Tough to have real freedom in a nation full of selfish people

I have never really understood the people who argue that there should be less and less government and more and more freedom.

To me it seems as if their argument boils down to one thing -- man is basically good and the more freedom we give him, the better he will be.

Let's examine that thought for a minute. We have lessened regulation and/or restrictions on nearly every aspect of our culture, so should me assume that our movies, television, music and books are now better, more uplifting, more celebratory of the human spirit?

Did you see Miley Cyrus's performance the other night?

I don't even want to think about who found that uplifting. Of course, Cyrus is just following in the footsteps of Lindsay Lohan, Britney and Jamie Spears and a host of others.

I don't want to be too condemnatory about how that contributed to our culture, but let's just say that if "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" appeals to our better angels and our higher instincts, Ms. Cyrus appears to be aiming only below the waist.

Of course it's difficult to find much these days that doesn't try to stimulate us or scare us. If you walk out of a movie and you aren't shivering with fear, sexually aroused or both, odds are you're watching something that wasn't made by a major studio.

What disappoints me is that this country never seems to be able to strike a happy medium for long. We go through periods when people are very idealistic and want to contribute to society, and then through periods where all they want is for society to contribute to them.

There are some among us -- I'm one of them -- who believe our country would be far better off with mandatory national service. I'm not talking strictly about the military; people could work in hospitals, in schools and in all sorts of other situations that would help the community. Two years, maybe. Some people would say it doesn't do any good to compel people to serve, that it's no good unless it's what they want to do.

The thing that seems wrong to me about that is that it assumes no one can ever really learn. I've known people who were pushed into doing things they didn't want to do. In some cases, they learned a lot and really expanded their own horizons.

In World War II America, the rich served alongside the poor, a far cry from Civil War America, where someone called to service could pay $300 to hire someone to take their place.

In our current volunteer military, no one has to do anything he doesn't want to do. And we end up with a military made up of the poor and uneducated defending those who, as Dick Cheney once put it about himself, have different priorities.

No matter how much money you have, no matter how much property you own, you're not the person who created this country and made it what it was at least for a while -- the last best hope of mankind. And even if your ancestors did build it, that shouldn't give you a free ride for the rest of your life.

I don't want to force anyone into the military, but there are plenty of other worthwhile jobs that need to be done. Folks could help out in hospitals or schools or they could work in community centers that are always shorthanded.

There wouldn't be much in the way of salary, but there could be benefits after the period of service the way we did things under the old G.I. Bill. But the biggest benefit would be the same thing that happened during World War II, when people got to see how the other half lived. All four of President Roosevelt's sons served on active duty. The Kennedys lost their oldest son when his plane went down.

In World War I, my grandfather -- a poor boy from Ohio -- served with Robert McCormick, the owner of the Chicago Tribune. They kept in touch for decades after the war.

I know there are people who will look at the way black people were treated and the roles to which women were limited and say this wasn't as good a country then. But in so many other ways, the first 60 or 70 years of the last century were so much better. Opportunity was real, and there really were people who grew up poor and through hard work made successes of themselves.

We had more government then, but when it comes to the things that really mattered, we had more freedom too. That's what the ideologues will never understand.

More war? No doubt that the lunatics are running our country

Generally, when the United States goes to war, there's one reason at the heart of it.

Money.

Two-time Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler said it best.

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."

Butler died in 1940, and I have a pretty good idea he wouldn't be thrilled to see some folks in our government urging us to get involved in the civil war in Syria.

Here's the question, though. Reports out of Syria say that both the government and the rebels have been committing war crimes and atrocities. So if we were to intervene, on which side do we come in? Here's another question: Would we even consider getting involved here if President Gee Dubya hadn't attacked Iraq without provocation?

We have never been a "mind our own business" nation, but in the past at least, most of our intervention has been in our own hemisphere, under the guise of protecting American business interests. Of course our pretense at allowing other countries self-determination ended under Nixon in the early '70s when we ousted Chilean president Salvador Allende because he was a Marxist.

Civil War in Syria

We lost most of the rest of our moral rectitude when we didn't stop the slaughter in either Rwanda or the Sudan. Hey, no oil. No white people. Nobody to save worth saving.

So we invaded Iraq. So we've been at war in Afghanistan for 12 incomprehensible years. And now we have to show how big our genitals are by making even more Arabs hate us?

Somewhere in the ninth circle of Hell, Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off.

He knows who really won the War on Terror.

It sure wasn't us.

Fifty years of progress, but still much work to be done

In one respect, I write this for my children and grandchildren, who may or may not be surprised to learn that there was a time in this country when black people were treated as less than human.

Or maybe they won't be surprised at all. They live in an era where conservatives seem to want to take us back to the pre-civil rights era.

It was 50 years ago this weekend that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech before more than 250,000 people in Washington, D.C. The America of which he spoke was one where restaurants and hotels could still legally discriminate on the basis of race, one in which discrimination prevented people from even voting in most of the South.

It was the next year when the Civil Rights Act banned much discrimination, and it was 1965 when the right to vote was guaranteed for all who were eligible.

Some folks would have you believe that discrimination ended then, but of course it didn't.

Discrimination outlived Dr. King, who was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in April 1968. I'll never forget the night. I was in a dormitory in Charlottesville, Va., studying a lot of stuff that I never really learned. A kid came running down the hall shouting happily that "Martin Luther Coon had been killed in Tennessee."

It was strange. I didn't think of that particular kid as a particularly vicious racist. But at that point in 1968, there were probably more kids in my dorm pleased by the news than appalled by it.

