When I was a child war was an honorable and heroic enterprise as we sent G I Joe off to Europe and the Pacific and Rosie riveted. We were all involved. We recycled with a vengeance. We saved and turned in every thing from our newspapers to the cans the peaches came in. to the fat that collected in the frying pan after breakfast. We saved our pennies to take to school and buy savings stamps to turn into victory bonds when we accumulated $25 worth at a quarter apiece. We dug up our backyards to plant victory gardens and collected our outgrown clothes for Bundles for Britain. We took our ration books to the grocery and to the filling station and we fought our backyard battles with cardboard toy guns. We collected unused metal to be melted and recast in to bullets and bombs. Even the civil war cannon, my perch on the courthouse lawn for the Saturday afternoon band concerts, went into the crucible of our war. We watched the Hollywood Heroes take Iwo Jima at every Saturday matinee. There were no protest songs. We were one nation, indivisible.

.When it was over and the boys came home it was over. The one nation became divisible. We were without an enemy to unite us so we became a nation without that sense of direction that war’s enemies had given us. Our government divided and the 80th Congress set out to undo the New Deal and assure that there would never be another FDR. We found the new enemy; Godless Communism and the Governor of New York accused the President and his party of being soft despite the Berlin Airlift. President Dewey never took office. We hadn’t the stomach for another war so soon.

But it came on June 25th of 1950. It was a local war that we watched like a football game as it seesawed between the goalposts up and down the Korean peninsula. Never at a loss, the loyal opposition vilified the Administration as both being soft on Communism and fighting a war against the Communists. We were relieved when a new coach entered, called time out, and ended the game in a scoreless tie. In the mean time we learned to “duck and cover”. The Communists had the bomb. We watched I Led Three Lives and read I Was A Communist for the FBI. We had our enemy and the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Black List and Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy. Nobody sang protest songs. We heard the eerie sound of Sputnik singing across the skies.

The torch was passed to the first President younger than my parents. We built fallout shelters and stared at the skies for the Missiles of October. We were eyeball to eyeball on the eve of destruction and someone had to blink. We could do better. We had to do better and we did. Then Camelot came to an end on a Dallas street.

Lyndon’s war taught us to sing protest songs as the 6 O’clock war raged on. Nixon’s secret plan to end that war was six more years of body bags. The score was National Guard 4 – Kent State 0 and we were one nation – divided and we learned more protest songs. We knew where the flowers had gone. The President, who was not a crook, resigned when the Congress saw the smoke swirl up from the gun and we had our first appointed President who Whipped Inflation Now with buttons and brought the last American’s home from Saigon in helicopters and stumbled weekly on Satyrday Night Live.

Jimmie was a peanut farmer and a nuclear engineer and he miscalculated. Government wasn’t just down home made bigger. We couldn’t turn the thermostat down to 68 and put on sweaters and make up for the heating oil that wasn’t there. There wasn’t any war but there wasn’t any peace. Prices went up, unemployment went up and so did inflation. There wasn’t a Great Depression but there wasn’t any prosperity either. He lost reelection behind the walls in Teheran and every night on Nightline while Ronnie paid for the microphone in New Hampshire.

The babies born that year are voters now. They don’t remember a time before Reagan was President and that Presidency they know only dimly. They don’t remember supply-side voodoo and the world’s biggest taxcut that raised taxes on the middle class. They have no memory of the Savings & Loan industry collapsing when the breeze of reality tumbled the elaborate house of cards. They don’t recall the splendid little wars; Lebanon, Grenada. Mr. Bush embraced voodoo and became President. Mr. Gorbachev tore down that wall and the Soviet Union with it. We spent the Peace Dividend on the videogame war to free Kuwait for the Emir. The Marines landed in Somalia for the Television Cameras and George went home to Kennebunkport.

Blackhawk went down and so did Monica and interest rates and the deficit. The stock market went up and so did incomes and taxes. The internet grew and so did the economy and the Fortunate Son became President with a money-back guarantee – if you had money you would get it back.

So here we are and we don’t know where we are going but we are in a rush to get there.