Today is my 89th birthday and birthdays are as good a time as any to reflect on what has gone wrong or right along the way.
That path is considerably longer as one enters a tenth decade
I was born into the lower middle class in 1935, smack-dab in the middle of the Great Depression. There was a lot going on societally in those times, and when someone hungry knocked on the kitchen window of our house in Evanston, they got a sandwich and a glass of cold milk. That was called neighborliness in those times but now it would be called engagement.
Neighborliness has a sense of love and compassion for those less able than yourself, while engagement is something armies do against other armies. Language matters, and George Carlin has a great piece about the deterioration of language across the decades. Now, there’s a rule about links in the middle of essays—don’t do it, because it takes your reader elsewhere.
You have my permission to go elsewhere because George does what I try to do, and does it so…