I sat in a barbershop in downtown Bowling Green, Ky., Saturday and listened to patrons talk about the Jaycees’ Christmas Parade the week before.
Not nearly the number of people attend anymore, said the shop’s matriarch.
You cannot throw candy anymore, her colleague behind chair No. 1, said.
“Someone complained about throwing it, so you have to hand it out now,” she said.
“You’re lucky you can even hand it out,” I said. “Many cities don’t allow that anymore — safety issues.”
The owner closed the shop the day of the parade, she said. Back in the day, the shop stayed open because the parade drew large crowds downtown, and that brought business. But in recent years, all staying open brought was a parade of people wanting to use the bathroom.
“I should have charged them a nickel for the toilet paper,” the owner said.
That “insider” line drew a laugh from a silver-haired lady getting a full treatment.
“Do you remember when it cost a nickel to unlock the doors to the bathroom stalls?” she said. “We’d send a youngin’ under the stall door to unlock it, just to save us a nickel.”
The Christmas Parade —and a nickel — meant something back in the day.
No one said it, but we all longed for the “good old days” and the simple life that came with them. I drove home thinking about that “simple life” and simple things that still serve us well.
The U.S. Constitution reflects a simpler time but it also remains a simple document, and one that continues to serve.
Today, Dec. 15, marks the anniversary of the passage of the Bill of Rights. Through 220 years, the changes in the Constitution have been few and the challenges many. The “experiment” called the United States continues, clearly with more good than bad a product of it.
The founders became infected with the notion of freedom and created a template that helped infect others — a moral compass aimed at making it possible for a diverse group to live together.
It remains beautiful in its simplicity and effective in its ability to guide the less simple country we live in.
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time,” wrote E.B. White, author and essayist.
But even the skeptical-sounding White admitted to the infectious nature of freedom. He wrote this about the power of the written word in a democracy: “But I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself historically to be the hypodermic, which inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation, so that there are individuals in every time in every land who are the carriers, the Typhoid Marys capable of infecting others by mere contact and example.”
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p>I can understand why people today might forsake a Christmas Parade.
I cannot understand why they would forsake the document that allows them the choice.
We can thank George Mason for the Bill of Rights. Mason doesn't get nearly the credit he should for his ideas about a system that would successfully serve millions of people, years after his death. Happy anniversary.
Yes, Mason was a very important and interesting man. A biography of Mason I read stated that he was among the most frequent speakers at the constitutional convention — but that he refused to sign the final document. His major concerns were addressed by the Bill of Rights, it stated. Thanks for your post. Mac McKerral
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