Though it is popular to suggest otherwise, we do not live in bad times. Things – in many, many ways – are better than they ever have been.

Yes, I know. It’s fun to reminisce about the good old days when mothers could stay home; the average family could afford a home; T-Bones were 99 cents a pound; cars cost $2,000; and “Bonanza,” “The Andy Griffin Show” and “The Wonderful World of Disney” graced our TV sets.

All that is true and all that was special. 

What those evocative reflections don’t take into consideration is that in the sixties, $125 a week was considered a middle-class living and that $125 left little room for T-bones, except for special occasions. 

 In my home, like most homes in WNC, we ate meat at dinner three or four days a week, and most of that meat was chicken. Pinto beans, cornbread, onions and fried potatoes grounded dinner more often than not. 

Dessert was something for Sunday and birthdays.

I didn’t even know what a casserole was until the first time a big spoonful of one was alarmingly slopped onto my tray in a chow hall. 

If it hadn’t been for the all-I-could-drink 99-cent-a-gallon milk my blessed step-mother bought for me every other day, I don’t think my bones would have formed.

I distinctly remember having two pairs of jeans and two shirts in high school.

That earlier mentioned anything-but-wicked step-mother would starch the button-down shirts popular at the time, but I had to handwash the jeans.

I couldn’t count the times I did a tinman-like walk to the bus with wintery frozen-stiff jeans that had failed to dry the night before.

The consequential rheumatism my grandmother swore would result has yet to materialize. 

The fact is what’s been lost in the transition from yesterday to today is not prosperity, it’s truth and responsibility.

 We spend far less of our income on housing, food, clothing and other necessities today than we once did.

Today, eating out is taken for granted. Then eating out – especially for a family – was about as rare as a bigfoot sighting.

And where did a family go on bigfoot days? McDonald’s of course, for a 15-cent burger, 10-cent fry, and 10-cent soda.

If you’ve heard that back in the day Ronald insisted on fresh-cut potatoes and beef tallow for his fries, you’ve heard right.

Today, Mickey-D’s fries are frozen concoctions cooked by chemistry, ensuring a “down in the floorboard” half-life that will outlive your car’s transmission.

 Pass through any poor neighborhood in Asheville – and there are proportionately very few – and you’ll find that almost every domicile has cable, wide-screen TVs, a car, plenty of food, and enough computer and cellphone power to have taken our astronauts to the moon.

 In our public schools, breakfast and lunch are free for anyone who requests it. 

We do an excellent job filling our students with sugary-fattening food, but filling their brains with knowledge has been replaced with filling them with political correctness.

When kids are stuck on race and gender fascinations and cannot do basic math, visualize a world map, or write a legible term paper, it’s fair to assume something is getting missed today that was not missed in the past.

And so it is with life in general. Every generation has things that are good and things that are bad.

The greatest generation that reached their productive peak in the ‘60s, but had to endure WWII and the Cold War that followed as a counter to their blessings.

Though very few young people realize it, we live in a time of amazing material plenty ironically countered by a deficit of societal and moral bounty.

We have become so dedicated to social justice for one “victimized” special-interest group or another, that the ideas of unity, love of country and normalized values have been broadly tossed. 

When a large swath of our populace celebrates the college campus murder of a respect-driven, courageous, free-speech role-model in front of his family, we know that the idea of social justice has been distorted into something that is anything but social and about anything but justice.

The suggestion there is something missing today is absolutely correct. 

We’ve abandoned the pillars of any sustainable civil society found in truth and responsibility.

Today, almost everything we see is grounded in deception. The rot in our systems of education, justice, finance, governance and faith is covered in sexy paper mâché happy faces that dependably prioritize public relations over public service. 

Truth and responsibility have fallen way down our list of priorities in deference to pleasure, comfort, imagery and group-think. 

When these two things are removed from any life equation, nothing works for long – absolutely nothing.

For those looking for a hopeful way to navigate today’s confusing, chaotic, dishonest, and corrupted world, grab hold of the dated notions of truth and personal responsibility.