WHY MUST THE MERRY-GO-ROUND STOP...?

Of all the wrong times to shut down Kiddieland....!

Still, the generations-treasured amusement park at the corner of First & North Avenue will tuck away its tiny train tracks and musical merry-go-round in just a few days. Built at the start of the Great Depression in 1929, it closes in the middle of the Great Recession in 2009. Just when so many other remnants of our youthful innocence are also disappearing in a tsunami of adult complexities.

Thomas Wolfe caught it dead center when he wrote, "All youth is bound to be misspent; there is something in its very nature that makes it so. And that is why all men regret it." Very much like the youth of our nation which we spent blazing trails, cutting through forests and frontiers, intoxicated by the conviction this would never end.

But it did, and we've been compelled to backtrack over the journeys of our youth to confront what we rushed over. With few of the empty spaces available to that small population, we now have to figure out how to live in the more crowded spaces left to a booming population. Instead of bravado it takes brains, instead of raw energy it calls for rare excellence. Making America work today demands what trappers and gunslingers never had to think about.

Precisely why we're going to miss Kiddieland. And all the other kiddielands across this terribly grown-up country of ours. We're gradually losing the semblances of a simpler yesterday which could help balm the wounds of a complex today. A today in which hundreds of channels, thousands of websites, and millions of blogs drown us in equal parts facts and fears. Over banks, health-care, energy, schools, Iran, and often each other!

During the kiddelands of our youth, there was so much more space and time between us. And between our needs to make great decisions. In America's post-Tom Sawyer, grown-up today, neither space nor time are in abundance. Everything happens everywhere, all at once, all the time. And given the dictates of democracy, everyone decides they are the decider. That's an army even Napoleon and Patton would have found hard to lead.

What then to do...? Yes, we still have our Disneyworlds; but actually they're just as grown-up and complex as everything else. The restorative surge of simpler times is becoming a thing of the past. Even our kids' everyday playtime is grown-up and complex.

Maybe both our generals and their troops could build their own backyard merry-go-rounds. Cheaper than alcohol...less dangerous than drugs...still the kind of re-set button Silicon Valleys has yet to think of...!