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It’s Halloween, and we are spooked.
According to ancient pagan tradition, it’s the scary season — the dead supposedly walking the earth and all that — but it’s not the ancient pagans shaking in their sandals.
The whole country seems to be going around with a lump in its throat and a fear-puckered butt. Most folks seem inclined to nod and agree with the worried 35-year-old mom quoted in a recent newspaper story: “It’s very different from when I was little.”
Let’s see, looking back 35 years, the Middle East was a mess, the economy was queasy, we were stuck in a war we couldn’t seem to get out of and we were led by a president we’d re-elected
against our better judgment, whose low regard for the niceties of the law threatened to put the Constitution itself in jeopardy.
Well, I guess some things never change. But back then, I don’t remember so many being so scared of so much … for so little reason.
From where I sit, it seems people haven’t been seeing so many ghosts, goblins and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night since we quit burning witches, a practice certain of our fundamentalist brethren seem to be not all that adverse to resuming — provided they can calculate the carbon-offset for an auto-de-fe. We’re frightened on the left, scared on the right and pretty darn nervous right down the middle — all in a world that’s probably never been safer.
Yeah, think about it. When she was little, that worried mom likely lived in a house coated with lead paint, bounced around sans seat belt or high-tech baby seat in an airbagless automobile burning leaded gas and plenty of it.
She grew up on red meat, whole milk, Wonder Bread, lots of butter — and for a real treat, her mom served up a seven-can casserole, with a Twinkie for dessert, none of which was stamped with an expiration date.
Kids solved their own playground problems, often as not with a fist fight in the alley. The “dumb kids” dropped out of school, got a job, got married, bought a house and raised a family — while their academically inclined classmates graduated and, in time, moved in next door. Sort of “no child left behind,” without all the tests. She survived second-hand smoke, legal booze at 18, Chernobyl, Reaganomics, leisure suits, Monica-gate, disco and New Coke.
She’s right, things were different ...
They were different on the front page, too. Today, we have an administration soiling itself in fear that Ahmadinejad’s Iran, if it tries real hard, might be able to come up with some sort of atom bomb in seven or eight years.
Thirty-five years ago, there were 15,000 Soviet A-bombs pointed at us — not to mention the Red Chinese nukes. And if Ahmadinejad is nuts, I recall Nikita Khrushchev, red-faced, pounding his shoe on the table at the U.N. when things weren’t going his way.
Let’s not forget, it was 45 years ago this month that Kennedy and Khrushchev were nose-to-nose over nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy resolved that situation without firing a shot, and because he did, we’re here to remember it.
We were lucky then to have leaders who didn’t scare too easily in a world where there were genuine things to be feared. The collection of misfits and nutjobs our current leaders have dignified with the sobriquet of Islamo-facists would have been vanishingly small potatoes to
Truman, Eisenhower or Churchill. They’d faced and fought the real thing. They’d have called them what they are — thugs, kidnappers, murderers and thieves — and seen to it they were tracked down, put on trial and packed off to prison; glad and relieved to be rid of them, but never giving them such credit as being a real threat to the essential survival of our country or the way we live.
But on this Halloween, we seem to be a spooked nation, cowed by a rag-tag bunch of criminals and tin-pot politicians. It’s past time we straightened up and announced to ourselves and to the world that there are no monsters in the closet, no bogeymen under the bed.
Bin Laden’s hiding in a cave and save for a few rough spots, all is right with the world.
Today may be Halloween, but Thursday is All Saints Day — the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, life over death, of courage over fear.
Were things “very different when I was little?” Yes and no.
Are we, as a people, different? I hope not, I certainly hope not.
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3522 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com.
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sanfi74 wrote on Nov 6, 2007 10:08 AM: