Pappa Hardy's Musings on Life.

Well, a recent trip on I-80 lead me to believe that perhaps the Semi-Truck isn’t as dead as I might have thought. With the price of fuel jumping over $4.00 a gallon, the temptation was to think that they semi-truck may no longer be economical as a form of transportation to move goods around the country. I can remember times when I-80 was just crowded with truck after truck after truck. Sometimes the road was so heavily traveled that you could not move over say, 80 miles per hour.

Well, I do think that perhaps there are less trucks on the road. I saw a train last night, seemed like it was miles long and of course, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that my theory was true. Of course, the lower number of trucks was probably related to the fact that the economy is slowing down and there was bad weather. Regardless, I think the semi-truck’s future is probably in limbo now.

Good Ole Cheyenne, the home of Frontier Days. We are in town this week visiting with the kids in Cheyenne. We lived here for a long time, and the kids, most of them, consider this town as home. For me, it will be a place I fondly remember because of the family associations and the friends that I have here, but it will never be the home that Utah is.

That aside, Cheyenne has changed a lot over the years, and yet, it is also the same. It has grown. The streets are more crowded, and there have been improvements and other such things occur. However, I think the thing, outside of family, that I will always remember Cheyenne the most for is Frontier Days and the image that the city has. It is a symbol of the old west. That spirit, and the spirit of friendliness, will always be something that I remember Cheyenne for.

I had a disturbing conversation with a friend and business associate the other day. We were discussing the disturbing state of affairs in the United States and the World with regard to crime, drug abuse, and particularly, the safety of our homes and our children. That thought immediately took me back to my childhood and my experiences.

I remember days of playing outside during the summer, and the winter, and not having a care in the world. I didn’t have a care, and while I am sure my parents had cares, they really didn’t need to worry much about the safety of their children playing in the neighborhood. Those were days of playing baseball from morning till night. Those were days of building snow forts and having neighborhood snow ball fights for control of the imaginary turf states that we held. Those were days of not worrying about strangers coming along and either kidnapping us children, or of trying to get us to use substances that would be bad for our health. When I became older, I knew that there were bad things in the world, but my neighborhood and my home were a fortress held inviolate and bad things of the world did not find me there.

How times have changed. I remember the first fear in Detroit in the 1980s, where we lived in a neighborhood that had drug houses across the street, and where we had a man stop and try to get our daughter to get into a car. It was only the speedy reaction of my wife that saved our daughter in that instance.

We had a respite in Cheyenne, when our children could go out and play and we didn’t feel the pressure that we felt in the “big city”. We moved to idyllic Payson, and also heard the screams and yells of children other than ours now, playing in the neighborhood, and it was music to our ears even though our young kids by then were grown and gone.

However, not all is well in Zion, or anywhere else for that matter. We also hear of a huge meth problem, or drug use going rampant amongst even the “good kids”. Neighborhood homes are broken into randomly, probably by friends of neighborhood kids who may have a drug habit to feed. You can’t leave your garage door open anymore for fear that a lawn mower, a car, or something else may disappear. You have to be careful about the appearance of your house. You can’t let you daily living habits signal to “bad” people the times that you and your aren’t at home. You have to worry about your house getting broken into, and putting in security systems that may or may not secure your home. What have we allowed this world to come to. The big problem is, we could trade our freedoms for guarantees of security from the government. If we do so, we will have neither security nor freedom. We indeed live in perilous times, and other than convincing the world to live according to the precepts of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I have no idea how we can cure the world of this disease. Yes, if fear that there is “No Safety for our Children”.