WRAPPING IT UP

                                                           

For a lot of us here today the world has become a far different place then the one we grew up in. Some call it progress and yes, in some respects it is progress but progress to where? No one wants polio and small pox around again but yet it seems we have traded these dreaded diseases for others born on the backs of the carcinogens we have poisoned the earth with. Just think half of this state has bodies of water unfit to swim in or drink. A state that once was called the land of sky blue waters. We seem to increasing love violence as seen in our sports. The harder the hit in football, the bigger the wreck in Nascar, two hockey players slugging it out at center ice until their faces are bloodied always bring the crowd to its feet. Movies and videos games where the body count is not calculable and people are ate up like those little globs on the Pac Man machine.

Gone, but not forgotten are love songs and slow dances. Families praying together and sitting around the supper table sharing their fears and successes. All of this gobbled up in a frenzy of greed and power that took a world that shared and cared to a dog eat dog world most people my age don’t like or understands. We used to have a world of compatibility and teamwork and now we have a world have competition and selfishness.

The minds of today are going to be the mentors of tomorrow whether we like it or not and that’s somewhat scary. The mentors I talk of that should be mentoring today’ youth+ are the same minds we didn’t mentor well enough or we wouldn’t be where we are now. So in fact we have no one to blame but ourselves. I always dislike when people criticize the young people of today as if we had nothing to do with it.

I’m going to close with Lyrics from a song by one of the greatest songwriters this country ever produced. I’m not going to sing them so you can relax there but the words Bob Dylan wrote some fifty years ago are still so relevant today.

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land. And don’t criticize what you don’t understand.

 Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly ageing.

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand. For the times they are a changing.”