You probably have heard me relate to you that I wrote a weekly column for over 100 weekly newspapers for over 25 years…big deal, move on nothing to see here.
But the upshot of this column is to tell you that in those 1300+ columns I purposely stayed away from writing about some things.
In particular, Henry Ford….I have no idea why folks would get so mad at me for writing what little I knew about him, but they did. Sports…I know nothing about sports so anything I wrote was bound to get someone’s panties in a wad..so I wrote very little about sports of any kind.
Politics. Here I had fun….you can write about politicians and what you think about them all you want and you will almost never make anyone mad….but when you try to tell people how to vote or who to vote for….watch out. This is columnist quicksand.
My advice to anyone is simply this…”The person who does not vote …deserves to be governed by those who get elected.” I am not going to try and convince you who to vote for. This would be foolish of me. Most of us already know who we support or don’t support and my comments on way or another will have zero effect on what you believe or choose to believe. I have my reasons to support who I like as well as you do.
So, I am telling you that this time next week, the election will be over. You need to vote. You do not have any right to complain, bitch or moan about who gets elected if you did not take the time to go to the polls and exercise your right to vote.
No matter what you think about the current administration or the past administration, you must be honest with yourself and admit that we are living in the best country in the world at this time.
Do we have problems?
Of course we do, who doesn’t?
Are we making progress in solving those problems? Yes, we are, slowly but surely.
Could we go faster? In some ways, not so in others.
Do we have all of the answers necessary to provide all of the solutions? Nope and probably will never have all of them. As fast as we solve one, another one comes up for us to review.
Are our problems unique to this country? No, not by a long shot.
You might (maybe not) be interested in knowing that in 2018, I was the oldest graduate at Sam Houston State University when I got my Master’s degree in History. I love history as it just reaffirms to me that nothing in mankind has changed over the course of time.
You thing the news media is bad today? Go back and read Cicero back in 50 or so BC. He was mad at the so called ‘fake’ news that were published by the Roman equivalent of newspapers in that day. Julius Caesar wrote for some of these so called papers and you can easily imagine his position on the government at the time. (I need to research what exactly a ‘paper’ looked like-(–stone—clay—paper?)
Fast forward to the election of 1800 in which Jefferson was running against John Adams. Got some spare time, read up on the mud that was being slung from both sides against these 2 candidates for the presidency of the United States. Today’s name calling runs a distant 2nd to those two founding fathers.
Here is a partial description of the verbiage that was used…
Jefferson’s camp accused President Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” In return, Adams’ men called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was “one of the most detestable of mankind.”
Since there wasn’t any radio, television or internet one can only imagine how these descriptions got convoluted being passed along from one person to another.
But we survive, didn’t we?
Yes, we did and have improved upon ourselves little by little, year after year.
So my advice to you is this. Don’t give up. We have been through worse times than this in years past. Go forward, believe in your country and its future.
You have a gift that others in various parts of the world do not have nor will they ever.
Get up, get out and go vote.
If you like what you read, hit the like button…feel free to share this and follow me on Facebook as I get started back on the road to mojo rehab.
If you don’t like what you read…go somewhere else.
I’m trying to stay positive….thanks