Gun-hating Gannett unveiled another series of propaganda articles blaming firearms for the actions of disturbed criminals. Regarding the Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City where gunfire killed one, the USA Today article titled, “Gun danger lurks wherever people gather” suggests that firearms have taken on a life of their own; that guns choose their victims and pull their own triggers.
The articles sub-title; “Prevalence of firearms worsens risk of attacks” seems a cognitive disconnect when in the same breath the author tells us that over 800 police were present at the time. The police are all armed. Did their presence, “worsen the risk” or should we be looking at the behaviors of individuals?
The same old mantra’s spew forth from the same old fear-mongers with solutions to problems we have already addressed, Universal Background Checks, (already in place) a well-worn, buzz-phrase-call-to-action dog whistle to those allergic to reality and addicted to propaganda. Large magazines, firearms cosmetic-appeal and the barriers to lawful firearms ownership are in no way related to or affecting the criminal and evil actions of those outside of normal societal constraints, ie: criminals and the mentally ill.
Immediately adjacent to the Super Bowl article appeared a follow-up story titled, Sellers of crime guns get federal scrutiny” When the gun left the store, did it become a “crime gun” by its very will? The article goes on to tell us that the stores that sold the most firearms ended up with more of those firearms identified as being used in criminal activity. What a revelation. No inquiry about how those firearms changed hands over time. No mention of the fact that the vast majority of crimes with firearms are committed by people illegally possessing that firearm. Clearly this kind of story is meant to cast a pall on the lawful business’s supporting the firearms industry.
Would a story identifying the largest car dealerships in the country as having sold the most vehicles that were involved in DWI stops or were used in the commission of crimes be a news-worthy article? A firearm, like a motor-vehicle, is an object we use; for good or for bad, it is a choice, a human choice. Attacking objects as if they were complicit in behaviors misses the bigger picture in genuinely searching for solutions.
The key components that are central to addressing the issues of civil and societal violence and upheaval rest on these three things:
Criminals in our midst that should be incarcerated
Untreated, undiagnosed and un-cared for mental illnesses
Godlessness
No bail, no jail, no way to fail encourages behavior without consequence; low-risk-high reward criminality. The mentally ill, the addicted find help only after tragedy or death and finally, we reject and deny God, substituting our own values for His, abandoning the pillars of absolute truth in favor of what best fits our pleasures. Faith, belief and redemption, only available through the grace of God is the answer. Deny this and witness a continued rudderless mankind destined for destruction.
In 2006, a groups of local taxpayers-business and property owners were drawn together while attending a rally in protest of high taxes and government over-reach. The local American legion hall was filled to capacity with angry and vocal taxpayers, eager to grab the microphone and vent their frustrations to the crowd and the three local TV networks crews and cameras that were covering the event. With minimal marketing but ample word-of-mouth, the event was a true organic, heartfelt reaction from citizens fed-up with their government.
As the event was ending and the camera crews were packing up, a small sub-set of attendees, myself included, looked around and realized there were many familiar faces and common interests. The genesis of what would become Citizens for a Better Broome began after that meeting and two-years later would result in the formation of a not-for-profit organization dedicated to smaller, affordable, accountable and principled governance.
Our first public event was a taxpayer protest held at Confluence Park in Binghamton on April 15, 2009 which was well attended and attracted local media attention. We became very active in challenging local school boards to demonstrate more leadership instead of marching lock-step with management. We were strongly in support of the dissolution of the Village of Johnson City into the Town of Union, an initiative that failed by a handful of votes. Our group was a strong supporter of merging the neighboring school districts of Chenango Valley and Chenango Forks, a referendum that failed because the process was flawed. We did score a big win recently in supporting the candidacy of the newly elected Town of Vestal supervisor, ushering in a truly representative style of leadership that was sorely lacking.
Since these projects, we have attempted to fund the revitalization of the Johnson City arch, a process so mired in bureaucratic hold-ups and set-backs we gave up. We even tried to fund and support churches in maintaining, repairing and ringing their bells again, a lovely tradition that has fallen by the wayside and to that the council of churches wasn’t even interested in helping us.
