The Force of July

July 3, 2020

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity … it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …

Pretty good, huh? Just something I knocked off. Don’t know where the Dickens it came from.

Fifty-five years ago, when I was a wee shaver, my parents took our family to see and listen to the Rev. Martin Luther King speak on the Winnetka Village Green. Winnetka then, and for many years after, was the most affluent town in the United States. I had just graduated from eighth grade.

What I remember from that peaceful celebration was the contingent of about six Nazis parading around in their brown shirts holding Nazi placards, protected by a cordon of city and state police.

Most people ignored the Nazis.

This was years before Facebook, and those poisons.

I asked my Mom: “Why are the police protecting the Nazis?”

She explained the First Amendment to me, and I thought I understood.

All of a sudden the Nazis booted it out of there. Slamming of car doors, peeling away.

Turns out that the cops had told the Nazis that the police had other (better?) things to do. And the Nazis ran away, like the cowards they are — without police protection.

Just thought I’d mention it. It was July 25, 1965.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether … oh, sorry! Plagiarizing again.

A friend of mine — never mind what color she is — asked me this week what I thought of the “civil unrest” roiling our nation.

I said, “It’s about damn time.”

She nodded and we walked on, in opposite directions in the dog park.

I’ve said it before and I say it again: Dogs are better than people.

Dogs just wanna have fun.

I’ve been walking my two Big Dogs around Denver’s 100-acre off-leash dog park for two years now, and in those two years we’ve seen two dog fights. And that was because of bad humans, not bad dogs.

And humans? Humans today will fight about anything:

The simple act of wearing a face mask to protect other people from death, in case you’ve got our modern plague and are asymptomatic, and possibly a spreader.

Whether strip clubs, bars, gun shops and gyms are essential businesses.

And in an astounding bit of news, the Pew Research Center reported this week that 25% of the U.S. population believe the novel coronavirus “was probably created by powerful people as a way to make money.” And 5% of us — I use the word loosely — 5% of us believe that this is “definitely true.”

(Unspoken and unasked in the Pew survey is whether our benighted neighbors think “the Jews” — in the form of George Soros — are to blame.)

The mind reels. It reels back more than 600 years.

Listen, folks: I understand that this column will appear on July 3, and stay up over the Fourth of July weekend. I understand that my boss may receive “howls of execration” (spot the plagiarism) for running it as a Fourth of July column.

But come on, Dudes and Dudettes: Our country was founded on protest — as a protest.

Put your guns down, my presumed enemies. Learn to live with black people being equal to you — and superior, if they are.

At long last, my fellow white people: Learn to live with it.

And one more thing: You’ll come to like it.

Trust me on this.

Categories / Op-Ed