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My son and I have a moment when one of us says, “Hey, you know what? I got to thinking.” That is immediately followed by something like, “Oh, no! Do I need to sit down?”

Yesterday, I got thinking. You can begin your chorus of “oh, nos” if you’d like.

My son sent me a link to a guest opinion he found in the Bangor News from an extremely misinformed individual about what effects the recent policy change to allow concealed carry of guns in national parks is going to have for all of us. I’ll save the full rebuttal for another day but in the opening paragraph, the author, Stephanie Clement, conservation director for Friends of Acadia, blessed us with her political savvy and showed us that her knowledge of history goes way back perhaps 20 or 30 years and that might be a stretch.

In reference to the newly passed bill to allow concealed carry in national parks, this is what she said.

This is policy change motivated not by interest in bettering our national parks and the experience of all who visit them, but by a lame-duck presidential administration forcing its outgoing political views on our national heritage.

I wonder if the illness of Bush Derangement Syndrome will wane any after January 20th. A brief clarification on this. This policy change began with 51 U.S. Senators, both democrat and republican, signing a letter asking Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, to look into getting the draconian policy changed. It dates back to the Reagan years.

But I didn’t get thinking so much about the nauseating politics of whining, misinformed, cry-baby liberals and the hypocrisy of accusing Bush of forcing his political views all the while Ms. Clement wants to force her political views. Nope! I got thinking about the qualifier on the end of her statement – “on our national heritage”.

Think about this for a moment. Here’s a person who is attempting to tell the readers of the Bangor News that our national heritage bans the free exercise of our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Had she concluded her statement by saying that President Bush was trying to force is political views on those who believe the Bill of Rights makes good toilet paper, would have been more accurate.

I’m over it! I don’t much care whether Ms. Clement suffers from some incurable disease which symptoms are hysteria and delusion. I really don’t care that she sees anyone with a gun as a killer. I’d hate to live that way. What I do get upset about is the lack of any form of education that teaches people about our national heritage. It does go back a bit further than yesterday. For God’s sake! People today think our heritage involves the evolution of cell phones, computers and video games.

I moved beyond the anger and began to laugh. What possesses people to go public in order to show their ignorance? I do it for entertainment value. I hope you like it.

But seriously, though. Bush had nothing to do with this policy change and if someone wants to believe it’s a case of forcing political views, why is it forcing political views “on our national heritage”? And how do you do that anyway? This person was definitely born yesterday.

So, I got to thinking about my own heritage. I grew up the youngest of four boys. Nineteen years after I was born, my parents produced a baby sister. For the most part, all us boys had flown the nest when she came along but prior to that, we all grew up in the country in a house that had somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 square feet of living space. Yeah, yeah, I know. Extravagant, yes, but we needed the room to spread out.

We bathed every Saturday night, whether we needed to or not, in an old galvanized tub, hand-carrying our water. Being the youngest, I got sloppy fourth in line bath water. We possessed a one-hole outhouse and doubled up sleeping in one set of bunk beds. In other words we had everything anyone could want.

We stood our guns up in whatever corner of a room would allow and when we could afford ammunition, we did a lot of “plinking”. A favorite pastime was a trip to the town dump to shoot rats.

My brothers and I shared are own car before we were old enough to legally drive, creating our own race track in a neighboring, partly overgrown field.

My heritage I’m afraid is considerably different than that of Ms. Clement. You see, we didn’t need government telling us what we could and couldn’t do. We respected others and we let live. Government was something that kept an army to protect this country from people like Ms. Clement who want to steal our freedoms. For the power hungry, taking away freedom is the biggest tool for their success and over time we’ve handed them exactly what they want, albeit piece meal.

My heritage goes back to when I could speak freely and not be censored by something we’ve come to call political correctness. Growing up we referred to this as, sometimes the truth hurts. We didn’t talk about making laws every time we saw something we didn’t agree with and attitude adjustments took place out behind the barn.

