On May 13th of 2018, an F1 tornado touched down 6 miles from the house where I spent thirty-four years of my life with my first wife until she died.  The corresponding 90 MPH winds took the measure of two very large trees growing on either side of my house and brought them down with a resounding thump, scaring the bejeepers out of my daughter, who currently lives in the house.  What you see in the picture above is what’s left of a tall pine tree that graced the side of our house for years. With thanks to all involved in the clean-up effort, it is now gone.

The other side of my house was not spared either. You can see what’s left of a deck I built some 20 years ago. I was pretty proud of that deck. It was nice workmanship for a rank amateur. The big locust that fell on it would give us fragrant flowers in the spring. Had these giant trees fell, one to the left and the other to the right, we would be watching the bulldozers take out what was left of the house.

Kudos to Tuscarora-Wayne Insurance Company.  They responded quickly to the damage and didn’t jerk me around trying to negotiate down the prices for the repairs. The check I deposited this afternoon was very fair. This was unlike Nationwide Insurance Company, who are a rotten bunch of scoundrels.  Here’s my story on them:

When we bought the house in 1972 we were having trouble finding an insurance company to write the policy covering the house. Our agent, Carole Bell, finally got Nationwide to agree to write the policy, but only if they came out to do a physical inspection of the property, to which we agreed. One of the things that the agent did was to go up on the roof in the first picture and walk around. He wanted to be sure that the roof, which was not pitched at a steep angle, would drain off the rain properly. Satisfied that there was enough pitch to the roof for sufficient drainage, he okayed the policy and it was written.

Several year later, I was lying in bed one night and felt the distinct sensation of water dripping on my face. Sure enough, the roof was leaking. I called Nationwide and filed a claim. After their adjuster came out and inspected the roof, they denied the claim. On top of that, they cancelled the insurance, giving me a frantic scramble to find another insurance agency to cover us before the bank repossessed the house for being uninsured. Tuscarora-Wayne finally came to our rescue.

Now remember, this is the same Nationwide that insured us when their own agent said that the roof was properly pitched and the house was insurable. To add insult to injury, I took this before the Pennsylvania Insurance Board in a lawsuit, gave the judges there these simple details, “Sirs, it was their own insurance agent who okayed the roof,” and the judges on the board ruled in favor of Nationwide. Nationwide is on your side?

I THINK NOT!!!!

I think what Nationwide did was rather typical of so many insurance companies this day and age. Insurance companies did not get their bad reputations for no reason. They earned every last rotten word we can say about them. Therefore, once again I say kudos to Tuscarora-Wayne for being a class-act. You want to know how good they are? When you call them, a real, live person answers the phone instead of some insane machine that will drive you crazy by having you go through five minutes of pushing buttons to answer prompts and then you still wind up in the wrong department.

That aside, here’s what I am writing about today. The check was made out to me and to PNC Bank, the holders of the mortgage, which is understandable since they want to protect their investment in this property. I could easily take the check and go on a drunken spree in Mexico, leaving them holding damaged goods. It took me almost an hour of filling out paperwork, answering questions, and getting forms Emails from Tuscarora-Wayne to PNC to get the polite lady on the other end of the phone to authorize the release of the money to me. This is what I told her at the end of our conversation.

“You know, I am almost 70 years old. When I was a kid, a man would seal a deal with a handshake and his word was his bond. Those were days when a man’s reputation was the most important thing he had, and when a man gave his word, you could count on it. I understand why you have to have a pile of paperwork filled out. It’s because we live in a day and age of liars, starting with all those liars in Washington DC. It’s really a shame.”

 I was a bit surprised when she enthusiastically agreed with me.

“We used to make the checks out to the insured, but we had too many people just cash the check and walk away from the house.”  

So the check is in the bank, the work will be done, and the house will be repaired. What really needs to be repaired is a country that has become so dishonest, so rotten to the core, that lying is taken as a matter of course rather than something we should get upset about. This is not the America in which I was raised. I am from a time and place where men said what they meant and honored their promises.

It is symptomatic of a greater rottenness, a pervasive deadness to morality which has infested us like a cancer. I refer you again to Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s excellent blog piece, Modern America: A Disneyland Dystopia. This IS what we have become. Rich elites can shred mountains of evidence against them, destroy computers with Emails in them, and no one so much as bats an eyelash. Planned Parenthood is caught on video aiding 13 year old girls to plan an abortion instead of turning in for arrest the 30 year old man who molested the girl. When they are caught on video offering the organs of babies for sale, the indignation is directed to the man who captured the video instead of people who are running a business with the moral decency of Auschwitz. It is as if we are walking in our sleep as the whole country we live in slowly sinks into a putrid pile of moral feces. We mow our tidy little middle-class lawns, sink into an easy chair to watch the NFL all day Sunday, and polish our new car. Meanwhile the country goes to hell as the the poor and hungry are ignored.

When will someone wake people up to the fact that the Titanic called “America” has hit an iceberg and it on its way down?