Counting your blessings not as therapeutic as complaints

By David W. Kuhns Sr., Northwest Guardian

It is traditional at this time of year to make lists of the things we are thankful for. On the other hand, the world is full of things for which we are anything but grateful, and there is a therapeutic effect from getting some of them off your chest.

I spent Saturday morning in the commissary, and Saturday is not the best day to do your grocery shopping. But there are plenty of people who make the crowding more trying than it needs to be.

There are a couple of things that bug me when the commissary is crowded:

• The people who ignore the little red arrows on the floor and walk the wrong way down the aisles always mess up the traffic flow. Since I like to systematically go through every aisle of the store (always following the indicated direction of travel) I have to put up with the wrong-way shoppers on every aisle. I hate that.

• The people who push two carts through the store but park them side-by-side while they search for a particular brand of whatever. Can’t they see the 20 other shoppers they are holding up?

Shopping isn’t the only source of irritation this time of year. There is always freeway traffic. I can’t stand trying to merge onto the freeway behind a driver who refuses to accelerate to freeway speed. If the traffic is going 60 you should be at 60, when you merge, right? Yet a lot of knuckleheads merge at 40 or 45, or even slow down to wait for a gap. Where did they learn to drive?

Language is important to me — hey, I am an editor, after all. And it annoys me to hear the language misused. The Army almost institutionalizes the practice.

Take the word cache, for example. This is a noun, meaning a hidden supply of something. Why does everyone in the Army mispronounce the word?

It has one syllable and sounds like cash, but Soldiers everywhere pronounce it “cash-ay.” There is a word in English pronounced that way — cachet. But that is an official seal or stamp, not what the speakers mean.

Then there are those who walk their dogs without even thinking about picking up when their pets do what comes naturally.

I have offered plastic bags to people after I saw their dogs make a deposit, only to have the pet owner get mad at me! Good grief, dogs have to do what dogs have to do — all I ask is that you pick it up.

Then there is ...

Well, maybe it is better to count our blessings instead of our complaints. Here’s wishing every reader of the Northwest Guardian a happy Thanksgiving Day.