Thoughts

 As I write this today, I am full of many thoughts about things that are going on, both personally but also in the wider sphere of society.  As I mentioned about my dissertation, I am at a place now where I can start writing more again here and exploring other topics.  But it has been so long since I have written regularly that I have a bit of brain fog about what to say, so we will just go with the proverbial flow here and I will speak randomly of things I have been thinking about. 

Earlier this week, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was hit by a large cargo barge, and the entire thing just collapsed into the Chesapeake Bay.  Although it has been about 50 or more years since I have been on that bridge, I know it well - growing up as a kid I spent about a year in Baltimore with many of our family who lived there then.  Back in the day (from the late 1950s until the early 1980s approximately), Baltimore (in particular the western fringes of the city closer to Catonsville and Ellicott City) was a haven for many West Virginians.  The lure of good-paying jobs compelled many from our state to move there, and our family was no exception.  The areas between Wilkins Avenue and West Pratt Street could be called the "Hillbilly Ghetto" then, as it was populated by a lot of West Virginians.  But this too was a major trend in many cities - Cincinatti, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, DC, and other large metropolitan areas adjacent to the Appalachians drew many people from West Virginia, Kentucky, and even Tennessee to them.  In all honesty, in northern West Virginia, the boom industries that originally supplied good incomes for many people (coal, the railroads, timber) were in decline, and people needed to survive.  So, in the aftermath of World War II many West Virginians headed to the cities for work.  It was equally true elsewhere in the nation as well - my dad's family in southern Alabama moved to Jacksonville and Pensacola down there for many of the same reasons. Although the greatest uptick in migration to the cities was after World War II, there was a large migration of West Virginians heading for Baltimore and other urban centers as far back as the Great Depression.  As my family and other mountain transplants began to become more stable and affluent, they would do one of two things eventually.  First, many would eventually save a nice nest egg to retire back home, like my late Aunt Angie and Uncle Charles did.  Second, for those who chose to stay as well as their kids and grandkids who were born and raised in the city, there was a move out of the "Hillbilly Ghetto" to the suburbs, and I have a lot of cousins that still live in the outlying communities of Baltimore to this day.  When that started happening, the cities unfortunately began to decline as other groups moved into those areas and bad Democrat-led bureaucracies became more corrupt and hastened the decline of those old communities as crime rose and prices for basic good followed.  The communities many of my family lived in back in the day in Baltimore are no longer recognizable - urban decay has destroyed many of those areas now.  Recently, when I was doing a street-view look on Google Maps at the old neighborhoods, I was shocked to see on camera a Black guy near an old bar my uncles used to hang out urinating on a street sign!  This was in broad daylight and there for everyone to see too.  Yet, he more than likely got away with doing it because in all honesty the apathy foisted upon society today by corrupt rich career politicians is sickening.  While they will spend millions in taxpayer dollars locking up old grannies who may have been taking pictures of the Capital on January 6, 2021, as well as targeting everyone from devout Catholics to a former President, many of these same hacks will let real crime run rampant on the streets of major cities.  San Francisco, for instance, has become the biggest toilet/gay bathhouse in the country, and many who have been there have accounted that you cannot even walk three feet in any direction on certain streets there without risking stepping in a pile of human feces or on a drug needle.  But that is Leftist Utopia - no, those pesky Catholics and pro-lifers are the bigger "threat to democracy" according to such crooks as that dried-up old California raisin Maxine Waters, or the pimp-daddy from Georgia, Hank Johnson.  Then you have clowns such as Steve Cohen in Tennessee calling the nation of Israel "genocidal" (mind you, he is supposed to be Jewish himself) while at the same time getting his own palms greased by his buddy Erdogan in Turkey, who is really advocating genocide against Armenians and other minorities there.  And don't get me started on those idiots that make up "the Squad" - they are almost laughable if they weren't potentially so dangerous in their rhetoric.  Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi's emasculated lapdog in the Senate, openly calls for violence against Supreme Court Justices while at the same time calling Donald Trump a "dangerous insurrectionist."  On and on that goes, with more career politicians and grandstanders acting hypocritically when they themselves are the worst examples of human sin on the planet.  But they are OK, right?  I mean, when you have megalomaniacal billionaires like George Soros, Klaus Schwab, and Bill Gates funding you, money can fix everything.  The takeaway from this is that many so-called "progressives" are actually the most ambivalent against true progress, and they know it - they don't really care about the rhetoric they spout, as the majority of them want one thing and one thing only - complete power.  And, ironically, they are not even confined to one political party either - alongside crazy Leftists like AOC are nominal Republican politicians (Michael Knowles calls them "squishes") who are just as bad, just as corrupt, and they have been in power for a long time, and it has gone to their heads - those are the Liz Cheneys, the Adam Kinsingers, the Lindsay Grahams, the Dan Crenshaws, and others (with their Democrat cohorts, they are collectively called the Uniparty).  Maybe it is time to clean house in DC - it is long overdue.  Any rate, I apologize for getting off on a political discourse, but it's been in my head the past few days and I needed to vent it.  Thank you for allowing me that. 

