Once Upon a Time I Lived in a Place Called America

I was born in America at a time when the country was still at war with Germany and Japan and there were more patriotic people than one could imagine. I can even remember when you could still say a prayer in public, or God forbid in school. Poor fools that we were, we were still proud of our country and we believed that anyone could grow up and become President of The United States. We thought that older people should be treated with respect by the younger generation. Wasn’t that a foolish thing to believe? We were even foolish enough to think we could walk down our streets without being robed or shot or just beaten up. We even thought we could leave the keys in our cars and not have them stolen. We sent our children to school expecting them to return home alive. The school was so irresponsible that they didn’t even have a metal detector to keep the guns and other weapons out of the classroom. This one will really grab you, we even instructed our children in the use of firearms. Doesn’t it seem odd that none of our children were shot while attending school? We were under the impression that if a person worked hard and saved their money that some day they could own a home and look forward to retirement. What a novel concept to be able to live out our last years in a peaceful environment free of random break-ins and worse. I think this was referred to as The American Dream. There were a lot of things then that we all took for granted because life was good. We lived in a time of innocence where kids were still kids and didn’t know about adult things before they became adults. We had cartoons that were funny and not filled with blood and gore with evil machines killing each other or destroying cities and people. We were backward in our beliefs about what a good guy should be. We believed that the winners were the good guys that wore the white hats and stopped the robbers and other assorted thieves from committing their crimes. We believed that the sports figures should set a good example and be looked up to by the children. The sports figures in that time were just as tough and just as good as the ones of today and they thought they owed something to the public.

I don’t believe that the time I just described was a time of no problems or injustices, because it wasn’t. There were many bad things that happened then just like now but back then there we still had pride in our country, and people believed in, and lived, the American Dream. So where did it all go wrong, and better yet why? If only I were smart enough to think I could provide all the answer to why. I do know some of the reasons for the changes I have seen over the years but would anyone be willing to listen? Probably not, because the people that need to listen will not be willing to accept the reasons for the downfall of the American Dream. The when part is a little easier to pin down, I believe it all started in the sixties as the result of the country being split up over the war in Vietnam. The public lost faith in Government and a lot of people turned from a normal life to one filled with drugs. Along with all this the family unit was slowly being eroded and people started turning to the if it feels good do it philosophy. We were all glad to throw off the constraints of the fifties and free love rained. Was it fun? Yes, but what was the price we wound up paying for this so called freedom? The biggest price was the erosion of the concept of faithful marriage and the results of this were a higher divorce rate, leading to an increase of the single parent family. About this time we started to scorn our religious teachings and through the use of so called mind expanding drugs we decided that God was dead. The next step was the attack on religion as a whole by the antireligious movement endeavoring to take God out of everything. This battle is still going on and will continue until we come to the realization that God does in fact belong in our lives.

I am sad to say that I have lived long enough to see the country I was once proud to call my home come to be in the condition it is now. We are hated all over the world in some cases justifiably, but not in most. We The United States Of America are still the first to come to the aid of any nation that suffers a disaster with whatever needs to be done. For some reason I will never understand we have decided to become the world police agency. We are trying to bring law and order to other nations when we can not even have law and order in our own country. We are trying to feed the hungry of the world when we let our own people starve in the streets. We are trying to make it possible for people in other countries to get an education when we are turning out students that cant read of write. We are taking God to court on a daily basis when the corrupt political element continues to robe and steal from us and we sit by doing nothing about it. We are promoting gay marriage when at the same time we are tearing down the concept of people being married. We sit and wonder why our children are doing the things they do but what are we doing to stop it from happening? Is installing metal detectors and adding police officers to the schools the answer, or should we be doing something constructive with our children so they wont want to kill each other? I didn’t have the best home life when I grew us but I did have a Mother and Father that were home every night. I can’t imagine what it would be like to come home to an empty house as a kid. Is it any wonder that kids with this kind of home life turn to gangs for a replacement for the family that they don’t have?

The things I see on television every day, advertisements for products that I was in my twenties before I knew such products existed. I am not a prudish person, but I think that some things do not need to be shown for audiences of all ages. Call it old fashioned in you like but the video games that the kids have access to with the graphic violence in them leads them to committing the same violence in real life. It is a short step from blowing off the head of a game person to doing it for real. The realization of what they have done hits home after the fact when it’s too late to do anything about it.

Now if you have read this far you are saying I hear a lot of complaining but I don’t hear a lot of answers. I have few answers but I truly believe that if we could return to a belief in God and retain the family unit a lot of the problems would go away. I probably am coming off as what some of you would call a religious nut, but I do believe in God and I think that God is the answer. For my beliefs I am not ashamed and if by chance I am right wouldn’t it be a better way to live?