There were no riots on our campus. In fact, there weren't very many black students at the University of Virginia in 1968. It was still very conservative and very Southern, and as much as I loved things about it, starting my college travels there was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

Who could cheer the death of someone who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? At least at that point, Henry Kissinger and Yasir Arafat were still in the future.

But Dr. King spoke of good things. He spoke of peace between the races and of judging people by their character instead of what they looked like.

How could anyone argue with that? Well, there were plenty of poor white people who were pretty much at the bottom of the ladder, and the only thing they had going for them -- in their minds -- was that they were not black.

They didn't want to hear that black people were just as good as they were.

At the grass roots, a great deal of that has changed. I live just outside a small, relatively poor Georgia city. Anytime I drive downtown, I drive through a pretty bad black neighborhood. But one thing I have noticed here in Griffin, Ga., is that I have never seen so many interracial couples with beautiful coffee-colored kids.

Probably the worst discrimination in our part of the country is from conservative politicians. Before civil rights, they were Democrats known as Dixiecrats. Now most of them are Republicans, and when I voted last November, once I got past president, eight of the nine offices on the ballot were Republicans running unopposed.

The demographics are slipping away from them, and in numerous states Republicans are working very hard to make it more difficult for minorities and young people to vote.

But times do change. In the late '50s, people said they thought civil rights would come, but not for another generation. A lot of people spoke of gradualism, but truly, if you're ending something that is wrong, how can you be gradual about it.

Dr. King died at the age of 39. If he had lived to 79, he would have seen a black man elected president of the United States, but in the years after that, he would have seen a lot of racists resurfacing to say horrible things about that president.

I don't need to repeat those things.

We celebrate the 50th anniversary of a wonderful speech by a great American this weekend, and we celebrate 50 years of progress by our country as well.

But it is also important that we tell the people of the other side, the people who never wanted there to be civil rights, four little words.

"WE'RE NOT GOING BACK."

Just a thought on the most contrary guy I know

Facebook makes it too easy to argue with the world. Post an opinion and it seems like everyone you know chips away at it. It's difficult not to answer all of them back, especially when they are people you know well.

My dear friend Mick Curran, bless his heart ...

Stop right there.

Huh?

You've lived in the South too long. You know that saying "bless his heart" about someone nearly always precedes a negative comment about them.

It's better than "damn his eyes," isn't it?

A little.

Anyway, whenever I post anything on Facebook that is even remotely opinionated, you could win a lot of money in Las Vegas if they allowed you to bet on who is most likely to post "a discouraging word." Even when I post something that isn't an opinion -- something factual -- it's 8 to 5 Mick will disagree with it in some way.

Since we disagree on many more issues than we agree on, it makes sense that he would argue his points. Better yet, from his side of the political equation, is if he can discourage me from posting at all. That has been happening some of the time lately.

We have been friends for more than 48 years, and while I say to him that if we met now, we would have little in common, I know that our friendship will last till one of us dies. He will say the most outrageous things, such as that I have a very simplistic world view, but I take it with a grain of salt, bless his heart.

In some respects, namely job hunting, I could compare his experiences to being beaten like a rented mule ... or a redheaded stepchild. It has always been difficult for me to understand how someone so intelligent, so talented, could keep coming up short in job interviews. I mean, once he learned that he was expected to wear pants, he corrected that right away, bless his heart.

I'll always be one of his biggest fans, and his not making it bigger in Hollywood remains one of the two great mysteries of my life. That and why Leo Durocher and Joan Rivers were in Moscow, Idaho, together that particular winter.

Bless their hearts.

No death penalty, but if they're guilty, never let them walk free again

Sometimes it is difficult to maintain consistency in one's beliefs.

I have worked hard to develop a consistent philosophy on life issues, and one that I have pretty much believed for most of my life is that I am opposed to capital punishment. There have been times when that is difficult for me. Sirhan Sirhan, for example. I think his murder of Bobby Kennedy did more to hurt our country than anything I can think of.

Imagine a country where Richard Nixon is never president, and the Vietnam War ends four or five years earlier. A lot changes. For one thing, Ronald Reagan probably never becomes president.

But I digress.

It's hard not to keep thinking about the shooting in Oklahoma, where three bored teenagers murdered an Australian baseball player the other day. I do feel obligated to point out that earlier media reports -- which I used yesterday -- showed the killers as three black kids. Apparently they showed the wrong Michael Jones; the correct one is white.

Is there redemption for people who do something so despicable? It's difficult to imagine.

Someone who did something not nearly as bad, but perhaps more notorious, spoke of life after infamy.

"I'm pretty sure I'll never get married. Can you imagine someone falling in love with me, taking me home to their parents and saying, 'I want you to meet Monica Lewinsky.'"

But is there truly redemption for vicious killers, especially ones who essentially did it just for fun? Or do they go on spreading evil, even while serving life without parole?

All I can say is, the reason we should not choose the death penalty isn't about them, it's about us. When we make the decision to take someone else's life, it cheapens us.

As for their possible redemption, we tend to go too easy on people. Serve a few years, write a book, make a very public apology (complete with tears) on Oprah. (The show, not the person) After that, they're free to run for Congress or open a popular restaurant.

Just another glimpse at the bullshit we call 21st century American culture.

True redemption for horrific acts -- if it is possible -- has nothing to do with how many times you say you're sorry before you get back to your old life. I think getting back to the old life is sort of out of the question.

It reminds me of one of the scariest books I ever read -- John Farris's "Son of the Endless Night."