Social media, word-of-mouth, editorials, even bill boards and a radio show have failed to excite the interest of the public and quite frankly, our small and loyal core group grows tired of trying to help those who don’t seem to want to help themselves or even care.
We pay too much and we get too little. 11 school districts and 24 municipalities in a county of less that 200,000 are 10 districts and 22 municipalities too many, becoming self-serving fiefdoms and mini-kingdoms of their own with zero incentive to change.
We believed our challenges would be in the form of opposition but instead what will end our organization, as well as the world we see rapidly morphing into something unrecognizable is apathy and for that I have no answer and no known cure.
Five days before the opening day of deer season here in upstate New York, I underwent some surgery that my doctor told me would prevent me from hunting. Turns out he was mistaken. That following Saturday, after a big breakfast, I hit the woods at the crack of noon, making my way very slowly up the ragged and rocky logging road that would put me into the small ground-blind my buddy Mark and I had staked out a week earlier.
Much to the chagrin of my hunting partner, who prides himself on being in the woods 45-minutes before dawn, my early-afternoon start time habits don’t sit quite right with his traditional hunting sensibilities. By the time I had made it up the hill and carefully and quietly approached the small ground-cover in the middle of a nice stand of oak trees sporting a broken carpet of acorns, it was 1PM.
It had rained the night before and the leaves underfoot made it as quiet as a stroll in the park. Not a breeze in the air, I made my way five or seven steps at a time, pausing for at least 90-seconds each time before proceeding. I heard snorts to my right, in dense dead-falls, and I froze in place to see if they might come out and into view. The first buck stuck his lowered head into the logging road, then the second and finally the third, a 4-6-and 8 point trio. I was stuck in place because I was more or less in the open and any movement would start a stampeding exodus. Seemingly uninterested and clearly not on high alert, the groups loitered about, me frozen in the open not daring to move. The 8-point looked up and back down half a dozen times before he finally decided to err on the side of caution and the trio trotted away, tails down but without delay. At least they hadn’t made me outright, so I figured they would be back and I quickly moved into my little blind just 100-yards ahead.
It was 1:15 as I settled in, scanning the forest in every direction. Mark and I were texting back and forth and I reminded him that in the event I got lucky, he was on the hook for field-dressing and the heavy lifting, given my post-operative condition and he graciously agreed.
At 3PM, a small doe caught my eye off to my left on the edge of an old quarry, her head down, munching on the occasional acorns littering the ground. Although I did have a doe tag, she was too far off and in no hurry to go anywhere as she was feeding easily but it was fun to watch her. Then something caught my eye to my right. I looked over and there was a large-bodied buck walking directly towards me about 150-yards out. I immediately turned my attention to him and began to strategically position myself squarely between the two small pine trees that gave me a perfect side-rest for my little single-shot, 20-gauge shotgun. As the buck continued to come towards me, I was hoping he would turn a bit for a better shot but he was staying true to a line and as he stepped into a spot where I had a clear head-on shot, I took it and he went down in a crash.
After I saw that he was going nowhere, I turned back expecting the doe to be gone but instead she was coming right at me! I re-positioned my shotgun and as she stepped into a nice clear spot I dropped her in her tracks.
I paced off the buck at 80-yards, the doe at 50 and they were not 100 yards apart! I texted Mark and he arrived just after dark to help me out. As we laid both animals out in front of the 4-wheelers headlights, I handed Mark my little Case Peanut folding knife to start the incision. He had forgotten his knife and he wasn’t crazy about the one I carry, so he ending up field-dressing both of those deer with only that little two and one-half inch Case knife.
Never before have a shot two deer within 2-minutes of each other and for Christmas, Mark is getting a brand-new Case Peanut and my doctor, a bag of back-straps.
