Remember when you could sit on the front porch and visit with half the neighborhood as they strolled hand in hand down the street on a sunny afternoon? When my parents removed the front porch from their home in 1970, I remember thinking it was the closing of an era.
Oh, Mom said the new "room" was for gazing out the window, but I never remember using it for that, and when we did open the window curtains to gaze out, the neighbors didn't see us sitting there, IF they bothered to stroll past. Life changed after that summer. We ceased to have lemonade on the front porch. I don't remember ice cream socials in the garden anymore either. Family gatherings became an exhausting event, instead of a fun time to share. Life got harder that year.
The City passed an Ordinance against having animals in town. Grandma got rid of her chickens and the chicken house came tumbling down. We gathered up the wood, the galvanized metal and hauled it all to the dump in the name of progress, and lives rushed on by.
The City wanted us to move our horses to the country, and eventually we did. The cows stayed in town, a heifer for milk and a couple of calves for milk. It was that next year the bull broke through the fence when the neighbor kids were poking sticks at him. He was an over stuffed teddy bear waiting for butcher, but those kids were frightened. I rounded him up and led him back to the corral, and we butchered him the next weekend. He was a mighty fine steak. I still remember thinking how tasty he was, to have been so full of vigor and fun.
Not only did the front porch go by the roadside that summer, but a bit of freedom washed down the river too. We began to see the coming of community rule, and the phasing out of the small American town. They still exist, but on a different plane. There's no community spirit, no fight for freedom, no holding out for the best of us to become better. Sustenance is government provided, neighbors don't come together to help neighbors anymore, like they did back then.
I used to hear adults talking about how things were back then, and thought they just didn't like the new ways of doing things, but then I began to see. We're phasing out the freedom that kept our lives pure, safe and free of crime and bringing in a kind of socialistic rule that makes everyone the same, takes away freedom, and removes the opportunity from our existence. Crime rates are soaring. The purity of life that existed back then is falling by the back roads, and freedom is disappearing from the face of this nation. Are we truly going to allow that to happen?
We can change it, but we'd better do it fast, before this next generation is gone too. We won't be able to change it when the baby boomers are gone. No one else remembers.
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