When I was a kid, lawyers had an aura, the profession was Up Here (picture my hand raised high)… and now they have to stoop to buying their Up Here on billboards, just dragging the whole profession to Down Here (picture my hand bent low). First lawyer joke I heard as a kid had something to do with sharks, and professional courtesy. But up there, stationary, just reminds me of common buzzards, sitting on a dead tree limb waiting for road kill…with their Been-In-A-Car-Wreck-Injured-By-An-18-Wheeler come ons…
“Uncle Walter,” journalism how
it used to be.
He was more trusted than Presidents.
How shameful, for a profession to have
trashed such noble public trust, in so short a time, for something so pitiful, as money…
I could write the profession almost to sainthood, and be sincere, in the role they played in forming America, but that high water mark is long ago, and a hundred thousand billboards away.
Three words: too many lawyers. Four words: too damn many lawyers. It’s like love bugs on a white vehicle…
Speaking Of Professions That Have Lost Their Way…
…what happened to journalism?!?
Same thing that happened to law – money.
My age and up, I think we saw it, the flower of journalism. There was a high code. To break truth and public trust was career suicide, business suicide, social suicide.
I know a little about business, and I understand how it’s come to this. A news story is a product, and news with conflict is a product that sells. There’s a pie out there, and it’s all about the size of your slice. You claim a demographic slice (Fox CNN etc.) and day after day, you sell this customer base what they want to buy. You’d think that people want to know the truth, but they’d rather be right about what they already believe. People want to be right today, right again tomorrow, so you just keep banging the same beat on the drum, and don’t ya dare make them feel wrong, even if they are, lest your slice of the pie grow smaller…
It’s like when I was a kid, the grownup men, arguing over pickups, Ford versus Chevy. But that was about four wheels and a get-you-there. With journalism there’s more at stake. We The People need something to trust for facts – even if we don’t like the facts.
Freedom of the Press is one of the noblest things that America ever gave to the world. Look what we Americans have done with it, in so short a time…
Political Correctness
Like religion, PC had a good intent, let’s be nice, let’s be careful with people’s feelings, but like when religion loses its way, it got ruined by people, who cherry pick which verse to obey, and which verse to ignore.
My religion is Christianity. The truth-shall-set-you-free religion. Political Correctness at its worst is anti-truth. We can’t call a spade a spade. We can’t speak of the elephant in the room. PC wants us to only look here, and not there.
Political correctness is wasting our time. It’s only gonna get dumber from here. Like you, I am all for leaving the world a better place than I inherited, but you can’t fix what you can’t name. Anything that interferes with truth is either inept, ignorant or the other thing, evil.
Generational Decline
Since WWII ended the American economy has been ascending. Every generation wants to make it easier for their children, and they have. My great-grandmother brought water into her house with a well bucket, my grandmother had a hand pump, my mother turned a faucet on the kitchen sink.
Same sort of ascent, in education, in clothing, leisure, standard of living. It seemed so noble, to give unto your children what you did not get yourself.
…but…throughout America I sense this uneasiness, that we’ve reached a place of Too Easy, and in The Easy we’ve lost some of our foundational Best. Parents now debate at what age to buy a child their first cellphone, but that same child may reach graduation without ever knowing a blister from an hour of manual labor.
Easy is a trap. Easy leads to soft, soft leads to helplessness, helplessness leads to crisis, and there we go, having not just lost time, but entire generations, before crisis begats survivors, and the climb back up starts again… just a big wheel of ascent and descent…
If your parental struggle is at what age to give the child a cellphone, trust me, that sound you’re hearing, that’s the whole family tree that came before you, all rolling over in their graves.
Long before you give them a phone, give them chores…
Standard Of Living
When was the last time you got someone a gift that they really needed? Stuff, stuff, everywhere stuff, we’re overwhelmed with stuff…
My dad had it figured out decades ago. People feel invisible. “They want someone to smile at them, with an expression of I See You.” We all hunger for the important things, to love, belong, matter, contribute, and all this stuff-stuff that we accumulate, it’s like the paper wrapper on the hamburger, it won’t kill you to eat it, but that’s not the meal…
I Used To Feel More At Home In America
I don’t feel “reflected” very often, anymore. When I watch TV, even the commercials often offend me. I don’t know the “whoevers” who make this stuff, but they’re not like me. I don’t think they’re like anyone I know. Fringe things, reflecting half a percent of the population, it’s shoved down my throat, like some new norm, and I better come aboard the concept.
Anybody of any age, just thinking back on two decades ago, and how it was then, and projecting forward, another two decades, my goodness, what America awaits us, up the road…
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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is dedicated to common sense. Each to our own, let us hold to our good roots.
Uncle P can be reached at eightyoneantiques@gmail.com.
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