Rant #2,831: It's Happening (NOT)

We canceled our long-planned-for cruise yesterday.
 
It was getting time to pay for the cruise in full, and in light of the circumstances revolving around this cruise and the world we live in, we simply decided that enough was enough and that we could not take another chance on this trip, which had been already canceled several times.
 
Yes, the world is getting better related to the pandemic—as I have said from the get-go, more than two years ago, we are going to have to learn to live with this thing—but the extra protocols that are in place on the cruise ships now make such a trip stifling, rather than relaxing, so we bailed out to get our full money back.
 
We aren’t writing off cruises in the future, but right now is not the time to set sail on the high seas, so we have decided to take one of our car trips up and down the Eastern seaboard, up and down I-95, and we feel that will be a better trip and vacation for right now in the world that we live in.
 
The problem is that we want to intertwine the trip with a couple of selected stops, but again, due circumstances beyond our control, we can’t get those out of the way right now.
 
One is that we would like to take in a baseball game, much like we have in the past on these trips.
 
The problem is, as you probably already know, there might not be a baseball season this year, and it has nothing to do with the pandemic.
 
It has to do with a much more dangerous malady, in my estimation, which is called greed.
 
This virus permeates both the owners and the players, including multi-millionaires and billionaires who are discussing—or not discussing—how to divide up a multi-billion-dollar pie.
 
Notice that when the two sides talk to the media, they never include the word “f-a-n-s” in their discussion vocabulary, because they could care less about the people paying for their product and salaries.
 
And with so many people greatly impacted by the pandemic—look at me, look at me!—the owners and players obviously breathe some other type of air than you and I do, because they don’t live in the actual pandemic-laced world where some level of suffering has become the new normal.
 
So we found a slate of games that would fit perfectly into our vacation, but who knows if they will even be played?
 
And the teams are actually trying to get the public to purchase tickets before an agreement is reached?
 
Yes, the players and owners do not live in the same world that you and I do, that’s for sure.
 
So we cannot plan that part of the trip right now.
 
I told my wife that we might have to do it on the fly, literally go on the trip and order tickets over the phone when we are in the process of driving to the venue, which his something that is a major annoyance … or we might have to bypass baseball this time around, because the two sides are finding that pie so difficult to cut.

Or even if they do settle, I will have lost my appetite by that time, and we just will choose simply not to attend a game this year in protest of their self-centered behavior.
 
Anyway, that leads me to another subject that has nothing to do with anything I have talked about up until now, but it kind of does, in a strange way …
 
Has anyone out there received their coronavirus test kits from the federal government yet?
 
We ordered these free tests on the very first day that the site was up—in fact, we ordered the tests the very day it was open, meaning the day before it was supposed to be accessible--and to this moment, we have not received anything.
 
About a week ago, I saw a TV news report where the White House press secretary was asked about this, because evidently, lots of people have not received their orders yet.
 
She replied that “millions of orders had been processed,” but I guess that of those “millions of orders,” mine wasn’t in that batch, even though I ordered my free tests the very first day they were made available.
 
To this date, I have received absolutely nothing, so I have to label this both a sham and a scam perpetrated by our supposedly responsible federal government to appease people who wanted our political leaders to do something about people waiting on line eight hours for tests.
 
Now that things have improved so much, even if I eventually get the tests I ordered--Christmas is coming, you know--they will be useless and too little, too late, as we are in the endemic stage of this virus cycle.
 
And the same goes for the free upgraded masks we were supposed to be able to get from our local pharmacies.
 
I have checked, they still don’t have their masks that were also supposed to be supplied with by the federal government, and now, with masking relaxed in many states, they aren’t even as needed as they were maybe a month ago.
 
Another sham, another scam, and I just hope that people remember this on Election Day in November, and for future Election Days, including when we vote for the commander in chief the next time.
 
“You can fool some of the people some of the time … .”