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Often, these days, I feel that I was born 100 years too late. I missed much of the ‘golden age’ of society and culture in being born in 1955, as opposed to 1855. Aah, the romance of this era.
This was an age of gallantry, civility, and good manners. Men still tipped their hats to ladies, opened doors for them, and stood whenever a woman entered or left the room. I long for those days, the days of chivalry and honour, where I surely would have flourished.
This was an age when men stood up and spoke without the woke coming down on them. The press was still a crooked and chicanerous institution which spread lies about anyone and everyone with whom they did not agree. But, theirs was not a message of woke communism. They rose up against all such nonsense and kept the idiocy of socialists in check. It was an age where men would rush into the fray in order to protect the weak from bullying, mugging, or injury. Today they just take video with their smart phones and stand idly by while the weak suffer at the hands of the strong. From opening doors to protecting the weak, this was an age of enlightened goodness.
This was an age when over 91% of Americans attended church. They largely worshipped Jesus Christ within the many and growing numbers of Christian denomination. While their beliefs varied from parish to parish, the American people were still a largely united folk, and they would band together in the cause of right.
Americans, by and large, looked upon the right to vote as a God-given right. In this period, over 87% of registered voters did vote on Election Day. After sorting through the muck of a failed press and public opinion, most Americans voted their conscience and not their party.
At this time in America, politicians and others openly preached their allegiance to their country, and not so much their party. Today ‘party politics’ rule and almost all politicians could give a tinker’s damn about the people who elected them. Theirs is “Party Allegiance” above all. Such was not the case in 1855 America.
I would have been 6 years old when the War Between the States broke out, too young to have had any part other than reading of battles, victories, and losses in the local papers. This war changed the face of the American landscape forever.
By the time I reached the age of majority at 21, it would have been the year 1876. I would read of a man named Alexander Graham Bell who had just invented a ‘talking machine’ [the telephone] which allowed men to speak to one another at great distances over a length of copper wire.
In my 21st year, an author named Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, published his book, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” and Americans immediately fell in love with this wonderfully presented fiction. In June of the same year, only a month after Mark Twain’s delightful contribution to American Literature, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer suffered ignominious defeat at the hands of Sitting Bull at the ‘Little Big Horn’. Here 2,500 American Indians decimated the meagre force of 300 led by Custer. This rang throughout the press in newspapers, weekly tabloids, and monthly magazines. The nation stood aghast that ‘primitives’ could have scored such a victory over the ‘civilized and advanced’ forces of the United States Cavalry.
Newspapers and magazines across the land vilified Custer as an incompetent and egotistical rogue who got his command slaughtered. Very few newspapers dared contradict this account.
The Presidential Election was clouded in controversy, dispute, and mistrust. It would take 2 years to decide that Rutherford B. Hayes was president. A cloud of 2 years of confusion surrounded our election and government at large as both sides cited voter fraud and illicit voting practices. Hmmm, does that sound familiar?
I would have been 11 years old when the War Between the States came to its uncertain end. I would live to see the endless looting of the south at the behest of a president who ‘turned a blind eye’ to all atrocities committed by the north against the south. It was a time of rampant injustice and governmental criminality.
Long after the execution [some say assassination] of Abraham Lincoln, the American people still smarted from all aspects of the bloody war he had started. I would have been torn, not having sufficient ‘unbiased’ information regarding the criminality of Lincoln and his cohorts.
These were turbulent times, even dangerous times, and technology was in a season of boom. Despite the violence and confusion of these times, I still believe that I was born 100 years too late. I find myself in an age of confusion, contested presidential election, war, economic uncertainty, and the pandemic cholera, which killed hundreds of thousands across the continent into South America.
Despite the turbulence, uncertainty, and danger of these times I would prefer life then to now. At least there, a civility existed which is almost completely unknown to the people of the day. I long for a hundred-year reprieve.
I’m Max, and that’s the way I see it!
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