Skip to main content

The New Wow! Is Old...



In speaking with an old friend, actually a former superior in the Marines the other day. Yes, we haven't seen each other since 2006. It's been a while since I've been under her command. We can actually diplomatically talk politics. Scary thought isn't? 

As we are different religions. Me, I'm way out of the box. No indoctrination here. I'm the lost Catholic coming from a hard-core Republican old fashioned Catholic family to one side. Lutheran good girl from the other side. Sold that sex was something we didn't even say the word, until you were either married or Mom gave you a book on it to read. 

And only tramps of the female persuasion joined the military. Yes, by my Dad's standards. I was disowned by him from 1980 till 1994 on that one. Looking back, it was not much of a loss though. Years later my dad realized I was stricter than he. And that my husband taught me all I needed to know about sex... You know that three letter word we couldn't say. Yep, one intimate relationship I had was all. I am a dying breed... at least from a Baby-Boomer perspective, probably. 

Way before then, I'd already invented my own religion, behind my parent's back with no one in it. I learned on my own that most Christian religions if not all were some how misinterpreting the Bible. Actually all. Just my thought. I challenged that before age ten.

My Lutheran side didn't vote Democrat till after FDRs first term in office. Yeah, way back. And after you voted for Nixon, you cursed at him being on the television in 1974. 

In economics, we were 80% blue collar. No woman ever owned her own business till I had in our family. Quite few finished college. Some women extremely distant relations got that. 

As we watch the world around us and chatted, I suggested something in selling a politician no longer worked like it did.

It's just like in any game, job interview, Americans have lost interest. Not necessarily the subject matter but the crap covering it up. That's what I'm seeing. She agreed. There's always an angle to success or wanting to be heard to implement progression. 

Negative retracting verbiage has a way to want to hold us back. However, honesty does always work in my book. Too, calling the 'kettle black', is still quite worthwhile.

The negative verbiage to me are things like, 'Isn't it better the way they were.' Or 'The good old days.' 

However, like in the song "Anticipation" by Carlie Simon "...these are the good old days..." Meaning the the current moment. Even the most dastardly moments are the ''good old days'.

We seem to forget the things that made the 'good old days', were new ideas, new inventions, expanding our thinking. Even when they took years to nearly perfect. Many times it resulted well.

Even things we disdain or fear can be of use. I'll give many examples... New diseases make us cautious. If we looked at what arrived from them, taking away the initial painful mess we were in, we've gained as a society. That's if we were fearless enough to let go of some old ideologies and apply the revised or new ones.

Stress on society brings about change. The process is painful. However, for those of us who recognize the process. We can learn from it. We learn a new way of living. We reconcile with society or we can discard relationships. 

We may figure out what we no longer need. Or what we thought we wanted, erring on thinking it was a necessity. Only to find out we appreciated it, while it existed in our lives. But we may never have the chance again to experience it. Yet, we can still feel the joy we had and then perhaps share that joy with others in the heat of the battle.

Yet, there will be old nuances, basic standards of decency needed to be kept. We've lost some of them based on old fears. Yes, we've lost some basic human decency because of old fears. The new Wow! Is old.----Jody-Lynn Reicher 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2023 Holiday Letter from the Reicher's

Well, I didn't think I'd be doing a Holiday Letter this year, but here goes... The Spirit of Norm is in the air. As the wind whips with minus a true snowstorm.  In hopes the Farmers Almanac was correct, I pray to the snow gods. Rain ensued the month of December thus far. We have nearly tripled the amount of rainfall usual for December in New Jersey. And I've witnessed its treachery. Storms such as these hit us hardest in July. Then remained fairly intense through til about early October.  Our daughters are doing well, Thank God.  Their Dad would be proud of them. Our oldest Sarah, now a Junior at UCLA pursuing her degree in Chemical Engineering. She's digging the whole California scene. Which I thought it was for her. She's had some good traveling on her off times from school. For her March 2023 week off, she drove her and a few friends out to Lake Tahoe and went downhill skiing for a first in nearly 5 years. She had to rent the ski equipment.  Funny enough when

Sledging the Hammer

  "You could have a steam trainIf you'd just lay down your tracks..."---Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' lyrics. This is not the tune that lay in my mind this morning as I reminisced about yesterday's volunteers to help on trail crew.    However, as I looked up the proper definition of sledging that song popped up. I say sledging, which is my own take on swinging a hammer that we call a "Double Jack". The Single Jack is six pounds. I know that because our regular crew of five including me and one staff supervisor are handling Harriman State Park Trails, and have to carry about four of those, two shaping hammers, along with a hoist, belay bag with heavy equipment, first aid kit, double Jack, three 18lb rock bars, a lopper, three buckets, three eye to eyes, two burlap straps, two green wrapping straps, two pick Mattox, a roe hoe or two, a bar for either the two ton or one ton hoist, the feathers with pegs for splitting rocks that we drill... s

It Follows Me...

One may wonder what would inspire someone to work hard labor voluntarily. For me it’s the love of many things. It’s the passion that won’t be broken. Because there are so many aspects to such service for me, that it may seem beyond comprehension. I’d compare it to my youthful desire to enter the military as a young child. Then for a multitude of reasons only to follow through thirteen years later at age eighteen entering the Marines. There were things that followed me throughout my life. Sometimes they were questions of how I ever gave up my over decade’s life dream to become a New Jersey State Trooper. My childhood desire to never wed—to never have any serious relationships with another human being. I desired only service in military and law enforcement nearly my whole childhood. Too the extent that even one of my Marine Corps superiors expressed to me last July, “I never thought you’d ever get married. It just wasn’t who you were. You were always a loner.” I replied, “Yeah. I know.