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by Tom Anselm

Sometimes thoughts come to me that don’t really lend themselves to a full column. Well, maybe the topic does, but the thoughts I have about them are insufficient. Like, for instance, where do birds go when it storms like a typhoon?

We drove through one the other day on the highway. It was like we were in a carwash. The Super $12 version. With 30 other cars. At 20 miles per hour, and no end in sight. And along with the thought of ‘this is not good’ was the query of ‘where do the birdies go’ in such a deluge?

Then there is the randomness of events. Like the tragic story of the recently-married couple who died together as a result of that fluke boiler explosion in the Soulard area.

Were they in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or the right place at the right time, given that they went together to their just rewards, happy in love and with new life ahead of them? Do you ever wonder how leaving the house and then returning to get something you forgot just might alter your life completely? Or not?

And how about this story of the City of St. Louis failing the vote to secure a soccer stadium funding mechanism? I was really for major league soccer in our region, but against anyone being taxed in any way to pay for it, citing a far better use of tax money to fix far worse problems in the city.

Violence and poverty go hand in hand, it seems, and St. Louis has its fair share of both. Maybe the new mayor can find the dollars to go to that issue, not having to worry about losing tax income to millionaire entrepreneurs. So far, the Major League Soccer folks haven’t totally nixed the idea of a team here.

So should we keep our eyes open for someone to miraculously come up with the bucks to pull this deal off? Wouldn’t surprise me, but then neither would the idea of the whole thing going down the rabbit hole.

A lot has been said about a city-county merger over the years as a plan to solve the region’s woes. We’ve heard about a borough system, combining smaller municipalities with larger ones, consolidating services to be more politically efficient and cost effective. This will take some serious independent leadership and willingness on all parties to give up their small pieces of fiefdom.

Who might that leader be? My guess is that it won’t be a current office-holder, not someone who has a dog in the fight, but someone who has enough clout to bring disparate forces together. That, sadly, is another long shot.

And how about that MetroLink stuff? Having relied on public transportation only a short time in high school, I still have a taste of how difficult it is to get from here to there and back again. Light rail was supposed to help this. But still no North/South line and nothing going really farther west than the airport hasn’t done much to solve the problem. .

And forget crossing the wide Missouri. That will not happen in my lifetime.

Maybe the north-south route will suffer the same fate as that effort to go to St. Charles County? And, as a side note, but one which should be a top priority, who where the genius planners who thought that it was a good thing to develop a light rail system where people could just walk on with no accountability for a ticket? (Like maybe a turnstile system, or actual people selling tickets?)

Seems like a good way to stop at least some of the ‘bad actors’ from jumping on and off the train at will. And clearly security needs a massive upgrade, but that takes funds that may not be there. So we shall see.

Unfortunately, not everyone can Uber-it.

In my sojourn through schools, as I touched on in a recent column, I see a lot of kids using cabs and contract vehicle services to get to school. Last week, there was a young man who traveled to a Ballwin school from Baden inthe far north portion of the city. That’s an hour and 45 minutes, each way, each day. His attendance was poor, even with a door-to-door ride. How does that make any sense, sports fans?

And totally unrelated to anything so far, I saw where a Cheeto shaped like the recently-deceased gorilla Harambe sold on e-bay for $99,000. Who has that kind of money? With that in mind, however, I am on my way to the Circle K for a bag of them tasty orange things. Maybe I can score one that looks like April the Giraffe.

And so I wonder, as I wander.

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