Friday, March 23, 2012

The Best of Times

I was reading an editorial in a local weekly paper that got me to thinking. The editorial was bemoaning the current state of affairs in this country, looking back to better times when people weren't so greedy, so selfish, so sexually promiscuous, etc.,etc.
Obviously a Tea Party person who wanted his country back.
But is this true?
I know. Gas costs too much. Everything costs too much. Anyone remember "Bye, Bye Birdie"?
If I'm remembering correctly, there was the lament in the movie that ran, "What's wrong with kids today?"
The play and movie go back to 1960. Get what I'm driving at? It's the same old same old complaint. Always complaining things are horrible now and if we could only go back to an earlier time when people were morally straight and hard working?
Really? Like maybe prohibition? Or maybe the Wild West? How about slavery and the Civil War?
Sure we have problems today. Always have and always will. But I'll take this time over any of the "good old days" because they weren't all that good.
But I guess there are some who really do want to return to the "good old days" when women were expected to stay barefoot and pregnant, and submit to a beating when "their man" thought she needed it. Maybe go back to the time when kids didn't get beyond grade school if that far and worked in dangerous jobs.
Sorry but we have made progress even though it seems to be mostly of the two steps forward and one step backward variety. Maybe the glass will always remain half empty. But that's no reason to go backward to a time that wasn't as good as some would have us believe.
I don't want my country back. I want my country to go forward.

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