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Governor Roy Barnes
State Capitol
Atlanta, Georgia
Dear Governor:
It has been
quite awhile since I have written. You will recall that a few months
back, I asked you to resist Atlanta Journal columnist Colin Campbell
lobbying you to store Olympic first aid forms at my beloved alma mater, the
University of Georgia. I check periodically to be sure that junk
hasn’t slipped in during the night and so far, so good. The heat may
be off this issue, governor, because Colin has now discovered that Atlanta’s
mayor, Bill Campbell, is lacking a tad of leadership. After all these
years, he and I finally have something we can agree on. Imagine that!
I know you
are a bit distracted given that your popularity ratings have swooned like
the Atlanta Braves in September. Education reform isn’t as easy as it
looks. What your advisors forgot to tell you was that tarring all
teachers with the same brush in your enthusiasm to do the right thing upset
the teachers and they, in turn, have upset the parents. Conciliatory
letters and promises of pay raises may be too little, too late.
Now here I
come with a request that isn’t going to help your popularity either.
We need more state patrol personnel and quickly. Somebody has to save
us from ourselves on the highways because we clearly aren’t capable of it.
I’m sure
one of the perks of being governor is people fly you or chauffer you where
you need to go while you work on important stuff like how to get teachers
off your back. You probably don’t drive yourself around much anymore. If
you did, you would no doubt have already called a special session of the
legislature to get the money for new and current troopers.
I have
just come off the road from six weeks of book signings and speeches all over
the state. I drove over 3000 miles and never crossed the state line. I was
on every interstate highway in Georgia. Let me give you some not so
surprising news, governor – drivers in the state are absolutely, positively
out of control. There are third world countries in the middle of civil war
showing more discipline than we do as motorists. I look back on the past
six weeks and thank God that I lived to tell about it.
As I went
from city to city, my strategy for survival was to get in the far right lane
and creep along at 75-80 miles per hour. That allowed cars and trucks
to recognize a pokey car ahead and to swoosh by in one of the alternate
lanes, while giving me dirty looks for holding up traffic.
We need
the State Patrol out nailing these wild people before they kill each other –
and me – but I understand we are woefully short of personnel. We don’t have
enough authorized manpower to begin with and even if we did, we can’t fill
the current openings.
If you
are waiting on the motoring public to ask you to slow them down, you might
as well wait on inmates to call for asylum reform. It ain’t gonna happen.
You are going to have to roll the legislature for the money while you still
have enough power to do so.
I think
you could collect enough in fines to more than cover the cost of the
additional troopers needed to try and take back our highways. I don’t know
what the price tag would be, but I can tell you the state hasn’t got enough
money to get me back out there.
Let’s
start by fining anyone going the speed of sound. That’s a step in the right
direction. If caught driving with one arm draped over the seat while going
the speed of sound, you get fined and sent to Puerto Rico, where everybody
drives like that. Talking on a cell phone while driving the speed of sound
would incur a fine and a government-mandated removal of your larynx. More
than six lane changes in five seconds would result in a fine and ten years
of driving on a two-lane highway behind a logging truck. I’ve got other
suggestions, but you get the idea.
Governor,
please do something to slow us down. I hate to hit you with this problem
while Linda Shrenko is making your life so miserable but remember I did get
Colin Campbell off your back so, respectfully, I think you owe me one.
Yours for
happy motoring,
Dick
Yarbrough |
