We Should Care

Today, April 5, 2011, was a rough day. In the early morning hours, a storm attacked my home in Tallahassee, Florida, with great ferocity. In my own yard, three magnificent Red Oaks were laid to rest alongside the grave of my revered golden retriever, Chelsea of Lancaster Park. Chelsea was undisturbed, however, and continues her rest unabated.

The same cannot be said for those of us who still live and breathe. My heart was touched tonight as I read the comments of an aged minister in the comments section of a computer newspaper in the town where I was born and raised. The newspaper, titled the Madison Voice (and comment), which can be read at http://madisonfloridavoice.net/?p=17379&cpage=1#comment-15914, certainly tugged at my heart strings.

Our world, here and abroad, has erupted in a realization of the tightening of available resources. Abroad, the youth in other countries are turning against corruption and the defiling of sacred honor of self and others. Here at home, we are caught up in a web of turning against our old—perhaps because they offer a softer target than that faced by the younger generations in countries of the Middle East. There, in those places, the angst of what happens tomorrow is directed with great honesty against those who are stealing the future of the young.

While revolution abroad attacks the incumbent and corrupt leaderships that exist in those countries, we turn instead against our teachers, against those who care for our young, and against our elderly. It is a sad commentary and one of which no right thinking individual can be proud. While those who have robbed and pillaged for generations in foreign countries face a quandary and possibly the gallows, here at home we have turned against our strengths in what appears to be a resolve to reveal the most venial in ourselves. We refuse to live within our means. We refuse to face up to our responsibilities for our young and our elderly in order that we can reap great profits for ourselves in the moment.

Meanwhile, our brethren in foreign lands take a different stance and demand that corrupt leadership yield to those with better ideas and hope for the future. Such a picture of us in this day can only produce a picture tomorrow which will be an embarrassment to our descendants. Perhaps the words of the ancient prophets do not ring hollow near this anniversary of the surrender of the confederacy of the southern insurrection, along with anniversaries of the season that remembers the deaths of Martin King and Robert Kennedy; perhaps the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children for generations. If such is the case, could not those who forecast doom for this generation indeed have an eye and an ear to the future? A future filled with the screams of agony of those who refused to face up to those who have stolen our tomorrows and our hopes for a brighter day for us or at least our descendants!

Enough you are saying. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps it is time to take my sleeping pill and go to bed. After all, tomorrow is a work day and we must not think of why we are working or for whom. We do not have the courage to undertake the task proposed by such a question. All of which may dictate that we do not have the mentality or the will to keep any semblance of a society that exists for the betterment of all and prevention of its exploitation by social psychopaths on the right and the left of the political spectrum.

All I can say is: While you may be right, it still makes me wonder why those in the rest of the world want so much and are willing to give all for what so many here deem to be so little.