Twenty Years Ago

 Twenty years ago I was 45. We didn't have TSA-we used to drive my husband to Love Field and walk him to the gate waving good bye to his plane. Things were normal. Nobody knew in 24 hours life would change. Where are we now? We are in a world where lockdowns and quarantines are the "New Normal." We curate opinions to massage our own egos. Where we go from here is a choice, but 20 years ago we didn't know we'd lose 3000 lives b/c of failures of our security apparatus. Where are we going now?

We survived the AIDS epidemic, the threat of crack babies, Y2K , Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Legionnaires, The Oklahoma City Bombing-whatever Disaster du Jour was amplified by a needy and craven media more concerned with ad rates than truth. They learned this lesson during Desert Storm. CNN was in its infancy and suddenly swelled to a 24/7 source for a fearful American population that was not getting the full truth from the MSM. That was a lesson the viewers learned when the media started curating stories during Vietnam and Watergate. I watched the mass food drives during the pandemic. I know many were struggling. But while local news pushed this as an urgent need, I noticed a great many brand new cars in line. Have we forgotten the talk of Wants vs. Needs? Or is that racist now?

We have rogue agencies run by shadow figures. Who knows what the FBI, CIA, NSA, Pentagon and State Department are doing when they cover for each other instead of representing constitutional law? We do not even know if our current president is actively engaged in his job because his gaffetastic presentation often seems frail, vague and lacking in depth. People who watched Joe Biden early on had to know he was a serial liar. That the media refused to expose his lies speaks to their own incest laden need to have pipelines into the Oval Office, even if they are only spewing the party line.

We seem to be in a world of Newspeak, where words are used to stand for their total opposite. It's like Eternal Opposites Day-Infrastructure means free money for child care instead of bridges, roads and dams. COVID care means quarantining the healthy instead of the sick. Progressive is only meant in terms of making congressional Democrats, their buddies and lobbyists richer at the expense of middle class workers. We are veering to a path of self-destruction that is destroying entire industries. And we are doing it with the blessings of insulated politicians and celebrities who will not bear the brunt of the damage.

I am angry. And I am sad. My husband and I never got handouts. We didn't even borrow from our own parents. We saved, we did without a new car every two years. We didn't have cell phones or buy them for our kids until they could drive. We never took out a loan except to pay for our house. And yet more and more we seem to be the clear target for progressive politicians because we don't depend on government. We're still paying taxes while others linger in protection provided by Democrat governors. Sooner or later the bills come due and barring mass bankruptcies by landlords, there will be mass evictions because you can't go without paying forever.

Twenty years ago my husband and I were middle aged. We worked, we volunteered, we went to church. Now we are retired, our church has become woke and left us, our news has become so laced with woke dogma that it's unwatchable. You can literally watch any newscast and see the same three stories. They cherrypick to find scary stories of young people dying of COVID now, often having to reach to places hundreds of miles away. All the news is the same. It's boilerplate written by White House insiders. And even when they make egregious mistakes, such as the recent kerfuffle over COVID cases in children and fake news about Ivermectin in Oklahoma using a doctor not even on staff to make their case they hide their retractions if they have them at all. So eager are they to push the dogma on COVID, Climate Change and Social Justice they will openly lie and then make excuses for not publicly exposing their own dishonesty. (Looking at you CNN).

As I said, I am angry. I am angry that my kids will be saddled paying for bad decisions made by soulless octogenarians to enrich their own families. I am angry the qualities I was raised with such as honesty, kindness, patriotism, honor are now qualities the Left callously labels as racism. I am angry that an entire generation has been so poorly educated with the blessings of the NEA and AFT that they will be unable to do most of the entry level minimum wage jobs although they will be paid more than my Dad ever made in his life. Something is terribly wrong and unless things change, my grandkids will be subjected to the worst kind of tyranny as the liberal bicoastal elites throw them under the bus to make themselves feel better about being elite.