Vigilante justice can be a good thing.

A tip toe through the tulips for me. That was the country I grew up in. It has been morphing into a place I don't recognize since the 60s. The change has been slow but inexorable - probably the reason why people haven't fought back much. Also, the path of least resistance has been to go along to get along. And most of the citizenry has taken that path. Or has it been just an inability to see the truth of the situation? Kind of like the Air France airplane that did a stable stall all the way from 35,000 into the Atlantic Ocean. The pilots didn't recognize what was happening.

Man, I sent that link all over the place yesterday; painful, and beautiful. It also caused me to look up Fred Reed's bio, and discover that, yup, he's about 4 months younger than me.

Like you, G, only the place names need to be changed for it to be a story of my life. I've always been aware of the difference between my childhood and that of the West Coast folks that I've shared most of my life with; Fred made me realize that it's our generation that gives us a common America.

Same with me, Gerard. All the same identifiers for me, born 1946 in suburbs of Chicago. I wouldn't go back there now if you held a gun to my head. Actually, that's the most likely thing that would happen if I did go back there.

How did it happen? Huh, nobody took it from us, we gave it away.

That is the way I grew up, too.

It's a damned shame the way things have changed. My upbringing was the same, only more idyllic.

The ideas of liberty, independence, industry: all soiled, now.

But, we are trying to keep the flame alive here. Tonight I will be in my deer stand, and the America we once knew will be there for a few moments longer.

I think it was the late 80's, early 90's when it really changed from what was described here, because up until then this jibed with life in Northern California.

I was born in 1965.

Pleasant Grove, the southeast Dallas neighborhood in which I lived as a young child, remained almost unbelievably unspoiled until the early 1970s: crime-free, peaceful, well-kept. As children, my cousins and I played on the sidewalk and in the front yard without the slightest worry. We walked to school unescorted. went with Grandma to the old, non-conglomerated neighborhood bank where the tellers all knew her name. We rode with our folks to the Ford dealership and rode away with them in a Falcon or Fairline that our dads had helped make. We went to public school where there were grooming standards, penmanship grades, and where each morning we were all obligated to stand respectfully as the principal's voice over the intercom led us in the Pledge and in a prayer specifically addressed to Jesus Christ.

Our mothers wore gloves and stockings to Safeway.

Our dads wore Ford coveralls and smoked Marlboros and took us to Cowboys games in the freezing clod of the Cotton Bowl.

We boys all had Brylcreem cuts and wore little Kennedy suits to church. In the spring we threw wild figs at each other and walked to the corner store for ice cream in little paper tubs. (You ate it with a wooden spoon that was like a miniature tongue depressor.) In the fall we threw horse apples at each other and walked to the corner store for candy bars. (They don't make those candy bars any more.) And in the long afternoons of summer we watched Bugs Bunny and Popeye cartoons on TV, sweated through our crew cuts into our sailor hats, and pored over our uncles' World War II photo albums, imaging we were there with them in the Pacific fighting for the old 48-star flag and for the greatest country that ever was or ever would be.

Pleasant Grove is a ruin now -- a slum of check cashing places, pawn shops, discount stores, and empty storefronts. Feral kids in t-shirts run the streets now, and I'd hate to think of what they watch on TV. The bank is gone. The Ford agency is gone. The school is still there, but only a madman would send a little white boy or white girl through the doors. And I guarantee you that nobody in that building is praying to Jesus over the loudspeaker any more.

So what happened? What destroyed Pleasant Grove? Two things:

1. The closure of the East Dallas Ford plant, where our dads all worked, and

2. Desegregation.

The Mexicans are taking over in Pleasant Grove now, and are driving the blacks out to the first-ring suburbs. They are not particularly fond of black people and are not particularly shy about that. They make a lot of noise and are laid back about gun safety. They run little businesses there. They paint their little frame houses in funny colors. They speak Spanish and watch Univision, but they root for the Cowboys instead of for soccer teams and they drink la bala plata (Coors Light) instead of Tecate. Their kids don't speak Spanish except at home. There's a sort of brown hope in the old neighborhood now, a chance that someday Pleasant Grove might be pleasant again, in a sort of cumin-scented, bright turquise-painted way.

But Pleasant Grove will never again be what it was when I was a kid, because the people who made it the way it was are all gone now.

And nobody cares.

And soon, nobody will even remember the Pleasant Grove that once was -- that sweet little refuge from the foul Age of Aquarius.

And that's sad.

Sic transit gloria mundi --, or, as they say in Old Nippon, (いい天気ですね?

I wish this had been the way I would have grown up. By the time I came around psychiatry was the hottest craze, and it hauled a new era of navel gazing that continues even now.

As I have sniveled here and elsewhere, my childhood bridged the great divide. My mother grew up on the wrong side of the tracks among the lumpen-proletariat, and she was always worried that we'd be kidnapped or molested... even after we'd moved to a rapidly changing suburb from a blue collar neighborhood that seemed to fall apart overnight. And yes, mom's less than idyllic childhood was during the same timeframe as Fred Reed's.

My guess is that before 1962 or so, we used red-lining and housing covenants to keep the sort of folks my mother grew up with confined in some very well-defined areas. We only imprisoned them (a relative term, since they were already imprisoned in a sense) when they left the neighborhood to commit some crime or did something so egregious within the barrio or ghetto that the law could not ignore it.

Crime is down. I've lived in a couple of neighborhoods now where a kid could leave a bike on the front lawn overnight and the chances were that it would still be there in the morning. What remains unclear to me is why that is happening. More and better psychotropics (the soma solution)? Better law enforcement? A revolution in morals? Or is it just more of a hassle to rip off a beat up old bike when you can buy a new 18-speed at Target for 169.99?