In response to the horrific attack and massacre of innocent Israeli civilians by the terror group Hamas, leadership at SUNY-Broome chose to remain silent. When given the opportunity to sign an open letter in support of a coalition co-founded by SUNY Chancellor King of over 100 colleges and universities, amongst them some 18 SUNY campuses condemning, “the brutality and inhumanity of Hamas.”, SUNY Broome President Hawkins took a pass.
After multiple efforts to contact Hawkins, he finally responded and excused his inaction by writing his own “official message”, which was frankly political pabulum that said nothing, meant nothing, and condemned nothing.
SUNY Broome Board Chair Connerton was also silent and failed to respond to my request for an explanation of why SUNY Broome made the conscious decision to not sign this statement in support of Israel.
Hawkins and Connerton should follow in the foot-steps of fellow-travelers, former University of Pennsylvania President Magill and former UPenn Board Chair Scott Bok and both resign immediately.
Raising their fingers to the political winds and offering empty and meaningless platitudes indicates a sickening silence of complicity without saying it out loud. That level of failed moral leadership has no business in shaping students ideologies.
Honor. The word is mentioned 147 times in the Bible. The Medal of Honor is the highest US military award for valor. The last sentence of the Declaration of Independence says, “… we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” The last word in the last sentence of US Declaration of Independence is honor. This word was not some esoteric and theoretical exercise in hyperbole but a life-changing, some times life-compromising obligation as well as a sacred expectation.
History tells us that of the 56 signers of that oath, more than half died fighting, or lost their fortunes, or were captured and tortured and lost their families. Others died bankrupt, fled their homes and families in exile and had their homesteads, farms, fields and lands laid to waste. To the founders, their honor was real, tangible, brought to bear by their actions, to the point of being more valuable and more important than their very lives.
In the history of the United States, Medal of Honor recipients make up less than one-one-hundredth of one-percent of the entirety of the ranks of the armed-forces. More than 40-million have served our military and only 3,517 have earned that medal. Honor, especially when combined with valor is indeed rare.
The Bible instructs us to, “Honor thy mother and thy father”, “Let marriage be held in honor among all”, “Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the first fruits of all your produce” and finally, “Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life, righteousness, and honor.” Let us not forget, in the Declaration it was their, “…sacred honor…” that they willingly embraced and which related them directly to God.
What about our honor? What about honor in today’s world?
As recently as 200-years ago, honor was so important to men that duels were fought defending it. Then sitting US Vice-President Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel after he had assailed his character. Modern day dueling would likely make for a more restrained and polite society when “talking smack” might well get you killed.
Socrates tells us, “The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be,” an ancient version of fake-it-till-you-make-it, as well as an uncomfortable revealed truth for many.
The fact is honor exists only in the make-believe world of most people. The rarity of the trait makes those who possess it exceptional. Somewhere along the line, we have taken what was in the first instance rare, and rendered it into near extinction today.
And so it is that amongst the ranks of the “honorable” we should be selecting and electing our political leaders. We should expect no less from today’s politicians than we did from our founders, but how does one test for and measure honor?
Ironically, our deceased-duelist, Alexander Hamilton penned the following in Federalist 51. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Hamilton was obviously lamenting about the shortage of honor amongst men and because of that reality, he helped design a political philosophy and governance blueprint that recognized the issue of men’s propensity towards self-dealing with a series of checks-and-balances to temper against such acts.
Thomas Jefferson wrote those eternal words in the Declaration, not accidentally ending with honor and additionally said the following:” Honor and duty are superior to rights and self-interest.” And finally, ““A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
Where we find ourselves today seems like a bridge-so-far when compared with those great men of our founding.
Isaac Asimov warned of the following:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life; nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
By fostering and nurturing our relationship with God and re-asserting our sacred beliefs and eternal expectations, we can re-gain our collective honor. If we fail, we cannot prevail in that exquisite model of perfection those wise and exceptional men designed and created for us some 250-years ago. The concept, so often misunderstood: “American Exceptionalism”, is inextricably linked with our “sacred honor” and with that, undeniably the worship of and glory to God Almighty. It will be up to the honorable amongst us to insure that continued success of this great nation or if not, we then shall indeed deserve to perish. In the truest sense of a humble prayer, I ask for God to guide us in our quest for honor.
