This Screwed Up World

Becoming a Walker

When I was a kid, I was very independent. My mother worked in the Pentagon, and my dad, well, he was mostly unemployed and spent a lot of time in a local bar, where he worked as a cook and bar tender on occasion, or where he sat as a customer on other occasions.

During the summer before I started school at Virginia Tech, he got me a job in his favorite bar as a dish washer so I could earn a bit of the money I needed to pay for that first term!

My sisters and I turned into what some folks call "latch-key" kids. We had keys to our home, and we could come home from school and let ourselves in until mom showed up after work!

I lived in Falls Church, Virginia for most of my time in public schools. The Falls Church school system was too small to have a fleet of school buses. Instead, the city contracted with the Arnold Bus Line, which provided public transportation in the area and students could ride the city buses to school. Arnold even ran special lines through the local neighborhoods to pick kids up. It worked quite well, and only cost a dime each way. That was cheap enough that even us poor kids could ride the bus to school. I even got to be friends with one of the bus drivers, Mr. Chase! More on him later.

However, I grew up following my mom around, and she was a very fast walker. When you work in the Pentagon, you have a lot of ground to cover to get places, and following her around that building was one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid. All the cool people, offices, stores, could consume an entire day if needed. So I learned to explore and walk really fast.

That meant that on occasions, I would walk to school. My first schools were only a few blocks away, and walking to those was no big deal. My Junior/Senior High School was over a mile away, but even that was no big deal, so I walked there as well.

Shoot, I walked everywhere! With no fear that I was being stalked by weird folks intending to do me harm. MY parents walked everywhere, and no one thought anything was wrong with that! Good exercise, after all!

Exploring The D. C. Area

I was known to walk over eight-ten miles on occasion. That meant I could get to the Smithsonian if I did not have bus fare, I could get to the Pentagon to see my mom, I could get to National Airport to watch airplanes fly. Sure it took a while to do, but it was no big deal for a fast walker like me.

When I was about eight years old, my dad came up with a way to get me an allowance when the family really did not have enough money for that. He got me a paper route delivering the Washington Daily News, which was a light newspaper. I delivered papers to around 30 homes in my neighborhood and earned some spending money. I never really liked that job, and I found out I was a lousy salesman, but I did enjoy the cash.

When riding the bus home from school, if you forgot to get off of the bus, its final stop was 10th and F street in D.C. That was right in front of the Ford Theater where Lincoln was shot, and right by the house where he died. I would get off of the bus, walk up the stairs into the house and check to make sure the bed where Lincoln died was still there, then head down F Street to the Smithsonian. I was doing this from the time I was eight years old. Yikes, I am still here to tell the tale! In today's world I would have vanished without a trace, or so we are told!

Usually, the fare from Falls Church to Rosslyn, Virginia, at the foot of Key Bridge which crossed the Potomac River into Georgetown, was a Quarter. If you wanted to ride into D. C., it cost another Nickel. After I got to be friends with the afternoon bus driver, Mr. Chase, he would let me ride all the way to the end for free, other drivers made me pay that extra Nickel, and I usually could do that!

Mr. Chase even gave me a punch and a bus transfer ticket book and taught me how to transfer from one bus to another one if I wanted to get somewhere else in D.C. Boy! I am sure he would have been arrested today for that! I managed to ride the bus all the way to Rockville, Maryland, to visit my cousins who lived there!

The walk from the last bus stop to the Smithsonian was interesting, especially on Saturday Mornings. (I had to pay full fare to go there on a Saturday, Mr. Chase was not working that day!) After crossing Pennsylvania Avenue, I went between two huge buildings on the last block before the Museum of Natural History that was my first Smithsonian stop.

On the right side of that block was the Infernal Revenue Service, aka IRS. That building was kind of boring, full of tax collectors.

But the building on the other side was cool, that was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI! Way cool! On Saturdays, they ran a public tour of the building, and I could join the crowd and follow along. The last stop on that tour was in the basement where that had a shooting range. Agents would bring out old Tommy-Guns from the Prohibition Era and blast away for the entertainment of the crowd

Sorry, I could not resist putting up that "shot"!

I would explore the museum buildings for several hours and get back up to the bus stop for my ride back home. During the week, I could make it back home before my mom got home from work. Great fun for an independent kid, and a great way to get involved with learning new things! The Smithsonian was full of things that could capture your imagination, and inspire a career!

All of my friends did almost the same thing. I do not recall any of them wandering downtown to the Smithsonian like I did, but I bet a few did. The point was that we had no fear, our parents either trusted us in this, or were oblivious to what was going on, or never even knew! We grew up, often on our own!

The Information Age

The news was not full of shootings, rapes, or kidnappings. You know, the daily stuff we are bombarded with on TV, today. So, our minds were more at peace. We did not view the world as an evil, unsafe place, but a place to be explored and enjoyed. We all knew there was evil in the world, our parents survived World War II, where the ultimate in evil was on display, and we fought to put that evil down! MY generation learned a lesson about service to our fellow man by living through those times.

Then came TV and suddenly, we were much more aware of all the evil that surrounded us. The newspaper had news that was days old, so we read it, but it was not immediately a concern. It was about history, and that was over. We might be interested in reading about history, and maybe learning something from it, but we did not really have to act on it. This news was "cold".

TV changed that. We now had news about things going on today, hours ago. It was still history to us, but it was "warm". The events being reported might even be live. I watched Kennedy being driven down Pennsylvania Avenue, the same street I crossed almost daily, as his funeral procession would past the White House on its way to Arlington Cemetery. I sat on the floor in my home watching that on TV. I had seen him in person in a motorcade with John Glenn, on the same street, when they let all of us out of school to go to Glenn's parade after he orbited the Earth for the first time.

TV news was mostly local, but there was also global news to see. That news was not so immediate, but it was real enough to make us aware that there was still a lot of evil around. Maybe, we should not be so trusting of our fellow man!

Finally, we got the Internet. Information is fast, global, and overwhelming! It was "white hot". Suddenly we are in the middle of events all over the world, and every crazy person on the planet gets their "15 minutes of Fame" now. All the new services use this magical tool to stream their live video to us on all of our devices: phones, tablets, Monitors, and even those TV sets we glue ourselves to.

News now impacts us almost second by second. We are in the middle of every disaster that happens, anywhere in the world! It has to affect our thinking and our behavior!

I am convinced the world is not that much crazier than it was when I grew up, we just know way too much about it now, thanks to the Internet!

Perhaps we need to step back and ask ourselves if we want to live in a world of fear, where every person we see is some crazy about to pull out a gun and shoot someone. Perhaps that person is a kind soul having a bad day, and you could be a ray of hope to that person.

Sad to say, many (most) of us seem to think the worst, so we are prepared for it. We fear for our kids, ourselves, and our neighbors. We are forgetting how to trust. Those few crazies poison everyone, and we end up living in a world full of fear. Sad!

After finishing the news this morning, I cannot say which way today will go. I still might need to walk into a room full of armed students if our local "politicians" have their way. Should I think the best of those students, or prepare for the crazy one?

I really do not know the answer!