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BS ‘n’ About…
B.S.
Hi there. I’m Bob Smith and I thought I ought to introduce myself and give an overview of how the thought process that went into this has evolved. In many ways the stage was set for my outlook on life by the consequences of my birth. Conceived a Libra, I popped out a two-and-a-half month premature Leo. Mom and Dad were told not to get too attached and I was thrown into the primitive, (no plastic!), nursery to fight for my life, a battle it seems I’m still waging. As I was blowing out the candle on my 1st Birthday cake, Mom was in the hospital giving birth to stillborn twins, victims of yet another asthma attack and premature birth. Quite the first year, even if I slept through most of it.
I grew up as the first grandchild of the first grandchild of the first grandchild in my Mom’s very long-lived, very serious German family. I saw more wrinkles before I was five than your average geriatric nurse, playing on the floors of the dusty Victorian Drawing Rooms of my elderly relatives, exposed to values and lifestyles that have since passed into history. …exposed to a simpler way of life that had been with us since ‘The Beginning’.
My childhood was spent in Leave-it-to-Beaverville while the Civil War that was the ‘60’s poured into town through the tube. It was still FDR’s New Deal America so Dad had a union job, Mom stayed home, the family had health benefits, two cars, and we owned our own home.
There was enough left over to get me an economics degree from the University of Chicago and the opportunity to register as a Republican in the last years of Mayor Daley’s watch. In those early days I was all for the Reagan Revolution, even though I saw through the ‘social services to the states’ proposal and never did trust the ‘trickle-down’ stuff. At the time we needed a strong President who could unite us and make us proud to be Americans again. Reagan did all that and more.
Having lived my adult life in Republican America, these days I’ve admittedly gone back to my New Deal roots and the conservative Victorian values that spawned them. Money doesn’t motivate me and empire doesn’t appeal to me so I’ve spent most of my adult life on the outside looking in, left behind by the Republican firestorm, trying to find relevance in the New Deal values with which I was raised.
That’s not saying that the message-less Democrats impress me all that much these days, either. Neither Party has done anything much to better the lives of average American people in a long time. If at times it seems that the Republicans are bearing the brunt of my ‘questions’, it is only because they’re the ones claiming to have all the ‘answers’ these days. So I guess it evens out in the end.
To me, America seems strong in a Wall Street-Special Forces kind of way, but as a people we seem more divided, more unsure of ourselves. The liberal New Deal values which dominated our Not That Long Ago, as dragged home from the mines, mills, and factories, by our parents, are nowhere to be found. We are no longer the obvious, no-doubt-about-it Good Guys.
When I compare the America of today to the America of my youth, it disturbs me greatly. I can’t help but feel that those Victorian Drawing Rooms would have been appalled by our excesses, our waste, our fear, our greed, our selfishness, our lying, cheating, and stealing. I’m not proud of what we’ve done with the America they built for us. None of our results seem in line with the values they beat into us as kids.
America’s strength has always been its diversity of people, united in righteous common cause, fighting for the ‘huddled masses yearning to be free’. Most of us can remember a time when America stood for hard work, open borders, and the Statue of Liberty. The following pages are my attempt to understand how we could have changed so much, so quickly.
I own up to the fact that the America I compare our present times to is an ideal that we’ve never quite achieved. And that the New Deal Days of Not That Long Ago had their fair share of problems, too. I only use and exaggerate these ideals to better enable us to see the present in the context of where we’ve been and where we’re headed. I choose to naively believe that we were “conceived in liberty” and that “all men are created equal”. I believe in the America represented by the Founding Fathers, our patriotic songs, our Constitution, and the Statue of Liberty. That is the ideal I pledged allegiance to first thing every morning in grade school. That is the America I’m willing to fight for.
But BS ‘n’ About isn’t a partisan political rant. I try my best to stay out of the way of the issues by accentuating facts and leaving room for your own conclusions. Admittedly, I’m going to present those facts filtered through all the prejudices alluded to in the last few paragraphs and I’m going to use every trick in my literary repertoire to find common cause and help you draw the same conclusions I do. But in the end, most of what’s in here is fact. Most of it is stuff you already know. So I don’t presume to tell you how it is. I’m asking what you think.
I apologize in advance for the audacity it takes to propose that we are deluding ourselves about almost everything, not to mention the righteousness implied by the hope that my fervor and writing skills can actually make a difference. What will make all this feel different is its scale and perspective. I try to look at the forest without being unduly influenced by the trees. I’ve tried to take a step backward and address the issues within a context of history, uninfluenced by time and place: What will they be saying about us a thousand years from now? What would our ancestors have to say about what we’ve done with the world they left us? Where do we fit into the grand scheme of things?
I write this as a scared little human being trying to make sense of his crazy world, as one lemming among millions, suggesting maybe we ought to slow down and consult the map. What follows is nothing like anything you’ve ever read. ‘The King has no Clothes’. (He really doesn’t!)
I accept the possibility that I might be absolutely nuts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m also wrong. So put on your thinking cap, be prepared to challenge me every step of the way, and let’s get on with it. Forgive me in advance for when I get in the way of the message.
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