In it, a college student is possessed by a powerful demon and commits truly gruesome murders. It's a complex problem, because while he physically committed the crimes, he had no mental involvement in them

He is acquitted of the crimes, but there is no way he can be part of society anymore. He goes to a remote monastery to do good works and serve penance for the rest of his life.

Somehow I don't see that happening here.

We're not really into the true penance thing.

But I remain consistent. If they're guilty, don't execute them. But don't ever let them walk free again. I have no desire to see what would happen the first time they got bored.

For Lane a real tragedy, for three others a horrific act

Sometimes parents really are clueless.

I don't want to blame Jennifer Luna of Duncan, Okla., for the fact that her son Chancey Allen Luna reportedly shot and killed a college baseball player from Australia because they were bored, but I'm sure not going to buy her statement that "I know my son. He is a good kid."

Christopher Lane

The only "good kid" in this story was Christopher Lane, 22, who came all the way from Melbourne for a baseball scholarship at East Central University in Ada, Okla.

Chancey Luna, he might be a monster.

He and his buddies were apparently riding around Duncan. Luna was playing with a gun in the back seat when he apparently decided at random to shoot somebody. Lane was walking on the sidewalk and Luna apparently leaned out the window and shot him in the back.

He died.

But Jennifer Luna knows her son as a kid who likes to play basketball on a local court and who enjoys playing video games on his iPhone and Xbox.

Michael Dewayne Jones, the oldest of the three at 17, wept in the courtroom, but he was just the guy who drove the car. Duncan police chief Dan Ford said Jones told him earlier that they were bored and killed Duncan "just for the fun of it."

So he might be sort of a monster too.

It's a shame it's a black-white thing, because I'm sure there will be plenty of people who want to make a racial point about it.

I don't. I want to make a gun point, and I'll do it by asking the question whether this is why the goddamned National Rifle Association fights so hard to protect gun ownership, and whether the purpose of the Second Amendment is so kids can ride around in cars playing with guns.

Because they're killing our country.

I agree 100 percent with the former deputy prime minister of Australia, Tim Fischer, who criticized the NRA and suggested Australians should avoid the U.S.

"Tourists thinking of going to the USA should think twice," he said. "I am deeply angry about this because of the callous attitude of the three teenagers (but) it's a sign of the proliferation of guns on the ground in the USA. There is a gun for almost every American."

I've heard all the arguments and they don't work for me. The one that especially annoys me is when they say the Founding Fathers wanted people to have weapons to overthrow a tyrannical government. I have a hard time believing that the greatest minds of the 18th century wanted to make it easy to overthrow the government they were starting.

I don't have a single friend or relative who owns a gun, to the best of my knowledge. I think my grandfather had a shotgun in the late 1950s, when I was little, but the only thing he used it for was to put meat on the table.

I don't know how true the correlation is between gun ownership and small genitals, but it doesn't really matter. I do think there's a relationship between owning lots of guns and feelings of inferiority.

That's why Colt's famous gun that "won the west" was called the Great Equalizer.

It allowed little men to stand up to bigger ones.

And worthless ones to stand up to special ones.

A 20th-Century Californian gets a little bit snarky about Florida

Two of my closest friends in the world live in Florida, one in Sarasota and the other in Lake City after living earlier in Miami. I have only been in the state twice, in Fort Lauderdale for spring break in 1980 and Cape Canaveral for the Cassini launch in the fall of 1997. On my second visit, I was a columnist for a Southern California newspaper, and I wrote about the famous feud between Florida and California. From October 12, 1997, here is:

"Florida; tacky, humid and crowded: What's not to love?"

"So, Mike Rappaport, you've finished your latest column. What are you going to do next?"

"I'm going to Disney World."

Well, not exactly.

I may or may not make it to the Happiest Place on the East Coast this time, but I am flying into Orlando and heading over to Cape Canaveral for the launch of the Cassini spacecraft.

I didn't have much choice in the matter. My lovely wife has been working on NASA's Saturn exploration mission for the last seven years, so this is a very important moment for her.

Nicole is already at the Cape, and our son and I will jet in with an eye on seeing that giant Titan rocket lift off at about 2 a.m. PDT Monday morning.

It's just a shame it had to be in Florida. You see, I have never liked that state -- Dave Barry, Travis McGee and the Miami Dolphins notwithstanding.

The southernmost part of our country is far too humid, crowded and tacky for my tastes.

I've only been there once, so I know this is kind of a rush to judgment, but believe me, once was more than enough. I spent an unbelievably difficult week if Fort Lauderdale in 1980. Everything that could have gone wrong, did.

The natives weren't very friendly.

My hotel accommodations were less than five-star.

The food was barely edible, and it came in such small portions.

All in all, I couldn't spring a break. Or break a spring, for that matter.

I never had the slightest desire to go back.

It may be different when you're living in the East and you've got winters to cope with. I suppose then an occasionally trip down to Miami can be fairly pleasant. I do recall walking on the beach at Lauderdale in 89-degree heat during the first week in March 1980. That was definitely above average, especially since it was 70 degrees colder back home in Virginia.

But I live in California now, and why anyone would want to leave California for Florida is beyond me. Florida is nothing more than California Lite. Any comparison makes that obvious.

After all:

-- We've got the J. Paul Getty Museum, Huntington Gardens and the Norton Simon Museum.  They're got Snakeworld, Alligatorland and Manatee Pond.

-- We've got the Golden Gate, they've got the Golden Girls.

-- We've got Caltech, Stanford and other institutions of higher learning. They've got the Ringling Brothers Clown College.

