Perhaps They Believe

 As a young boy, I did not get the chance to watch much television.  The first home I remember with my family was what today is a fairly standard "ranch" home.  Our "ranch" consisted of a yard which was, in total, about half an acre.  A good chunk of it out front was taken up by the road that went past, and so we got to put the septic tank in that fringe.  The side yard to the south of the house was wide open, and the back yard had large flat spots, and a slight ridge about 15" tall that raised the rear fifteen feet or so - which was where my mother's garden was, therefore we were not permitted back there.

Inside, the main door in and out of the house ran through the garage.  We very rarely used the front door.  But the "back" door entered into the kitchen, which opened into the dining room.  Down the center of the house, with one eight foot wide gap, was a bearing wall.  It separated the kitchen from the front living room, where the Television was, and ran down the hallway past the bathroom to the three bedrooms.  And thus, unless she was downstairs doing laundry, my mother could hear the TV being turned on no matter where she was in the house.  And, in those old days where things weren't yet "transistorized" but were instead run on tubes, everything had to warm up.  Yeah, like an oven or toaster.

So as a young child, I had certain portions of the day where television was permitted.  First thing in the morning Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room were permitted.  Then the TV went off and we did other things.  At lunch time, we could watch Casey Jones and Roundhouse Rodney, a locally produced television show I loved as much as Romper Room because while I got about a once every month callout on Romper Room, Casey Jones would often greet kids on their birthdays - if someone let him know.  And the first time he greeted me, I was thrilled, because I knew I lived near St. Cloud!  

After Casey, Rocky and Bullwinkle came on, and I was always sorry to see that end, because that was when nap time kicked in.  And I had three hours - what as an adult I would now consider "three blissful hours of sleep" but as a kid I saw it as "three boring silent hours."  Yeah, youth is definitely wasted on those idiots.  

But after that, sometimes, when I was a bit older, we could watch Sesame Street.  If you're thinking my youth revolved around the Television, not hardly.  That little ranch house had no air conditioning.  But my father had taken some 1/4" plywood and built a "wall" around a large chunk of the basement.  Mom could be down there working on laundry, or mending, or sewing new clothes for us, and we would be in this play pen, which was about sixteen feet wide and probably twenty four or so feet long.  A huge space for a couple of toddlers.  My parents managed to find a big chunk of remnant carpet so we weren't directly on the hard concrete floor, but it was a solid landing when you tripped or flipped.  

And I very much preferred the outdoors, when I could get out.  Eventually, our back yard had a sandbox, a swingset, a rather unusual see-saw, and a jungle gym.  I just enjoyed the outdoors, and when I got old enough, my mother permitted me to skip nap time if I was out playing in the neighborhood.  I had a group of friends who would play baseball, kickball, my personal favorite baseball with the kickball, and our absolutely thrilling jaunts through the cow pasture that was behind most of our houses.

But when I was nine years old, that summer was pretty difficult.  Captain Kangaroo wasn't on many days.  No Casey Jones or Roundhouse Rodney, and no Bullwinkle.  Instead, the days were taken up by men in suits who were arguing about things.  Dull, boring things.  But then I started to pick up a little bit on the news.  I was a voracious reader because I loved reading.  After I burned through the books I could get my hands on, I started going through the magazines, like Time, Life, and even the TV Guide. And the newspapers.

And things started to get weird.  I knew who the President was, because one Saturday morning, in about 1968, I'd come across an early-morning program about the death of the President.  I ran into my parents' bedroom to tell them the President had been shot - my mother got up, checked the TV, and sent me back to bed.  She told me it was a review of what had happened five years ago, a little over 6 weeks after I'd been born.  President John F. Kennedy, the man who set our course for the moon, had been killed.  

But that wasn't what was ruining my limited TV time.  It was another President.  He was arguing with other people about how he didn't do anything wrong.  But a lot of people thought he had.  Then they really started arguing, because one man said that there were recordings about what happened.  And I didn't understand, but I knew there were other men who were trying to figure it all out.  And most importantly, make sure that if someone was responsible for doing a bad thing, well, I knew what happened when I got into trouble.  Adults yelled and got upset.  And it sure sounded like someone was going to be speaking to someone's mom.  Or however adults punished one another.  

But I was smart enough to realize that if you're not going to be an honest person, it's probably a fundamentally stupid thing to record yourself doing bad things.   I mean, I knew the difference between good things and bad things.  And I was learning that if you tried to do bad things to other people, they might not like you.  I had a particular beef with a couple of boys whom I thought I knew from the school bus.  In the spring, a friend of mine and I pooled two dollars, and we paid these other two boys for their tree house.  

