Before I was the Lone Ranger, I was Tom Sawyer

I just got to thinking about my youth, so if you'll indulge me, I'll talk about myself for awhile. I was talking to my mom a few weeks ago and told her about how I wear out my cowboy boots from the inside out, because when I walk, I tend to dig in my toes. She told me that's because she didn't let us kids wear shoes unless it was to town, to church or to school. We were poor. But nobody told us kids. We didn't have government social workers back then to tell us that we should feel sorry for ourselves and should be resentful of anyone who had more than we did. There were times when we were out of milk, but it never occurred to us to steal the milk off our neighbor's porch. There were times we went to bed hungry. But we went to bed early so we didn't feel it. We thought Santa Claus brought groceries to all the houses on Christmas eve. I still have a picture of my six-year-old sister handing Santa a Hamm's beer -- two months before she died of leukemia. No miracle cures back then. That was life. We thought the wealthy purple-haired lady at church took all the kids shopping for clothes. The one time I remember walking home in tears was one winter when I didn't have gloves and the teacher gave me one blue glove and one red mitten from the lost and found box. My mom didn't work, because rearing kids was more important than making extra money. And there were no daycare centers back in those days. It never occurred to our family to expect anything from the government. And we certainly didn't resent the government for not taking care of us. That wasn't the government's job. The government's job was to pave the roads and pick up the garbage and protect us from the godless commies. There was no class warfare. You had what you had and if you could EARN more, more power to you. And if you had the misfortune to have less, well, even the people who had little themselves helped out. To this day, if I go back to my old stomping grounds in North Dakota, my peers recoil in horror at the thought of taking government money. They refuse to even apply for grants or small business loans. They don't want the feeling of shame at taking a handout. Apparently shame is a lost emotion these days. Too bad, it was one of the better ones. We had no video games or TV. We had no ipods, and when we wanted to listen to music, we had to work for it -- by turning the crank on the spring-powered Victrola -- not too tight though or it would break. My sister broke more than her share of Victrola springs. We all gathered around the radio at night to listen to Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke and my future namesake, the Lone Ranger. American kids apparently had opposable thumbs back then, because there were no soccer moms. We would pick up balls, throw them, catch them, hit them with a bat or croquet mallet. There were also no other organized events to which our moms had to drive us. Good thing, because even those who knew how to drive, didn't have a car of their own. During the summer, Mom would just give us breakfast, open the door and out we'd go. We were left up to our own devices. That consisted of hunting varmints, fishing, building rafts, hiking for miles and miles, building a tree-house, riding horses, playing cowboys and Indians or Tarzan and Jane (one of my favorites with my girlfriend), or with toy soldiers and just sitting around and conversing or playing board games. We once played a single game of Monopoly that lasted 8 days. Kids back then were low maintenance. If we were hungry at lunchtime, we'd stray back home for a quick sandwich or be fed by the mother who happened to have possession of us at the time. Since I was the oldest, I had to keep an eye on my brother and two sisters, which I did in a Tom Sawerly way. It made for some interesting supper conversation: "Mom, Tom got charged by a buffalo today. You should have seen him run!" "Keith pushed Tom off the raft today. Did you know he can't swim?" "Tom almost got run over by a deer today. He didn't even see it coming!" "Tom almost got sucked into the sewer system because of the big rain. It took five of us to pull him out!" To this day, I'm not much of a dinner conversationalist. Back then, it took a village to raise a child. But that didn't mean establishing a socialist system as Hillary wants to do, it meant each parent watching out for other kids and expecting the same from every other parent. Sexual predators were few and far between and when discovered, would be dealt with swiftly and permanently. The only time we thought about the government is when it was discussed in school. I have to look back at my youth to see how radically the left has changed this country since I was young and how much more radically they want to change it. We were all much freer and much happier and much more care-free when I was a kid.