It All Seemed to Make So Much Sense

I was born the same year Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President, though I had no knowledge or 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 recall a very wise fourth-grader telling me that if Nixon were elected, kids would have to go to school on Saturday. That's when I decided to back Jack. There you have it, for all those who've suspected I am a Democratic left-leaning pinko liberal loser, that may have been the moment the road to perdition was paved.

Too many 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 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 score of years in free fall, and when I say "we," I mean what was once considered the middle class. For the better part of a decade, we watched billionaire oligarchs trade blue skies for BMWs, wash their cigar boats with bottled water, and elevate day-trading to an Olympic event. 

Meanwhile, for tens of millions of Americans, the promise of prosperity remained a rumor, so while we lament what happened, some of our neighbors never had even the sniff of that in the first place, and now look at us as if we've lost our minds, and maybe we have.

Pick a place and space. Be it micro or macro, it's almost always the same movie, just with a different cast. We have 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 the way we are. What I call Present Shock.

At both the national and local levels, it seems there are two ways 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 other response is to just keep pressing the same button even though the pellets stopped dropping a long time ago. 

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. 
-bill kenny