In the midst of so much prevailing lunacy in a world seeming gone mad, tomorrow the 19^th Annual Rubber Ducky Races will take place here in the Kern River Valley. Just think, despite all the nuclear saber rattling going on and threats to America from so many quarters and talk of WWIII and the impending nuclear Armageddon here we are in this beautiful valley having Rubber Ducky Races. Now that’s what I call having your priorities straight.

We all need some point of comforting stability in our lives, something that helps us maintain our equilibrium without the emotionally depleting effort of Kipling’s “If.” Linus had his blanket, many folks depend on their family or their church, and doctors are telling patients to lower their BP by not watching the news, especially if they have been diagnosed “bipolar.” Though like ADD, etc. the great majority of Americans seem to be suffering these conditions and in my opinion such diagnoses properly belong in the realm of phrenology, palm reading, and witch doctors plying their trade. And no, I’m not a Scientologist, just someone who likes to give more credit to common sense than to psychologists and psychiatrists where you are as likely to get a better answer through flipping a coin as by “analysis.”

One might be excused for thinking the frantic noise accompanying TV newscasts, the barbaric (in my opinion demonic) noise so many call “music” today cannot but make a contribution to the virtual senselessness of an America in the grip of lunacy throughout. So I often turn to the films and music, the great literature of a time when America was a nation that had its priorities straight and children were raised with hope of a future.

Many years ago I read an article calling into question just how much time was actually being saved by the introduction of so many “labor-saving devices” into modern living, things like automatic dishwashers, etc. And true enough, in many cases the devices removed some of the drudgery from our lives but the time saved did not seem to be put to any better use. Save time for what has been too often corrupted to time spent in unproductive ways uncongenial to either mental or physical health, and children today are not collecting stamps or building model airplanes from balsa and tissue as they used to, but growing obese from watching TV and stuffing themselves with “convenient” food. Mom is no longer in the kitchen preparing a wholesome meal and the family no longer gathers at the table for the meal preceded by dad saying grace.

“Remove not the ancient landmarks which thy fathers have placed” has real merit in many cases. I wouldn’t say downgrading Pluto to “dwarf” status falls into this category, nor am I particularly upset over Britain finding fault with Tom rolling a cigarette during one episode of Tom and Jerry. As long as some of us make time for Rubber Ducky Races there remains some hope for the sanity of proper priorities, and I cling to such hope.

But notwithstanding such hope the realities of what we are facing today does not make me misty seeing life through a rainbow or the gossamer wings of butterflies while listening to Serenade in Blue. As I once shared with Senator Don Rogers I often feel the weariness of having lived too long and seen too much to be naïve or altruistic about the daunting challenges America is facing. And having lived the extremities of WWII I can foresee troops on our borders and those concentration camps once more in America.

I’m not a lunatic, and only a lunatic would wish for such things. But despite my broad streak of romanticism and the longing for those ancient landmarks such as the Bible and moral instruction in both homes and schools, the longing for a time when one paycheck provided for the needs of a family, those things that once made America a proud nation and one trusted by the other nations of the world I have an equally broad streak of pragmatism as well and am quite capable of seeing things as they are rather than as I wish they were.

“Circumstances alter cases” remains a truism, and there is what I call the “Circumstances of the Immutable” that invariably plays the trump card from the Devil’s deck. In the meantime, here in the Kern River Valley the Rubber Ducky Races will go on flying in the face of the seeming lunacy all about and here in this beautiful part of God’s Creation we will be spitting in the eye of the Devil. He probably hates rubber duckies, rainbows, butterflies, and Serenade in Blue.