From newspaper columnists to social media influencers (gag), oodles of people, some een intelligent, have been running “best of the first quarter of the century” lists. Don’t worry, I’m not joining them. You don’t have to stop reading before it turns boring. It may turn boring, but that won t be because if a list of my top ten anythings from the last 25 years.

Frankly, I’m not so sure we’ve completed the first quarter of the century. Go back to kindergarten, earlier for the more precocious of you. When you count, do you start at zero? No, you start at one. No matter how you look at it, we may have gone through 25 years starting with a 2, but only 24 of them were in the twenty-first century. So maybe next year, after we’ve completed the quarter of the century, I might make a list or two.

One thing all these spurious lists have done is make me think what significant progress we have made – not in the last 25 years, but in the last 75. I picked 75 years because that brings us mid-century of the twentieth century. I don’t go back quite that far but I am ld enough to be an American mid-century classic, built in the 50s. Some parts still original.

I grew up during the 60s, a period of civil unrest in a town where everybody was wary of everybody. Other areas had racial issues. We were siloed off by nationalities – Italians, Greeks, Croatians, Irish, and then overlaid racial tensions. But it wasn’t so bad. Since nobody could be top dog, we learned long before the rest of the world we can probably do better by ignoring the obvious difference and concentrate on the things we have in common, like some terrific ethnic dishes. Laugh if you will, but 70 years later, Nationality Days still fill the air with the aroma of everyone’s “old country” kitchens and several interesting fusions.

By the time we got to the 90s, it looked like the rest of the county was starting to embrace the whole melting pot idea.and it was working. And then some 5 foot 9 inch 300 pound spray tanned orange manwhore came along and convinced all the backward hat wearing men and their husky, tattooed women that the world needs more hatred. Weak as they were an still are, the sniffling crowd sucked up to his man girdle and begged for more kool-aid.

But in the meantime, start making those best of lists of the twenty-first century and we can revisit them next year. Maybe we’ll all be in a better mood by then – if we haven’t all died from preventable diseases that they burned all the vaccines for.