The Prom season is almost over and it is the night that kids get to pretend they're adults and ready to take on the world. I know I was one of those..The most beautiful girl in the world on my arm, ready to hit the big time and make a name for myself, preferably as a singer..Radio was the second choice. Planning a future free of toil and strife..Of course there was, as Kenny Rogers called it, "That pesky Asian War". But we were naive. We relied on Walter Cronkite for 20 minutes each night (minus commercials) to tell us everything we needed to know about the world. 20 minutes wasn't enough to spend on unfunded liabilities, debt limits, and federal deficits. 20 minutes was barely enough to tell how many died that week in Southeast Asia or the show President Johnson picking up his beagle by it's ears. No, Prom was just a night that would be burned into your memories to be resurrected once in a while to remember a quieter and simpler time. Republicans and Democrats got along, more or less, we didn't question our elective process or hear of hanging chads. All that mattered was how to make those idiotic Roman columns for the gym. Our motto was "We Came, We Saw, We Conquered". About the only thing I conquered was the Pythagorean Theorem and don't ask me to explain it today. We went in my custom painted '61 Plymouth 4 door sedan which, while looking much better than she did when I bought her, wasn't exactly the stretch limo kids rent today. I washed it and then waxed the hell out of it.
We had some quiet rumblings about spiking the punch bowl, but thought better of it. Our corsages were a courtesy of our small town undertaker. They were magnificent and I don't think he made much, if anything off them. A 2 orchid corsage was 3 bucks, a single a buck and a half. It cost 15 bucks to rent the tux. I was lucky, a friend of the family actually owned one and he was my size. I forget the name of the band, something like the Sominex Sextet or something like that. We would have had our own school dance band but the whole trumpet section (myself included) and half the sax section were Seniors, so a band consisting of drums and 2 clarinets wouldn't have provided much romantic atmosphere. Nobody hired disk jockeys back then, at least not in small town America. They were those mystical people from far away places and God, I just had to become one of them. Should have become a door to door proctologist. Or a used car salesman. At least I wouldn't have had to choose between the microphone and working 8-5.
Nowadays, kids going to the Prom face a future of uncertainty. They already owe around 50,000 dollars toward the national debt, more or less depending on whose figures you use. Even more if you included State and Local debt. The "fun" jobs are going away. Hell, the kid who wanted to be an astronaut just saw his dream job go away. Can't even pay for a Shuttle ride anymore. "Green Jobs" and "I.T." jobs are apparently in abundance as are jobs at Walmart. But the jobs you can grow old with are swiftly fading away. As we make better mousetraps, we need fewer mice.
In the Bible, Jesus said "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth". Time to change that to "Blessed are the EDUCATED" America is so in need of young adults who are ready and eager to learn. In my neighborhood, most of the young adults are more interested in learning skateboard skills and how to make their pants defy the laws of gravity. Learning is so easy today...If the history teacher leaves out some important details on the Battle of Hastings, there's always the internet and the History channel to fill in the gaps. There's always a friend on one of the social networks to walk you through a Math problem. Wood shop..get rid of it. You can learn to cut off your thumb on your own.
America is at a crossroads. Continue on as we are and go down faster than the Roman Empire, or make the changes that need to be made and upset everybody who has a hand out, and in one way or another, that's all of us. Makes you want to go back to the days of blue Prom dresses and '61 Plymouths.
No comments:
Post a Comment