Land of the Giants

I'm not sure today what the sentiment is supposed to be like to return to your childhood home.  Recently one of my childhood homes became vacant for the first time since my parents sold it in l978.  It was liberating for me.  It was the first time I could drive up in our old driveway and see for myself how much the same or different my childhood home was.  Overall it was okay.  The seminal markers in the backyard were gone reminding me of a time when my father was in his heyday.  He had built a small log cabin in our other childhood home in Mocksville, North Carolina.  Our backyard was bordered by a small creek that flooded when it rained and then woods.  He felled trees from those woods, debarked them, and proceeded to build me sister and me a playhouse we would enjoy for years to come.  When he found a better job as the band director for Terry Sanford High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina the cabin moved with us.  (?)  How that happened I am not sure.  What I am sure of is how many extraordinary things my father did for me when we were young.  The second was the creation of a Lionel .027 gauge layout in his band room at that very school.  This was my Christmas present, which he built in its entirety before loading it in a rented U Haul trailer and hauling it to this very childhood home.  In the wee hours of the night it made its way out of that trailer and into the screened in porch that still is on the back of that very house.  It was an amazing feat.  Extraordinary.  Reflecting back upon these things it is a little easier to discover whence my talent came.  I can't remember it today.  I have lost whatever "mojo" I once had.  I don't think that entirely is true, but whatever it was it no longer is relevant to America in the year 2014.  For some reason I have arrived at a time in my life where I no longer seem to want the extraordinary.  Instead I want ordinary.  I want down to earth, mundane, almost boring roots in human reality.  I don't want what the current media is pitching.  I don't want want "Fear and Intimidation."  I don't want the "newest thing."  I don't want cutting edge technology.  I don't want new software.  I don't want a new phone.  I don't want a computer in a watch.  All of these things are useless and in due time will become extinct in proportion to their worth.  It is time America moved on from her smoke and mirrors campaign of trying to make money.  Moving money around for a living no longer is a viable option.  Wall Street sealed their own fate with that one.  I harp quite a bit about modern television, because when I grew up American television was a core component of American life.  The weekly television schedule provided a much needed structure in your entertainment life.  Not only did it entertain, it guided our culture.  The things we did, the way we dressed, and what we talked about highly were influenced by television.  Television was different then.  It was good and honest.  It was a reflection of our real lives that amazingly then were real.  We were living life.  We are not living life today.  We are existing.  The whole substructure of American life has been rendered moot.  Why?  The answer is public education.  Once America cared about her youth.  Fully we understood our youth would be the next generation that would lead America.  We educated and began to empower them.  We openly and willingly passed the reigns on to our next generation.  America today, like a ravenous, narcissistic, and immoral animal began feeding on her youth when the economy collapsed.  When the economy moved from family values to accumulated wealth for the rich, then America faltered.  A heel was kicked out one foot of America, and she has not stopped stumbling since.  Until the middle class and their education again becomes important to America, we will not change.  Making America's middle class a focus of attention will be difficult.  It will mean that the rich who are running the country now will have to take a back seat to the common American.  By taking that back seat fully they will understand that an investment is being made in the future of America's economy.  The needs and wants of Americans once again will become the infrastructure of America.  It will not focus on the slave owners.  It will not focus on the Communist leaders.  It will focus on America and her people.  What will need to happen for this to take place?  It is clear our current system of government is failing.  When Congress becomes so constipated that the President needs to evoke executive order to make progress, it is clear that this body of self serving hypocrites needs to be eradicated.  It is interesting that for the first time in my life, America has returned to a previous point in history.  There was a time when these wealthy lawmakers ruled America.  Trusts they were called.  They ruled with an iron hand.  Several extraordinary presidents changed this over the course of time.  Whether anyone knows it or not President Barak Obama with his Attorney General Eric Holder have made more strides against this great machine than any president in recent memory.  The culmination of this judicial juggernaut must be Bank of America's 16.65 billion dollar penalty for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities and other financial instruments leading up to the economic crisis.  The change in philosophy will not come from our federal government.  While Obama and his team are pioneering that fight, the reestablishment of our economy will have to come from those that are holding America's money.  Simply it has to move from dying hands into hands of honest people who once again are willing to invest in the future of America.  The recent generation of the wealthy who began feeding off of her children only can be represented by one image in my mind.  They are like hermaphrodites they posses the sexual organs of both male and female genders.  They and only they can satisfy themselves with no need of others.  This small contingency of rogue bacteria are extinct.  They have eaten all they can eaten with little to no regard for the rest of America.  They have not fertilized.  They have not rotated their crops.  They have not conserved.  Instead of sewing to reap their crops, only have they eaten of the fruit.  It is enlightening in my life to witness such a historical precedent.  While Viet Nam, Korea, the Dessert Storm, and Iraqi Freedom are notable conflicts, while America's attention was focused in the Middle East, extremists infiltrated our political, governmental, and financial systems covertly.  This is where the damage has taken place, and still is.  What will cause this shift in ideology?  The only plausible solution can be a coup.