A life of progressiveness until now. I hope it can continue.

[Mountainman]

Let's look at what has happened in my lifetime.
I was born 9 month's after Japan surrendered. My mom visited my dad at Fort Riley after he spent 4 years in the war in Europe. I must have been conceived there. Because of the first two nuclear bomb drops my dad did not have to be part of an invasion of Japan.

During the 50's we get a lot of consumer goods like TVs and dish washers that were new to all of us. We saw the Korean war on TV every night that war was going on.

We saw the beginnings of the struggles by blacks and women for equality. We saw people beginning to question authority and fundamentalism.

We saw the stand off between the US and Russia over the missiles in Cuba. We built bomb shelters and feared a nuclear attack. We were taught to hate godless communism.

The civil rights movement began with a lot of killing and beating up of people because they demanded equal rights. Race riots broke out all over the country.

When I was a senior in high school. John Kennedy was assassinated.

I got drafted and was sent to the Vietnam war.

Dr. Martin Luther King was assasinated then Bobby Kennedy. We felt that no good leader could ever be around for long before someone would kill them.

Malcolm X was assented. I really liked him for being able to change his thinking after he came back from a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The anti war protests got bigger and bigger. Students were killed at Kent State.

There was the summer of love at Haight Ashbury in San Francisco.

We lost the war in Vietnam. Nixon was impeached and forced to resign over Watergate.

Jimmy Carter was president during the time of 12% inflation. We had the misery index. Americans were taken hostage in Iran.

Through all of this I thought that these struggles were happening because they had to happen if a society was to make progress. Though people died their kids would live in a better world because of it.

Then Reagan became president. I began to feel that the country had lost it's mind in electing him. How could so many people give up on progressivism? We had Jerry Falwell and the moral majority, We had the religious right which was neither religious or right.

Eight years of Reagan then 4 years of Bush. The conservative revolution. The gap between the rich and poor began to get wider instead of smaller. Iran Contra happened and people didn't care.

There was Perestroika. Then the Berlin wall was torn down and we began to talk about the peace dividend. I had hope again that we were going to learn from the past.

Then Bill Clinton was elected. He could have done so much but he was just a bit left of center and he couldn't keep his johnson in his pants.

The biggest let down of all was the election of 2000. Imagine, we had a balanced budget, there was relative peace in the world. There was a social security surplus. Gore had great progressive plans for us all. I had a lot of hope again.

I had forgotten that for the last 20 years or so the conservatives were working in the background plotting their evil take over of the country.

The supreme court decision that put Bush in office was too much! I lost all respect for the court system and lost all hope that there would be a progressive revolution in my life time.

I'm not too far away from retirement. I watch what is going on politically and wonder if the MSM will ever get back to what it was when Walter Cronkite told us how it was every night and we trusted what he said. I wonder if Americans will ever get back to intellectualism and begin to think for themselves again.

I think now that people will have to hurt a whole lot more than they have before they wake up to what has happened to their lives. How could we go to war over a bunch of lies that people swallowed so easily? How could they be instilled with such fear that they are willing to give up their freedoms for a false sense of security?
Will the middle class survive?

Well time will tell. Right now we need to get on the ball and take back this country!