By allowing ads to appear on this site, you support the local businesses who, in turn, support great journalism.
Problem of DUIs in Ceres seems to be worse
Opinion

This problem of DUIs is far worse than I think most of us realize.

As you know, last week I wrote about a young woman, aged 19, who wanted us to remove a posting about her DUI arrest. She was upset at the public focus on her. Actions have consequences, don’t they?

I wrote in my column last week that there has been a rash of DUI arrests involving young people who are driving drunk or high on pot and endangering others’ lives. Another story published last week was of a 32-year-old man who hit two parked cars while drunk. The week before that we ran a story about an intoxicated 29-year-old who drove his car into a house. In the same issue as that column, we reported two more young people arrested for DUIs after crashing into cars. Tuesday night before the ink could dry on my column of Dec. 14, a 20-year-old Ceres woman crashed into a man on Service Road while under the influence of drugs. He was killed.

Clearly, many young people are not making wise decisions. If you wanted to ruin your life, getting high and driving and killing somebody is a quick way to do it.

Now that marijuana use is accepted and condoned by law, you can bet there are a ton of young people driving while under the influence of that drug.


* * * * *


I may come across as a disagreeable and headstrong guy in my column but, believe it or not, I have a sentimental side – especially this time of year.

This will be my 61st yuletide season and Christmas music carries me back to the time when I was old enough to first experience the traditions of the season. That would be the mid-1960s when TV shows like “Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Charlie Brown Christmas,” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” were must-sees on network TV. I even recall how one girl in my elementary school classroom said I reminded her of the Claymation character Hermey the Elf in the 1964 Rudolph movie on account of my wavy hair (only he was blonde).

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that my Christmas memories are soulfully tied to family members who aren’t around anymore. Let me give you an example: Rudolph was a TV show that my precious little cousin Sandra watched and would get upset and cry when the other reindeer made fun of Rudolph. Sandra wasn’t with us long. She was a flower that came upon the earth for a short time to give forth beauty and blessings and faded quickly. She got sick with leukemia, underwent chemo treatment and lost all of her hair before dying at the age of 10 in early December 1975. All of us in her famil felt the sting of her death. So as you might imagine, Rudolph is freighted with a painful memory for me.

On these crisp wintry nights I remember the same chill in the air as we greeted relatives who came out to our house on Christmas Eve in the 1970s. Our fog-shrouded house in rural Oakdale grew warm and almost stuffy with all the company we had over – my great-grandparents, grandparents, great aunts and great uncles, aunts and uncles, cousins, my two brothers and my parents.

Of course, I grew up and married and had a family all my own. There was a blending of the old and new with four kids and a wife to enjoy new traditions. There was also the Christmas traditions of the church we attended, including the months of choir practice leading up to Christmas musicals and the night to decorate the church tree. We always joked about the name of that ceremony, “Hanging of the greens.” Among my happiest times were caroling aboard a wagon pulled by a pickup. The progressive dinners were great fun of socializing as we dashed from one host house to another and enjoyed good food and company. Church family also changes, members die and move on.

Those memories leave me longing.

At 61 I find myself grieving over how most of those I celebrated Christmas as a kid and young man are gone. Mommy stopped kissing Santa long ago; my parents split up in 1977, complicating life with blended families. My great-grandparents died in 1979 and 1984; and in a recent seven-year stretch, I lost my wife to leukemia (2013); my very close grandmother at the age of 96 (2015); and my dear mother at age 80 (2020). My dear Uncle Roy – Sandra’s dad – passed away suddenly in 2021.

All of my cousins have scattered. A brother moved to Hawaii. The family hasn’t reunited since.

This has also been a year of losses for me.

I was enjoying time with my aging father (who is 82), and felt the sheer disappointment in August when he and my stepmom decided to move to Alabama. He was disgusted with the politics and high cost of living here in California, the state of one-party rule from now until Christ returns.

At the beginning of this year my second son moved his wife and four children to Missouri for educational pursuits. My youngest son – whom I once photographed on Christmas Tree Lane in Ceres as a two-year-old as his eyes were filled with the wonderment – is in another state, leaving my oldest son and only daughter here in the Valley.

Don’t get me wrong. Life is good and I’m very blessed. I have another love in my life and her two sons are family now. But the old heartstrings are pulled when I listen to the old Christmas classics and a feeling of melancholy camps in my heart for the month. I’m a kid again when I hear Gene Autry and Burl Ives, Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole, Karen Carpenter and Frank Sinatra. Their music was associated with an easy time as a child, where there were no responsibilities, all of the loved ones were around still, the world was innocent and simpler and the anticipation of opening Christmas gifts was some overpowering that I remember getting sick to my stomach.

Elvis’ Blue Christmas will always make me think of Mom because she had that album and absolutely loved Elvis.

Besides missing dear ones, I think the magic of Christmas songs leaves me with a longing for a bygone era. Roasting chestnuts on an open fire? Who does that anymore? Riding on a sleigh in the snowy countryside, laughing all the way as bells ring on bobtails seems a practice only known in the Currier and Ives age. I wouldn’t even know where to go to experience that. And friends calling “Yoo hoo”? Contact seems limited to Facebook posts.

It sort of rings hollow to hear Bing Crosby dream of a white Christmas for snow in the Valley is almost unheard of.

For me one of the saddest of all Christmas songs is found in “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”:

“Christmas Eve will find me

Where the love light gleams

I’ll be home for Christmas

If only in my dreams.”

