I remember a time when we were told that all you need to know, about anything, is contained in the pages of The New York Times.
Those were the days when we trusted; We trusted our media, our government, our elders, our teachers, our leaders…and all of us were devoted to our parents.
All of us were patriots.
Please don’t ask me to pinpoint such a place, such a time, but it was there, somewhere, and it lasted…what?...a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade?
Was it all just a fantasy…the fiction you invent to cover up hard times, yours and the nation’s?
But I do remember the milkman delivering the milk, and the paperboy making his rounds house to house, and the coffee counter at Woolworth’s.
Neighbors knew you by your name, by your family, and everybody looked out for everybody else.
Was there really such a time?
Sinatra was the epitome of cool, but Elvis was all the rage.
There was also a particular day for my family. So Mother wrote down a list of things we urgently needed, and to tell the grocer that she’d pay him in a week.
I did that with fear and trembling. The grocer, who did not know me or my parents…we had just moved in…smiled when he handed me the package brimmed to the top.
“I can tell you are trustworthy,” he said. But how? “Your arm still has the marks of having put on tefillin.”
He wasn’t even Jewish, far as I could tell…and in a land far away the big story was about the re-birth of a nation.
Against all odds, behold…Israel.
We all cheered for this tiny nation that could…after an exile of 2,000 years. Goosebumps and tears of pride and remembrance at the playing of Hatikvah.
Edward R. Murrow was a comforting presence, always to be trusted, and he smoked, but we all did.
We were not judgmental about ourselves or others.
We trusted all the networks, and all their anchors, and all their reporters…We “liked Ike.” JFK was a promise unfulfilled.
It was the age of the Red Scare, communist witch hunts, HUAC. Joe McCarthy, The Hollywood Ten, the quiz show scandals…suburbia.
We were city people, and the suburbs came to set us apart…but we got along at this time and place.
Because we trusted.
Today we trust nobody, neither the media, nor the government, nor our leaders because they lied…as surely as you remember global warming.
Oh, you forgot? Maybe so because the topic hasn’t come up in a while. But for a time, it was the world’s leading concern, led by a Greta Thunberg, the Pied Piper of global warming.
A wicked child, with a bitter message, the media gushed for her. She was the saint for our times. Yes, global warming, the cause of our age.
We were all going to disintegrate in a few years, and since that did not happen. she, and her world, switched to something else…Jew-hatred.
She now goes stomping for “Free Palestine.”
So what else is new?
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His novel, “Compulsive,” motivated John W. Cassell to declare “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.