Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The Unlucky 7: Devolution In My Lifetime

August 13, 2017 by  
Filed under Community

BY LOUIE OVERSTREET

Louie Overstreet

To this day, the very best gift I have ever received was my parents’ move to Cleveland, Ohio from DeKalb, Mississippi when I was less than a year old. Growing up on the Eastside of Cleveland in the 1940s and ‘50s, I didn’t have a care in the world.

The Greatest Generation, after winning WWII in three years and eight months, returned to build America into the unquestioned leader of the free world. They shook their heads through the 1960s — watching their children engage in free love, join the civil rights movement, and protest the Vietnam war.

As it has turned out, that was the most eventful decade in my lifetime: I went off to college and was able to ease out the back door without too many people noticing; civil rights and voting right laws were passed; President Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; we were moved by the 1963 March on Washington; riots took place all over America; and I closed out the decade by getting engaged to JoAnn.

As we pursued careers — boosted by affirmative action in a few rare instances — we were able to send our daughters Lorie and Piper off to college as our parents had done some 30 years earlier.

After years of struggle with some measurable progress, and as I play through the back nine of life, I am witnessing America devolve for the first time in my lifetime. After the likes of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Obama serving in the White House, our country elected the most ill-prepared, petty, repulsive, xenophobic, and vulgar man to ever serve as President.

After producing generations of Nobel-Prize winners and legends, poor, uninformed, science-deniers voted against their interests — with the help of Russia — to elect a devolved knuckle-dragger President of the United States. Oh my!

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