Living a long time puts you in a very interesting place. You have seen the end of the Dust Bowl and watched our parents crawling out of the Depression era. You've watched those young boys with smooth faces go off to a war they never should have been expected to go to and waited to see if they returned. And some didn't.....and for what? You've seen the girls in their zippered knee high boots and mini-skirts with their straight long hair swinging getting ready for an actual he comes and picks you up date, applying that God awful white lipstick and cat-eye jet black liner. (My uncle Roy once told me "you are a pretty little thing but right now your eyes look like two pee holes in a snowbank." Hmmmmm You've loved and listened to music referred to as Doo-Wop, you've closed your eyes and swayed to the folk tunes, you've shimmied and shook to Wipe-Out and you've even sat and watched your mother dancing in the kitchen as she listened to Stardust Melody by the great Nat King Cole on a 45 rpm record player. You lost your composure in the back seat of the car when the Beatles came on the radio.....demanding that your daddy "turn it up!"
Then you checked out for a while to raise a kid or two, you found that working brought a level of stuff to your life never before experienced. Some of us parked our kids in front of Sesame Street simply to get a kitchen floor mopped. We've married, we've divorced, we've lived single, we've made bad decisions and we've learned from them and done better. Some of us had more than a passing flirtation with substances and quickly learned that there are only bad decisions happening in that neighborhood. Some of us got better and moved to a more righteous street and sadly, some of us did not.
We've watched our contemporaries burn bright and flame out early. We cheered and watched some achieve so much success in life that it inspired and gave us hope. We've watched some struggle and we've tried to help as best we could. Sometimes the only thing we had to offer were beat up knees at the side of the bed praying for help that only God can bring.
There is little we have not seen, or heard.......or felt. And yet, we find we are constantly being discounted as out-of-touch. I am not sure how a generation that has been able to embrace smart phones from their initial experience of a long and 2 short rings on a party line phone wired to the wall....can be out of touch.
And so.....from my vast bank of almost 72 years of observing life and human nature I come to this:
School boards used to be comprised primarily of "parents"....and somewhere along the way we decided this needed to be political and we started to fill our school boards with lawyers, school administrators, teachers, etc. and very few parents. I have absolutely no problem with these people on school boards but they have to be balanced out. They come with a pre-planned agenda whereas parents come with the well being of their children in their tool box. I think we need to rethink this and make sure that SBs are heavily weighted towards concerned and active parents. Which means....people have to get involved and stop ASSUMING that other people have your childrens' best interest at heart. The question I always ask myself is this....."your child and my child are in a burning building....which one will YOU run in and save?" People we have to start standing up for and representing our own best interests, particularly in the education of our children. And, it is OUR job to teach them how to be good and worthwhile human beings. Stop allowing the world to teach your kids....you know more than you think you do.
Politics is a crap hole and why anyone wants to do it is a mystery to me. Therefore I have to assume that it is all about $$$. Therefore, we need to start looking closer at the people who represent us. If they've been in office for 4 or 5 decades and are still spouting the same tripe....THEY.NEED.TO.GO! And, I've been saying for years now that the party represented by the donkey always goes a bridge too far. When something nefarious has actually worked out...instead of being careful and stealthy the next time....they just go balls to the wall full out and usually run themselves into a water filled ditch. This is actually NOT doing their constituents any favors. Yesterday, I actually heard a Dem contributor say that McAuliff's comments about parents not deserving to have a say in what their kids were learning, made her cringe. You know why? She is a mother and no one thinks they can do better for their kids than a mother or a dad. It might do well to remember that most of these people with all these high flung ideals don't have kids in school anymore, heck they don't even have grandkids in school anymore. They are wholly out of touch with the reality of humanity and wholly engaged in the shiny prize of socially manipulating the human race. But, they are trying to swing the pendulum too far and like every other thing in motion, once a certain point has been reached it either comes untethered or it swings back in the other direction.
Ordinary, average Americans have no soapbox or platform upon which we can stand and deliver our manifesto for what we want. Only the rich and powerful and those of a celebrity status have that ability. The ability to skew truth and sway minds. For this reason, we have to use every tool at our disposal to be heard. And.....and I can't say this enough or with great enough emphasis.....WE HAVE TO STOP BEING AFRAID. America was not built by cowards who could be forced into their homes to await their doom. They went out and met their death bravely and with vision and they sure didn't do it so we could passively hand our country over with a whimper. It is time to roar, my friends. And instead of thinking people are crazy for speaking their mind.....ask yourself "what do they know that I do not?"
For my part, I have come to realize that power and money are the greatest corruptors of our nation and they can absolutely influence a person's behavior and rarely are they influenced for the better.
Start holding people accountable, don't automatically discount what people say just because it doesn't fit the narrative of the day, become active in your own life and pray that the pendulum begins to swing back to sanity. Back to a time when we were Americans.....all of us. We could disagree on whether the Cowboys were the best football team on earth or not and still sit down at the Thanksgiving table and remember that in the end we loved each other enough to allow everyone to be themselves.
Peace out!
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