Things have been busy for me the last couple days (start brag mode).
A few days ago, the BBC posted an article to their Website soliciting opinions from Americans about their thoughts on the budget fight in Washington. I posted one of several thousand responses to it, and thought that would be all.
I received back an E-mail from the BBC, asking if it would be alright if a journalist were to call me, to solicit further thoughts. I took about a microsecond to respond, "Yes."
That journalist called this morning shortly after 6 am (she was unaware I live in Mountain Time Zone, GMT-7). After interviewing me for a few minutes, she asked if I would appear as a panelist to field questions from callers, texters, and tweeters (if that is a word) from around the world on "World Have Your Say."
Yes yes yes yes yes yes. A disabled vet Romance editor in a town of 140 actually gets to express an opinion on a world-renown media outlet?
The BBC called me back a few hours later, at the start of the programme. (I was sleeping at the time, recovering from the early morning call.)
They put me with a nurse from Ann Arbor, Michigan (outlying city near Detroit); and the city treasurer of Scottsdale, Arizona (middlin' city in Arizona), to field questions from China, India, the USA, and Europe on our thoughts about how the budget negotiations had gone. (My opinion: the whole charade was embarrassing for the USA because of both parties in Washington were acting as though if you won't play by my rules I will take my ball and go home).
So, I got to sound like an uneducated boob before one hundred million listeners around the world; a college educated nurse, an economist and politician, and a disabled vet Romance editor that only made it out of high school.
A humorous thing did happen when the journalist called this morning: she said she had looked at a map of Nebraska and could not find my town on it. I pointed out that she would not find it unless it were a state-issued map or she used Mapquest and zoomed in -very- close, as my town only has 140 people.
Amongst other things, I answered questions about the politicking in general, how potential cuts in social services might affect the little village I live in (I pointed out we are fifty miles from a significant town and elderly folk depend on publicly-funded transportation to get to physicians and such, my own income is from Veterans compensation from military service, &c. Such drastic cuts as were proposed would devastate towns like this.)
Of curious note: the Scottsdale treasurer is a Republican and was holding forth on the idea of cuts-only, while the single-mother nurse and I (decidedly not wealthy either of us) both held that you cannot balance a budget even in a home without cutting expenses and raising revenues (both the middle class folk were in favour of higher taxes if it were used to resolve the debt, while the politician was not.)
I am only just now coming down from my "high" of getting to "represent" for the mighty Village of Broadwater.
/bragmode
James.
"Be ye not lost amongst Precept of Order." - Book of Uterus, 1:5, "Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her."
