Just when I thought I was back on the blob track I lost everything I wrote. So here we go again.
Today, when I went to the drugstore I opened the door to enter at exactly the same time that a man and his wife were trying to exit. He said “please come through, I’ll hold the door”. “No, please,” I replied, “allow me to hold the door”. “Oh no,” he said, you first”. The, ‘you first,’ went on for what seemed like an hour, but might have been five minutes. The back and forth seemed awfully familiar. A person, such as myself, who can’t remember anything, has to dig into their treasured mind of memories, to try to find an inkling of where and why.
Zounds!, The memory whacked me right in the head! Ronald Reagan. New Hampshire. 1976. He was coming out of the hotel and I was going in. He held one door for me and I held the other door for him. He was a Republican candidate a I was a Democratic staffer. It was a different time. Holding the door was symbolic of the courtesy that existed in the nation’s political past. It didn’t matter the Party, everyone was civil.. It was a time when elected officials respected one another. It was, as my mother would say, ‘what was, was.’
It was such a different time. It was a time when Presidential candidates as well as elected officials respected one another. Sure, you paid for commercials that attacked your opposition, that were incredibly negative, sometimes heart wrenching. But your in-person behavior was always civil. That is true in local campaign as well as National. The Presidency, no matter who occupied the White House, was always something important. That’s why I can admit today, with great reluctance, that when Tony Snow was George H W Bush’s (the first George Bush) White House Press secretary, I did help him figure out how to write speeches for that President. Needless, to say I did not do that when he ran against Clinton. But friends help friends, or so it was in the past.
Anyway, lets get back to this WW3 thing because war, not only politics is just not the same. This morning there was another mass shooting. You go NRA…. Guns do kill people. War this time is like a game of hide and seek, only the hiders don’t know who they are, and the seekers are not just looking, they are also killing. And you never know where the seeker is going to be. I love analogies, even if they don’t make sense, and are simply apples and oranges. I just threw that in to add to the confusion. Maybe WW3 is an exaggeration but a war with no rules when you don't know who you’re fighting is also something that the USA has never done before. We don’t even know when an act IS terrorism because other than the bombing of the government building in Oklahoma and the World Trade Center, we never thought on a grand scale, about something called domestic terrorism.
Our fighting is usually far away in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Now it’s not. There are still episodes in France and England, but citizens killing citizens has reached remarkable proportions. The murderers in yesterday’s episode in California, had Saudi and Pakistani backgrounds. But can you imagine dropping your baby off at your mother’s then going home and getting your weapons to kill a great many people. Unimaginable. I get the part where you drop the kid, but the rest doesn’t make sense.
When I spoke to my cousin Debbie this morning I assured her that she didn’t have to be afraid of terrorists in Newburgh. The killings here are gang related. How stupid is that. Once again mom would have said, “dead’s dead”. Its pretty stupid that we are now listing all the different kinds of killing, weighing and measuring which is the best or worst kind. I just wish people would be nice again. We’re just sayin’… Iris
Today, when I went to the drugstore I opened the door to enter at exactly the same time that a man and his wife were trying to exit. He said “please come through, I’ll hold the door”. “No, please,” I replied, “allow me to hold the door”. “Oh no,” he said, you first”. The, ‘you first,’ went on for what seemed like an hour, but might have been five minutes. The back and forth seemed awfully familiar. A person, such as myself, who can’t remember anything, has to dig into their treasured mind of memories, to try to find an inkling of where and why.
Zounds!, The memory whacked me right in the head! Ronald Reagan. New Hampshire. 1976. He was coming out of the hotel and I was going in. He held one door for me and I held the other door for him. He was a Republican candidate a I was a Democratic staffer. It was a different time. Holding the door was symbolic of the courtesy that existed in the nation’s political past. It didn’t matter the Party, everyone was civil.. It was a time when elected officials respected one another. It was, as my mother would say, ‘what was, was.’
It was such a different time. It was a time when Presidential candidates as well as elected officials respected one another. Sure, you paid for commercials that attacked your opposition, that were incredibly negative, sometimes heart wrenching. But your in-person behavior was always civil. That is true in local campaign as well as National. The Presidency, no matter who occupied the White House, was always something important. That’s why I can admit today, with great reluctance, that when Tony Snow was George H W Bush’s (the first George Bush) White House Press secretary, I did help him figure out how to write speeches for that President. Needless, to say I did not do that when he ran against Clinton. But friends help friends, or so it was in the past.
Anyway, lets get back to this WW3 thing because war, not only politics is just not the same. This morning there was another mass shooting. You go NRA…. Guns do kill people. War this time is like a game of hide and seek, only the hiders don’t know who they are, and the seekers are not just looking, they are also killing. And you never know where the seeker is going to be. I love analogies, even if they don’t make sense, and are simply apples and oranges. I just threw that in to add to the confusion. Maybe WW3 is an exaggeration but a war with no rules when you don't know who you’re fighting is also something that the USA has never done before. We don’t even know when an act IS terrorism because other than the bombing of the government building in Oklahoma and the World Trade Center, we never thought on a grand scale, about something called domestic terrorism.
Our fighting is usually far away in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Now it’s not. There are still episodes in France and England, but citizens killing citizens has reached remarkable proportions. The murderers in yesterday’s episode in California, had Saudi and Pakistani backgrounds. But can you imagine dropping your baby off at your mother’s then going home and getting your weapons to kill a great many people. Unimaginable. I get the part where you drop the kid, but the rest doesn’t make sense.
When I spoke to my cousin Debbie this morning I assured her that she didn’t have to be afraid of terrorists in Newburgh. The killings here are gang related. How stupid is that. Once again mom would have said, “dead’s dead”. Its pretty stupid that we are now listing all the different kinds of killing, weighing and measuring which is the best or worst kind. I just wish people would be nice again. We’re just sayin’… Iris
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