This week’s column is a bit of a rant. So sue me…

Rodney King said it best: “Can’t we all just get along?”

“We,” in this case, refers to people who fish. We enjoy a common pastime, but we spend far too much time criticizing each other.

Spend five minutes examining the posts on just about any Internet fishing forum, and chances are you’ll come across at least one flame war.

A common example: Fellow catches a nice trout on a spinner, photographs his catch and posts a photo online. Within minutes – sometimes within seconds – someone puts up a post that reads, “What?!! You used a treble hook? Don’t you know that treble hooks can cause fish mortality? Have you no decency, man? No care for the resource?!!”

And that’s an example of a tame response. The flames really get intense if someone (horrors!) uses live bait or (cardiac arrest!) keeps a bass or a trout for the dinner table.

For crying out loud, people, it’s only a pastime.

Fishing is supposed to be recreation – a way for us to leave the workaday world behind. When I grab a rod and head for the water, my goals are simple: To spend some time away from cameras and computers and telephones, to get some fresh air and maybe to catch a fish or two.

I fish with the tackle best suited to the task. For trout, that usually means a fly rod – but I’d happily grab a spinning rod and sling PowerBait if I thought that would work better. When I fish for bass, it’s almost always with spinning or bait casting gear. My preferred bait for channel catfish is chicken liver.

Crappies go bonkers for live minnows. By the way, so do trout and bass. Yes, you read right; the man who owns 14 fly rods deliberately uses minnows to catch trout or bass when the spirit moves him to do so.

If this horrifies anyone, let me offer some timeless advice from Sgt. Hulka, the drill sergeant in “Stripes”:

Lighten up, Francis.

Life’s too darned short to get bent out of shape because someone caught a fish using a method that offends your delicate sensibilities.

There was a time when stuffy British fly fishermen lived by a strict code of conduct, and looked steeply down their noses at anyone who didn’t comply with it. Trout were to be caught only on dry flies, and specifically only when those dry flies were cast upstream to visibly rising fish.

The high priest of this cult was a stuffy chap named Frederic Halford. One day, he found out that a young upstart named George Edward MacKenzie Skues had fished England’s River Itchen with a sunken nymph.

Halford confronted Skues at the local angler’s club. “Young man!” Halford exclaimed. “One simply cannot fish the Itchen with the methods you describe!”

“But I’ve done it,” Skues replied.

I’m with Skues. If a fishing method is legal, and if the person who uses the method obeys any regulations that govern the body of water being fished, far be it from us to criticize.

We anglers face ongoing challenges from those who would pollute the waters we fish, or those who seek to close off prime destinations by putting up no-trespassing signs. Only through unity can we ensure our fishing future. Yet here we sit, Balkanizing ourselves over such trivial matters as barbed versus barbless hooks.

Can’t we all just get along?

This week’s column takes a trip down memory lane:

The other day, while cruising the fishing-tackle aisles of a big-box store, I found myself yearning for simpler times.

We old guys do that. Once we pass the big five-oh, the world that once seemed to pass in slow motion now whizzes by at express-train speed. Modern sporting-goods departments (there aren’t many true sporting-goods stores anymore) offer dazzling arrays of fishing tackle hermetically sealed in blister packs and festooned with computer bar codes. There’s convenience in having such variety, but there’s confusion too. When I started going into sporting-goods stores, at age 9 or 10 or so, the choices weren’t nearly as varied.

Hooks were made by Pflueger or Eagle Claw. The Pflueger hooks came in little round tins. The ones I bought contained a modest assortment of hook shapes and sizes, all meant to hold live bait. The Eagle Claw hooks I remember came pre-snelled on heavy monofilament leaders, strung on long, slender cards and wrapped in plastic.

I mostly remember the lures.

Dardevle spoons were as eye-catching then as they are today, especially the red ones with broad white stripes and green ones with yellow frog spots. I always wanted to fish with one of those magic-looking lures, but frankly couldn’t afford one until after I got out of college. By then, other lures were more in vogue. I eventually bought a couple of Dardevles, probably for nostalgia’s sake, but to this day I’ve never taken a fish on one.

Across the aisle from the Dardevles were the spinners. No tackle box of that era was complete without a couple of Abu-Garcia Reflex spinners, with their distinctive corrugated blades; Rooster Tails, with a brightly colored hackle feathers wrapped around their treble hooks; some Mepps, with their distinctive brass blades and squirrel-tail adornments; and a few plain silver or gold Hildebrandt Colorado blades with looped clasps that trout flies could be attached to.

Sporting goods stores of that era also carried a modest assortment of Helin Flatfish lures. Flatfish were inexpensive enough even for me to afford, and I spent hours agonizing over which ones to buy. I invariably chose small silver ones, mainly because they so closely imitated the minnows that inhabited the creek behind my house. I caught a lot of bass with them.

Close to the Flatfish display, stacked neatly in boxes on a shelf tantalizingly out of reach, sat the Holy Grail of artificial lures – plugs. No one called them crankbaits back then, and only a handful of purists called them lures. If they weren’t spinners or spoons, then by golly they were plugs.

They were colorful and multi-hooked and big enough, at least in a kid’s eyes, to land a whale. Their names, and even their manufacturers’ names, spring readily to mind despite the intervening years:

Topwater Hula Poppers and Jitterbugs, both made by the Arbogast Co.; deep-diving Hellbenders made by Whopper Stopper; shiny MirrOlures made by the L&S Bait Co.; and the granddaddy of them all (translation: the one I most lusted for), the jointed, perch-patterned Pikie Minnow made by the Creek Chub Bait Co.

I never could afford to buy very much, and yet the proprietors of those long-ago stores were invariably tolerant and friendly. Perhaps they knew that if they showed a financially challenged kid some encouragement, the kid might one day become a steady customer.

They were right, but they were wrong. Sporting-goods stores of that era tended to open and close within a few years, and by the time I was able to buy, the stores of my youth had closed.

It’s a pity. Those stores were infinitely more intimate than today’s big boxes, and would be infinitely more fun to shop.