-- We've got the Rose Bowl, they've got a 64-lane all-night Bowl-O-Rama just outside Kissimmee.

-- We've got California redwoods, they've got Spanish moss and kudzu.

-- We've got Barbra Streisand, they've got Anita Bryant. (Well, maybe that one is a tossup)

-- We've got California Condors, the bird with the largest wingspan in the world. They've got mosquitoes that run a close second.

-- We've got world famous restaurants all up and down our state. They've got donut shops every 50 feet along the Tamiami Trail.

-- We get visitors from Japan, Australia and most of Europe. They get tourists from New Jersey, dressed in their colorful native costumes of Bermuda shorts, white socks and sandals.

I think we all know which is the better place to be.

Of course I'm sure there will be people who will take issue with this. There must be at least a few folks who have been to Florida and enjoyed themselves. After all, it is one of America's leading tourist destinations.

Disney World is there.

So are Universal Studios.

Rumor has it they're very proud of their orange groves.

Sound like anyplace we know?

Maybe I'm not being entirely fair. Florida does have a few things that set it apart from the other 49 states.

Poisonous coral snakes.

Deadly walking catfish.

And worst of all ... the Kennedy Compound.

That's why I won't be spending any more time in the "Sunshine State" than absolutely necessary.

I'll watch the launch, have a meal or two and hop a flight before the weekly hurricane hits.

I need to leave quickly anyway. I'm fresh out of clean socks to wear with my sandals.

***

It has been 16 years since I wrote that column for a California audience, and these days I find myself living a lot closer to Florida than I did then. I do love Jimmy Buffett, and I find there are at least a couple of places in Florida I would like to see.

Yes, we're exceptional, but for some pretty goofy stuff

I think I finally understand what some people call "American Exceptionalism."

It isn't about something we do that makes us exceptional. It's about the things we don't do.

We may be the only so-called free country in the world where it's all about the Benjamins. In every other democracy or republic in the world, part of what comes right along with living there is health care. It isn't free. They pay for it with their taxes and it doesn't always cover anything.

Indeed, in France, which is rated as the best health care system in the world, taxes pay for 70 percent and many people buy supplemental private insurance to cover the next 20 percent. The patient pays the final 10 percent, up to a point, but nobody goes without necessary care.

Here we get guys like this schmuck running for the senate from New Jersey, who says don't look to him for your health care. He probably won't win, but there are too many people like him, and most of them prattle on about how we have the "Best Health Care in the World."

Pardon my French, Steve, but that's horseshit.

Yes, if money is no object, you can get pretty fine health care here. But please, tell me how many people you know for whom money is no object. My wife and I are blessed with financial security and good insurance, so the spinal surgery and other things we went through last year were mostly paid.

I added it all up once, and I think it would have cost us $150,000 or so if we had to pay everything. We didn't, but the $22,000 or so we spent on all medical stuff last year would literally have hammered a lot of people who aren't as well off as we are.

When my wife and I went to Tahiti in 1999, Nicole broke her wrist in a motor scooter accident. We went to the hospital, where she had X-rays and treatment for her wrist and I had precautionary X-rays for my neck and lower back.

Total cost to us?

Zip.

Yes, she has dual citizenship (Tahiti is part of French Polynesia), but I don't.

Are we exceptional here? Damn right we are. In the United States, plenty of people don't get the health care they need because they can't pay for it. Little wonder that the World Health Organization ranked us 37th in the world in 2011. Maybe Obamacare will help. It sure can't hurt. We're below frigging Cuba.

Oh, yeah. France is first.

Think about vacations. Many American workers don't accrue vacation time at all, and the average full-time employee in our country takes less than two weeks a year.

In France, as in most of Europe, everyone gets 4-6 weeks a year. Those lazy Euros, right? Actually, they've done studies that show that giving people time off, usually in the summer, to recharge their batteries actually makes them more productive the rest of the year.

We could talk about so much more. Better retirement, cheaper education, but I don't want anyone tearing their hair out.

What's the big difference? Honestly?

Well, most of their rich people don't live as high off the hog as ours do, and we have more things than they do -- bigger cars, bigger televisions, etc. But be honest, does that 80-inch 3-D television with Sensurround make up for poor health insurance, little or no vacation time and all the rest?

Not hardly, pilgrim.

It seems to me we're living less than we ought to be just so idiots like Donald Trump can have solid gold bathroom fixtures, and that's not right. I think we did it best during the Eisenhower Era, when folks could make just as much money as they wanted, but once they got about a certain level, their taxes went way up.

It's different now, but is that really what we want to be known as exceptional for?

The richest rich people in the world?

Damn, they don't even give medals for that.

There's progress, and then there's real progress in this world

My grandmother lived to see Halley's Comet come twice.

She was 14 when it passed through the inner Solar System in April 1910 and 90 when it came back in February 1986.

That last time was the one time I saw it, the only time I will ever see it unless I live to the summer of 2061.

I was 36 years old and living in St. Louis the one time I saw it, and sadly, everything about the comet except the fact that I saw it has pretty well vanished from my memory.

My grandmother died in 1990 after seeing the world change from gaslight and horse-drawn carriages to spaceflight and computers. At first glance, the world seems to have changed massively since I was born in 1949, but I'm not really sure that's true.

In fact, there are time I think that most of the changes in my lifetime are simply about getting people to part with more and more of their money.

1948 television

Yes, our television sets have gotten bigger and bigger, with high definition, color and even 3-D, but all those things are just improvements on the first televisions, which were built and sold before I was born.

