In the past 19 years, our country has changed course in a manner that reflects that title song sung by Tony Bennett. It is a love song about a lost love that said… “The world was sweeter than we knew”– or appreciated!
I grew up during the Great Depression in San Francisco, a city that had a rich mix of ethnic groups in our grammar and high schools. Our sports teams reflected nicknames for those we played with and against: Zuggie, Hooks, Yamo, and Dutch. They were names of endearment and lasting friendships … until the day our Japanese friends disappeared over night; even then we kept track of them.
When I was 7, on crowned cable cars or street cars, a sharp elbow in my ribs from my mother was a signal to get up and give my seat to woman or elderly person—lesson learned and kept.
My Army days gave me a great admiration serving with soldiers from the South and their warm Yessum or Yessir, regardless who they were talking to!
In the last 19 years we have slipped into nationwide meanness with using unloving nicknames and threats of retaliation over some hurt. It’s lost us friends, much love, and that rare place which people looked at us as freedom’s example. They knew we had stumbled over “Manifest Destiny” and did a terrible job with “Reconstruction” in solving the aftermath of slavery, and have had bad presidents. But they still loved us.
And they also knew Hoover, a Quaker engineer, had gotten food to starving Europe after World War I, the Marshall Plan after WWII, and we joined NATO to repel Russia from the Ukraine, a free country which had lost 4 million people under Stalin. (It was not a cause measured in money or minerals.)
Like any nation that makes a few bad choices, we have reached a point where we are losing our most important quality—TRUST. If lost, it is almost irretrievable, a tragedy that was unnecessary, played with like a pinball machine hoping it would yield money for a few and pablum for the masses! And most of all played by someone convicted of fraud!
Where he should be rushing missile defense weapons into Ukraine and insisting that the bombing in Gaza cease, Trump’s playing golf.
Trump has proved you can horse whisper a jackass! It is quite evident that the tariff fiasco was to show Trump was King of the Mountain, a Mafia don to the world.
He will get the tariffs he wants— but the cost of not going to those classes on “Econ 201 World Wide Trade” will be felt by the 99.9 percent of the world’s population. He really doesn’t care about those retirees with small 401Ks or the increase in food cost—it’s his temporary adjustment, so suck it up, from the kid who never went without hamburgers.
The only thing missing now is the permission to send anyone who insults Trump to what Herr Steven Miller would call the “perfect solution,” a ride to San Salvador’s motel and a slow death!
Once upon a time, we had a working Congress (without the far-right money that replaced moderate Republicans) and a Supreme Court that wasn’t as bad as the Dred Scot court.
We had a nation that believed it had a special mission in this world that helped the least of them to gain freedom and enough of them to be loved and to be kind!
Tony Van Vliet, who calls himself a former Republican, is a Korean War veteran, a retired OSU forestry professor and a former Oregon legislator. He lives in Corvallis.
