I was out for a walk a while back and came upon one of my neighbors walking his dogs.

“It’s a shame the way things are going in this country, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head after we had dispensed with subjects of more immediate concern such as the weather and the dogs.

“Well, it’s been worse,” I said, which put an abrupt end to that topic.

There is plenty to worry about nowadays: climate change, especially. And the disinformation divide. Those are the biggies, I think.

But when a lot of people complain about how bad things are nowadays, I think they’re harking back to a golden bygone era that some of us remember — maybe in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

It was a simpler time, when everyone sat on their front porches in the evening and told stories

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