I may watch television on a 47-inch, high-definition set that seems almost perfect in the picture and sound it gives me, but I would be willing to bet that the folks watching the set pictured here watched with a far greater sense of wonder than I ever had.

I may drive an SUV with all sorts of modern conveniences, but except for the GPS system, just about everything else on the car was there in some more primitive form in cars people drove before I was born.

Early computers.

We have computers in our homes now, but there were computers people used before I was born. Ditto for most of the other marvelous things we have in our houses now. They're better, but they aren't new.

As for the computers, they certainly make it possible to do a lot of things we didn't before, but just as the original thought was that television would mean people could watch symphonies and plays at home, the Internet hasn't quite worked out the way we thought it would.

Whether it was chat rooms on America Online in the 1990s, porn sites, weird political stuff and e-mail attachments later, or Facebook in the new millennium, most people spend way more than half their time on the Internet just screwing around.

I've been trying to think of something that actually started during my lifetime and has actually made a difference to people, and the one thing I came up with was fax machines. Xerox patented the first commercialized version of the fax machine in 1964, although it was 15-20 years later that such machines were in widespread use.

I suppose manned space flight would be another, but of the billions of people on Earth, I'm pretty sure no more than a couple of hundred have actually flown in space. And I seriously doubt that any private citizen who isn't fabulously wealthy ever will in my lifetime.

So things don't really change all that much, and the progress we do make, we sort of take for granted. I can only imagine what it was like when my grandmother was a young woman and her family purchased a radio for use at home for the first time.

Or when the first televisions came available.

I can't think there is anything that would excite us that much. No television, no computer, no cellphone. In fact, it may be that the next thing that would truly excite us would be when reality finally catches up with Woody Allen.

This won't mean anything to you if you never saw "Sleeper," but I have to figure even the most jaded among us would be more than thrilled to come home one day and find out they were the proud owner of their very own Orgasmatron.

For the meaning of honor, we need to look to the past

Honor.

Maybe the best five-letter word in our language (or six, if you want to spell it the way our English friends do).

Honour.

Either way, a great word, and one of the ones we seem to lack so much of in modern-day society.

It is both noun and verb, but it's the first category in which I want to look at honor -- and how much we lack it.

Dictionary.com defines the noun "honor" as "honesty, fairness or integrity in one's beliefs or actions." Note that it doesn't include bravery or any sort of great physical prowess. In fact, many of the men who have been awarded our military's highest honor -- the Medal of Honor -- were anything but impressive.

When I was 13 years old, my dad gave me a book of short stories about World War II. I don't remember the name of the book, but two of the stories had been written by his closest friend, Josh Greenfeld. One of the stories was about General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, but the one I have never forgotten was about Rodger Young.

I wonder if there was ever a more unlikely winner of the Medal of Honor. Young was a kid from Ohio who stood just 5-foot-2 and was nearly blind without his eyeglasses and was also nearly deaf. On July 31, 1943, in the Battle of New Georgia in the South Pacific, his 20-man patrol unit was pinned down by a Japanese machine gun nest. Several Americans were killed, and the others needed to crawl to safety. Young made their retreat possible by moving toward the Japanese. He was wounded several times but managed to throw several grenades into the nest before he was shot and killed.

Because of his heroism, his patrol made it back to camp with no further casualties.

Now I don't know if our military people have changed all that much. I know there are still heroes who sacrifice their own lives to save their friends or comrades, but I can't help but wonder how many people we still have in politics, business or the media who fit the traditional definition of honor -- honesty, bravery or integrity in one's beliefs of actions.

Think about these sayings that are now part of our vocabulary:

"Greed is good."

"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

"If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying."

And then think about the hottest new political movement. Libertarianism basically says "leave me alone, I'll make it on my own" and treats that as something admirable.

Does anyone think of Donald Trump as a man of honor? Or a hundred other moguls like him?

It's as if we accomplished what we did in the Second World War and then were rewarded too much for it. Our economy boomed for 20 years because we we were the only major country in the world that wasn't devastated by the war. We bought everything we wanted and still wanted more.

Somewhere along the line, we lost our sense of honor.

To a young man setting out upon a great adventure

A young man I know has made a big decision.

After living all his life in essentially one place -- although it is a big city -- he has apparently decided to move 1,200 miles away and get a fresh start in life.

He is 30 years old. When I was 30, I felt old as death, but from the perspective of 33 more years, I think I was actually pretty young. He has a good education -- a graduate degree -- and has yet to start a family of his own.

He is bright, outgoing and talented, but the fields he has been pursuing have been changing rapidly. He has seen the struggles of men of his father's generation and it would certainly be understandable if he wanted to step away from the table and take some time to think.

24 years ago.

I have known him since before his third birthday, and I figure he's about the second-best young man of his generation that I know. (I'm not rating anyone ahead of my son, but I love this kid and would do whatever I could to help him)

He wants to be a writer, but for every big success in that field, there are a dozen who just get by and a hundred more who don't make it at all. If I could give him any advice at all about that, I would tell him to make a mark for himself writing non-fiction first. Magazine articles, biographies, that sort of thing. Those are things for which there is still a market and you don't have to compete with the thousand wannabes who are trying to write the next big science-fiction movie.

In his move, he is doing something I did many times during my career -- picking up stakes and going somewhere entirely different for a fresh start. I always had jobs waiting for me when I moved, but he has friends and a place to stay waiting for him.

