Catchin' up.
One of the first things I remember seeing that I hadn't yet
noticed after six years abroad was how very quickly things happen here. Now,
truthfully, not everything that's happened here in the US since about 1968 has
been truly great. Some things have. I keep waiting for the movie to end all
movies about the moon landing to come out and all I've seen is Apollo 13 - or
"a near total failure that didn't really prove anything anyhow." Not
fair in my book. The Lunar Landing was an intensely important and difficult
achievement. This all occurred during the "Vietnam War" and extremely
hostile and continual and well publicized criticism of our country as some sort
of evil place that never could and never would do anyone any good - sort of
like Israel right now. We were the bad people we had slaves and were racists,
war mongers and otherwise ignorant people. The Jews were slaves in Egypt you
know. The whole story is in the bible. Of the four years I lived in Israel, I
never heard one person say that any of his problems stemmed from slavery in
Egypt. The attitude in Israel was that the people themselves were ultimately
responsible for their fate and that's life. And, in fact, that's how it is. So,
vicious forces seem to have aligned against the good ol' USA in ways not so
flattering to us.
So, we had a general falling out and away from our very fine
and very deserved patriotism, pride in our country, loyalty to our own here. I
noticed that too. I also noticed very heavy suppression of white people here in
our cities. It's still going on and I'm sure most of you are familiar with the
effects though many persons might not have experienced times when there was a
full and unembarrassed pride in our country.
In 1974 when I came back here from England, there were
convenience stores that stayed open until late at night and then all night
long. The music was pretty good too. The ice cream was never better and I spent
most of my time drinking coffee - which is especially good here- and eating ice
cream which is a special case of happy that is unknown elsewhere and taken for
granted here.
I enlisted in the US Army, remarried and eventually changed
my major in college and became a science teacher. It took a long time and was
very difficult. It was very much an "against the current" swim.
I've seen the widespread development and use of personal
electronic information processing systems, cell phones, and the internet. I
worked on this stuff. I was a technician for RCA and worked on one of the
Apollo cameras. I also worked for Univac (now Unisys) on the development of
third generation random access computer memories. It's very satisfying to see
this particular thing take hold. Sure beats the bad PR from Vietnam and all the
slavery.
An appreciable number of our people found some sort of
comfort from drugs. I didn't know any, but I did witness some use of marijuana
and odd laughter here and there. I think this was also blown way out of
proportion by the media.
All in all, I'd say that these past few decades have seen
enormous and significant change including a near doubling of population and
somehow the "Americanization"
of new tens of millions of persons who've at least learned the basics
here, including, "people are all different, but we are all human
beings" and "we are much stronger as a nation united than as
scattered people." This is who and why we are as far as I can tell.
