Bill Pezza: Let him have the damn plane

I spent many of my preteen years growing up on the 300 block of Lincoln Avenue in Bristol Borough. Today, after the redevelopment that took place in the 1960s, it’s a pleasant neighborhood with quaint twin homes, driveways, and manicured lawns. But in the mid-1950s, it was pretty run-down, with high-density, crowded apartments and very few owner-occupied dwellings. I was too young to know how bad it was, and certainly too young to care.

To me, that block was heaven. An open creek ran behind our apartment building, and if you dipped an old mayonnaise jar into the current, you’d pull it out a minute later with a collection of minnows that became your pets for the day. We played army in the wooded area behind what was then Delaware Valley Hospital, using sticks for weapons.

Amazingly, Mazzanti’s Market, home today of one of the best-known hoagies in Bucks County, was already there back then. I’d go to buy nickel bags of candy, and on weekends the counter  would offer trays of tomato-pie slices and doughnuts from Mancuso’s Bakery. If you were short on cash, all it took was a few soda bottles cashed in at two cents each to earn your pizza. We played marbles in the street, but since we didn’t have marbles, we used old bottle caps. I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything.

Of all those experiences, my favorite was the hobby shop on Pond Street, right where it intersected with Lincoln. The shop had a large selection of plastic model airplanes you could buy and build. The smallest ones fit my budget at 99 cents. I could choose from an American P-51 Mustang, a Japanese Zero, a British Spitfire, or a German Messerschmitt, each one complete with a small tube of glue.

I loved those planes, loved building them, collecting them, and staging my own personal dogfights.

I share that story because it helps me understand the president’s fascination with the offer from Qatar to gift a $400-million plane as a replacement for Air Force One.

People are jumping up and down, pulling their hair out over the plane issue. I say let the man have it. Is the gift legal? No. Is it ethical? No. Will it cost taxpayers tens of millions to retrofit? Absolutely. Does it pose a national-security risk with potential embedded-surveillance technology? Of course. But when has any of that ever been the standard by which this administration is judged? 

So stop shouting. Let him have the damn plane. Put gold-plated toilet seats in it if that’s what makes him happy.

Here’s why: All the outrage over the plane is exactly what he wants. It’s another shiny object, something to pull attention away from issues that truly matter, especially here in Bucks County.

Right now, there’s talk of eliminating or drastically reducing Pell Grants for higher education. If that happens, we might as well shut down Bucks County Community College today. So many of our students depend on that financial aid to gain marketable skills for their future. That deserves your attention.

I ran into a friend the other day and asked about his 95-year-old mother-in-law. He said the family had been committed to caring for her at home and had been receiving helpful visits from a home-health aide, until the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) invasion began. Since then, they’ve had to give up the service because response times and service denials became unbearable. That deserves attention.

We have doctors and scientists, some privately, others publicly, in tears over the damage Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is doing to public trust in health  care. Number 47 could have given him a small office in the basement of the Department of Health and Human Services where he could rant about vaccines. Instead, he put a man with no medical background in charge of our nation’s healthcare system. That deserves attention.

I could go on and on about the reckless, ill-advised, chaotic attempts to cut spending, none of which even came close to the savings top Trump adviser Elon Musk once bragged about, but you already know that.

My only purpose here is to suggest we not let shiny distractions like the plane fiasco pull our focus from the issues that actually impact people’s lives. Especially the lives of Bucks County residents.

Bill Pezza, an author of historical fiction, teaches history and government at Bucks County Community College.