Louis Roney: Beginning again

Happy New Year!

You may have noticed the repetitive quality of life in the solar system. Our personal clock starts the moment we are born and runs until our time is up whenever that may be. But the repetitive quality of almost everything on this Earth is initiated by our first 24 hours of living with day and night, dark and light. And we soon notice that time — which Einstein called, “the fourth dimension” — has been conveniently split up in ways that stem from the repetition of all we are caught up in, including our heartbeats, and the times of our sun and moon.

Tell me what words of mine can add productively to my confrontation with my upcoming 94th year? — one hopes, another complete year! These days the air seems hot with controversy and politics takes on the semblance of actual warfare. “Maledizione” is the word Italians used to put a curse on ones’ enemies. If you want to earn maledizione from your kids and their kids, just make your life a series of worthy examples that they find nearly impossible to match. Still, let me wish you a New Year that will break all your past years’ best records. My father used to tell me, “You make your own good luck.” I grew up believing that expecting something puts one on the track toward getting it.

Now that 2014 is behind us and 2015 has arrived, we have much to be thankful for, and also much activity ahead. Liberty is continuously under assault from many directions and our mission must be to stand firm against such assaults — a mission that will decide the course of our great nation. We hope always to stave off tyranny and keep our nose toward stouter democracy. Let us elect more constitutional conservatives to high office. They must undo the damage of Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America” that he has dared to use to subvert the U.S. Constitution. Obama’s “transformation” leaves little doubt that he dislikes this country as he found it. The year 2015 is a critical one — as is every year! A mental sapling wrote me, “It will not be your America much longer.” That fact has weighed heavily upon the minds of many observers of our national culture, and I am one of the least of them.

History is said to be our greatest teacher. George Santayana who was a professor at the New England university I attended wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana said that he stood in philosophy where he stood in daily life — he was a concise pragmatist, not an idle dreamer.

I remember how much fun we small boys had playing “cops and robbers” and “cowboys and Indians.” We had cap-pistols which went off with a bang made of paper tapes rolled up inside the handle, and advanced as the pistols were fired. We often said such things as, “Bang! Bang! You’re dead,” and even fell down and played dead just to make the game more realistic. In those days there were very rare maniacal public killings such as the ones we seem to experience now, frequently. Kids could be kids. I now ask myself if such play ever led to anything of danger in real life ... clearly not in those days.

But today the picture is decidedly different. What seems to be missing is the purely entertaining quality of imagination which we kids sought when we “play acted” in our most outrageous crimes. Perhaps today one might be arrested for simply saying things that were once part of the fun of childish theatrics. A whole dimension of “state of mind” is missing during today’s childhood games. Do kids today “go outside to play?” Has “big government” taken too much from all of us? Have we already given up too much of our liberty and childhood freedoms?

Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America” must be carefully rethought, and revamped.