Leaving a place you have lived for a long time can be a mixed bag, and many people tend to expect too much of it. They think all their problems will be left behind, and of course that isn't true. Because whenever you move, no matter how far you go, the one thing you can never leave behind is yourself.

I got that line from a movie I never actually saw -- "Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension" -- and what it actually said was, "Wherever you go, there you are." During the years I was a newspaper columnist, I was called upon several times to give speeches to 18-year-olds who were getting awards. What I eventually got from it was that yes, you don't leave your problems behind, but you also carry your strengths along with you.

You have the love of your parents and your sisters, your friends and acquaintances. You have what you have been taught and what you have learned. And if there's one thing I can leave you with, maybe it's this:

Remember Jay Gatsby, of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald said he paid a very high price for living so long with the same dream.

Dreams come and go. If one good thing doesn't happen, something else will as long as you keep faith with yourself.

Best of luck, kiddo.

You'll be fine.

Modern man is and always will be a social creature

Imagine waking up one morning and finding you were all alone.

Not just where you live, but everywhere you go. You get into your car and drive through your neighborhood, but you don't see any other signs of life. You get out onto a main drag, or a freeway, only to see that you are the only car moving in either direction.

You stop at the grocery store. The parking lot is empty, and when you go into the store, there is no one there. The only sound you hear is the air conditioning. You take what you needed, and since you're honest, you leave money on the counter to pay for it.

Back in your car, you turn on an oldies station. After a Beatles song and a doo-wop group, a song comes on that you had all but forgotten. Jonathan King's "Everyone's Gone to the Moon."

It's funny. Right around the time we actually did go to the Moon, we stopped believing in all those wonderful stories about space travel and colonizing other planets. We stopped thinking that ordinary people -- average Joes and Janes -- would ever get to do things like that.

The stories changed. Now when the towns were empty, it wasn't because the people had gone anywhere. It was because they had died. Dystopian stories like George Stewart's "Earth Abides," Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" and Stephen King's "The Stand" told wonderfully how the Earth was rapidly depopulated. Two by disease, one by worldwide nuclear war.

All three books are worth reading, so I'm not going to recap plots. But I was listening to the audiobook version of "The Stand" -- King's apocalyptic tour de force -- and two of the characters were looking for camping supplies in a completely empty small town in Colorado.

That's nothing strange in itself, but imagine an America where the population has dropped from more than 300 million people to about 2 million. Due to the gregarious nature of people, some less-populated states might drop almost to Zero Population.

Think about walking into a town that has been completely depopulated. There's a library that will never issue another card or check out another book, a movie theater that will never show another film, a church where no one will ever pray.

Think about driving, or riding, or walking hundreds of miles and never seeing a living soul. Think of living out the rest of your life and never being able to talk to anyone else. Of course you would have to give up television, radio and computers, because there would be no one to keep the electricity running. If you were knowledgeable enough to use portable generators and to find gasoline and/or batteries, you might be able to have at least a few benefits of the modern world.

But you would never be a social creature again. And almost any formerly minor problem could be fatal. Step on a rusty nail and die because there's no one to give you a tetanus shot. Or you might break a leg and not be anywhere you could do anything to fix it.

Of course, the saddest of all possibilities came from the mind of Rod Serling in the first season of "The Twilight Zone." Burgess Meredith plays a harried little man who loves to read but never has time to do it. One day he is deep in an underground vault when a nuclear explosion destroys New York.

Meredith comes out to find that he is the last man alive in the city. He joyously finds himself outside what remains of the New York Public Library, and sees books he loves scattered all around him.
Then something happens and he realizes what all of us eventually would. Man is a social creature.

Is there anything that does more for the world than music?

What's the very best thing about being alive?

I'm not sure there is a bigger, more open-ended question than that, but I'm going to make it a little easier by eliminating an entire category. Just as Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Hell is other people," I'm going to ask the question without including interpersonal relationships.

After all, all you need is love.

But if we look at so many of the other good things in the world, from sunsets to cheeseburgers, there really isn't any doubt to me what belongs at the top of the list.

Music.

There is nothing in the world that can touch more emotions or enhance more moods than music, and there are few things in this world that come at us from more directions.

What's great about music is that you can love music even if the only thing you enjoy is George Jones. Or Gregorian chants. Or John, Paul, George and Ringo. Or even Simon, Theodore and Alvin.

 I was fortunate to grow up in a home in which both of my parents appreciated music, and a great deal of what I heard at age 7 or 8 in the late '50s was Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger, among others.

At about age 11, I started listening to rock 'n' roll, and in fifth grade I started playing a musical instrument myself. I never got very good at the cornet, and in 10th grade, my high school band director suggested that I switch to the tuba. He told me I wouldn't get to the top band on the cornet, but he promised me two years at that level if I learned the tuba.

I did. I spent two years in marching band playing the Sousaphone in the fall and playing the tuba in symphonic band in winter and spring. I never got really good at it, and that was exacerbated by the fact that I sat next to the best tuba player in the state and was constantly reminded of my own shortcomings.

But I gained a real love for the music we played, and when I hear Sousa marches, my feet still want to step higher.

I stopped playing after high school, partly because I didn't own my instrument. But I loved music more and more as the years passed. I collected albums, then cassettes, the CDs and finally a big iPod that has more than 13,000 songs on it. In the space of half an hour, I can hear Jacques Brel, Alan Jackson, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Buffett, Eric Bogle and Spike Jones. I can hear popular music from the 1930s up to the present.

I've got video of one of the best musicians I have ever known, my son Virgile on the saxophone. He played through high school and his first two years of college, and as a senior he was both all-state -- in the state where it means the most -- and drum major of the marching band.

