Waking Up Is Hard To Do

SEE HERE I live in a very different world today than the world that I grew up in.  On my paper route I had forty two customers in Cleveland Heights, Ohio for the afternoon paper, a working class paper, The Cleveland Press.  It cost seven cents and I got two of those cents for delivering it.  There was only one divorced woman on my paper route and none of the women had jobs that I knew of.  But what did I know, I was just the paper boy.  Kids would ride their bikes all over for miles without thought of safety and most people left their cars and their houses unlocked.

We were taught that if we worked hard and pulled together we could make things better, but that it was up to us.  Doctors weren't tied up with medical insurance and teachers were not unionized and schools actually taught things that were got for you and not just propaganda.  I learned to write cursive and my dad taught me the secret of learning to type in about ten minutes and when I applied the lesson vigorously I got to be a good touch typist.

Nowadays most folks can't add a column of numbers without a calculator and writing is pretty much a rare art done well.  We're spending more money then we ever did and getting less for it.  It's probably good that I'm getting old because I'm not sure I could bear watching the country go downhill for another twenty years.