When the British army marched out of Yorktown after surrendering to a colonial upstart nation in October of 1781 they shouldered arms and marched into defeat, supposedly, playing a tune called the “World Turned Upside Down.”  I would assume it was a popular 18^th Century ditty at the time or just maybe apropo for the moment. But this was a truly a moment when the bottom rail was on top.  A change in the world order took place.  Shortly after the American Revolution there was a far more radical French Revolution that decapitated many French traditions that easily dated back to the 14^th Century. France literally lost its head with change.

I feel that we all should bone up on the “World Turned Upside Down.” The world is changing quickly with the Covid-19. Add the recent cries of racism to the turbulence swirling around us and we are  like an airplane in a flat spin. We see people rushing to judgment on all sorts of issues.  Opening businesses back up and then reeling them back in. We have turned simple traditional health practices like wearing a mask into a public debate on civil liberties equivalent to free speech.  One woman, complaining at a Florida county commission meeting,  compared wearing a mask to wearing underwear. Everything has got to breathe, she said.  This really has me asking which end is really up. It is hard to believe that this is the same country that helped wipe out smallpox and could vaccinate its citizens from polio. That we could build health care systems and sewage systems to control dysentery, yellow fever, and cholera.

Americans complaining about public health and safety concerns is nothing new.  In the 1970s we squawked about seat belt buzzers and bells in our cars reminding us to buckle up.  Finally states started passing mandatory seat belt laws. But we resisted, feeling it was our God-given-right to implant our face on the windshield of our car when we experienced a sudden and abrupt stop.  I recall a classic bumper sticker in Florida from the 1980s.   It simply said: “I’ll Buckle Up When Bundy Buckles Up. It’s the Law.” This was in reference to serial killer Ted Bundy, who like so many of our country’s conmen, miscreants, weirdos and psychopaths end up in Florida. Some even get elected governor.  Bundy spent 10 years on death row after being convicted of his killing spree in Florida. He kept appealing his date with the hangman.  Finally on January 24, 1989 he was executed in “Old Sparky,” Florida’s electric chair.  This was an era before drugs were used to execute a death penalty sentence.

It’s ironic how we Americans embrace change.  Sometimes we move fairly quickly.  We went from price tags being stamped on canned goods at the grocery store to bar codes, chip reading credit cards, and now smart phone payments.  Who writes a check? But the Covid has turned businesses upside down.  We have  airlines filling the coach section of the plan at 60 percent capacity and first class at 50 percent. What happened to overbooking? Baseball is talking about  a 60-game schedule.  In fact, the Covid may finally kill off the 150 year tradition of pitchers batting in baseball altogether.  The National League, probably the last league in the world not to use a Designated Hitter to replace the pitcher in the lineup, is finally coming around in a short season. Sometime change is slow in coming. Golf tournaments are back, too. Without crowds and some obnoxious fan screaming his guts out to be heard on TV: “In the hole!”

Without a doubt small businesses have been sliced into the the high fescue grass. There are so many small businesses “in the hole” it is doubtful they will ever reach the fairway let alone the green. Forget par. And Congress is stuck on a third stimulus package because it will increase a multi-trillion-dollar deficit. Get with the program.  We quit counting after billions. This reminds me of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they are contemplating jumping off the cliff and into the river below to escape the posse that has been following them for days and now has them trapped. In  fit of desperation a reluctant Sundance tells Butch he can’t swim. Butch laughs and tries to reassure Sundance that the fall will kill us. Well, we fell off the fiscal cliff 10 years ago and survived. Meanwhile some poor schmuck, who cannot “tax and spend” his way into  or out of debt cannot pull $1,000 together to stave off eviction and a life on the street is drowning.

We have been told that the Covid would miraculously be gone in the summer heat in a belief businesses could attempt to open. While many are crying for more money to help businesses there is a huge demand to defund the police.  In Seattle a group even took over a police precinct. Some have called them terrorists, anarchists; but nobody has called them entrepreneurs.  But why not? In a time when things are going upside down, opening up your own cop shop goes beyond a Libertarian belief. It is pure Reaganism. It is  getting government out of your back pocket.  It is good for everybody. It is teaching a man to fish for his dinner. It is putting your money or lack of it where your mouth is. I am surprised more conservatives have not embraced this concept.

What is equally disturbing is the systemic overt and benign racism that is flipping old embraced beliefs and traditions. For more than 150 years since the end of the Civil War Americans have either blatantly ignored or just turned a blind eye to our country’s racial inequality.  The country’s check engine lights that have been lit up for so long but we keep driving.  The state of Mississippi is just now removing the Confederate Battle flag from its canton on its state flag. As much as Robert E, Lee is (or was) beloved it really is time for him and his fellow Confederates to come down off their pedestals. They have finally had their 150 years of fame turned to shame–to say the least.

These racist icons are going off all across the nation, and in some cases physically being pulled down. Statues in town squares or in front of courthouses that we drove by every day, never really paying attention to,  have gone from amber to red to being gone.  Those statues are making Americans question the past and how it influences the present. As much as we may try to deny it, the old plantation belief still survives in our nation’s consciousness.

As conquering heroes at the end of World War II we had no problem turning Germany and Japan upside down by eradicating Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism. It is easy to enforce change from the end of gun barrel.  The Union Armies may have drove old Dixie down, destroying a slave economy.  But it did not institute lasting economic and equality changes that the country needed. The South, however, managed to throw off the yoke of Reconstruction and reestablish and institutionalize slavery beyond the plantation in all but name. What happened was the infusing of segregation, suppression and inequality deep into our country’s muscle memory. Today, we are now dealing with up righting the changes that should have taken place 150 years ago.