A TIME FOR CHANGE

                                                          

On Easter Sunday I went to my sons home to see my family. It was also the day that I got to hold my newest little great grandchild Jaden for the first time. I thought back to the times when my own kids, now in their 50’s, were babies and I used to sit and rock them to sleep, my nose nestled in their silky hair. Nothing ever smelled so clean and pure as that little baby’s hair. There isn’t anything that has ever given me the pride I had right then, being a new father, but my contentment was short lived.  For I knew the babies would inevitably grow up and I worried about the trip they had yet to take in life and I knew that only for a few short years, would I have the power to protect them and influence them. It was 50 years ago and already I was troubled about the world we lived in. I found those same fears coming back to me Easter day as I held that baby boy. Want kind of a world have we made for our kids?

It should have always been our goal to make this a better world. To find cures for diseases, educate, and make those kids smarter then we would ever be and not just our kids-- but also everybody’s kids.  At the same time we needed to put aside our natural greed and differences and live in peace with our fellow mankind. For it’s only in this spirit of love and cooperation that this world will survive.

About this same time 50 years ago our nation sent astronauts to the moon and I will always remember the picture they took as they circled the moon looking back at the earth. Here in the vast emptiness and darkness of space surrounded by billions of light years of nothing but rocks and cold, was this beautiful blue planet. It was warm and viable and filled with life. To those of us who believe in creation the proof was there in the pudding. The question that begged to be asked however was, why wouldn’t we want to take care of it? That question has never been answered but I know why anyway and it all has to do with human greed.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is a great example of people who amassed a fortune and elected to take it and try to make this world a better place to live. They have shown dysfunctional greedy governments all over the world what can be accomplished if your heart is in the right place. There are others helping too but sadly far to few of them to counteract the greedy ones who care less about helping anyone but himself or herself.

So Jaden, I hope that someday when you are my age, you too will be sitting at a keyboard, typing out your thoughts with your great grandbaby in your lap. I hope and pray that at that time you will be much more optimistic then I am today. That your grandparents and mom and dad will have been part of a great transformation in this country and this world and you will no longer perceive the threats I see today to your great grandchildren and others. For lack of a better adage it has been said, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” I’m not sure how much darker it can get before we come to our senses and change. Time will tell. We have been at this stage before and were never able to learn from it. I won’t be here for the transformation and I do take some blame for the past. Hopefully your generation will do better.

THIS CIRCLE OF LIFE

It’s Easter Sunday morning and I’m up early. Too much cake and coffee last night with friends and loved ones and a fitful nights sleep. Its dark yet, the sun is still below the horizon but you can see the first vestiges of light, peeking through the trees in the east.  Yesterday the ice went off the lake and this morning as I took Molly out to do her thing, for the first time since last fall I could actually smell the lake as the waves softly lapped the shoreline. Then as if on cue, I heard the loons calling from somewhere out on the lake. Yes, their back, I’m back and spring is back. Somehow, this circle of life goes on.

Today I will travel to the cities to be with my son’s family. I look eagerly to holding my newest great grandson born just a few days ago. The oldest and the youngest member of my family, being introduced. The day will be bitter sweet for me however, because this babies other great grandfather, my daughter-in-laws dad, is in the end stage of a long fight with dementia that has robbed him of the ability to eat and drink. It may well be the last time I see him. My heart breaks for his family. It’s a ritual that plays out for to often at this stage of my life. Yet somehow, this circle of life goes on.

I wish there was a way for younger people to see and feel, what us old people feel at this stage of our lives. I know this; there are no words to adequately describe it. I can try but the thesaurus that holds those words has never been written. There is no magic elixir you can take to just numb your feelings and help you get through this kind of recurring sadness. You just have to accept and live through it as we have done so many times before. Time weighs heavily on your mind in times like this. But for every door that closes, another opens and at least for me this baby today will be in that open door. Somehow, this circle of life goes on.

Outside today that same circle of life is being renewed. This world that was black and white for months, locked up in ice and snow, is coming back to life. Soon winters picture will only be seen as a photo negative of what we have seen for the last few months and the new picture will take on the vibrant colors of summer. As if Mother Nature, sitting at her easel, with her swift broad brush, was creating another masterpiece as she has done so many times before. Soon eggshells will crack and baby birds will crawl out. Deep in dens in the forest wombs will empty out and tiny replicas of their parents will start their journey through life, insuring the renewing of the species. In the shallows the fish are spawning and the insects they and the birds need to eat are coming back to life. Somehow, this circle of life goes on.

I feel so blessed to be able to be with loved ones this Easter and to enjoy the love our risen lord came to instill in all of us. It’s only through our relationship with him that all of what I have written about today makes any sense. Earlier, I talked about those magic words I couldn’t find to describe my feelings today but one word does keep coming to mind and that is hope. Hope for a better world. Hope for a life in the hereafter and hope that somehow for all of us, this circle of life will go on.

MORE ON DRUGS

                                               

I just watched a Netflix special on Drugs in America and I have so many questions that seem to defy common sense. First a little history. The war on drugs has been going on for over thirty years and we have spent well over a trillion dollars on it and the proliferation of drugs seems to grow every day. So why aren’t we wining and what are we doing wrong? The short answer is, we need to only go back to prohibition. For those of you who don’t remember that or haven’t read about it, it was an attempt to ban alcohol in America. Long story short, we found out that the American people wanted alcohol in their lives and so they fought prohibition tooth and nail and until it was repealed. The same argument is being made for drugs.

The drugs we buy come from impoverished counties, so in order to make a living, these people are only to happy to risk their lives to supply our society, even though most of them live in fear for their lives.  And just so I’m not making you think we are alone in this, this zeal for drugs goes on in other free societies around the world too. Add to that our governments zest to make more money on taxes, to prop up our economy and you are finding more and more governments simply advocating for legal drugs as long as they can somehow tax them. Somewhere down the line after the laws are changed this will come back to haunt them, because the people who sell the same drugs that our government is advocating making legal, will not be under cut when it comes to price. Hence we will get all the problems that come with the drugs and little taxes coming in and we just made it easier for the illegal’s to operate. 

I have several friends and acquaintances that have lost children to drugs. I witnessed overdose deaths on the fire department many times. The loss of a loved one to drugs is probably only topped by suicide for the guilt and pain it leaves the surviving loved ones, and to be truthful they are closely related. It used to be you worried about your kids getting hurt or killed in car accidents but death from drugs now takes front and center in our society and that is only going to get worse because not only are there more drugs, there are newer and stronger drugs now available. Every great society that has existed since the times of the Romans collapsed because they couldn’t control their vices. When I was a kid and was doing some foolhardy stunt my father would always say, “You guys think you’re indestructible. The grave yards are full of your kind.” Well what was foolhardy then-- pales in comparison to what is foolhardy now.

We live in a new era of permissiveness. We are asking for freedom to do things today that we were not even thinking about doing twenty or thirty years ago. Keep in mind nothing has changed, except the pressure to change the laws to conform to what a segment of the population wants to call their rights and to hell with the consequences. What drugs and the results of people using drugs does to our economy is almost incalculable. The crime it spawns is one the biggest drivers of burglaries and robberies. Not to mention the killings amongst those fighting for their share of the business. Just think, 200,000 Mexican people, killed trying to get their drugs to our lucrative markets.