Gone Are The Days

This blog is titled Lo Que Vi. What I Saw. It is a record of my travels. It is not a political blog, although at times I touch upon politics. But with last Tuesday's national election, I reflect on the loss of freedom since the days of my youth. Although the past was far from perfect, the older I get, the more I think that I once lived in a Golden Age. We will not see such times again.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, my home town was a short distance from Berkeley.

It is late 1967. I am eleven years old and in sixth grade. One day, our teacher introduces two men who will speak to us. They are with the National Rifle Association. They want to sign up students for a firearms safety and marksmanship class, to be held on Saturdays for several weeks at the police department's firing range by San Pablo Bay. Several of us boys apply.

Our house has no firearms but my friend and classmate, who lives down the street, has a .22 rifle. So over the course of several weeks, my friend and I go to rifle practice on Saturday mornings. We walk through town with the rifle, a box of ammunition in our pockets. We spend the morning at the range. Then we walk home. We often stop at a market to buy a soda. We can't take the rifle inside, so I hold it while my friend goes inside, and he holds it while I go inside. Adults walk past us. The police station is just around the corner. Then we head back home with our sodas and the rifle and the ammunition in our pockets. It's just a normal day in this Bay Area town in 1967. Unremarkable, really.

A glimpse of my past. A simple account of something that, when it happened, was ordinary. But with the passage of years, it shows what we have lost in this country.