I'm not sure there's anything -- excluding people and maybe baseball -- that I love more than music. The song I'll use to wrap this up is far from the best music around, but the words mean something, and there is a certain beauty to it.

We really are all better off when we add some music to our day.

Big timers sure, but the best memory is of a kid in a chair

I wrote the other day about my two years in Greeley, Colorado, and what they meant to me.

But something happened this week that brought back something very important that I had all but forgotten.

Somebody died.

When I went to Greeley in the fall of 1986, I had been in journalism as a sportswriter for seven years. My job in St. Louis had been big-time until the paper ran out of money. I covered college basketball and went to the NCAA Final Four in both 1985 and '86.

But my purpose in going to Greeley was to manage a department -- three full-time and three part-time employees -- and serve as a mentor to them. I told them when I started there that if they had ambitions, I wanted to help them achieve them. Two of my people want on to big-time careers.

Mike Fisher went all the way to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to cover the Dallas Cowboys and has since gone on to become one of the top names in sports radio in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

My other employee who made it even bigger originally came from Texas. Nancy Gay worked for several major metros before winding up at the San Francisco Chronicle. Earlier this year, she went to work as managing editor for Comcast's Sports Net in the Bay Area and for all of California.

She actually has achieved even more in terms of the NFL. She's one of 44 voters for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

As impressive as the two of them turned out to be, and as proud as I am of the small role I played in their success, I'm pretty sure both of them would have succeeded if I had never gone within a thousand miles of Colorado.

Where I made a difference was with Matt Schuman, who died Sunday at the age of 49.

When I first met Matt, I was told that the previous sports editor had hired him to grab sports agate off the wire and clean it up for publication. I was told that was all I could expect of Matt, since he had been born with muscular dystrophy.

That was fine with me. I liked him and felt good about the fact that we were providing a job for someone who was partly disabled.

He told me he thought he could do more, though, and he asked for the opportunity. I had him take phone calls from high schools and write up the reports, a huge part of any small-city sports department.

He did well, so we tried sending him out for feature stories, sidebars at afternoon events and finally game coverage.

He may not have been able to stand up, but he certainly was able to rise to the challenge. He was still a part-timer when I left Greeley in October 1988, In my final column as sports editor, I wrote about some of the things I would never forget about my two years in Colorado. I mentioned 15 different items, and this one was No. 6:

"One of my sportswriters, Matt Schuman, who is fighting a lifelong battle against muscular dystrophy. When the previous sports editor hired Matt, he didn't expect him to be able to do more than type up agate results. Now he writes almost as well as a lot of full-time sportswriters I've known."

Sometime in the years after I left, Matt earned a full-time position with the Tribune and he worked there for the rest of his life. In 2003, he did a seven-part series on Weld County citizens living with disabilities that won him numerous awards.

This past weekend, he went into the hospital for some routine tests, and he developed pneumonia and died. In many of the stories written about Matt after his death, so many of the people who knew him talked about how he never complained. I didn't laugh when I read it, but I did think it was strange.

Complain about what? His disability? I think Matt understood that most of us have strengths and weaknesses, and we don't always get to choose what they are. There are plenty of people who have no obvious physical shortcomings, but they're dumb as a bagful of hammers. Or they're rich but they have no heart, no compassion for others.

Matt's legs didn't work, and he had other shortcomings physically, but he was smart, talented and had a lot of people who loved him.

My guess is he thought he had a pretty good deal.

Sail on, Matt. I believe you are in a better place, and I know you'll appreciate it. I thank the Lord for my contact with you and for any small role I played in improving your situation. You're my best memory of my time as a mentor.

God bless you.

Serving in the military, people earn the respect of others

Almost alone among American institutions, I have tremendous respect for the military.

I certainly have little use for American business; there's far too much greed and selfishness and far too little ethics. It's pretty much the same with politics, with a few exceptions, and there are plenty of people who call themselves religious when what they really mean is that they're holier than thou.

The military certainly isn't perfect. There are places -- like the Air Force Academy, for one -- where religious Dominionists try to force their own brand of Christianity on others. For the most part, though, the military is the closest thing we have to a meritocracy in our country.

Middle class or poor, black or white, male or female. Work hard and follow orders and you can get ahead in the military. Back in the '50s and '60s, a lot of kids were able to straighten out their lives when judges offered them a choice of sentences for a minor crime -- time in jail or enlist in the Army.

There really isn't any doubt that the period mentioned and the one directly before it -- World War II -- was perhaps the most egalitarian our country has ever seen.

Soldiers serving in the 3rd Armored Division in Freidberg, Germany, in the late '50s served with maybe the most famous man in America at the time -- Elvis Presley.

In WWII and Korea, many of the richest and most powerful families in America had sons serving in combat. Pretty much the only reason John F. Kennedy became president was that his older brother -- Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. -- died when his plane went down. He was the Kennedy son who had been slated for politics.

In the postwar era, service in the military mattered, both in business careers and in politics. If someone didn't service, it raised eyebrows and questions. Ronald Reagan was the first president who didn't serve overseas, and Bill Clinton was the first president with no military record at all. Several Republicans avoided service with cushy appointments to the National Guard, and Dick Cheney pretty well sneered at those who served by saying he had "other priorities."

The 2012 election was the first in which none of the four candidates -- Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden or Paul Ryan -- had any military service. The draft had ended, and none of them chose to serve.

I didn't serve in the military, and neither did any of my close friends. Two of them had fathers who were career officers, one in the Navy and the other in the Air Force.

