The contrast in two of our front page stories could not be greater.
On one hand we have Wells Rural Electric our locally owner electric company whose employees take it as a point of pride they have never shut anyone’s power off in the dead of winter no matter how much is owed on the power bill.
We have said it before and we will say it now: WREC is a phenomenally decent company.
And there is also something to be said that Nevada has no law forbidding the shut off of power during frigid conditions.
Yes we know power companies have a bottom line and we also know that some people need a little encouragement to pay their power bills.
But we are proud to say that because of the simple basic decency of power company workers. No one will shut off power when 32 degrees is considered balmy.
On the other hand we have Wendover Gas whose owner Nancy Green told the city council that if they did not pony up and spring for an emergency supply of propane our children would freeze.
Yeah tough choice.
As small businessmen ourselves we at first sympathized with her when she was the plucky woman trying to keep her generations old family owned concern going.
But that was five maybe six years ago and now we are looking at the schools shutting down for lack of gas.
Yes there is a regional shortage but no other propane company in our now frigid neck of the woods is asking for a handout to keep the pilot lights lit.
It is less of a crisis than it is poor planning and any warm feelings we had for Ms. Green froze completely when after getting her ransom off handed told the council that she was off to Arizona next week.
We were 12 years old when Roe v. Wade made abortion the law of the land. At the time we didn’t care. We were boys.
As we got older we were pro-abortion primarily because we were boys.
Get a girl in trouble before Roe you had to get married, after Roe you had to pay for the abortion. We did the math.
It was only much later did we change our minds and again purely for selfish reasons.
Abortion we found out was not only reserved for unwanted pregnancies, it was very popular for those who wanted to avoid less than perfect children.
In Japan it was even encouraged and paid for by the government for women whose fetuses were found to be afflicted with dwarfism, cleft palates, clubbed feet or color blindness.
Hold on just a minute we said to ourselves.
We are profoundly color blind and while we sometimes have trouble with traffic lights and have never seen the color purple (we did read the book) we get along okay.
Yet in the far east we are so undesirable that aborting color blind fetuses is a serious option.
Then we began to list our other genetic shortcomings.
We have quite a few thanks to our family tree not quite forking as it should, the worst of which were deformed legs that required surgery to fix.
Had that a year after Roe, spent half that year in the hospital.
And we thought that if a woman today was given a list of all those defects we possess she might give termination a thought, she might even go through with it.
And all of a sudden we went from being us to them.
Despite our less than perfect DNA we came out all right.
We have done some good and we raised four great kids whose genetic code is much better than our own.
But why should anyone justify his or her life?
With modern contraception not to mention the demand for adoption should there still be a need for abortion?
Perhaps we are still being selfish, but on the other hand we have never heard of a handless man bemoaning being alive either.