When I was six or seven years old,
four F-86 fighter jets flew
in formation over my house
on approach to O’Hare Airport,
the military side.
They’d been summoned home,
back from the Korean War.
Today, hardly anyone remembers
the Korean War, though it
has never officially ended.
When I was nine years old,
one of the very first jet airliners,
a Boeing 707, flew
above my school
on approach to O’Hare,
the commercial side.
My teacher pointed it out
saying the future was coming.
Today, hardly anyone has flown
in anything but jet airliners.
When I was eleven years old,
my parents owned a malt shop.
I cleared tables, chipped ice,
and flirted with high school girls.
The lady who cooked hamburgers
for us earned 35 cents an hour.
I earned 25 cents an hour.
Today, no one in the US earns
less than 725 cents per hour,
but more than a few citizens
earn 50.000 cents per hour,
and some earn far more than that.
When I was fourteen years old,
John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since then, Martin Luther King.
Bobby Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi,
Anwar Sadat, and John Lennon
have all been assassinated.
And that is only the beginning
of the list of those assassinated.
Today, hardly a news cycle goes by
without another assassination.
Tens of centuries before I was born,
writing was invented.
And later, the printing press,
books, newspapers, radio,
television, and the internet.
The hope was that ignorance and
falsehood would cease to exist.
Today, ignorance and falsehood
loom larger than ever.
When I graduated high school,
Theater of the Absurd,
Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove,
and Waiting for Godot
were popular. I was enthralled.
Surely pointing out the absurd
would drive a spike into arrogance,
false logic, and hypocrisy.
Today, hardly anyone seems able to
recognize what is and is not absurd.
|
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
Grayson
KY
USA
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