I wish I could have served. From age 18 to about 25, I was lost and stumbling through my life. Learning some discipline and personal responsibility might have made my life very different, but when I turned 18, most of the recruits were going from basic training to Vietnam. I wasn't know for my survival skills at the time, and I'd say the odds of me surviving a month in Vietnam -- let alone a year -- were not in my favor.

But I do admire people who served, either then or later, especially when the draft was no longer in force. In this era of greed and selfishness, it's nice to see people who understand that being part of a society is giving of yourself as much as taking from others.

When I meet some who served, it tells me something good about them. When I meet people who pulled every string they could to avoid serving. I admire George H.W. Bush for his service as the youngest fighter pilot in the Navy in World War II, but I have no use for his son, who avoided Vietnam by using family connections to serve in the Alabama National Guard.

I honestly don't recall Gee Dubya ever living in Alabama.

Maybe another great American Gee Dubya -- George Wallace -- helped him out.

Neither one of them could carry Colin Powell's jockstrap.

And the greatest Republican president of the last 100 years? Not the guy who sold war bonds, but the guy who ran the Normandy invasion.

Yes, I like Ike -- a lot more than I liked Ronnie.

Happy birthday to an extremely special person

I didn't meet my daughter until she was 12 years old.

Pauline was 12 and Virgile was 7 when I married their mother and became their stepfather. Ever since the fall of 1992, I have had the opportunity to watch two of the most amazing young people on the planet grow to adulthood.

Pauline and Virgile in 2005.

I know I brag on my children a lot, but today is Pauline's birthday and I am going to do it again.

My daughter works for the Department of State as a Foreign Service officer, and she is currently serving at her fourth posting. She has been getting every possible promotion at the earliest opportunity and she is already making twice as much money as I ever made at any job I ever had.

Those are both good things, but they aren't the best things about Pauline. The very best thing about her is her love of family and her loyalty to the people who love her. A couple of years ago, I was writing a piece about basic truths of life, and of all the people I asked for their opinions, Pauline gave the most interesting answer.

"I always put my family first -- no exceptions."

Pauline at work.

She has two children. Madison will be 5 next month and Lexington will be 2 in November, and Pauline has told me that when her kids are older, she will assess how the frequent moves are affecting them and then decide whether she can stay with her current career plan.

And yes, she will give up her great job and her great career if she deems it better for her children.

A lot of people talk the talk, but my daughter is one person who absolutely walks the walk.

Happy 33rd, Pauline.

You know how much I love you.

But I also want you to know -- just as much -- how proud I have always been of you.

A fascinating time, even living without an automobile

Of all the years of my adult life, maybe the most interesting -- because it was so different -- was the last two months of 1986 and the first two of 1987.

I was living somewhere I had never lived before, enjoying a brand-new job at the very best place I ever worked, living in a new apartment -- and doing it all without owning a car or even having access to one.

I never worked in this building.

It all came out of the blue. I had made contact with a former girlfriend who was working in Minnesota in September and we wound up spending a week together in Denver in mid October. I was pretty fed up with my employer at the time. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat had gone out of business once already while I was there and was heading for another fall.

I had come to Denver for fun. I had brought my resume and some clips along, but I really wasn't planning to apply for any jobs. I didn't bring anything to wear for an interview. But I was looking at an issue of Editor and Publisher and I noticed that the Greeley Tribune was looking for a sports editor. I phoned up there and talked to Ron Stewart, the paper's editor, and asked if the job was still open.

He said they were fairly far into the process, but he would be glad to talk to me. I told him I would come up the next day, but that I would have to interview in blue jeans. My friend Nancy Anderson drove me to Greeley, about an hour from Denver, and I met the very best boss I would ever have in the newspaper business.

Downtown Greeley.

The Tribune was an excellent local paper, less than 25,000 circulation, and it would be the second smallest paper for which I ever worked. I didn't get the job till I had been back in St. Louis for nearly a week. I gave two weeks notice, but within a week, the Globe went out of business. I left for Colorado two days later.

My plan all along was to take my stuff in a U-Haul and tow my eight-year-old Subaru behind it. But the engine blew on my car and I left it behind. I drove to Greeley, found an apartment, unloaded the truck and then turned in the vehicle. For the first time in my adult life, I didn't have transportation.

For four months, I took the bus to and from work. What would be about a seven-minute commute once I bought a car was a 30-minute bus ride. I was able to take the bus to the mall, to the movies and to the grocery and occasionally one of my colleagues would give me a ride.

I was sports editor, in charge of the section and supervising three full-time and three part-time employees, so I didn't need to go to a lot of assignments. I rode along with one of my reporters to Denver Broncos games and wrote columns, and I completely fell in love with Colorado.

I even had my own little private payday treat. We got paid every other Thursday. I deposited my check, got some cash and went to one of the downtown bar/restaurants. I got a table by myself, ordered their wonderful nachos -- best I had before or since -- and sat there by myself eating, reading and drinking two Pina Coladas. Then I went home.

I bought a new car in March 2007 and a lot of things changed. But I loved living in Colorado -- in Greeley -- so much. I stayed two years, and when I left it was only because I had set a goal for myself years ago. I wanted to live in California and cover pro sports. I did, but I wound up working for the worst paper -- and eventually the worst bosses -- in my entire career.

I would have loved to have had the best of both worlds, and winding up in California gave me my wonderful family. But oh, it sure would have been nice to have lived in Colorado and raised our kids there.

We really can't have it all.

If we could, we probably wouldn't appreciate it.