When I was a kid and TV was new, it was easy to tell the good guys from the villains. The heroes wore white hats. They were polite to the ladies. The bad guys came in all kinds of getups- Nazi uniforms, black hats, peroxide blonde hair, red pointy tails and nails-through-the-noggin. There was nothing subtle about it. You were with the good guys or you weren't.
By the time I approached puberty, lines blurred. Walter Cronkite told us that we were losing the war in Viet Nam. Somebody killed our beloved president and his brother and our civil rights leader.
Suddenly all those stories about slavery and lynchings and brothers killing each other in a horrible civil war and internment camps and smallpox blankets swirled in a heartbreaking stew in my struggling brain, already trying to make sense out of a world that was far more complicated than the one I knew.
Now I'm in England, far from the circus that I read about every day in the New York Times. I don't hear much from anyone, certainly not the ones that I was in close contact with in the US. The villains couldn't be more obvious to me. Half of the population that I left behind agree except that they seem to have a different idea of the good guys and the bad guys.
I surely hope the good guys win.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
I have a UK friend who I've written to for years about records and music findings, but never met. His most written question has always been "So what music have you found since we last wrote?" It's now changed to "HOW CAN HE GET AWAY WITH IT??? WHY DON'T MORE PEOPLE FIGHT IT ???" Which I tell him is exactly what we ask. But we don't happen to have the wall of stupidity and egotism matched with a lot of bark chewing dullards who only care if their bank account goes up and keeps going. It's like the Wall St. Collapse, only without brains or sympathy. And my pro-trumpperi friends keep saying "Ha ha dream on, you'll see! He's gonna save us!" But then again they also say " If he came up with a cure for cancer you guys would say he didn't!" Right. Especially since he hasn't got any brainwaves working and barely functions successfully at breathing. How do we put up with it? We'll see....
ReplyDeleteI'm not anonymous - I'm Greg Pennell! Always have been as far as I know.....
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