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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tidbits: Mr. Varsity, church and oil
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tidbits from the morning paper:
First up, an Atlanta institution. Most everybody in Metro Atlanta and every student who has attended Georgia Tech in the last 50 years had to have met Erby Walker. He was the most famous “What’ll ya have? What’ll you have?” counterman at the Varsity, the North Avenue insitution that’s only slightly less famous than the institution of higher learning across the street. He died Monday at the age of 70.
I found him intimidating — friendly and likeable, but intimidating. I felt a bit like a customer awaiting service from Jerry Seinfield’s Soup Nazi. The Varsity counterman speaks a code; all the regulars know it and order their food accordingly: chocolate milk in a cup without ice is NIPC. No Ice, Plain Chocolate.
Anyway, the question is whether the Varsity and Erby Walker in particular are a part of your personal history.
Another item from the AJC’s Wednesday edition is an effort being made by lawyers for the Southern Center for Human Rights to strike down a state law taking effect July 1 that prohibits registered sex offenders from volunteer work in churches.
Opponents of the law say it will prohibit even those who were convicted after engaging in “consenual sex as teenagers” from volunteering, even though they pose no danger to children. Furthermore, they contend, the prohibition would keep adults from singing in the adult choir.
There is, of course, nothing in the law that keeps registered sex offenders from attending church, as State Sen. President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) noted Tuesday. “They just can’t be Sunday School teachers or volunteer for vacation Bible school. It prevents them, as it should from being around children.”
He thinks, and I do too, that “somebody’s trying to use religion to accomplish their own agenda.” It’s a repeat of the strategy that seeks to raise doubt, find inconsistencies, work openings and eventually do away with capital punishment. Convince the public that the offenders are actually the victims of “unjust” laws.
In the news today, too, is a story headlined “Offshore drilling stirs fresh debate in Florida.” Yes it does. But one might conclude from the three pictures that first show “sugar-white” beaches, the second showing oil rigs in the Gulf and the third showing “the fears” of Floridians — an oil-soaked beach in San Francisco last November — that there’s a direct connection.
First, to see the proposed oil rigs that would come from opening more of the outer-continental exploration, you’d have to take a boat or a plane. Rigs that are 50 or 150 miles off shore are not visible from the sugar-white beaches. And while accidents do occur, the spills — as in San Franscisco — are far more likely to come from tankers transporting oil, whether that oil originates in Nigeria or from the outer-continental shelf, where 97 percent of federal lands are currently off-limits to drilling.
The votes apparently exist in Congress to lift the ban on off-shore drilling. Four-dollar gas, and no relief in sight, has convinced the nation that safe, responsible exploration is an integral part of an effort to provide some protection against the whims of a world oil cartel. But Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid Democrats won’t bring it up — at least until later in the summer.
Delay, pretend, stick your head in the sand. Maybe $4 gas will go away. Maybe the Social Security crisis will go away too. Maybe tyrants just don’t understand the real us. Maybe fantasy is good public policy.
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