I make three predictions:

1. Old Stock Americans will end up with at least some of the territory that used to be part of the United States.

2. Even if it is Death Valley, if we are left on our own, among our own, in sixty years it will be the Switzerland of North America.

3. Thereafter, the blacks and browns will be beating down the fences to get in, all the while screaming about 'racism.'

I suggest that the next time, we give them 'racism,' with both barrels.

Yeah, this is the way it was in rural Western New York in the 1950's. I'm a few years behind the other folks here, born in 1951, but it was the same. When we left the house for the day we never locked the door - didn't need to. Why bother? No one's going to come in - they wouldn't think of it. When Ma went in to the local grocery store (town population ~150) she left the car running if she was only going to be a few minutes; if longer she shut the car off but left the keys in the ignition. Why not? She didn't need the keys in the store so better to leave them in the car where they belong. After all, no one is going to get into a car that doesn't belong to them. I find this idea so difficult to convey to my 30something children. They give me skeptical looks when I tell them that that's really the way things were. They also have a hard time understanding when I try to tell them how hard it is for me to walk the bridge from the antiquarian past to the through the looking glass present. Today I constantly shake my head at what I see around me. Was it really this hard for past generations?

Born in '58, grew up in a small Indiana town. Story of my childhood too. The doors weren't locked at night. No need. No crime. We rode our bikes for miles and miles into the countryside and Moms had no idea where we were. Most families owned one car, not two. Typically a station wagon. The Moms were mostly all at home. I remember thinking it odd when I was in 6th or 7th grade (sometime around 1970 or so) when my best friend's Mom got a part time job at Sears.

Even through the 60's, which most people nowadays view as being a revolutionary, hippie, free love and war protesting crazy time -- for those of us too young to really care about or understand what upset Dad when Walter Cronkite droned on in the background on our small black and white t.v., (the only tv in the house) and why Dad referred to our president as "that sonofabitch LBJ" - the 60's for many of us kids was really kind of like a real life version of "Leave it to Beaver," or "Andy of Mayberry." Except in color instead of black and white. And we had sting ray bikes. And our schools had evolved to having green chalkboards instead of black.

My kids (in their 20's) cannot believe or even process in their minds that those shows could even remotely be connected to any sort of reality of what life in much of America was like at one time.

Well, my kids understand how it was and so do my grandchildren, because I told them. They know they're living in another country.

...And people obeyed stop signs.

Pretty much the same here ... grew up in Texas (and even there LBJ was that SOB rather then the Pres.) One thing no one has recalled, but probably holds true for most ... you could be called on the carpet by anyone's mother and be in just as much trouble as you might be with your own mom. Also ... in the doctor's office was a glass canisiter for storing syringes, needles were a lot thicker and were reused by matronly nurses in sensible shoes (I was there often for stitches acquired during a mostly idyllic childhood).

That piece really struck home with me. Born in a town of 2500 people in the middle of the gold country of the east central part of the Kalifornia, Sierra Nevada foothills, 1945.

No locks on the doors until the hippies invaded the area in the late sixties.

This is key to our cultural decline:

"This is why as cultures break down, or mix with less civilized cultures, more and more police become necessary. So do locks, bars, alarms, cameras and, for the remaining virile, carry permits. Hello."

The "hippies" were not a civilized culture any more than the invaders from uncivilized south America.

Rant if you will but I lived in an area that was totally destroyed by the invasion of both of these sub-cultures.

Fred has left us a fine legacy via his daughter, Emily:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PBv7GvHMlg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9h_3dwCO0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah6c_PGPTnI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chkVkGR3wBE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5cE0zxBjYE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR7l20ZA1aQ

Fred did his best to raise her, and did a really fine job. Fearless (scuba and rock climbing), cute as a button, and talented. She used to love it, when she was tiny, when I tossed her up in the air, with Fred, pretending not to be nervous, looking on. Fred told her to "spread her wings and fly," and she followed his advice.

Another sampling of Little Miss Emily Anne:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBCpqhRvbNI&list=PL6FFBA61088C87C32

What happened to our beloved country?

The long march of Commie cool and the new Soviet debasement of man happened.

Kisses became cumshots, and 'art' took a dump on the Readers Digest. Kids were chastised for loving God and Country while their parents inhaled, snorted, popped, and fucked their way to divorce while Felix the cat buggered Mickey Mouse like a donkey in a Tijuanan whorehouse until what we'd seen could never be unseen.

The left walked strait up to mother America and our Father who art in heaven and spit in their eyes for fun and profit...While We the eternal children chose the tranquility of servitude over the animated contest for freedom as we aborted our babies with the bathwater for an unequaled inequality in the eyes of our new lords and masters in Washington D.C...Then we invited the barbarians and enemies who were skulking around outside our white picket gates into our homes for TV dinners. They never left.

Yes we can! Together, we can move forward into the future. We can improve on the Gulag Archipelago. We'll help fundamentally transform it into an entire country and make it a fit place for chickens to roost.

That's what happened.

Memories are often beautiful, but also influenced by our individual perceptions.

You probably shouldn't go to the library and read newspapers from your town during that period.

You probably shouldn't ask any of your peers from your old neighborhood, "what was really going on inside your house back then?"

Doing these could seriously disturb your bucolic memories of a bygone time and place.

Us older gentlemen remember a time when we actually had some freedom.

As we move on, that knowlege is lost.

If the progressives were smart, they'd move slowly. In another two or three generations, there will be no one left alive who can directly recall the time when the government didnt control everything.

Of course, they've been playing this game for a 100 years and look how far they've come.