The country I grew up in has gone missing and I’m not all that sure where to look. Let me try to define it. Our founders called it an experiment, but it seemed more real to me than that as a young man.
But I’m an old man now and old men tend to look backward rather than forward
I remember the last truly altruistic event in our post WWII history. That was the Marshall Plan, the first (and last) time a conquering nation would foot the bill to rebuild what it had destroyed. I wonder if one man in a hundred could tell you today what it was or who it helped.
We were different then. My dad set aside his landscape business to work at Douglas Aircraft, building DC-3 interiors. Young men went to Europe for the second time in twenty years to save what had been crafted as a free world. My mother saved bacon-fat for munitions and everyone tended a Victory Garden. When our soldiers came home the government sent them to college for free and all we wanted was to drop the weapons, get a job, raise a fam…