NEW, BETTER, and SIMPLER are NOT always synonymous terms!

By Joseph Walther

I come from a working class family. In the early ‘40s, when I was born, every family had a father and a mother, unless either one or both had died, in which case the children lived with a family relative. Social Services had very little to do back in those days.

My mother could go to the corner grocery store—located a block away—and buy 2-loaves of bread, 2-gallons of milk, and 2-dozen eggs... all for a whopping $2.50.

Of course, my father netted about $40 a week in wages. The average annual gross wage was around $2,300. And, just as now, people complained about the rapidly increasing cost of living, too.

You could buy a house for an average of $7,500 and purchase an automobile for about $1,100. But, we couldn’t afford either one until 1948.

The house was a bargain at $6,500 because a residential development had been built for returning WWII veterans. Our automobile was “used,” weighed close to two tons, had “running” boards, and cost $250. It was a gas-guzzler but gas was only $0.199 a gallon.

The news media reported the news: who, what, when, where, and how. Investigative reporters held their subjects’ feet to the fire and demanded verifiable answers.

We trusted people like Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, Huntley/Brinkley, and a number of others. They didn’t report speculation as news. Why, at one point, we even trusted Walter Cronkite.

The news has changed today. Now we have the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Al Franken, and others, reporting speculation as news. Many voters—most of them incapable of original thought—buy into it because they NEED to be entertained.

They believe that if not Democrat or Republican, you’re a troublemaker. If not Conservative or Liberal, you lack all sense of conviction. If not an advocate for Christianity, you’re a Satan worshiper.

And, if you so much as imply that habeas corpus is a basic human right, you’re suddenly a terrorist sympathizer.

It has come to the point where it’s difficult to tell if truly intelligent people are running the world or whether it’s a case of genuine imbeciles spouting off about what they really mean.

On an educational front, the kids of yesteryear had to know how to read and write in complete sentences, as well as do fundamental arithmetic in order to get INTO a high school, let alone graduate from one.

This is NOT the case today. The public school system has become a standing joke. Lowering the hoop so everyone can slam-dunk is a bad policy. It seems that everyone but public school administrators seems to understand this

Even some of the teachers have difficulty with basic arithmetic, not to mention expressing coherent ideas in complete sentences. And, according to the authorities, WE can’t fire them… teachers’ unions, you know.

Another modern day biggie is POVERTY. We like to blame it for everything. It’s become THE default socio-political scapegoat.

The problem is that we’ve always had poverty. We’re always going to HAVE poverty, too. There’s nothing we can do to eliminate ALL poverty. But, we’ll never diminish any amount of it as long as it remains a cash cow for those with vested interests in maintaining it.

Medically, compared to today, we lived in the medical science Dark Ages back then. People died from causes we don’t even talk about today because those causes no longer kill people.

Both kids and adults died regularly from things like polio, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, pneumonia, and even diarrhea. Childhood leukemia was an automatic death sentence.

So was every other brand of cancer, especially breast cancer. If your coronary arteries clogged back then, you died—there was no such thing as “by-pass” surgery.

I contracted scarlet fever—now called strep throat—when I was 4-years-old.

The doctors put me in the hospital for 12-days where I received penicillin shots 4-times a day for seven of those days.

On top of this, the board of health quarantined our residence for 30-days—absolutely no one IN or OUT. And no one gave a hoot about how much it inconvenienced us or the fact that my father lost his job because he couldn’t go to work.

In all respects, today is way different from the thrilling days of yesteryear: economically, politically, medically, socially, and legally.

Today, economically speaking, you can’t buy a single loaf bread for $2.50, let alone the grocery list of items that my mother was able to buy. Every item that she was able to buy for pennies on the dollar now exceeds, by sizeable margins, what she paid for her entire list of items.

Politically, modern day White House Administrations have grown accustomed to doing whatever they feel like doing. Over the past twenty-years, they seem to have grown fond of shredding the Constitution whenever they deemed it convenient.

Over the past 16-years, particularly, politicians have elevated convenience to the status of an imperative while reducing truth to that as a mere option.

Both the Clinton and Bush Administrations lied to us, doggedly and egregiously. Only their lies were about different things.

Trust me on this, one day the real implications of the Patriot Act are going to smack us in our collective nose. Hopefully, it won’t be a fatal blow.

With the exception of periodic elections, the Congress has ceases paying attention to the voters. Why should they?

We permit it, they pander to us in order to get themselves re-elected time after time, by telling us what WE want to hear, but their true constituencies have become the inhabitants of K Street: the lobbyists.

For medicine, on the positive side, medical technology has conquered most of the death-sentence diseases of an era long past. Today, eighty-five percent of the kids diagnosed with childhood leukemia survive it to live productive normal lives.

Many other brands of cancer are no longer automatic death sentences, both, breast and prostate cancers, are prime examples. And, not only have we learned to replace clogged coronary arteries, we can transplant the heart itself. And lungs! And kidneys! And livers!

Even though new diseases pop up all of the time, medical science in the United States is the envy of the world. We reach out to the world, too. Our doctors do more pro bono work for the world’s sick than any nation on the planet.

However, at least on the home front, we still have a thing or two to learn relative to saving lives. Chiefly among them is learning the difference between the “science” of medicine and the “art” of medicine.

The former is clinical—cold and cruel at times. It consists of statistical inferences and group probabilities. They let us predict medical outcomes with amazing accuracy.

But, when symptoms do not abate, we must permit the latter—the “art” of medicine—to take over by ignoring the probabilities and letting, as humanely as possible, nature run its course without people going on moral and litigation feeding frenzies.

Today, at 66-years of age, I am healthier than my parents ever were. Technologically, I have more power in my tiny cell phone than the scientists of my father’s time had with their mainframe computer systems.

I am able to communicate with anyone in the world, anywhere in the world in an instant. All I have to do is use my personal computer to log onto the Internet. I can even use my cell phone to do this.

Yes, it costs me more to live today. I pay more than five times what my mother paid for a dozen eggs, thirteen times more for a stamp, thirty-one times more for a loaf of bread, and twenty times more for a gallon of gasoline.

However, at time I retired, I was earning sixty-four times more than my father did at the height of his earning potential. Even in retirement, I have twenty-nine times more annual income than he did working full-time.

While some things were much simpler then, they were NOT better. Some the things WERE better, but there weren’t enough of them to make me want to go back to the “good” old days.

As a nation, we have some serious problems, ninety-nine percent of which are political in nature. We need to learn that justice—if it means anything at all—cannot prevail until those who have not been injured by injustice become as persistently incensed as those who have been.

All we have to do is rediscover our collective backbone and begin holding our elected officials and the people they appoint accountable to US instead of to the folks on K Street in Washington, DC.

Oh yes, I think the reporting media could do with a good old-fashioned ass kicking, too. Let’s do it! I’ll see you next week.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.