Letter to the Editor

I remember a time that seems so long ago when people could talk to each other. A time when people had conversations and exchanged ideas. Even in a heated debate there was almost a sense of sport in a creative conversation that, in the end, left us with more things to think about than when we had started, and we usually just smiled and remained friends.

The world today is a scary place for an old lady like me. I forget, sometimes, that I am not allowed to speak my mind and have therefore faced the threats of the undisciplined who cannot seem to control their outbursts of rage at having to define and prove their own ideas.

It seems that the enlightening debates of the past have politely died, yielding to the modern perpetual adolescence of those who only demand to be heard, but never listen. In such a state our views and talents are destroyed in the stale and tedious atmosphere in which real progress can never be made.

I remember a time when violence was not a virtue, when assaulting someone was a crime, when destroying someone’s property, stealing their stuff, and burning them out of their homes and businesses was simply wrong. I remember a time when officials were voted into office to do a job, not an agenda, and they protected their state’s economy and the wellbeing of the people who lived there.

It seems like such a waste of energy as the world flings itself into chaos, spinning around on insult, accusation, and offense; wasting itself in pursuit of those things that precede the very problems it wishes to solve.

I am an old grandma facing the so called “new normal” which is not so normal at all. It can be a scary place, but I have a freedom in my spirit that will not respectfully consent to being boxed into a cage, like a parrot, destined to mindlessly repeat some approved narrative in exchange for a life sustaining cracker. No, I come from a different time, a time when we recognized and valued our freedom and defended it with our lives. No, I will not willingly hand to my grandchildren a world in which they are defined as “essential or not” by some entity that controls how they will be allowed to find happiness and feed their families.

I have been told that the so called new normal is not about freedom, but about safety. But I am an old lady who remembers a time when freedom was real, and safety was an inherent piece of a self-reliant life.

I do not need a nanny government to tell me who I am or how I will be allowed to take care of myself. I know how to take care of myself, and I will.