I must be an eternal optimist. Every morning I wake up expecting the world to have somehow changed for the better – overnight -then I turn on the news and find myself greatly disappointed.

We are accepting things as normal that are just – flat out – not normal.

Are things as screwed up as they appear to be, or am I just a victim of some “good old days syndrome”?

Maybe I spent so much of my youth in a self-inflicted near coma that all this reality is just new to me. Maybe things have always been this screwed up and I’m just starting to see it.

Being seventeen and worried about the draft and Vietnam and Nixon and Watergate, it seemed like they were tangible, localized really screwed up things to worry about, but they were somehow manageable. I could figure out what to do about the draft and I had a faith in the system that it could heal itself and take out the garbage and make itself right and good again. I was young and full of optimism.

My daily news feed is littered with crap like the Apollo missions to the moon were a hoax – ask Buzz Aldrin, he’s 85 years old and he’ll still take a swing at you – The government was hijacked by extraterrestrial beings, something I’d buy, except I’d expect them to be way, way smarter. I don’t think you’d need to travel light years to best this Congress in wisdom and intelligence. It seems that people will believe just about anything anymore… I miss the time when people thought and arrived at their own conclusions. I miss being able to have an intelligent discussion with someone and not be labeled

I miss Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley telling us what happened, not what and how to think about it…

I miss us, who we used to be.

Waking up every morning I drink my coffee and watch the news and walk away with this growing sense that the wheels have a literally come off and we are just watching a slow-motion train wreck.