I often tell students about King Solomon who made the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes his swan song.  Know how one of the wisest men of all time summed up existence?  “Meaningless, Meaningless, everything is Meaningless…”  Was he a pessimist or what?  Actually, I don’t think so.  It’s about perspective, that’s all.

I’ve heard a lot lately about how America will never be the same.  We’re up against too much.  Well, what about the cycles of history?  One of the biggest selling points on the importance of history is that understanding the past helps us makes sense of the present and predict the future.  If everything is so terrible why even continue to care?

I hear you reacting already out there.  You think I sound like a fatalist, a basher of thou liberal arts.  Not at all.  Prophets have been warning folks since those stubborn Israelites refused to listen.  If you need to change the way you live, by all means do so.  One of the changes I need to make is to not get rundown by overwhelming scenarios of an apocalypse that may never come.

What’s that you say angry blogger?  America is dying?  No it’s not. 

Say what my main radio man?  We’ve lost our way?  Didn’t that happen long before we joined the search back to sanity? 

And I see you in the back there grandpa.  You’re thinking about the good old days when things were simpler, people were kinder, guys knew how to turn an honest buck, and girls winked back.  Sorry, those were also the days when black people had their own urinals, polio would cripple you, and overactive bladder sent you stumbling through the weeds by the light of the moon to find the outhouse.  There wasn’t even air conditioning for crying out loud!

The good old days is just another way of saying you were young.  That means one day some of these tight jean wearin’, ear lobe stretchin’, crying music lovin’ kids of today are gonna refer to this decade as the best years of their lives. 

That’s right, as a historian I am predicting that current college students will one day call the Bush or Obama years the good old days.  I know because I’ve studied Marx.  Not Karl but Groucho.

I’m serious.

Groucho Marx saw over 80 years of America, achieved huge fame, and made a ton of money.  Oh yeah, he also lost a life’s fortune in the stock market crash of 1929.  Guess what?  American came back, kept going, and got better.  So did Groucho.  In the end, he said all that mattered was your health.  One might add spiritual as well as physical.  Hey, Solomon told us the “days of trouble” would come.  Be prepared.

So what are we all worried about? 

I get that these are serious times.  So were the 1930s when the economy tanked, government overreached, and Americans feared becoming a welfare state as citizens were taken care of by the govt. for the first time.

I get that we face serious threats.  They had those in the 1940s too.  Remember Hitler?  All he wanted was world domination at the expense of anyone without the right beliefs, ethnicity, or skin color.

Then we got to the 1950s.  The good old days right? Well, in a lot of cases the surface belied the dark depths of this nation.  There were some great realities to be sure, but let’s not whitewash the whole truth.

Then the 1960s came.  The government once again launched massive programs at the same time Americans increasingly tried to understand a tough war.  Guess what?  The opposition party won 49 states a few years later. 

The key here is checks and balances built into our system by the dead white guys known as the Founding Fathers.  Call them irrelevant; I think they’re brilliant.  And before you fire off emails notice I did not say they were perfect.  Neither are you.  None of us are. 

Spend a Friday evening at Walmart and you may fear for the future, but something happens when Americans are pushed too much by anybody.  We push back.  Like nasty ingredients to a brilliant recipe, when we come together things get good.

This country has already faced the types of problems that have so many doomsdayers scurrying for the cliffs today.  As Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.”  We may be self-centered, but history barely knows who we are.

So smile with someone you care about and take care of your “health.”  Everything else is meaningless.