MEET DICK CONFIDENCE!

Meet Dick Confidence...!

He believes in God (especially a blue-eyed one)...Country (especially his understanding of it)....Mom (especially when she was a stay-at-home guardian of hearth & home)....neat neighborhoods (especially without too many noisy kids)....cops (especially when they arrest other people not him)....Flag, Church and the local Rotary....most particularly he believes in the destiny of a better tomorrow.

Dick sounds like a nice guy. Maybe a little like you and me at one time. Back in the roaring 1920s and again in the robust 1990s, the mantra of all the Dick Confidences was: "Becoming better every day in every way."

But now that Dick has seen the future -- same boom-and-bust cycles, brutal job-sucking competition of global economics, re-surging enemies and receding resources -- Dick often hears another mantra: "I guess I'm adult now, but the question is how did this happen and how do we make it stop?"

As adults we start learning some of the answers, but the future keeps changing all the questions. Maybe Currie & Ives and Norman Rockwell had the right idea about America -- keep it safely as it was! Freeze those sweet, imagined moments inside eternal artwork! That once-upon-a-time was touchable, manageable. On the other hand, this ready-or-not future sneaked up on us without warning. Worst of all, without a user manual.

Dick is caught as if on an ice floe which has split in half. One leg stands on what was...the other on what is becoming... in between and below is the black ocean. Dick has to make his choice. Quickly. As the old school readers would say: "See Dick, See Dick Run." But there was always a Jane in those stories. What one wonders will be the choice of today's Janes and yesterday's Dicks.

Come to think of it -- do they even have a choice?