Old Guy Musings

I was born the same year Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President, though I had no knowledge nor any memory of my life with him as the Chief Executive. I remember being in the third grade at Pine Grove Manor School when Nixon and Kennedy ran for the White House. 

Politically astute even then, I can recall a very wise fourth-grader telling me if Nixon was elected, kids would have to go to school on Saturday. That's when I decided it was time to back Jack. There you have it; for all those who believe I am a Democratic left-leaning pinko liberal loser, that may have been the moment the road to perdition was paved.

Nearly sixty years later, I'm not sure I understand what has happened to the country I grew up in, returned to, and have grown old in. We had so much go so well for so long. We don't seem to have any stomach for hard work or truth anymore. Our institutions which have always buttressed our way of life, from finances through interpersonal relationships, are pretty much bankrupt and we don't seem to have the will or wallet to repair or replace them.

We've spent most of the last decade in a free-fall-and when I say "we" I mean what was once considered the middle class and all that's happened since the elections of 2016 has been to see that descent accelerate. In recent decades we've traded blue skies for BMWs, washed our cigar boats with bottled water and elevated day-trading to some sort of an Olympic event. Meanwhile, for tens of millions of other Americans, the promise of prosperity of the Clinton Years never happened, so while we lament what has happened since then, our neighbors never had it that good in the first place and now look at us as if we've lost our minds and maybe we have.

Be it micro or macro, it's almost always the same movie, just with a different cast. We seem to be having trouble, not with leaning forward and looking ahead, with my apologies to Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, but with accepting where we are and why we will be here for the rest of our days if we don't change. It's what I call Present Shock.

At both the national and local levels there are two ways, it seems, to manage Present Shock. One is to do nothing but say no and insist that those in power are to blame for whatever we now see as a failure. The same folks with those 'how's that change thing going?' bumper stickers when Obama was in the White House years ago had ones that described his predecessor as 'somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot.' There's no point in a bumper sticker denigrating the current occupant who is both arrogant and ignorant as his MAGA minions can neither read nor reason. 

The other response is to just keep pressing the same button even though the pellets stopped dropping a long time ago. I live in a state where we invented 'securitization. Don't try to look it up, we've given it a whole different meaning than anyone in finance would recognize. We project revenues from the future and list them as receipts in the NOW as if they were real in order to balance the books. Does this remind anyone else of Wimpy's I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a Hamburger Today? The line between surreal and cereal grows finer by the moment.

We're working very hard here to break the cycle and seize the day and the momentum, but there's still a longing for what was. If it could only be yesterday tomorrow, then today would be wonderful. We've failed to realize that (too) often the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth (of the habit) and that sound of footsteps we hear belongs to ourselves as we calculate the distance we'd need to outrun our own shadow. 

But after a while, you realize time flies. And the best thing that you can do is take whatever comes to you. 'Cuz time flies.
-bill kenny