If someone would have asked me when I was in high school, would I ever imagine America deteriorating to the point it has, I would have thought they were crazy. You see, it was post World War II and Korea. It was a time of stability and growth…when you could depend on people…a time of hope.
When I started driving the family GMC pickup back and forth to town at age 12, gasoline was 16-cents-a-gallon. That was in 1959, the year Hawaii chose statehood. My brother had a roommate from Hawaii, who escorted me on the vacation of a kid's lifetime. The ocean, the gorgeous greenery and the rich flowers with morning dew spattered on the leaves were the most beautiful sites an Iowa farm boy had ever seen. My favorite location was the big island, Hawaii. My wife and I recently returned, and "The Islands" were the same, about the only difference was, the costs had skyrocketed, and my preferred island changed to Maui.
Even though I didn't know it at the time, growing up in a rural community was a special treat. Not only did your neighbors know who you were, they cared about you as a person. Remember the Roseman Bridge in Clint Eastwood's movie, "The Bridges of Madison County"? My mom and dad courted in that covered bridge. I used to ride horse-back down to the bridge, and go fishing on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
It was a comfortable place to live, a town where you could trust everyone. My dad used to borrow money from the bank, with just a handshake with the banker. The preacher and several neighbors would come help us bring in our hay crop. There would be maybe 10 men pitching in to help, and the ladies would make the men dinner. And, farm ladies know how to cook, and they would make fresh lemonade, with as much ice as could be rounded up. Ah, nothing better than fresh ice cold home-made lemonade. All would work very hard, and that would make relaxing all the more refreshing.
So, how did we go from that atmosphere, to current times when the majority of us don't even trust our lawmakers in Washington, let alone the neighbors. In American cities nowadays, most are lucky to even know who one of their neighbors is. It is my observation, that the mass urbanization of our country is responsible for the decline of our way of life. You do still see caring and neighborliness on occasion, like the masses of people who pitched in to help with the Boy Scout body search and cleanup following the Monona, Iowa tornado. Another example is the record numbers of volunteers who gathered near Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri towns to try and hold back the flood waters and assist in cleanups. But, for the most part it has disappeared as a way of life.
After the Korean conflict, the majority of the population was rural. With the advent of the "machine age" came mass urbanization. The country was at peace, and our cities attracted our populace, those seeking prosperity and promise of the good life. As more and more citizens clamored into cities, the cultural melting pot started to split at the seams. Gangs developed due to ethnical differences, people didn't socialize with their neighbors as much and the psychology of the community wasn't based in the church nearly as much, which in many ways dismantled our country's core values, people's morals and ethics, and eroded the strong national American allegiance that once held all of us together as "One nation under God, with liberty and justice for all"!
You might be inclined to ask, what was better, when I was a kid? You didn't have "drive by shootings"! Most people didn't even lock their home's doors at night. Crime was very low. You could walk on almost any street in America at night, and feel safe.
For the most part, kids played outside, instead of inside pressing buttons on a video game controller. We couldn't wait to get outdoors. In the summer, we played baseball, went swimming or fishing, whatever we felt like doing any given day. We were free to play in neighbor's yards, swim in their ponds or play baseball in their vacant lots. My friends and I built a raft that we used as a swimming platform on the neighbor's pond. My best friends and I even built a diving board on it, and also used inner tubes to buoy our journey to the center of the pond. We also played basketball on the driveway with the backboard at the edge of the roof on the garage. Poor kids didn't need a glass backboard rivaling the NBA to have fun. We would use old farm tarps and make tents to sleep out at night, and have camping adventures. We built sand pits for throwing horseshoes. We played badminton in the lawn. There was this schematic for building a table tennis table out of plywood, in Boy's Life magazine. So, four of us joined forces, laid the table out, cut it and painted it. As many as 15 kids would come by the house and play ping pong tournaments.