Perhaps the eternally famous phrase, “All Men are created equal…” might have been followed by the quip, “but they don’t stay that way for long.” Many today confuse the equality of opportunity with the guarantee of an outcome. In the long run, the equality of outcomes would homogenize everyone into generic and genetic sameness and mankind would mimic a gigantic school of sardines.
Human differences in intellect, ingenuity, physical attributes such as strength, height, weight, all play a role in determining outcomes. The intricacies and complexities of physics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry and mathematics to name a few, are beyond the intellectual capabilities of many, but thank God grasped by some amongst us in the interest of advancing all of mankind. No intelligent person vilifies the physician, astronomer or mathematician because they are smarter. Regardless of our individual abilities to understand some things, we still benefit by the knowledge. The science that created the computer I am using to create this article is well beyond my personal ability to completely understand its operation yet I am able to harness that complex compilation of components, hardware and software in a way that makes me productive in my own way. Because of our individual and internal limitations, the theory of the sameness of outcomes would demand devolution towards the lowest of abilities and outcomes in order to accommodate everyone.
Sameness is nothing to celebrate, it is our differences that add nuance, tone and contrast to our lives experience. Those who seek equality of outcomes are also likely in my observations to be those who seek to control climate, control speech, control firearms and affirm an invented “right” to abortions. “Control” in general is antithetical to the American version of freedom and the sameness of outcomes is a direct goal of communism. The further we stray from the Word of God the more we believe in our realm of control.
All Men are created equal and thank the Lord they don’t stay that way for long.
Earlier this week on a local radio interview, Broome County Sheriff Fred Akshar lashed out at Endicott Mayor Linda Jackson, repeatedly accusing her of “living under a rock” regarding conflicting reports of whether or not officials were properly informed of the sheriff departments activities within the village.
Akshar’s conduct was not becoming of a high-ranking public official but unfortunately, predictable from a power-hungry-bully.
M.K. Davis reminds us, “You can tell a bully from a leader by how they treat people who disagree with them.”
Akshar demonstrated all of the tendencies of a typical bully. There was no need to attack the mayor that harshly and with that degree of venom. Only a coward would accost a weaker person in that way. He could have handled the situation professionally but instead he demonstrated to the community exactly why we shouldn’t want a man like this anywhere near the levers of power yet here we are with a sheriff that essentially won a beauty contest in becoming Broome County’s living-breathing version of GI Joe.
Akshar’s personal life illustrates the same troubling tendencies; control, bully and dominate. First a inappropriate tryst with a subordinate at the sheriff’s department, then jeopardizing a murder case by having sex with the mother of one of the victims during the trial, and finally, converting a secretary in his then senate office from low-paid part-timer to a really well-paid girlfriend and eventually wife, all examples of manipulating power for his own pleasures and benefits.
Here’s the game plan if you haven’t already figured it out. Akshar cultivates and burnishes his image and authority by “assisting” local police agencies with all kinds of policing initiatives, painting the picture of why it makes so much sense to unify the policing county-wide into a single agency that, of course, he will head. With his hand-picked District Attorney in waiting, team Akshar/Battisti will control the entirety of Broome County law enforcement and adjudication. Voters have to also shoulder the blame for electing pretty-boy Battisti in another beauty contest that wrongly elevated our local Ken-doll over experienced and proven professionalism.
Team GI Joe/Ken have a track record of ignoring the boundaries of law enforcement. In 2014, Battisti called his buddy Akshar, then a Captain in the sheriff’s department, in order to have his estranged wife arrested in the parking lot of Dicks’ Sporting Goods in Binghamton. Ignoring jurisdictional boundaries that made it clear that the Binghamton police should have handled this call, Akshar not only approved dispatching a deputy instead of calling Binghamton PD, he sent his younger brother, a sheriff’s deputy at the time, to Dick’s and guess what? He arrested the ex-wife and of course, all charges were eventually dropped because the whole thing stunk to high heaven of the abuse of power.
