August 03, 2003

Episode No. 17

Yes, kiddies, it is that time again . . . time for another adventure from yesteryear. Yes, we all know you are all ready for another adventure of Rusty Rucker, and today's exciting episode is chock full of spine-tingling tales. So gather around, hush your mouths, make sure the parents are in the other room and let's get this show on the road:

Old Rusty lives way back in the boonies with a couple of hound dogs and one lazy ole mule. With nothing to do all day except whittle and listen to the radio, he gets some off-the-wall ideas about our political structure and its impact on our daily lives. Maybe you will get a chuckle out of some of the stuff he comes up with, and who knows, you might even agree with some of it.

January, 2000 Updated regularly -- Totally new first of every month.

2000 -- A brand New Year -- New Century -- New Millennium.

Time for some new beginnings -- some serious resolutions. If y’all can’t think of any for yourselves, how ‘bout resolve to uphold the Ten Commandments. It would be wonderful if all the people in the World did that. If that is too much to ask, then settle for The Golden Rule. Most of us could benefit there, too.

I read where the Ancient Incas predicted that “The world will come to an end on December 23, 2012". I doubt they ever dreamed of atomic bombs, laser guns, deadly viruses, or poison gases. We will all have to put forth our best effort to make it last that long.

The place to start is population control. The whole world needs to practice Zero births for at least a decade. Of course, there is no way it will happen. Sex is all the entertainment some disadvantaged countries have. Life is of little value to them.

There are folks having babies for lots of wrong reasons. To get extra welfare money -- to increase numbers of their race -- to prove virility and numerous others.

Someone will mention a particularly memorable event from the past and another will say, “Ah! Those were the Good Old Days”. What could possibly be so good about times before Television, Airplanes, penicillin, Major league ball, Skyscrapers, organ transplants and all the other wonders of our modern world?
Well now, let’s just see. How about being able to walk alone at night without fear. Never locking your doors. Food grown by your own hands with no artificial coloring or preservatives. No labels on cans and boxes telling how many vitamins or how much saturated fat was contained.

Never even heard of nuclear war. There weren't no terrorist neither. Oh, maybe a bank robbery now and then but we had so little money, it was not a very profitable line of work.

Heck we knew what was good for us. Pinto beans, cornbread, turnup greens, fresh oven roasted corn on the cob, sorghum molasses, and lots of hard work.
We didn’t belong to the gym -- don't s'pose there wuz any. Didn’t cost a nickel to slop the hogs, milk the cows, churn the butter, hoe the crops and bring in the harvest.

I challenge the people making all that expensive exercise equipment to come up with something that will develop a body like choppin' wood or hauling hay from the fields and tossing seventy pound bales over your head through an opening in the barn loft. And saunas -- shucks, try being the one in that hot barn dragging and stacking those bales.

No! We didn't have no super sonic jet liners or bullet trains. Nor did we have those exotic diseases and viruses brought in from all over the world on them.
I remember Pa telling about courting my Ma in a one horse buggy. They could stay out ‘til 8:30 or 9:00 on week nights and maybe as late as 10 o'clock on Saturday. No recreational sex before marriage in those days. A boy that did his girl wrong had to answer to her Daddy and maybe half a dozen hard-fisted brothers.

The "good Old Days" kept boys in the field from sun-up to sun-down where they developed into strong men with dreams of a wife and kids and a farm of their own. No thought of street gangs, drugs, rape, shooting up schools or burning churches. It was those boys around the start of the twentieth century and their off spring that defended America through two world wars and built it into the great nation it is today. Let us see what the youth of today does to top that in the NEXT HUNDRED YEARS.

Thanks for the ride. Y'all come back now ... Ya hear!!!

"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
--Frank Lloyd Wright

See all of the currently published Rusty Rucker works by clicking on this link.

Rusty Rucker posts are from previously published monthly columns of my late father that had been lost until I discovered Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Posted by Tiger at August 3, 2003 11:28 PM
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