Dear Betsy DeVos, I Can Get You a Great Price on an Ark in Kentucky, to build your...ahem, "God's Kingdom"

Enough with the rain already.  And when I say enough, I mean we haven't seen the sun since God did the math and realized the days until inauguration were quickly approaching and he began crying. It has been cloudy and/or raining for so many days straight in Kentucky, I have run out of fingers and toes to count them.  On my drive to check on a real estate listing in an adjoining county yesterday, I noticed we have had so much rain, newly created ponds now exist in the middle of horse farm fields.  This is Kentucky, horse farms are what we do here and rain is evidently what God does here.

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I have a district level PTA meeting this morning. It is 7:05am and I just put my kids on their school bus.  I love their bus driver & bus monitor; these kind folks are the district's first ambassadors to my kids, and I am thankful for them and the bus service they provide. They greet my kids and me with smiles and waves every day.  

Attending PTA meetings and putting my kids on the bus is nothing new for us, but it is important.  We are folks who show up; it's what my people do. We show up to serve and to learn; these are two actions that define me as a person and I hope to instill and distill in these small humans. We show up and we learn...always...and forever, for the rest of our days. 

I serve as my public school district's PTA By-Laws Chairwoman, serving local units by advising them on by-laws questions and helping to form the governing by-laws document for new local units as we open more public schools in this county. This district serves over 40,000 very deserving kids, who will win your heart in not a New York minute, but a Kentucky second.  The least I can do is help their parents (not enough, but we will take as many soldiers in this fight for public education we can get) govern their parent and teacher associations, whose main purpose is to advocate for the public school children in their buildings.

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So back to the rain.  But fear not my fair weather friends (see what I did there?), if this rain continues for 40 days and 40 nights, there is an Ark in Kentucky! And when I say Ark, I don't mean a painting of an Ark on a church nursery wall, although we have lots of those here too (more than I can count on my fingers and toes, in fact). Yes that's correct, we have a to scale, life size Ark.  

Fortunately for Kentucky....ahem, this is the "Year of the Bible" (as declared by our Tea Party Governor Matt Bevin...but then again he declared 2016 the year of the bible too).  As such, apparently our Governor's mansion has a high speed internet connection to God (shhhhh, don't tell Pope Francis) and Noah's blueprints were provided to the developers on a thumb drive. Meanwhile in Moscow, those same blueprints were hacked, were then given to President Elect Donald Trump, and a nice stipend was paid to Moscow by the Koch Brothers.  While watching the Ark rise like Phoenix in Kentucky, these brothers also realized that there was a great opportunity to use the Kentucky Tea Party Governor to unseat the Board of Trustees at the University of Louisville, putting the state University's accreditation at risk. Licking their wounds, after their failed attempts at controlling hiring at the University of Kentucky's John H. Schnatter Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise in the Gatton College of Business and Economics, the Koch brothers then decide to turn their attention to destroying the Affordable Care Act, in their master plan to make America sick again.

Okay, I am kidding (sort of) about all of that, but it wouldn't surprise me that any of them would claim that they had a dream (clearly nothing like the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr.!), Noah came to them in this dream and told them to build the Ark, unseat the UofL Board of Trustees and declare it the Year of the Bible in 2016 & 2017, because at this point God, so disappointed in their behavior, refuses to speak to them.

Anywho...back to the Kentucky Ark. I am a Real Estate professional, so I like to talk in terms of square feet.  At 51 feet high, 85 feet wide, and 510 feet long, with 3 decks, it is over 120,000 square feet (just take my word for it, but please don't ask me to measure it as with all those curves, you would need my real estate appraiser husband's expert skills to meet the ANSI measurement standard). An Ark, just like Noah's. Let that sink in.  