God-forbid team GI Joe/Ken take over the entire county. The bar for integrity cannot be set too high and these guys will lower it until even snakes can slither over it.
I ride my bicycle 50 or 60 miles every week in a mix of roadways, walking and bike paths and parks. The added benefit beyond exercise is the opportunity to observe people close-up. What I notice the most is that the majority of people create around themselves a shield or wall of insularity courtesy of electronic devices. Headphones, ear-buds and cell phones indicate to the outside world that not only is no inter-personal interaction sought, it is outwardly discouraged. They might as well hang a sign around their necks that says, “Do Not Disturb.”
A walk in the park serenades you with song-birds, rustling trees, babbling streams, laughing children, buzzing bees and the casual greetings and conversations you will not have when you block it all out in order to be left alone. Everything electronic can be viewed or heard at any time. Every moment of you life, if you stay in the moment, is un-recordable, un-reviewable as it passes into yesterday.
As I bike past a young mother and her baby in a stroller, I alone hear the soft coos from the infant as mom has her head buried in her phone, tuned out.
The push for exchanging gas for electric in transportation is an idea that has ironically placed the proverbial cart in front of the horse. While the problems of an inadequate power grid, too few charging stations, short range, high costs, long recharging times and battery fires are real, there are two gigantic issues looming that rival them all.
Current state and federal gas-tax regulation siphons off about 67 cents from every gallon of gasoline purchased in New York State. In California, that amount is $1.18-per-gallon. Nationally this equates to more than $53 billion a year in tax revenue. Those taxes account for more than a quarter of the expense of road and highway costs around the nation. No such system of taxation exists for electric vehicles. For every ten-percent reduction in gas vehicles being replaced by electric, a resulting decrease of more than $5 billion in tax revenue will occur.
Add this to the long list of issues that the rush to electric crowd has failed to address but the second concern is a direct threat to our freedom, our autonomy and our God given right to be left alone, (the abuse of which fits nicely into the liberal wish-list of control.) The electrical connection from charger-to-car doubles as a stealthy surveillance tool. Every interaction records the time, date, location, mileage, etc. basically interfacing with the extensive computing system of the vehicle to potentially deliver any and all of the data contained in the vehicle, which is extensive. Even charging at home, with the advent of “smart meters”, consumers can “program” their vehicles to charge at off-peak power times in order to save money. This same smart meter of course is also recording the time, date, duration of charge and potentially more data from your vehicle of which you won’t even be aware.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has got the ball rolling in taking advantage of not only the surveillance aspects of the modern-electric vehicle, but to simultaneously solve the lost-revenue problem as well. Whitmer proposes using GPS technology to track vehicle-miles-driven data in order to tax driving based upon usage.
While most people don’t think of lost freedom when it comes to these technological issues, it is time we did. Incrementalism is the hardest to identify poison because it kills you so gradually and slowly while providing what seems to be a nice service or that makes your life easier and better.
Is it really a stretch to believe that if you can summons “Siri” or Google on your smart-speaker that perhaps they might be capable of eavesdropping on you? If electronics in your car can call 911 after sensing a crash, is it really a stretch to believe that same technology might be able to know how long you were parked in a bar parking lot to the interest of the local police? If you show up between charging stations and your speed was above that posted, is it a stretch for you to see yourself getting a ticket by mail a day later? Is it hard to fathom a jilted police Captain searching license plate camera databases to identify his wife’s lover?
Every time you link your phone to a vehicles blue-tooth connection in order to use hands-free cell service, that vehicle “infotainment system” dumps the entire content of that device; call logs, list of phone numbers, texts, pictures, all of it. Think of that the next time you rent a car or sell yours to a stranger. You’re unwittingly leaving your digital DNA all over the place.
