Things haven't always been this way.

One of the exhibits that my kids got a kick out of at the Fort Walla Walla Museum was a display of all the different American flags that had flown over the fort since it was established in the late 1850's (32 stars right up to the 50 we have today).

Most of them were display replica's, but one of them blew me away...an actual 38-star flag that flew over the fort in the 1880's.   

Unlike the display flags, you can tell, Walla Walla being the Wild West frontier, that they just added the two most recent stars(Nebraska and Colorado), and kept going.  Very flexible and very practical folks back then. 

There is an important lesson for me there.  Things haven't always been this way, and they won't always be this way.  I could go sappy with this, thinking about how my girls are growing up.  I wasn't always there for them...oh, I was working FOR them, but I wasn't THERE. 



Or I could go cynical.  With no more football to distract me, I suppose at some point I must focus on politics. 

Where things always this hopeless?  I was only 6 years old when Reagan beat Carter, and so I can't even pretend to know how things felt back then.  I just know that none of this current crop of Republicans feels like Ronald Reagan.  Then again, given today's media, Ronald Reagan probably wouldn't feel like Ronald Reagan. 

I'm also worried that maybe four more years of things getting worse is four years too many. 

Just 130 years ago though, there were only 38 stars on the American Flag. 

130 years from now, there could be 38 again, or there could be 70 stars.  It's a safe bet that there won't be exactly 50.

Or, it could be that there won't be an American Flag.