As an old Red Buttons record puts it, “Strange Things are Happening.” Strange.
Like parents not letting their children listen to the President of the United States as he tells those children to study hard and be good citizens.
Like people going to town hall-type meetings, not to learn, but strictly to disrupt.
You see them on TV, faces distorted with hatred, yelling silly things about Socialism and becoming a dictatorship, etc. Like a Congressman bleating out “you lie” during a presidential address. Did their mamas not teach them any manners?
Oh, and like beautiful teachers abusing innocent teen-age boys. Shameful.
Really bad things, too. Mass shootings, drugs, drugs, drugs, and it goes on and on.
We can take some consolation, I suppose, in knowing that it has always been that way, people doing silly and evil things to other people since we started walking upright.
Take a year like 1939,for instance.
For about 85 percent of our population, it was a very good year. The Great Depression was grinding down.
There was a war in Europe, but we weren’t in it yet. Joe Louis fought about once a month. The Roebuck and Ward catalogs came regularly, Fords finally had hydraulic brakes.
Chevys had the shift lever on the steering column.
Hollywood reached a peak in moviemaking with films like “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
Big cities had at least two daily papers.
We managed to struggle along without AC and cell phones and TV and automatic transmissions.
Daddy got a job (besides farming). But, people of color still had to suffer the cruel, stupid humiliations they had endured for decades. And, you’ll find this hard to believe, but there were actually people who didn’t like FDR.
He, too, was subjected to charges of Socialism and such.
And there were bad things, too. Not as many, because there weren’t as many people.
The population was about 130 million (about right), far less than half of today’s count.
Percentage-wise, I suppose, it was about the same.
Speaking of Socialism, I know I like Social Security and Medicare.
The hard-righters say if we invested our own money instead of paying into Social Security, we’d come out better.
Maybe, if we were incredibly lucky, and picked some really good stuff, like Colonial or GM.
Paul Davis had a good line about universal health care: The people who are against it are the ones who already have it.
Strange things are happening.
Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.
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