The final piece of this tech-driven plan to eliminate personal freedom completely will be the replacement of our currency with a digital version. Once this happens, (God-literally forbid), the oversight will be complete. Not only do we know where you are, how long you were there and how fast you were going; now we know if you eat too much junkfood. (Expect a call from your health-care-provider.) You drink too much alcohol. (Time for some counseling or your insurance goes up.) Didn’t show at the gym again? (Report to the doctor.) Expect “social scoring” type schemes to develop, of course for your own good, just like the Chinese system.
Those who seek to control people will suggest that you write this off as a dystopian, hyper-paranoid tale of things to come. The Covid era was a Beta-test on our reactions to authoritarianism and fear-mongering and we failed miserably. This has emboldened those who seek to control us. That good-old incrementalism isn’t noticeable until it’s too late. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
What a cruelly-ironic harbinger of thing-to-come to know that that iconic symbol of freedom and mobility, the automobile, might well serve as the intrusive and unrelenting sentinel of the beginning of that next era in American life that sees the sun-setting on what it means to be free.
Today, I walked into 80 Allen Street in Johnson City, NY for the first time since I left there in my mother’s arms some 66-years ago. A seven-family, three story walk-up with a basement apartment on the side, the standard flat-roof box of an apartment house sports a crumbling concrete front-staircase overwhelmed around the edges by grown-over weeds guarding a wide-open front door.
The place was no palace back-in-the-day, but at least it was clean, neat and occupied by modest-hard-working families like ours. Two apartments on each floor, left and right, opposing doors on a small platform between stair flights, the same today, but in 1957 the soft tones of a radio or TV show, the smells of meals being cooked or the soft cry of a baby would be the norm. Today the overwhelming odor of a wet dog and cat crap, a blaring TV, a barking dog, loud shouting and as I climbed the stairs, filthy walls probably painted while I was last there and that unmistakable smell of poverty, so familiar and so much the same no matter where you find it.
In 1957, my parents had been married only 6-years. My dad worked in the local hospital laundry and mom stayed at home with me. My sister was about to be born and we needed bigger and better digs. My grand-mother made a deal with my dad and bought a single family home just up the street that had a mother-in-law apartment, the condition being that she had her home within ours into her old-age. She died there. The rest of the in-progress Kingsley family, eventually 6 of us, lived through our formative years at 40 Allen Street, 100-yards up the street but across that imaginary line that separated poverty from plenty.
We had occupied the third-floor apartment on the left side of 80 Allen and today, instead of driving by and wondering, as I had done 100 times before, I stopped and made my way up those squeaky dirty stairs. As I made that last 180-degree turn between the second and third floors I could see that both apartment doors on the third floor were open. I heard some noise from the apartment on the right and as I approached that open door, I said, “Hello?” just as he came into view. “He” turned out to be Alan, the tenant and who would have been my neighbor across the hall had he been there 66-years ago. But Alan was there today, a slightly build black man, introducing himself as “A-L-A-N” as he paused the video game I had interrupted. I wondered why he thought it important to spell it for me, maybe because we were on A-L-L-E-N Street I guess. He had been sitting on a square plastic milk crate while playing his game and at his feet was a tin-foil ashtray with maybe 50 filtered cigarette butts competing with the other odors of the place.
Alan got up and we began to talk. I told him that I used to live across the hall and seeing the door wide open and the place vacant, I asked if he thought it would be ok if I took a quick look inside. He told me that the place was not only vacant but condemned and with that, he proceeded to give me, completely unsolicited, a tour of his own apartment before I could say thank-you and good-bye.
As Alan began the tour he warned me about the infestation of the bed-bugs. Our first stop was one inwardly facing-windowless room just off the hallway that made the lack of light seem like twilight no matter the time of day. Inside and on the floor of this door-less room Alan declared this his “shoe-closet.” Perhaps as many as 50 or so pairs of sneakers were strewn and unmatched all over the floor. As he began to tell me about his, “collection worth $5,000.00,” he snagged two multi-colored Nike shoes from the pile, holding them up while telling me they were worth $150.00 but stating that he got them for $50 bucks.
