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Our legislature is hard to figure out. On one hand, it's foursquare in favor of marriage for some people. On the other, the General Assembly is dead set against anything that might even suggest marriage for other people, like gay couples.
Indeed, the legislature is so pro-marriage for heterosexuals that the House of Representatives approved a bill that would give counties the right to pay bounties to newlyweds.
The General Assembly was also giving serious consideration to a law which would require a couple to get a year of counseling before a divorce could be granted.
At first this sounded like a good idea, since it often appears that people take divorce quite casually.
But then I thought about it. I've known quite a few
people who got divorced. To my knowledge, not one of them
ever got up one morning and thought I don't have
anything better to do today, so I think I'll get a
divorce.
It's always a painful decision, reached after months or years of distress. Maybe things are different in the wicked city where the legislature sits, but out here in the boondocks, divorce is not a result of a transient impulse.
Presumably, one object of the law is to keep parents together for the benefit of the children.
But I couldn't think of one divorced couple that
qualified as Their kids would be better off if they'd
stayed together,
or Their lives would be so much
better if they had gone to a counselor and figured out a
way to stay married.
Perhaps there are such people -- my list of acquaintances is somewhat reduced by geography -- but if there are, I haven't met them, or even heard of them.
The only benefit I can see to this proposal is that it would provide work for counselors, and I had no idea that out therapy industry had hit such hard times that it needed some legislation to insure a ready supply of paying customers. Are so many Coloradans now so fully in touch with their inner selves that the counselors need to find new markets?
If so, I suggest that the legislature look into paying the therapists to treat people who succumb to the various rages that are raging through society.
We've all heard of road rage,
which leads to
aggressive driving, and lately there are variations like
air rage
and hotel lobby rage.
Neither of those afflicts me often, but there are some other rages I get that should be treated, especially if the taxpayers were willing to pick up the tab:
· Voice-mail rage. I do not place telephone
calls in order to converse with a machine, or to test my
dexterity with the keypad. I do it so that I can talk to a
human. When I'm six steps into a Press 3 to be
connected to the public-affairs department,
and then
end up with a recording device, my response is often
unprintable.
Further, it's safer if there are no tools like hammers or hatchets within easy reach, since my impulse is to start swinging. I know, it doesn't make any sense to smash my own equipment, but the anger wells up, and some therapy should help control it.
· Telepredator rage. This is actually a category
of a broader rage which hasn't been formally christened. I
call it the Comfort Alarm.
Whenever I'm sitting
comfortably, enjoying a newspaper, a book or a TV program,
an alarm must go off in the cosmic control center, so that
the phone will ring or a pet will want in or out, that sort
of thing.
Naturally, I get angry. And I get angriest at the
telepredators, so that they hang up really fast after they
ask How are you doing this evening, Mr. Quelkun?
and
I give them an honest answer. Doubtless some therapy would
make me more mellow and improve their lives.
· Blue Screen rage. Perhaps there is a Windows
user who has not encountered the Blue Screen of
Death,
or its relative, this program has performed
an illegal operation,
along with a display of the
processor's register contents, which might be of some use
if you were running it under a debugger, which is seldom
the case.
Last week I was upgrading my computer with a bigger hard drive. I hadn't re-installed Netscape, but I needed to look for something on the Web, so I used Internet Explorer, the Windows 98 built-in browser.
Microsoft's own software, running on Microsoft's own
operating system, gave me the illegal operation
message, followed by the blue screen of death.
The only way I could work off the resulting rage was to go out the woodpile and swing an eight-pound splitting maul at some tough chunks of alder, visualizing each one as the richest man in the world.
It was good therapy. The rest of the day was happy and
productive. And since there's still a lot of wood to be
split, I could charge people for maul time, except I'd call
it counseling,
and I'd be set for life, assuming
that the legislature kept forcing people to do business
with me. It may not save any marriages, but on the other
hand, my rates would be quite reasonable.
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