WARREN GRANT: Remembering the best of times

I called my uncle the other day just to say hi. As we started to close the conversation, he said something that kind of brought back some memories. He said, “You know we lived some of the best of times.”

Yes, we lived some of the best of times. I was born in ‘42, and the war was still raging, although at that age I did not understand what it was all about. Even though Hitler was a detestable man, he was extremely smart, in my opinion. Because of Hitler, we have the interstate system. Hitler had highways all over because he wanted to move his vast military. When the war was over, Eisenhower saw the advantage of having such a system, and so he began the interstate system here.

I grew up on a farm in central Illinois, approximately 12 miles west of the University of Illinois in Urbana. Most people associate the U of I with Champaign because that’s where the sports are played. If you cross Wright Street, you are in Urbana, which houses most of the academic buildings and the main campus. So call it Champaign/Urbana if you will. But I digress.

Lucky to have been born on a farm in the flat plains where the bitter winds of the northwest came with extreme cold temperatures, I never went hungry. All the winters seemed to be the same: snow blowing in around the bedroom windows, and going to the outhouse was a dreadful thought. My mother was a very smart and beautiful woman. Getting up in the early mornings to get a fire going in the stove to cook breakfast was a daily chore.

Finally, when all the kids had left home except me, she went to work for a professor in Mumford Hall. A very compassionate man, he understood the pain that my mother was enduring slowly being eaten alive with breast cancer. There was a small room in the big office, and he had a cot brought in and told my mother that when she felt bad to just go lie down. She worked for him until her death. It was the same death and disease that would consume all her sisters.

My daughter had cancer but, luckily, she survived. It’s a disease of hate. How could a woman’s breast be the thing that helps a young child live by giving it nourishment and yet turn around to kill that same person later in life?

But times were good. Fairly easy to find a job; a new car was $4,000, my first house was $11,000, and I made the same or more money per hour than many people today. Going through life I was able to travel the United States, working, went to Europe a couple of times on a project, and my children all graduated from college.

Later, I met a wonderful lady whose father was known all over Calhoun County as a man of great honesty and was well-respected. During the war, he worked in Intelligence, and he was the man who got the news that the war was over. He deciphered it and passed it on to the president.

Those were the good times. I fear that since 2010, this country has been on a course of self-destruction. The few who are the middle class have been saddled with the burden of supporting the poor, politicians, and third-world countries. We cannot in good sense continue this burden. The debt of this country, you and me, we owe $94,184 each toward the debt the government has run up and is till going up currently at $31,461,392,634,177. In fact, it’s going up so fast that by the time I typed those numbers, they were no longer correct.

Churches are failing because the young have wondered off, many don’t even know the first verse of the Bible. I’m not smart, just average, but tell me where I’m wrong.