I can understand those lyrics.


* * * * *

Only in today’s America are villains hailed as heroes and victims made out to be villains.

I don’t like being a downer but, man, things are going on in this country that are truly concerning.

The entitlement mentality is lending itself to a growing problem of retail theft – both organized rings and individual thieves. It’s causing some stores to close.

Target’s CFO Michael Fiddelke reported his chain has seen a whopping increase in shoplifting – about a 50 percent increase – resulting in more than $400 million in losses for this fiscal year. If it keeps up, he’ll close some stores.

What surprises me are the number of folks who attacked Walmart for that threat. They suggest that those self-checkout kiosks are where a lot of theft is taking place. But if you’ll remember, stores are only cutting back on employees and the cost of labor because the Democrats have mandated that they pay more in wages than the skills warrant (minimum wage hikes).  If you’ll notice, few people eat inside of fast-food places anymore because a $5 meal is now $10 and higher – thanks to minimum wage. It’s like a tax and we all know that a tax on something will curtail that something.

Also, there are folks with socialist points of view who believe Walmart should suck it up and remain open despite thefts. That line of reasoning is reflected in this Tweet: “You mean the Walmart that had an income of $532 billion in 2022? Let’s get real here, Walmart is not closing stores because of theft, if Walmart is closing stores its (sic) because they want higher profits.”

Why should stores remain open if people are going to help themselves to goods that don’t belong to them? Walmart announced that if the problem doesn’t stop, they will raise prices even higher and/or close stores where theft is the worst (urban areas).

There needs to be a shift in this country to one of intolerance of theft instead of permissiveness. Those who want to make excuses for thieves, also would balk at costs going up and stores closing. We should not tolerate thievery and must return to the days when thieves were grabbed and prosecuted. We need to introduce new technologies to stop these hordes of thieves to walk into a store and grab as many goods as possible while the paying crowd only watches and record with their cell phones. I’m sure that thieves could be stopped at the door with, let’s say, a net fired over them.

Laws need to be strengthened with more Republicans elected.


* * * * *

On Sunday I called my father who recently moved to Huntsville, Alabama. He left Oakdale for Alabama in August for a number of reasons but factoring in was his dislike of how the state was being run by Democrats and the high cost of living as a result of that. He isn’t paying any property tax being over the age of 65. Car license fees are miniscule compared to California. Sales tax is lower.

Dad told me that most of his neighbors around him are former Californians who fled the once Golden State. The ruling party doesn’t care that conservatives are leaving California, because they leaves a higher concentration of Democrat voters who guarantee one-party rule will continue.

An example of why there is an exodus is what was released on Thursday: new carbon neutrality targets which, despite being devoid of reality, was celebrated by Gavin Newsom as “making history.” Some are questioning if state bureaucrats have lost their collective minds.

Basically the unelected California Air Resources Board –the state agency that put a lot of trucking firms out of business with their emissions rules – wants California to be “carbon neutral” by 2045, meaning the state will remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as it emits. To do so it has a goal of reducing fossil fuel demand by 86 percent.

Besides being totally unrealistic, the plan does not commit the state to taking any particular actions but sets out a broad road map.

One goal is producing more renewable energy. If that’s the case, why isn’t the environment worshiping governor proposing to build more dams, the cleanest form of renewable energy we have while benefitting farmers? But come hell or high water, he won’t. Remember, the last dam we built in California was when I was in high school – and I’m 61.

The state has already determined the gas-burning car will go the way of the dinosaur by 2035 – along with your gas water heater. It’s okay to inconvenience 39 million Californians while the 1.4 billion in China don’t face such onerous restrictions and pollute the same air as Californians.

Now our governor is dictating that the aerospace industry aggressively cut emissions from planes. The plan’s targets include having 20 percent of aviation fuel demand come from electric or hydrogen sources by 2045. The reality is the government can require goals to be met until the Second Coming but technological advances are a completely different issue. Today’s aircraft engines are the most efficient ever, but progress in reducing fuel burn is agonizingly slow — about one percent a year on average. According to Jim Harris, leader of the aerospace practice at consultant Bain & Co., “There is no obvious solution, there is no one technology, there is no one set of actions that are going to get the industry there. The amount of change required, and the timeline, are big issues.”

They are also coming for our cows too. One of the goals is to achieve a 66 percent reduction in methane emissions from the ag sector by 2045. And you guessed it, cattle are a significant source of methane.

As a Christian, I’m left wondering why God would have told his people to go forth and multiply – which also means multiplying cattle to eat – if He didn’t design the planet to accommodate such growth? Of course the planet is able to take care of itself, despite what these radical environmentalists say.

And what is this plan to capture 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and store it underground by 2045? Are we talking the same ground that they won’t let us frack for oil because it will “contaminate” the water table far above where oil strata lies?

And wouldn’t you know it, left-wing attorney Connie Cho had to tie the government overreach to tackling “environmental racism” saying “Our communities have been suffering from chronic disease and dying at disproportionate rates for far too long because of the legacy of environmental racism in this country.” To the left, everything is racist.


* * * * *


I’ll end this column today to wish you all a very blessed time with your loved ones. Gifts are nice but the important thing is loving others – and remembering how the Prince of Peace entered this world in a very humble manner to settle a debt we all had with the Almighty.


This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or 209 Multimedia Corporation.  How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com