The old guy was born in a little house on Old St. Mary’s Road a shade less than eight decades ago.
The road was graveled, dusty and rural. We had an outhouse, chickens, and — for a while — hogs.
We listened to Harry Caray call the Cards games on KMOX as he lifted us up in the eternal hope that a fly ball to the outfield “might be and could be.”
And when we finally got TV, we joyed in the opportunity of watching hour after hour of blurry westerns.
We didn’t have two dimes to rub together but it didn’t matter. We had enough.
Why am I bringing this up? The world was a different place.
We don’t have the luxury or the time now for that distant, foggy, rose colored nostalgia.
This world, our world is on the brink and we can’t hide from it in our comparatively prosperous little hamlet in the Heartland.
If we embrace faith, God and Jesus is telling us.
If we embrace logic and learning, every bit of accurate media is telling us.
If we embrace dedicated human science, every piece of legitimate accumulated data is telling us.
Nostalgia, habit and BS, however we slather it, ain’t going to keep the truth away and the truth is this — unless we’re immigrants, perish the thought, we were born into the most prosperous, functional, constitutional democracy the world has ever known.
We were the unchallenged leaders of the world, not only economically, but morally and ethically.
And though a whole heck of a long way from working perfectly as a democracy, we the people helped steer that comparatively well oiled, pretty well maintained and purring machine ever forward.
But folks, we’ve fallen way behind on maintenance of this puppy.
The tires and probably a whole mess of other parts need replaced. It’s clanking and smoking and weaving, and way, way out of alignment.
Other cars are passing us right and left and yep, they’re giving us the finger as they go because we’re driving a heap and our driving stinks.
They ain’t happy.
It’s time to wake up. It’s not 1950 or 1960 or even 2000.
The damage we’ve done to our one irreplaceable world’s climate is on the brink of being irreparable.
We’ve allowed increasingly corrupt, race-baiting, xenophobes take complete control of our government and as a result, our economy, health care and judicial systems are up you-know-what creek as well.
You can go back in history to see the parallels — imperial Rome, where crazed oligarchs kept the populace sated on bread and circuses while they ever more frenetically and publicly acted out their collective lasciviousness while literally crucifying those who called them out.
Eighteenth century France, where the people starved in the streets while the “nobility” built ever more gilded estates.
And twentieth century Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan, where racial hate and the ridiculous myth of sacred borders and “nationalism” were used to justify an obscene lust for power and ultimately mass murder.
In every case, basic human morality, decency and a determination to embrace love and justice eventually won out, but at an incredible cost in human life and treasure to fight the seemingly inexorable tide of fear, complacency, propaganda and cultural inertia.
The difference now is a trifecta of looming doomsday scenarios as our clock ticks toward zero: ever more proliferating atomic weapons in the hands of literally blithering idiots, a climate crisis increasingly impossible to ignore and suddenly seemingly out of nowhere, a computerized intelligence which pundits, seemingly only recently were chuckling about as being ineffectual, but now suddenly may be on the verge of influencing if not taking over international logistics, communications, banking and defense systems.
Don’t know about you, but I think it might be past time to stop embracing “parties” and vote for folks who have a heart, soul, head and yep, a clue.
