Good Old Days

America the Beautiful…No More

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“I really love America. I just don’t know how to get there anymore” -John Prine

It’s Independence Day and somewhere deep in my soul, I feel, “So What?”

I’m celebrating like most any other day. Sitting with my puppies lost in my thoughts. Often my mind is a terrible thing. A cigar and brown liquor drink will soon join my terrible mind as I wait for the pyrotechnics to begin. I have no belief the drink will help.

 I’m forcing my thoughts to go back to the “Good Ole Days” to the celebrations of my youth. Yes, I understand that once you get past Dutch Fork BBQ, South Carolina hash, greased pigs and poles, patriotic songs, and the fireworks, for some, America was a beautiful, seemingly, impossible dream. See, I can’t keep my mind on little Donnie enjoying the Fourth of July celebrations of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

I was young and still believed in the American Dream my parents were peddling. This was before Viet Nam, before Watergate, before Reagan’s “trickle down” and the endless wars, mass shootings, and the hatred I am seeing displayed in the present. I have become more liberal in my autumn years and a tad bit cynical.

Honestly, I could withstand most of this…except for the hatred that is now being peddled like Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment…seemingly from all sides. We are taking doses of snake oil quite liberally. Especially, one side but the other side is not squeaky clean either.

America the Beautiful has lost its empathy and with it, its humanity. With our humanity we have lost our benevolence, creativeness, our brotherly love. Why?

We have embraced cruelty. Why just disagree with someone when we can metaphorically cut them deep, wide, and frequently.

Some will immediately begin to discuss…no argue venomously, that it is the Trump effect. This may surprise you. I don’t believe he isn’t to blame. Trump is a catalyst. We knew who he was from the early Seventies.

Trump is the greatest snake oil salesman of all time, and it is his followers who turned America into the not so beautiful. PT Barnam said, “there is a sucker born every minute,” and Trump took it to heart. I’m just flabbergasted that he found so many in one place.

The cruelty didn’t just begin with Trump 1.0. It was present well before Trump. It has always been there. An honest study of history will bear that out.

The cruelty has expanded with social media. Trolls, bots, foreign agents, and computer alphas hiding behind their keyboards have pushed the idea that being cruel was cool. It has been effective.  

Before someone suggests, since I hate America, I should leave. I don’t hate America. I love America with all her flaws. The concepts behind “America the Beautiful” are still there but like John Prine, I don’t know how to get there anymore.

Note to Steve: The drink and cigar did not help.

The Good Old Days

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“The only good thing about the good old days is they’re gone.”― Dick Gregory

The cold snap of the last few days have me thinking about the “Good Old Days” people wax poetic about. It is cold and windy and has me longing for the humidity and mosquitoes of summer.

Our good old days started when Linda Gail and I moved into the foothills of the Blue Ridge in 1987 just before a twelve-inch snowfall that kept us stranded for over a week.  Despite questioning our sanity, the old farmhouse became our “little piece of heaven.”

An old farmhouse sitting above the Cherokee Scenic Highway, built in 1892 that had no electricity, heat or plumbing until 1956 when the new owner, long time Methodist missionary and reverend, James Copeland and some of what he called his good “Baptist Brothers” installed it. It has never been updated and I admit I sometimes worry about how well the good “Baptist Brothers” installed it.

 Prior to 1956 this old house, with no insulation, was heated with a wood stove and five fireplaces, water was hauled from the stream located below the house and the outhouse was, and still is, located some thirty yards behind the house.

Would anyone like to explain to me the “Good Old Days” as it relates to the series of cold days we have experienced and the impending “Snowmageden” we are facing this weekend? I am reminded of the old childhood joke, “Have you read ‘A Mile to the Outhouse’ by Willie Makeit. The book was illustrated by Betty Don’t.”

I should point out that indoor plumbing was added in 1956 to an old porch that was closed in to accommodate it. We now have updated heat, two more bathrooms, a new well with running water and we only actively use one of the fireplaces. The insulation in the old part of the house needs to be redone but at least the old wavy lead windows were replaced.

 I spent some eight hours spread over three days, cutting and splitting two pickup truck loads of dead fall with a chainsaw, axe, sledge and wedge. I also had benefit of a tractor with a frontend loader to help keep me out of trouble. My back might disagree with that last statement and has me wondering how did the previous generations keep a woodstove, and five fireplaces fed without benefit from later technology?

 Hey, I’ll let you keep the good old days. I’ll take the toilet paper over the Sear’s catalogue or corn shucks any day. 