Perhaps some of my gentle readers may have forgotten the details of the biblical story of Noah's Ark or they may not share my liberal, progressive Christian beliefs (I am a real inconvenient truth to my conservative, regressive Christian brothers and sisters) so here is Lucy's abridged Version:

1. God created men & women...and a whole lot of animals.
2. Creation was going along swimmingly until it wasn't.
3. God got mad at his people who were acting like fools (like nominating Betsy DeVos as US Education Secretary )
4. God looked around for anyone who seemed to be behaving.
5. Noah was pretty good at getting his kids on the school bus everyday, so God chose him. 
6. He told Noah to build an Ark large enough to hold a male and female of every animal on earth, his wife, his three sons, their wives, and a Tesla.  
7. Noah is skeptical but obedient and figures he has no other choice as he is not a member of the Carpenter's Union. 
8. It took Noah a few years, like 120, to build the Ark.
9. Noah turns 600 years old (this part is true), begins drawing Medicare (most likely not true) and corrals all those animals, not to mention his wife who was probably thinking..."I should have married that other guy from my high school Algebra Class" onto the Ark.
10. God makes it rain 40 days and 40 nights and floods the entire Earth, killing all living things, except Noah, his wife, his sons Eric & Don Jr. & Barron (who was cranky about leaving his Xbox One in Mid-town Manhattan) and those animals who I am sure at that point were logically eating each other.  God realizes that this plan is brilliant, achieving post-Creation Take 1 natural selection goals and avoiding the US Fish & Wildlife Animal Extinction protocols that had become a bit cumbersome before he wiped the planet.
11. The rain stops, the land dries, the Ark "lands" in Grant County, Kentucky, costing Kentucky tax payers $18.25 Million in tax rebates, but creating 350 of a promised 20,000 jobs. (Okay, the last part didn't really happen, unbelievably the Ark Encounter in Kentucky was built in 4 years and opened in 2016. Opened in 2016...let that sink in. The tax rebates and relatively small number of jobs is just one example of the Tourism "Vaporware" coming to a theater near you.)
12. God had great hope for the offspring of Eric, Don Jr. & Barron.  
13. Noah joins the Carpenter's union, lives out his days on Medicare, and a defined benefit pension set up for Noah by God, thankfully not relying on the unbelievably underfunded Kentucky Public Pension system.
14. God comes to earth in the form of man and his name is Jesus.
15. Jesus is a really good dude. He heals people, demanding no co-pays. Leprosy is not a pre-existing condition to Jesus.  He clothes and feeds the poor. He becomes friends with prostitutes. He loves the little children, even the Muslims and Jews.  In the form of Jesus, God tries to show his people what to do and has bracelets made with WWJD on them so when they begin to act foolish it will remind them "What Would Jesus Do?"
16. God's most "devout" people, sitting in their Penthouse towers and sprawling mansions think they know better what God's Kingdom really looks like, chronically reducing funding to public schools & social support programs, thereby harming "the least of these", gilding everything in Gold and hoarding the rest in hedge funds, instead of giving it to the poor. Clearly, this is not what Jesus would do.
17. God watches the 2016 United States (& Kentucky) Election Results in horror, he cannot imagine how his words and teachings have become so misconstrued.
18. President Elect Trump nominates Betsy DeVos, (a billionaire heiress who has never attended a public school, nor put a child of hers on a school bus) for US Education Secretary. DeVos declares that in her role as US Secretary of Education, as she irrevocably destroys public education, she will use it to advance God's Kingdom. 
19. God begins crying in Kentucky, conveniently close to the Ark (coincidence...I think not!)

So Betsy DeVos, as God continues crying, my training in Economics and my professional experience as a Real Estate professional, tell me that the price on that Ark is going to rise dramatically. So we have to get on this Ark now!

I have some serious doubts that you will be considered the best behaved as it seems as though What Jesus Would (Actually) Do is pretty irrelevant to you.  So go ahead and list that $10 Million dollar House that Amway built of yours in Michigan. Then, just drop a dime and give me a ring on the phone, text if you prefer, and I can set up a showing of the Ark.  But I suspect before long, we will be in a multiple offer situation with your own President Elect and the Koch Brothers.  After all, they already know their way around Kentucky.

When we win the multiple offer situation (my multiple offer winning track record is HUGE!), if you are feeling frisky, you could even use your billions to move it here to Lexington and we will see if we can get your grand kids on a school bus route with my fabulous school bus driver and bus monitor. Wait, never mind. 

If it is God's Kingdom you seek to build, do us all a favor, start with your own billion (with a B), and not that of the struggling working poor & middle class United States tax payer.

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It is now time for me to grab my umbrella and head to my PTA meeting.

A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous.

  — Proverbs 13:22