But I’m afraid Ms. Clement is a closer representation of what America is today. For her convenience she chooses not to expand her national heritage back any further than what fits her “political views”. We sink gobs of money into a failed education system, one that no longer teaches about Ms. Clement’s prized “national heritage”. With each successive generation, “national heritage” becomes only in the eyes of the beholder.

What a shame!

Tom Remington

Greg Farber

Thats what the Rockefeller Foundation and their prized teacher marxist communist John Dewey did for America…it was slow and progressive but it worked…and our thinking for ourselves heritage is being replaced by mind controlled DORKS like this women….that can’t think past breakfast this morning…..
George

Long ago and far away, in a land that time forgot,
Before the days of Dylan, or the dawn of Camelot.

There lived a race of innocents, and they were you and me,

For Ike was in the White House in that land where we were born,
Where navels were for oranges, and Peyton Place was porn.
We learned to gut a muffler, we washed our hair at dawn,
We spread our crinolines to dry in circles on the lawn.
We longed for love and romance, and waited for our Prince,
And Eddie Fisher married Liz, and no one’s seen him since.
We danced to ‘Little Darlin’, and sang to ‘Stagger Lee’
And cried for Buddy Holly in the Land That Made Me, Me.

Only girls wore earrings then, and 3 was one too many,
And only boys wore flat-top cuts, except for Jean McKinney.
And only in our wildest dreams did we expect to see
A boy named George with lipstick, in the Land That Made Me, Me.

We fell for Frankie Avalon, Annette was oh, so nice,
And when they made a movie, they never made it twice.
We didn’t have a Star Trek Five, or Psycho Two and Three,
Or Rocky-Rambo Twenty in the Land That Made Me, Me.

Miss Kitty had a heart of gold, and Chester had a limp,
And Reagan was a Republican whose co-star was a chimp.

We had a Mr. Wizard, but not a Mr. T,
And Oprah couldn’t talk yet, in the Land That Made Me, Me.

We had our share of heroes, we never thought they’d go,
At least not Bobby Darin or Marilyn Monroe.
For youth was still eternal, and life was yet to be,
And Elvis was forever in the Land That Made Me, Me

We’d never seen the rock band that was Grateful to be Dead
And Airplanes weren’t named Jefferson, and Zeppelins were not Led.
And Beatles lived in gardens then, and Monkees lived in trees,
Madonna was a virgin in the Land That Made Me, Me.

We’d never heard of microwaves, or telephones in cars,
And babies might be bottle-fed, but they weren’t grown in jars.
And pumping iron got wrinkles out, and ‘gay’ meant fancy-free,
And dorms were never coed in the Land That Made Me, Me.

We hadn’t seen enough of jets to talk about the lag,
And microchips were what was left at the bottom of the bag.
And Hardware was a box of nails, and bytes came from a flea,
And rocket ships were fiction in the Land That Made Me, Me.

Buicks came with portholes, and side shows came with freaks,
And bathing suits came big enough to cover both your cheeks.
And Coke came just in bottles, and skirts below the knee,
And Castro came to power near the Land That Made Me, Me.

We had no Crest with Fluoride, we had no Hill Street Blues,
We had no patterned pantyhose or Lipton herbal tea,
Or prime-time ads for condoms in the Land That Made Me, Me.

There were no golden arches, no Perrier to chill,
And fish were not called Wanda, and cats were not called Bill.
And middle-aged was 35 and old was forty-three,
And ancient were our parents in the Land That Made Me, Me.

But all things have a season, or so we’ve heard them say,
And now instead of Maybelline we swear by Retin-A.
They send us invitations to join AARP,
We’ve come a long way, baby, from the Land That Made Me, Me.

So now we face a brave new world in slightly larger jeans,
And wonder why they’re using smaller print in magazines.
And we tell our children’s children of the way it used to be,
Long ago and far away in the Land That Made Me, Me.

B. Smith

“I Was Thinking”

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