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