Relics of the “Good Old Days”

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“One tatty old man in jeans—what was he thinking? Jeans are for young people.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

I stood in front of my closet staring at racks of pants, neckties, and dress shirts that I wore when I fought the teaching wars. I’ve been fully retired for nearly a decade, and these are nothing more than relics from those days. Several suits and old man Fedoras that I once thought were cool are among those relics.

I haven’t worn these clothes in a while. I’ve turned into the old man who wears shorts or blue jeans and tee shirts…occasionally a flowered Hawiian if I really want to dress up. If I can’t get away with those choices, I rotate between three dress shirts and two pairs of dress trousers…both khakis. If I must go somewhere that requires a necktie I don’t go.

Why do I keep these relics? I have no intention of going back to teaching. Someone could use them if they weren’t concerned about this year’s fashion statements, the width of my ties, or the sweat stains on my fedoras. It must be the memories of the “good old days.”

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

I’ve heard too many of my peers express their feelings about the “good old days.” Waxing poetic about how the days of our youth were so much better than present days. I’m sure it is due to a lost relic from our past. The relic we once called our youth.

I am a Boomer. I was born in 1950. I mostly enjoyed my childhood. I was, as were most of my friends, blessed with a family that extended far outside the walls of our homes, a family that included those with different surnames and DNA.

The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child” was a truism even if the village I grew up in was far from Africa in both location and thought. The saying emphasizes a child’s successful upbringing is a communal effort involving many different people and groups, from parents to teachers to neighbors and grandparents.

If these are the “good old days” you wax poetically about, I am in total agreement. They were as good then as they are gone now.

“Glorifying the past because we like the story better isn’t history; it’s propaganda.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

The good old days are person specific. Just because you or I remember our childhoods as wonderful doesn’t mean everyone remembers theirs that way…and I doubt everyone’s life was wonderful all the time. It is easier to remember the drunken party fun and forget the blinding hangover the next day.

There seems to be much debate about our youth. I hear that when we were kids, things were different. Things were better. Things were less politically correct. There was more freedom. The world was safer. I agree it was different but argue it might not have been better.

Safer? No seatbelts, riding in the back of pickup trucks, riding bicycles without helmets, lawn darts, cigarettes everywhere, drinking from rubber hoses…get my point? I survived but have many scars to remember the “good old days.”

Maybe you heard your own parents talk about how kids (you) used to be better behaved, how when they were your age, they worked harder and had their act together. I heard this in 1969 when my first semester grades were reported to my parents and found to be quite lackluster.

Think our youth are worse? Here’s a quote from the Fourth Century BC, over 2500 years ago. Credit Plato or Socrates. “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders; they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”  This was during the Golden Age of Athens, Greece.

Truthfully, the quote is more of a summary of the period and Plato’s and Socrates’ thoughts, but the summary is now over one hundred years old. The facts are, kids have always alarmed their parents, new generations are always vexing to the generations that came before.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

You might want to ask the question, “The good old days were good for whom?”

Black people, Indigenous Americans, “ethnic minorities”, the poor, women, people with a disability, gay people? The trouble with this question is it is often answered in a straight, white perspective that is decidedly masculine. The Sixties were populated by protest and the growing pains those protests fostered.

Today, most of us are fighting on some side of the culture wars but the Fifties and Sixties were fraught with minefields for the “others.” Civil Rights, the war in Vietnam, The Cold War, assassinations, riots, gays forced to stay in the closet lest they tempt being rolled on a Saturday night. Women’s rights? Women couldn’t apply for a credit card without their husband’s permission. The disabled didn’t even have a way to the table much less a seat. Oh…those good old days.

In some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We are fighting the same battles today. Only the battlefield names have changed.

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
― Sophia Loren

So why do we look back on those days of yesteryear with so much fondness? Why do we save the relics of our past? I have a theory.

At a certain age it is easier to look backward because we know the story on the road already traveled, and the road we now travel on is much shorter than it once was. We make the road we once traveled warm and fuzzy and slightly out of focus instead of facing today’s grim reaper we see closing the gap in our rearview mirrors.

I believe Sophia is on to something. My body creaks and cries out in protest every time I think about cranking a lawnmower or chainsaw, but my mind wants to be creative and active. My mind makes me go on and crank the lawnmower or chainsaw.

Where there is creativity there is youth. Afterall, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as “Grandma Moses”, did not start painting until she was 76 years old. Even though she had no formal training, she painted every day for 25 years and produced thousands of paintings.

I have hopes that I’m not just a relic from times past. I have hopes that I can still contribute…Maybe I can HELP make these the “good old days” for another generation instead of lamenting how sad things are now.

Don Miller’s works may be found at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Don-Miller/author/B018IT38GM?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true