Americans once had much thicker skin

You'd think from the size of the recent headlines World War III had just started! So someone got their feelings hurt again on the playground of life over a comment about the president and a black gun. Well now, isn't that grounds - amid unprecedented recession, wars, and mortgage crises - to bring in the Politically Correct Police, the Human Rights Task Force, and the Secret Service!

In the same Jan. 30 edition of the local Cd'A Press, people were arguing over whether or not Beyonce's performance was live or Memorex. How about the story of the young man who lost all four limbs in an IED attack in Iraq in 2009 and was getting double-arm transplants; and finally a blurb about 231 Brazilians who died at a night club fire that had only one exit.

I wonder on a scale of one to 10, 10 being of the greatest importance, which of these stories should have qualified as a truly newsworthy headline, especially since the so-called racist remark is not even attributed to school board member Brent Regan, but to his wife? Depending on what value we attach to each story determines the priority we as Americans give to the respective issues. Which do we value more: unfortunate, local hurt feelings over a faux pas (French for "false step"), the careers of cultural icons, a brave U.S. serviceman's lost limbs, or the senseless loss of foreign life?

Let's start with President Obama. News flash: He isn't black! I believe the term is Mulatto. Webster's definition is "anyone with mixed Negro and Caucasian ancestry." When I was growing up in southern California in the 1960s the black kids had a name for us Caucasians, I believe it was "honky." The Mexican kids had a name for us, but I can't repeat it, but it referenced a certain part of a woman's female anatomy. The Asians didn't have a name for us due to their respectful, soft-spoken cultural customs, but maybe they were thinking "dim-wits" because they were more academically disciplined, and we C-averages were more interested in going to the beach to catch a few waves.

The guys running the corner liquor store (mini-mart) would call us junior high-ers "punks," as we would invade their store by the hordes. Every Fourth of July I would remember that term of endearment as I lit my fireworks out in the street with ... a punk.

After moving to another part of the state in close proximity to a large Indian reservation, those "natives" never intimated with words, just their "bearish" size. One, a graduating senior, ended up with his picture in the yearbook with this quote: "Custer had it coming!" We white kids got a good laugh out of that. And since we lived in the mountains, visiting city folk were called "flatlanders." "Flush the toilet twice," we would say, "L.A. needs the water." We were known as "hicks" who lived in the sticks. The ultimate compliment was to be called a "WASP:" White Anglo Saxon Protestant!

Those where the good ole days when you could tell your favorite playground enemy to his face, "Your grandma wears combat boots!" I don't remember anyone committing suicide for being teased back then, it was part of "normal" sophomoric childhood behavior because we all had our foibles. Hasn't anyone ever watched "The Wonder Years," "The Goonies," "Stand By Me," or "Super 8"? Sure, we had bullies, but we were a little more thick-skinned because we had to endure such things as girls' saddle shoes to the shins, a teacher who pulled ears, a paddling from the principal, and sometimes dad's belt when he got home at night.

Our main link to the outside world was the AM transistor radio, where we first heard the legendary Vin Scully on KFI, the Dodgers Radio Network. If we wanted to go somewhere we hoofed it, or rode our bikes, including many miles to the beach, the reason most of us were skinny. We were raised to respect authority, and if with a foul tongue we didn't, mom whisked us off to the bathroom to have our mouths washed out with a fresh-from-the-wrapper bar of soap.

Our Depression-era folks taught us how to grin and bear it. Our relatives would gather on the weekend for Pinochle and joke their heads off over cards, pastrami sandwiches, a cold beer, and a cigar. We used their old decks, clothes-pinned to the front and back forks of our bikes, to make cool sounds as the cards hit the spokes each time the tires rotated.

Today in America, card-playing is still big. The ethnics play the race card, the homosexuals play the gay card, the Democrats and Republicans play their respective cards, the Muslims play the profiling card, and the tokers play the medicinal card, but the trump card seems to be held by the military, who as just plain-ole-Americans keep our freedom secure, i.e., the ability to protect all the idiotic politically correct people who keep mandating, "It's all about my feelings and my freedoms."

Now that everyone's thoroughly mired down in the media's diversionary punctiliousness, the bigger issue on the whole Brent Regan debate is the "scary" president who is moving toward severely limiting our Second Amendment rights. That should be a concern for all of us. Nonetheless as long as we continue to major in the narcissistic minors, we'll miss the true hand our heritage as Americans has dealt us. Not in Idaho. Anyone up for the real game?

Dan Cooper is a Post Falls resident.