Boy the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.
And you knew who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again.
Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days
(Theme from “All In the Family, by Lee Adams)
There were days, when the US government decided that slavery was abhorrent, and antithetical to what American democracy must and should become and be. There were days when the government understood that women, were not just on Earth as the spare rib from the body of Adam, and indeed deserved the voting rights as men. There were days when a president decided that the Negro was no longer chattel and he or she should have every bit of equality in housing, jobs, education as his or her Caucasian counterpart. There were the days when honest business owners and politicians realized that child labor laws were not only necessary but an integral part of a healthy human, without the tedious and tremendous responsibilities to work in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. There were days when love was love and who you loved or how you expressed that love was not illegal permitting people of different ethnic groups to marry and people of the same sex to say “I do.” There were days in the history of this nation that remind us how history can have an important impact on our lives and how history is a novel, worth reading and re-reading, knowing when to repeat it and when to leave well enough alone. Those WERE the days!
And there were days when the Republican Party was formed by leaders who realized that making America Great , was to make its president honest, to hold its president to the same standards that all Americans were expected to maintain. Richard Nixon was a narcissistic, egomaniac, insecure, and paranoid. His disdain for democracy filled Washington DC with a stench of rotting bodies left on the desert sands of the Sahara. The treasonous acts, the tyranny, the anarchy by the Republican president, was so anti-American that the GOP could not and would permit its stench to rust away at the foundations of America. And bravely, and with the honest esteem to declare their candidate a menace to America, Republicans believed that “checks and balances’, were an integral part of our democracy. And joining with the opposition party, TOGETHER, dragged an illegitimate, a criminal out of the Oval Office. There were days when justice, counted…not only by one party but by both. Now, we watch as history comes back to haunt us, and the only chance we have to relieve ourselves of these ghosts is for the Republican Party to become the Party of America, and NOT the Party of Putin. Those were the days that counted, these days are more like a count down to the end of democracy!
