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Foolishly I started thinking about my recent FB post about making America great again (hey, that would make a great campaign slogan!) and a couple things occurred to me.



                                                      Deja vu all over again!

First, what the hell does that mean, to be great again? Obviously it implies that things aren’t so great now. So then when were they great? What should we be aspiring to? The fifties and the fakey Father Knows Best lifestyle? The sixties when we baby boomers were running wild and Vietnam raged on? The seventies with disco and Whip Inflation Now? The eighties with Ronald Reagan, Star Wars and Iran Contra scandal (and being great again?) The nineties and Bill Clinton and . . . oh never mind, you get my point.

To some extent I think as individuals most of us have some romantic attachment to a time in the past; it is the rare person that says NOW is the point in their life that they have the greatest fondness for (although I understand those lucky people do exist – and sometimes I am one!)

This also comes up all the time when you see these lists like “who is the greatest golfer ever?” (That one’s easy.) Or who was the best baseball player. How do you compare people who had different rules, different equipment – lived in different times? A smart person doesn’t because you can’t.

So what defines greatness for our country? Exactly. Like those "who’s the greatest" lists, it depends on who you ask. We can make a judgement about what great is as I did in comparing inventing FB to putting a man on the moon (I think there is no comparison but I’m sure you could find those that consider FB the greater achievement and that’s okay too.) That’s the point: opinions are like noses, everyone has one. (Although I grant you that today many of us assume that our opinions are the same as truth or facts but that's for a different post.)

I guess greatness is like pornography - you’ll know it when you see it!

The second thought is related to the first. There is no point in trying to point the good ship USS America to some mythical place in the past. No matter how much you wish you could go back to a better, happier, more contented past it ain’t gonna happen for you and it ain’t gonna happen for the country so get over it!

That leaves us all with the very difficult task of figuring out where we want to go in the future. It’s kind of hard to know how it will work out though: as Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Given the candidates that we are stuck with it’s REALLY going to be difficult.

Good luck, friends!




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