OTR

... in DFW's Cowtown Bar yesterday afternoon, and on the road to Portland, Wash State and then Seattle.

I just spent $15 on two beers.

At Lake Quinault, southwest of Seattle .... my lovely niece, Danielle, will be getting married to a very solid young man named Oliver.

Both are in grad school at U Portland, MSW and PhD, respectively.

It's been said that on the West Coast... all the crazies eventually end up in San Frisco; those too crazy for The City end up in Portland and Seattle.

Regardless..... though they're still on the shy side of 30, Dani and Oliver both have their heads screwed on right.

Dani loves Elvis and Oliver collects Artie Shaw records (Editor: for our younger readers... "records" are large dinner plate-size vinyl discs with microscopic groves in them which produce sound when played on a "turntable" or "record player"----popular in the 1920s-1970s.)

Anyway, times like these I reflect on my five full decades and a bit more. Knowing people since they were born will do that to you.

I am worried.

My generation has failed; I will leave my beloved country to Dani and Oliver in much worse condition than when it was given to me by The Greatest Generation.

I cannot cavalierly shrug and say, "oh well" and mean it. "My bad" is far from adequate as I hand off the baton.

My vain, self-absorbed and narcissistic generation has helped ruin the American family--in particular, the black American family.

We have given you the Crips and the Bloods and MS 13.

We have given you a nation in which one million babies are murdered in the womb every year while hundreds of millions of our tax dollars are used to feed, clothe, provide health care, legal services and therapy for some of the most vile, murdering, psychopaths in the world.

We've turned logic and law so upside-down that we protect the guilty and kill the most innocent.

The first president of my generation, a lying draft-dodger, soiled the Presidency far more than Dick Nixon's tape recorder; he violated The People's House in a most despicable fashion.

And for this his popularity grew.

But other than that, how'd we do?

I hope that ten years from now, I have been shown to be the most pessimistic of all cynics, for their sake.

... but, I don't think it will happen.