Things are constantly changing for good or bad. Life used to be fairly simple compared to how we see them now. I was born and grew up in Southern Illinois in a town with only a 3,000 population. It wasn’t until high school I knew we had an extended family of ethnic Germans in the county. They were in a different school district for grade school. We had no non-white people living in the county and the only religious strife was Baptists sects against each other and both against the Pentecostal and Catholics. No fighting but lots of meaningless debating. It was a rare county to some extent because we had no non-white people in it. My family wasn’t racist because of my mother.

            At the time most of the names I knew were English so when I went to college I encountered other colors and saw nothing to be concerned about. They were just people like me. My first knowledge of racism in the Southern states was a girl who had moved up for junior college from a Jim Crow state. She had a huge inferiority complex and was uncomfortable around the rest of us and talking with us scared her. I hope she overcame it.

            My source of the wider world was the television and its programs. I had seldom watched the news so a university with Viet Nam protests and veterans, racial strife with Martin Luther King’s murder, studying population, food, and climate change was an eye opener. I started watching the national and international news and now I am a news junkie.

            Age old American Companies are now owned by foreign companies with CEOs who have distinct accents from the rest of the world. The internet companies have ethnic Asian Founders and CEOs. Oh, I have several Asian friends and my niece and nephew married into that ethnic German culture. Times have changed for the better for me but I still live in the good old days.

The bad is evident and I think the invention pushed by Al Gore is the basis for much of today’s problems. The newspapers and television were worried about not telling the truth about something and getting sued. Today we have media on the TV and internet that are so completely as to be propaganda status.

            Civility in politics has gone for the most part. Name calling and demeaning an opponent’s race and sex is now common. Having an immoral and despicable personality means nothing for millions of people. Lying has become an art form for some politicians. Religious people who run from any person wanting their vote now say they are not the second coming. What has happened to morals being their basis for supporting a person?

            Climate change has finally become evident with record high temperatures, and five hundred and thousand year storms are occurring every year. Home often are still in repair when another swamps it. Where I live in Northern Illinois a winter night reaching zero is extremely rare. Just a few decades ago that was a high temperature for days. Insects that burrowed down froze and died, but today the ground barely freezes.