My generation (I’m 76 years old) has seen quite a number of history changing events in this country. Some have improved the lives of millions, and some have cost the lives of thousands.

We have seen the assassination of the race hater George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party and watched the KKK go into hiding after the killing of little black girls in a church. We have seen the march over the Selma Bridge in Alabama and a state governor bend to the will of the U.S. government over a black student admitted to college. We have seen a president assassinated and his brother killed in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. We have seen the voice of the civil-rights movement shot down on a hotel balcony and another civil-rights leader shot down in his driveway in Mississippi. We have seen riots in the streets of Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and Chicago in the tempest years of the 1960s and ’70s, and through it all we have survived and stood tall as Americans.

But somewhere along the line, we began to lose sight of who we are as a people and as a nation. We put our faith and our trust in those we put into office to represent us and slowly but surely, that trust began to ebb and the tide of change was slowly moving forward. We saw the first of the political wars (Korea), to which thousands were killed from a number of nations and later called the Forgotten War. A little over a decade later we became involved in another political war, called the Vietnam War. Again, thousands were killed and thousands maimed and wounded for the rest of their lives and that also involved a number of nations.

Then we had Desert Storm and Desert Shield in the Middle East, and again young lives were lost from a number of nations and the area today still remains in turmoil. And through all these political wars, we have witnessed the destruction of many middle-income and lower-income families through the introduction of drugs into our society and mainly in the inner cities with the same old promise from the same old politicians: Give us a chance and give us more money for the Great Society and we will fix the problem and to our surprise nothing has changed in a positive way.

We have seen scandal upon scandal and even witnessed the impeachment of a president, who lied to the Congress and to the Supreme Court and to the people of the United States and received as his punishment a six-year suspension to practice law in the state of Arkansas. We have seen others convicted of lesser crimes go to prison, and some people resigned from Congress who should have gone to prison.

But through it all, we have placed our trust and our faith in those we placed into office until recently. In this past decade we have seen the collapse of the stock market and the housing market and major industries going overseas for cheaper labor and more profit. We have seen our educational system being destroyed from within and looked on helplessly as it was taking place, and now we see what that change has brought forth. We have college graduates today who haven’t a clue as to who fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War or who fought alongside the U.S. in the Second World War.

We have witnessed elements within our own society now trying to remake history by tearing down monuments and statues of historical figures and renaming schools. We have come from an independent people to a now touchy-feely people, with safe spaces against micro-aggression, and we have seen a movement in this country that once lifted up almost every American with pride now being destroyed in the name of Black Lives Matter.

No longer is free speech tolerated in public discussion or on a college campus. It is immediately shut down by grabbing a microphone or demonstrating in college libraries. It has taken itself out into the street with the burning of police vehicles and the torching of public and private property and all in the name of the oppressed minority, be it from a racial aspect or a gender aspect. We have seen hundreds of low-skilled workers out in the street demanding that they receive a higher wage and not once thinking that the job they hold is an entry-level position and not designed to raise a family with entry-level wages.

All these events coupled with other social events have now come full circle to the eyes of a vast majority of the American people, and we are beginning to see what is really taking place in this country and it is disgusting. We have seen our so-called borders become a joke, especially our southern border, and administration upon administration and Congress upon Congress have turned a blind eye to what is happening and all in the name of their own personal gain over the wishes of the American people.

We have seen recently the dirty underbelly of the American political machine, be it Democrat or Republican, and how the American people are being manipulated out of their vote and being replaced with the vote of the power brokers of both political parties in the way of delegates and superdelegates.

We now have three major candidates in our political race for the presidency of the United States. We have a woman who has been on the political scene for almost 30 years and is now under investigation by the FBI for criminal activities. We have a 74-year-old socialist whose Pied Piper agenda promises a utopian society of “free this and free that” which the “useful idiots” (college age kids who have no idea as to what socialism really is) are buying into. And we have a businessman, who against all the odds in the political world has upset the establishment and has sent shock waves into both political parties. He is rude, crude, brash and usually talks to the public without a teleprompter and calls it like he sees it. To those in the political world he is a nightmare, for his approach to problems doesn’t fall within the political spectrum of “compromise”; it falls within the thought process called common sense.

His approach to a problem is straight-forward and he has not spared his anger and disgust towards those in power today, for their total lack of common sense in dealing with our mounting trade imbalance and deficits and our open borders.

Think wisely, America. “For those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Jim Garvey is a resident of Kalispell.