My neighbor, I’ll call him Jim, grew up one of 17 children of Italian immigrants.  Now 75, he’s one of the last of the children still living.  Recently he buried a 93 year old brother.  The brother had been what we now call developmentally disabled.  He spent the last 75 years, all of Jim’s life, in a home.  When Jim’s brother died he planned to bury him near family in Wilmington.  The home explained it could happen if Jim paid the costs.  Otherwise a member of a close knit family would end up in the equivalent of a potter’s field. 

Jim telephoned his state and federal representatives.  He explains most of his life he’d been told a portion of Social Security had been set aside for the burial of his brother.  He found no answers from the people he once voted for.  A Democrat for most of his life, my neighbor now identifies as an independent.  Raised a Roman Catholic, he now also identifies his Christian faith much the same way.  He still remembers being a boy and pitching pennies.  The local Monsignor caught him and it wasn’t long before parents learned their son enjoyed gambling.  It didn’t go very well at home.  Jim still believes his church is filled with hypocrites. 

He enjoys gambling.  Mainly on horses and can share many memories of visits to harness tracks in Upstate New York, which I called home as a boy.  Judging by the man’s well appointed home he either had some serious skill or he never had a serious gambling addiction.  It was something he did, like many others, for a little enjoyment every now and then.  In other words, he’s a very typical American.  What I think also very clear is he no longer trusts the institutions which defined a way of life. 

Government leaders are viewed as ineffectual and our leaders in pursuit of heaven prove to be just as much as we are human. 

One can ask where we’re headed.  All summer long I’ve been reading the mainstream media warnings about the coarsening of civic debate.  Mind you, it was never coarsened by the filthy demonstrators of the 1960s and certainly not by the modern Cindy Sheehan’s.  Left wing foul mouths are victims.  Right wingers picking up after themselves following a rally in Washington are dangerous. 

What is clear is the breakdown of the family unit, the collapse of major cities and the crumbling U.S. Dollar should frighten all people into action.  Check your TV ratings and you’ll get the impression otherwise.  Can do spirit was long ago replaced by the spirit of New Orleans, where you wait for the government to come and get you as the water rises to your chin. 

A few months back I was channel surfing and came across a documentary about one of the aboriginal nations of the Americas.  Archeologists looking to make sense of its collapse discovered near its end citizens were sacrificing young children.  Remains of children estimated to be as young as 3 years old have been unearthed.  These toddlers died terrified and what little trust they had learned was destroyed as they were ripped from the arms of parents and cast to their drowning deaths.  My few remaining liberal friends insist we have become so technologically advanced it could never happen here.  Not from a people who put a man on the moon, not long after pioneering mass media and not much later personal computing.  I remember my country put a man on the moon when I was a child and it was momentous in the middle of an era marked by war and burning cities abroad and at home.  A few years later a court ruled babies could be ripped from the warmth of their mother’s wombs.  And mothers willingly assisted.  Fifty million times.

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