-bath, the ones feeding water to the upstairs toilet. That leak must have been going on for months and, given the level of saturation in the wood, perhaps for years. But no one knew because the drip and the damage were discretely hidden away under the upstairs floorboards. The smell was a hint, but it took the ceiling collapse to reveal the extent of the problem.
Now, at great expense, I’ve had the upstairs flooring and toilet, and the downstairs ceiling removed. We’ve saturated the wood with vinegar and bleach and are drying it well. Then, everything gets replaced, with all sorts of extra waterproofing to ensure that, if the toilet does leak again, the damage is confined and more easily noticed.
None of the above is a “poor me” complaint. Indeed, I’m just grateful the smell is gone and that there were no termites in there. Instead, I see the bathroom fiasco as beneficial proof that, sometimes, it takes a crisis—in my case, a downed ceiling—finally to reveal that the indefinable, unpleasant miasma in the air has a specific source. And the good thing is that, once the source is identified, the problem can be addressed by tearing out the rot, disinfecting everything, and building it up again in a clean, solid, and beautiful way.
Staying on the domestic side of things, neighbors of mine have flying behind their house an American and an Israeli flag. I very seldom see these neighbors but yesterday, when I was walking the dog, the woman was in the yard. I praised her flags and we started chatting. What I learned was heartening.
My neighbor is a Christian conservative. She is pro-America and pro-Israel. She’s also a very nice person. That all kind of went without saying because of the flags.
But what delighted me was something else she said. “I didn’t know what was happening on those college campuses. Now, I do.”
Those of us who obsessively follow the news, the ones who start their day checking out political sites and then check in with those same sites throughout the day, have known for a very long time what’s happening in academia. Heck, because I went to UC Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I’ve known it for over forty years.
But most people don’t know. They went to lovely colleges that weren’t Berkeley, or they didn’t go to college at all. They work hard, raise their families, and live good lives. If their children go to college and don’t fall in with the blue-haired crowd, they have no idea about the subtle and not-so-subtle indoctrination that permeates every aspect of life in college.
These people assume that the silly subjects (e.g., queer puppetry, womyn’s history) in the course catalogs are the equivalent of the “Mickey Mouse” courses that sparked a thousand jokes in the 1970s/1980s’ jokes. You remember those, right? They were the ones about the “underwater basket weaving” classes people took to get the one or two extra credits they needed to graduate.
But now, thanks to the really loathsome campus radicals with their open antisemitism and hatred for America, people who are mostly apolitical or at least politically passive are seeing the rot. It’s no longer a vague miasma in the background that they think is there but can’t really pin down. The ceiling has fallen, and the damage is clear. They understand that the situation must be fixed and fixed very quickly.
One of the fixes is easy: Stop funding these institutions! Public or private, they float on a sea of direct and indirect taxpayer dollars. The board at the University of North Carolina, the campus where the frat bros bravely defended the American flag, is on the right track because they ended all DEI funding (no more money for racists and groomers) and gave the money to the campus police. If campuses won’t do that kind of thing voluntarily, we need to force it upon them.
For too long, we Americans have forgotten that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” We, the taxpayers, are also the piper players and it’s time to start acting as if we’re in charge.
The other fix is easy, too: Vote for the politicians who are most likely to end this madness. In the primaries, vote for the conservative candidate, not the mushy one. In November, vote for a straight Republican ticket, from Donald Trump on down. Then—and this one takes a bit more work—keep an eye on your representatives and put pressure on them to respect that you’re mad as Hell about the abuse of your taxpayer dollars and you’re not going to take it anymore.
Image by AI.