I was born in the opening year of the Hoover administration, on a Sunday Halloween morning, just days after the Black Friday stock market crash. Like any newborn, I had no notion that the stock market crash was a stake in the heart of the country, a stake that would lead to the Great Depression and to FDR and a lurch to the left, and a big government of unelected bureaucrats that over the years morphed into a bureaucratic ruling class that oversaw every facet of the lives of a once free people. And now, in my age, I think upon an America that was and is no more.

While growing up I heard the stories told
Of how things were back in the days of old
Of trolleys clacking over grass filled land
To parks where crowds heard John P. Sousa’s band
The freedom to be what may be your dream
The summer Sundays cheering for your team
You knew your country’s greater than was Rome
For men like young Abe Lincoln called it home
You never locked your doors asleep at night
And work began for all at dawn’s first light
I heard my grampop talk of his first car
And how when airplanes came we’d come so far
The day is gone when free speech was the rule
Now mamas fear to send their kids to school
Boys used to carry baseball bats around
Now kids have guns to put kids in the ground
I lived to see the country scale the heights
Of greatness where we always won our fights
And led the world in science and in art
Where all who had the talent played a part
Skyscrapers cast their shadow far and wide
But now those city shadows are to hide
The wretched and the thugs who live to prey
On those unlucky souls who fall their way
I’m glad I lived to see us to the moon
But sad to see the country die so soon