“It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.” — Andy Rooney

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There are rats in the house. I’m old. I’ve seen ‘em before. I saw it years ago when Joe McCarthy was a rat who fooled people into believing he was a cat, because he hissed at Democrats The rats never go away. They pretend to be cats, but no matter how much they meow, they’ll always be rats. You can’t hide a squeal in a meow.

The cats in the house are there to protect us, but the rats are onto them. They know how to trick us into mistaking a rat for a cat. Take this morning’s op ed, “The era of woke government is over” (StarTribune, March 3), by US Congressman Tom Emmer, for example, who seems to assume the readers are uninformed or mis-informed, and that, even if we are well informed, we’ve given up. We don’t care anymore.

But…wait! There’s hope, says the Minnesota Congressman. “We’ve taken a stand for American’s fundamental freedoms by denouncing socialism in all its forms and defunding the Democrats’ army of 87,000 IRS agents.”

Rep. Tom Emmer, Star Tribune op. ed., Friday, March 3

If Andy’s long life hadn’t ended, he might have a few things to say about freedom and socialism. He might ask you and I whether we know that freedom without accountability is chaos and lays the groundwork for terrorism, and haven’t we learned yet that freedom and responsibility belong together, and that socialism is one way to hold the tension? Have we learned that freedom is not freedom when books are banned, buried, and burned, and when you no longer can say certain words without having your freedom curtailed? Do we still believe that this country’s independence was born of the belief that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are among the unalienable rights to honor with our lives?

Newborn kittens don’t know a rat when they see it until their mother catches one, which may be why some folks hang around for threescore years and ten (70) or fourscore years (80), like Andy and most of my classmates. Old geezers like me remember when we could see the prices at the grocery store — there was no such thing as a QR code or a cell phone to scan the code — and the only trolls were three-feet tall fairytale figures who lived in castles, prowled around in the dark, and turned into stones or exploded when exposed to sunlight. It never occurred to me to think of trolls as rats before a troll trolled my FB page and threatened my safety on my MacBook Air.

Rep. Emmer’s op ed is no feline. I think I’ll put out some cheese just before dawn and hold my freedom and socialism close. I’ll give copies of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution to my grandchildren in hopes they’ll listen and see more clearly that we are not rats or cats, but human beings — outrageous, fearful, angry, often self-righteous, and accusatory, sometimes despicable, sometimes honorable — who all get old and leave the trolls and QR codes behind in our dust.

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, Brooklyn Park, MN, March 5, 2023