Wally Spiers: It’s getting pretty bad, but we’ve had bad times before
The conversations at the barber shop during the past few weeks often have turned to where we should be planning to move if certain candidates are elected president of the United States.
Canada comes up often but it generally is pretty cold there, except for Vancouver. I looked it up, and housing in the Vancouver area apparently is costly enough to compare to the Los Angeles area, so it is out.
New Zealand is just too far away. Ditto Australia, and I’m not anxious to move to Central America.
No matter what happens, I will have to stick it out. So everyone is just going to have to calm down and make all this work. After all, it isn’t the first time that things have seemed a little grim.
Sure, it seems like every billionaire is fleecing the country with offshore shenanigans. Sure, it seems like terrorists are killing lots of people. Sure, it seems like a terrible start for the St. Louis Cardinals.
But none of this is new. I looked back 50 years in the Belleville News-Democrat files to April 1966 and found a lot of the same problems then that we have today.
The first headline I saw screamed about a terrorist attack, but it was by the Viet Cong in what was then Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. The newspaper said that terrorists attacked some officers’ barracks with grenades and explosives. They killed several officers but it wasn’t a suicide bombing. They intended to escape to kill again, although a couple were captured when their motorbike overturned.
In April of 1966 a high school student, who was described as brilliant but bored, shot and killed his stepfather and then himself in Louisiana. Only a few months later on Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman would shoot and kill 16 people, including his wife and mother, at the University of Texas.
A headline from 1966 proclaimed that chaos was growing in the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba and predicted possible changes. It seems to mirror some headlines from a couple of weeks ago about change in Cuba even if Fidel still disagrees.
Illinois was arguing over redrawing voting districts and the fight went to court, part of what has become standard process. The Cardinals lurched off on a 1-4 start to the 1966 season. They finished 83-79 and in sixth place in what was then a 10-team National League before divisional play.
There were some differences of course.
The FBI was just suggesting that computers might be useful in fighting crime.
When someone stole 160 suits from Sears along with camera equipment, getting away unnoticed in the night with police blaming a heavy fog for concealing the burglars, the suits were valued at $10,000, an average of $62.50 per suit.
And a wonderful picture showed the Belleville Serra Club’s annual after Easter bowling outing with about 50 Belleville nuns. I don’t know if you could round up that many for bowling anymore.
But when you start to despair at all our problems, remember that troubles have been around far longer than you, and things still keep rolling along.
This story was originally published April 9, 2016 at 5:26 AM with the headline "Wally Spiers: It’s getting pretty bad, but we’ve had bad times before."