IT ONLY GETS WORSE

            I still talk to my parents. They've been dead for decades, but I have all of their responses, complete with facial expressions, down pat. So, I carry on my one-sided conversations animatedly throughout the house, and I all but see and hear their every reaction as if they actually were still here.

            And what do "we" talk about? The increasing nuttiness of society. How every decade gets decidedly crazier than the one before it, in every way imaginable.

            How liberalism has pervasively permeated our very existence ever since about 1968. The more strides and gains that the liberals attain, the more stridently they complain, and about increasingly petty miniscule irritations, treating each one as if it were a major atrocity. "Micro-aggressions" now? Really??

            How pride in one's appearance has been on a downhill slide steeper than the steepest rollercoaster since about that same year. Bad enough that dungarees - once the trousers worn only by those who couldn't afford any better, and the wearers thereof were pitied or made fun of - have become ubiquitous and the supposed "height of fashion," but now they must be "decorated" with intentional holes and unravelings: features of which even the poorest of the poor used to be, justifiably, too ashamed to be seen wearing. Thus, entire generations have now been left in abysmal ignorance regarding the formerly basic awareness of the difference between fad or trend, and genuine style, which is timeless.

            How neurotic over-protectiveness, hand in hand with  a total decline in discipline and wholesale tolerance of lack of respect, has led to children being strait-jacketed into car seats like mummies in a tomb, unlike the free and easy, common-sense, relaxed and comfortable ability of a child to lie down in the backseat during the parents' interminable driving vacations, sleeping away the carsickness, the homesickness, and the boredom. Ah, bench seats: the only way to endure two or three weeks of endless confinement! Or the child's ability to kneel on the backseat, watching out the back window, keeping driver Daddy informed, minute by minute, of just how much closer and faster that tornado was approaching and gaining on us. Of course, in the refreshing comparative sanity of the 1950s and the early 1960s, we weren't cursed with demolition-derby-style way-too-many-laned interstate highways filled with far too many drivers going far too fast. We weren't nearly as horribly overpopulated, or nearly as ridiculously reckless. (And don't even get me started on how much uglier the cars have become with every passing decade! The huge hideous front grills on these cars now! Spare me!).

            And now I read the occasional Yahoo article doing it all backward: letting people of today look back with disdain, their snooty-snouts in the air, regarding how things were (and still should be) back when life was sane.