Yeah, I wasn't going to make millions in real estate when that transaction went down - because the two fellows who sold us their tree house didn't own the land it was on.  And in fact, they didn't even own the lumber that built the tree house.  Or much of anything, really, in their names.  Some kids had raided a few of the trash piles around.  In the pasture, there were two spots that building material had been dumped along with older cars and other things.  In the great dark woods to the south of my house, a little well-worn trail ran through deep, thick, dark woods even in the brightest days of the summer, and about forty yards from my house there was another pile of building material which was most likely dumped when the houses up by the road had been built.  There were six of them, and their yards all ended maybe a hundred feet from that road.  The unmowed grass and thick bushes with sticker bushes, raspberries, or anything with thorns or poison ivy, kept clean, decent people out of that woods.  It was only us lunatic kids who went down that path.

And we had to, because when we paid the $2 for that treehouse, we failed to include in that contract the rights to keep the lumber there.  And after all, what is a treehouse without lumber?  That's right.  Nail holes in trees.  If you had nails.  Which we didn't have many of, either.  But someone who decided that treehouse was no longer their concern took most of the "floor boards" and used them in another treehouse.  So there went that getaway.

But one day, I distinctly remember going to visit my best friend and talk about what we might be able to do with some of the lumber scraps we could find in the piles to fix the floor of our treehouse.  But he was uncharacteristically quiet.  So I asked if he had any thoughts about the day's biggest news, that the President had tapes with his conversations on them.  Wasn't that dumb?  My friend laughed, opened the drawer to his desk, and pulled out the cassette tape recorder he recently had received on his birthday - where he had secretly recorded me being ... all so very sophisticated and grown up, discussing the news of the day.

And all of that serves as a reminder to me, and possibly others, that it is entirely possible that some of the people who listened to the mad blitherings of our former President may not realize that he was intentionally lying to them. For, you see, I learned years ago that some bargains are bad, while other deals which you think might be something pretty swell turn out to be not much more than the wrong end of a stick used to move some cow poop.  And some people will throw that poop into the air and tell you it's rain, chocolate, or something wonderful.  Thing is, when it hits the ground, it's still shit. 

Just as the word of some people.  And so it occurred to me the other day that the people who believed the President when he was going on about stolen elections and all the other noise he made, I realized that perhaps some of the people who listened to him and believed him did not remember what happened when a previous President Lied.  And in that particular case, the man in the President's office was told by other men in his Party that if he went to trial, he would be convicted based on the evidence they had seen and heard.  And at that point, the President did the honorable thing and left the office before he made it and himself even less respected.

That was a difficult thing, and few men of honor would accept the news that they were going to get fired from the job they had if they didn't resign, and resign.  Sometimes life hands you difficult choices.  I've faced those kind of decisions.  And I've taken the route which kept a roof over my head and kept food on the table when I could.  And when I couldn't I tried my damnedest to get back to that position.

But back to Presidents, it occurs to me that there are people who might have actually believed the President when he said things.  And I think we have plenty of examples throughout history what happens to people who continue to lie to the people who elected or elevated them to a leadership role.  Unfortunately, people who have continually been deceived throughout a long period by someone who sought leadership only for the benefits they might be able to take for themselves or their families tend to suffer a rather extreme end of their reign, no matter how hard they might try to end it otherwise.  

And it isn't pretty when the population decides to turn on those who supported the ruler who lied.  Even long after they've stepped down, people really are not kind and forgiving when you use their belief in you to spread lies and destroy confidence in others.  Because they are incredibly angry at being deceived and used.  No one likes that.  And very few people are willing to stand up for someone who lies - they do not value loyalty or honesty, they value what others can go for them and give to them.  

And so I expect that while there are going to be a lot of people who are going to slowly realize they've been deceived, it's important not to call them "sheeple" or imply they were fooled.  They were.  And there's nothing that makes people more angry than having the lies proven to them.  So I think we'll see an awful lot of angry Republicans as they realize their party leaders went along with a series of stories the previous President spread about things we all knew were not true, because they are going to understand, suddenly, in most cases, that the deception they fell for was what destroyed the lives of others.  

And no one likes being guilty by association.  That's why I rather carefully pick my friends.  So far, I'm doing pretty good with the whole "never had to testify in court about a friend."  I've let some people leave my life rather than stand by them as they fell for such deceptions.  I'm not going to welcome them back with open arms.  I might nod with folded arms, but once fooled, some folks might continue to play the fool.  And I'm not going to be a party to any sort of deception like that.  I grew up in what I hope remains the darkest few days of our nation's history, and hopefully we will recover quickly from the crap smeared all over our capitol and institutions by the previous guy.  Anything he touches, no matter how gold plated it is, turns to shit.  So the farther you stay away from him, the less dishonor, deceit, and shit will end up on you.