When I was a kid, and I did something wrong, I got punished.
But Pop had standards.
Sometimes, I’d do something bad and instead of giving me a quick clip on the side of the head the old man would just look at me for a second or two.
“I’m not gonna punish you,” he’d say. “It had to be a mistake because nobody would do anything this stupid on purpose.”
It was a neat little distinction and it’s the reason why, even today, I believe most people don’t go to hell.
I worked out that little bit of theology while I was lying in bed in the old house we rented, the one where, on cold mornings, the water in the toilet was sometimes covered with a thin skim of ice. We had heat, but there was only one register on the second floor, where my parents and I slept. My 90-pound boxer dog, Joey, slept on the heat register, which was a cast-iron grate set into the floor between my parents bedroom and mine. It was an old house.
Those nights, after Pop hadn’t punished me, I’d lie on my back in bed, feeling grateful. Sometimes I’d lie awake for a while because both the dog and the old man snored. The old house was small and my parents’ room and the dog’s spot on the heat register were very close to my bed.
Those memories come from the early 1960s, some of them before President John F. Kennedy was killed, certainly before we lost the war in Vietnam, when ethnic white people still lived mostly in cities, and there were enough nuns around to staff a Catholic school in every neighborhood.
Just after that, and mostly because of Vietnam, and integration, and women’s rights, the liberal/conservative war started, and it continues to this day, a war across the decades that has burned and blackened and tore apart every quiet side street in the country.
We shouted, “Everybody must get stoned,” and “Power to the people.” The first one stuck and the second one didn’t.
We elected Nixon, and Johnson, and Carter, and Reagan, and Clinton, and two Bushes, and Obama and, finally, Trump. There’s a good chance none of them should have been president, and, to me, they represent a downward path with one hysterically bad decision at the end. Not one of them advanced the cause of this nation in any way. By the time I hit the hospital, and the doctor is telling my wife to turn the machine off, Kid Rock will probably be president.
This is what America must have been like in the decades before the Civil War, when no one could escape the argument.
And finally it becomes clear that you cannot ease out from under the punishment, that what you did was not just stupid, but willful and wrong.
To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "The Land of Trumpin'" is a collection of his columns from the last election year. It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, iBooks and GooglePlay.