With all due respect I don't give a shit about the increasingly restrictive atmosphere that begins to exist about us today.

It's not so special, not when I think back.

Neither does the strangle-hold on our personal freedoms impress me much. The tightening political nooses around our collective necks, even as we go about our various and sundry business does not throw my spirit into a proverbial sea of despond.

If you'll pardon my saying so, it recalls, not to be too unpleasant, the way things were in mid-century, in the fifties, during the wake of the Korean War.

It was a time in which nothing seemed to happen, except for Eisenhour golfing a lot, meanwhile warning us in certain privately attended commencement addresses about the military-industrial complex. A further and even more insidious invasion into our unlocked homes was the multi-faceted development of the situation comedy on television.

Yet furthermore, there seemed little to no danger, during those years, on the surface of things, anyway, nothing unusual was happening during that time span, not any time soon at any rate.

I write this as Georgie Gush blathers on in general terms about freedom and liberty meanwhile, behind his hand and our backs, he spreads rumors about saving Social Security from the bad spending habits of those of us who have or will have a right to claims for benefits after a life-time; years of toil.

For no particular reason all this takes me back to another period, the time following the second world war. I see in my mind's eye the gaunt face and the deeply set fearful eyes of a man with a huge beak nose. This skinny shell-shocked former soldier would walk down the street like any other normal looking Detroiter of the time, suddenly, he would spin around and drop into a deep crouch holding his hands out in front of him with the index finger aimed as if it were wielding a heavy gun, the muzzel was his own index fingers pointing in wild arcs. His eyes haunted with a survivor's fear for his life, sometimes tears streaming down his face.

Then, just as suddenly, while muttering to himself about things any little girl could never comprehend he would stand tall, shake his head and walk off for a few city blocks looking just about like anyone else, and then again, simply fly back against a wall, so quickly that it seemed he was being sucked there by a force way beyond his control. He'd slide along the wall turning the corner of the building and fall into the alley way as if to hide from his tormentors.

Well, it was during the time following my first and perhaps most strenuous receipt of child abuse at the crotch of my mother's youngest sibling. Her sister.

I know I was very young, I mean, very young when that happened. Following that I would stay in my room puzzling over what I had done wrong enough to be punished like that. She had forced me to insert my tongue in between her labial lips.

I was still in my "terrible two"s just exerting my right to say "no" and she forced this ugly experience upon me. Now, my father had told me to stick my tongue out at her once and so I did. I was small enough to be sitting on his arm at the time, as he sat in our dining room.

I wonder now why he did that. She was excessively rebellious, it may be possible that she had done this to me to get back at him, and his deriding attempts to exact some behavior from her. Placing limits she didn't want to respect, I think. Acting out her jealousy of me having a dad when hers had died when she was about the age I was when she so violently perpetrated her ugly domination upon my small, exceedingly innocent person.