As you travel life’s highway you see lots of changes and you learn to anticipate changes on the horizon. While change spices up life and I welcome most of it, there are still those things I wish had never changed and things I wish weren’t changing. Here’s part two of my ever-growing list:

• I don’t like walking up to the Oreo shelf in the cookie aisle and having to make a decision. Why can’t we just have the original Oreo we all became addicted to as children? The one consisting of two chocolate cookies with a thin layer of white stuff between them. I don’t want double-stuffed Oreos. Oreo brownies, Oreos with peanut butter, mint flavored Oreos, chocolate covered Oreos, or any of the other marketing ploys that exist today. I just want my old Oreos that do what they always do when dunked in ice-cold milk.
• I’m always reading about big corporations selling off their established brand names. For example Proctor and Gamble recently sold their Pringles brand. That’s okay because I never think of Pringles when I drive by the P&G building in downtown Cincinnati. But I do think of Ivory Soap and maybe the US Constitution should be amended to prevent them from ever selling or stop manufacturing Ivory. After all, it does float!
• Big box stores are nice but we should have never abandoned our support of mom and pop small businesses. I drive through small towns and see empty storefronts that once housed friendly faces who had known you since day one and didn’t rely on market research and computer generated data bases to know what your needs were. There are things that hold communities together and I have to believe a bustling downtown is one of them.
• I want to know how many hamburgers McDonald’s has sold. Why did they ever stop putting those numbers on their signs out front, it was fun keeping track? I can still remember when their sign said, “Hey, we sold one!”
• I will never completely believe it was a good idea to let doctors and lawyers the freedom to advertise. Seriously, my gut tells me the skyrocketing rise in health care cost and the increased numbers of trivial class-action lawsuits can be traced back to these changes.
• Beyond anyone’s memory, the dog has been man’s best friend. A man’s best friend should not die before the man.
• In the era of phrenology we judged people by the shape of their heads. Life was simple then. First impressions are just too difficult today. You have to decide what the tattoos mean, how to interpret the kinds and locations of piercings, can a person with pink and purple streaks in their hair be trusted, or is a person who wears athletic shorts in January sane? Secondly, all this freedom of appearance has permitted the creation of a whole new sub-class of humans, the People of Wal-Mart. Maybe we should have a national dress code.
• Andy Rooney is gone and for decades I enjoyed his Sunday night essays on 60-Minutes.  But, maybe CBS should never have given Rooney his weekly spot. We have become a nation that moans, groans, bitches, obsesses, and complains over the smallest of things. Is it possible we learned to do this from watching Andy do it for so long.
• We should have never started drinking Budweiser, doing so spelled the death of local and regional breweries. Untold generations will never know the pleasure of enjoying an Iron City in Pittsburgh, a  Lone Star in Lubbock, a Lucky Lager in LA, a National in Baltimore, a Falstaff in Louisville or a Gambrinus in Columbus. You can still have a Hudepohl in Cincinnati but it will not have been brewed there or by the descendants of  the city’s German immigrants.

Time marches on, change is inevitable, and change helps make life exciting. But, there will always be an expanding list of those things that just maybe we shouldn’t have turned away from. Can we go back?