The next stop was the other bedroom, this time instead it was clothes strewn in a semi-circle on the floor in just the same fashion as the shoes, again, self-described as the mans closet.
As we moved into the kitchen, Alan demonstrated how none of the 4-burners on the gas stove would light, never mind there were no grates over the functionless burners showing nothing but the igniter sparks as Alan proved his point by turning on the burner knob only to hear the staccato tick-tick-tick-tick of the false promise of a flame.
Alan must have been saving the worst for last because the small bathroom off the kitchen was truly wretched with ripped off jagged layers of yellowed linoleum exposing a soaked wooden sub-floor dark with 100 years of stains and what must have been the original tub, crammed into a 5-by-5 closet.
As we made our way to the back porch, this was a place I remembered as a child. The wooden and open porch stretched across the width of the building linking the back doors of the apartments. A stair case zigged and zagged its way down to the parking lot, now mostly grown-over with trees and weeds gradually besting the beaten and cracked tarmac and pushing the surface back into dirt and reminding me of how 66-years can change things. As I looked over the single, three-foot-high wooden railing, I wondered what miracle of miracles kept any number of toddlers from falling to their deaths during the past 100-years.
The back door to my old apartment was open and I entered the kitchen and looked around. There was a vague familiarity but mostly I was surprised by how small the rooms were. My recollection had them twice their real size in my minds eye. As I made my way into the front of the apartment, Alan pointed out the pile of dead bumble bees in the corner of the living room. The darkness and dinginess made for a somber and sad tone that seemed to define this space now, but it wasn’t always that way.
I don’t think we knew we were poor back then, just like Alan sees himself today, the heir to his valuable sneaker collection today. No, 66-years ago, the Johnson City Fire Chief and his wife lived right next door. Next door to them was Miss Cuttings little apartment, my later-to-be high school English teacher and the woman I credit with teaching me how to write.
We were blue-collar but moving up, learning to appreciate what we would have later in life, as my father became a police officer and we finally moved up the street into 40-Allen with my grand-mother.
At 13, I became the streets paper-boy, giving me a passport into the living room of everyone on the street. Even as a young teen, the compare and contrast of what we once had versus what we now were was conspicuously obvious and now here I am back at 80 Allen standing with my new friend Alan, after a lifetime lived.
This is what it seems to me. 66-years ago, life was defined by work, family, faith, friends and community. People were on their way up; the country was on its way up. We had shared goals, shared dreams and shared interactions regardless of financial stations. It wasn’t unacceptable to start from the bottom and work your way up, it was honorable and expected.
Today, it seems that the many who are defined by the 80-Allen Streets of the world are stalled out at best, and more likely on their way down. The country is on its way down. A culture of excuses, excesses and expectations without effort has gutted what used to be a common work-ethic. We are divided like never before, have as many nightmares as dreams and wall-off each other according to financial status. The 80 Allen Streets throughout our country are crumbling and along with them those they house.
Simple observation tells the not-so-obvious story and holds the key to why. With churches on every other corner, 66-years ago most of them were well attended on Sunday’s and families, mostly spanning at least three generations went out of their way to have meals together. Today, those same churches are teetering on bankruptcy, are sparsely attended, and during the week, after the remaining few Sunday faithful have gone home, church halls quietly replace the traditional family meal for the poor and down-trodden that have nowhere else to go and no one to turn to.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s our floundering relationship with God that holds the answers.
I tell people all the time that I am so happy to be 70 instead of 30 and that is because I don’t see a happy landing for our future. I for one ply the memory of the 80 Allen Street that forged the future of our family as we passed through that station on our lives with dignity, humility and grace, earning what we eventually accomplished and buoyed by the experience that then allowed us to fully appreciate our new lives by comparison. So much of that is gone today and other than my telling others about it, I fear mightily that building a sentiment for recreating that system of maturity and growth my soon exist only as a short story as told by some old guy that has faint and fading memories of a better time.
Perspectives from the INTJ angle 