[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]During a lull in the organized protest by fired Kaiser Permanente workers yesterday morning at their Cadillac hospital, I noticed, off to the side, a young man, Hispanic, tending to his fruit vending machine.
Since Easter is only several days off, the young man surely will mark a modest holiday, if at all, because he probably will be working that day, too.
Wrongly motivated as I was, when no one was looking, I slipped over and thrust a bill into his hand.
Even though neither of us spoke the other’s language, what I really wanted was for him to melt into a mound of gratitude and say thank-you, as if I had just handed over the keys to a new car.
I choreographed my charity.
In a single fluid motion, I would skate across the sidewalk, hand over the bill, then whirl around before he had realized what happened, and blithely walk away.
In this awkward but scripted scenario of faux generosity, the young vendor would lunge, tap my shoulder while blurting “Gracias.”
Meanwhile, I would glance back, blush and hurry on my way.
A Deserved Defeat
Jerome Robbins, I am not.
The vendor did not call out.
I did not earn a chance to bashfully utter “Oh, shucks,” and, in any event, my disappointed shoulders sagged.
Somewhere in my religion, there is an ancient teaching that if your overt generosity is illy motivated, no credit will be rung up on your side.
Call me Zero Mostel. At least Zero.
My fairly clumsy point is that I have compassion for struggling young people, especially those who probably could gain more money by drawing unemployment than by chasing off to a barely paying job 7 mornings a week.
All of that is prologue to my delight last week when I came across this happily true story:
News About The Times Gets Better
The failing New York Times announced last Thursday that it would summarily close the even faster-failing Boston Globe, which it owns, by May 1, unless the Globe’s 13 fat-cat unions shaved $20 million from their budgets.
In an environment where the undisciplined President of the United States is galloping like an untamed mustang across the landscape of Europe, chattering like a magpie, bowing to tinpot dictators, hailing the rise of Islam, and apologizing to adoring audiences for winning the Indian Wars in the 19th century instead of taking a dive, could there be a more delicious dessert than to watch two of America’s most liberal newspapers dive-bomb into their own coffins, ears first?
The nutty editor of The New York Times, Billy Keller, came home to the Bay Area a few days ago. He told a gullible crowd of shiny-faced left-wingers at Stanford that saving the Times — send in your piggy banks, kids — is on a moral plane with saving Darfur.
Sadly, the tightly wound left-wing featherweight was as wobbily serious as the President.
After the lies that the Times gleefully, meanly published in the last year about Gov. Palin, Sen. McCain and President Obama, may the Times close no later than Dec. 31.
May the reporters/columnists who promoted these lies learn to live on unemployment, at least until they can hear their devious robust tummies talking to each other.