I have been thinking about the old days a lot, as the unthinkable has happened to me.  At 54, I have become the elder now, as many of those who were before me are now gone - I just lost my last grandparent a couple of months ago, and yesterday it was two years since my mother passed away. When I was a kid, my grandparents were all my age now, and there were still people around from the 1800s then.  I belong to Generation X, perhaps the last actual generation that more or less carried on the values and norms of earlier generations - the Millennials just didn't care, and Gen Z is putting forth a noble effort to recover some things, but they don't quite understand the perspective like my generation did.  My generation recalls vividly the evils of communism, and we saw it fall too - I remember the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as the courageous Chinese student movement in Tianmen Square.  I remember Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement in Poland, and how it transformed the country.  And, there was still a vivid memory of atrocities like the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and we learned about those things in school.  Back in the day, I actually considered myself a "liberal" because I loved classic jazz and read things such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  I loved Black history then because it was taught right - it highlighted the accomplishments of many Black figures in our nation's history, but did so within the context that they were part of American History and contributed rich things to it as the legacy of our nation.  We respected the flag, we valued faith in God (even if we didn't always practice it), and many of us aspired to college education, and making our own contributions to American society.  We were not a perfect generation by any means - unfortunately Madonna was a product of our times then! - but we at least had scruples.  I look at the world now and wonder to myself "what the hell happened??"  The violence, the division, the craziness of today's society has me shaking my head in shock.  Thankfully, this "woke" nonsense being pushed now was not a thing back in the day - sure, it existed on the radical fringe, but no one took it seriously then as many of us were just content to be left alone to be free to live our lives.  But not anymore - if you say the wrong pronoun, you can be sued by a greedy attorney representing a crazy woman with a fat gut, blue hair, and a nose ring.  If you say you are Christian and you believe in the dignity of all humanity as individuals, it gets you labeled as a "racist" or worse (which is odd, being you just said you respected their dignity as an individual and that skin color is not a measure of character, yet somehow that is "racist??").  Common things that really shouldn't generate controversy - a glass of milk, a cup of coffee, algebra, correct grammar, and being on time for your job - are now labeled as "oppression of the patriarchy."   And now, a woman can identify as a man, and vice versa, and male perverts can read stories dressed as women to your kindergarteners. When I was in high school, not only was all this foolish BS ridiculous, but if you said things like that then you may be referred to psychological therapy (which still should be the case).  What in hell happened to America??  So much more could be said here, but we will leave it at that. 

As I get older, I long more and more for yesteryear, and at times looking at what is happening in society makes me wish time travel were a thing.  As smart and rich as Elon Musk is, I don't think even he could pull off that invention though.  We cannot reverse time, and the 1980s will not come back as they were then.  But I believe there can be a restoration of some level of sanity and decency, and thankfully now many people share that hope.  I only hope our "overlords" - corrupt politicians and psychotic billionaire oligarchs - don't lead us to our destruction as a civilization before that happens.  When we are now engaged in a new "Cold War" and we are now the bad guys, that is sobering - in a famous rant in the 1960s, Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev declared to Kennedy "we will bury you."  Ironically, as the Russians now become saner, the US and Europe seem to be descending into a self-inflicted psychosis.  Maybe we should come to the realization that Vladimir Putin may not be our worst enemy - we are our own worst enemy.  

Thank you for allowing me to share.  As I said, I wasn't sure where this was going to go, but it felt good to talk about things.  See you later and have a blessed Easter season if you are my fellow Christians celebrating it this weekend.