Month: January 2019

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Open for Business

The government is open. I suppose that’s a good thing but I don’t think it brings us any closer to solving what’s wrong with our country. I also don’t think that any one person declaring that they are going to be running for president is going to solve any of the problems we are facing. Our problems are much deeper, the chasm much wider than what any one person can bridge.

Everyone has their opinion about what’s wrong with our country, but the majority of those opinions are based upon their own self interest. Everyone feels that their view of the world, their wants, their needs are the most important. We have no empathy for our fellow man, only contempt. We don’t know how to listen, only comment and if that doesn’t work we scream obscenities until we get our way. We are all wealthy spoiled brats. Even the poor among us are spoiled brats, crying that they don’t have enough when their standard of living is greater than the majority of those in the world. Drive through one of the poorer neighborhoods in any city and you will see yards filled with the abandoned toys of both children and adults.

How did we get to this point? How did a nation founded with the idea of liberty and justice for all devolve into a society where it’s every man for himself. I think a lot of it has to do with our prosperity, our financial success. That was not always the promise offered by our shores. Once the promise was to the ‘huddled masses” yearning to be free. Now the majority of those wanting to come here are looking for financial success. Most of the immigrants pushing at the borders of our country would tell you they are looking for a better job. They are looking to get rich like everyone else in the United States. The American Dream as it is currently being exported is one where anyone and everyone can become a Kardashian with excess appetite and no social conscience. Few realize that in pursuing the dream as it stands now everyone must stop caring for anyone but themselves. They will be asked to give up their conscience and their morals in order to achieve the current version of the American dream.

Even those seeking to escape the violence in their countries and build a better life for their families will find that our murder rate is as high or higher than that in the less affluent countries they are fleeing. Here they will encounter a crime rate fueled by greed and envy, where a life is not worth a t-shirt or a pair of shoes. They may find financial success, they may share in our wealth but it’s s bargain with the devil. We have every thing we want at the cost of our soul.

In short we’re drowning in everything our money can buy. We ‘re become pathetic, obese, hoarders. There are those who realizing the predicament that most American’s find themselves in have become wealthy selling us books on how to lose weight or tidy up by getting rid of possessions. Thousands are trying to Kondo-ize their lives based on the de-cluttering principles of Marie Kondo. Thrift stores are overflowing with the refuse of our excess. Getting rid of unwanted pounds and possessions might be a good start, but we need to acknowledge that we have placed entirely too much emphasis on the pursuits of wealth and happiness at the expense of life and liberty.

And what about that liberty that our forefathers were seeking; the freedom to believe as they chose without government oppression. We are rapidly losing that final, most important freedom: the ability to live our lives without the government dictating our thoughts or becoming our moral compass.

None of our problems can be solved by a border wall, a different president or healthcare for all. We need a change at the gut and heart level. We need to stop being manipulated by those whose primary motive is financial, from social media or the press to the weather forecasters who keep us repeatedly on edge with their dire predictions. We need to tune out all of the strident and hysterical voices and focus on the world around us, those that we love, those that we don’t.

Instead of worrying about whether or not the government is open, we need to worry about whether or not we are open. We need to be open to others and open to all of the opportunities we have been afforded to live productive, fulfilled lives based solely on the freedoms promised by our forefathers.

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Snow Days

This is the prettiest winter we’ve experienced since we moved to Emporia. We closed on our house in February of 1999, so it will be twenty years next month and we have never seen the snow more beautiful. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the sun has not shone since it snowed last weekend. Grey skies make the snow seem all the whiter. The trees and bushes are still covered in snow. There is no sunshine to melt the snow and create a dirty, slushy mess. Because the weather before the snow was warm, there was no need for the snow plows to plow the streets. For the most part, it is still a pristine white world. Winter is as it should be.

Of course that’s easy to say while we’re sitting here in our warm house with all the heat and electricity that we need. The heavy snow can be quite hazardous to electrical lines, so our comfort is dependent on the sturdiness of the surrounding trees. We were fortunate here in Emporia that we only got four to five inches of snow. Those to our north, in Kansas City where they received up to 10 inches of snow, are feeling the heat or lack thereof. Ten inches of snow such as they received can easily break tree branches and create power outages.

That’s the kind of snow I used to pray for as a schoolgirl, snow that would make it impossible for school to be held. When I became old enough to drive to school I wanted it to stay away. The first time I drove in the snow was during a drivers’ ed class. I will never understand why the instructor let me drive out of the school parking lot. It was early in the semester and he hadn’t yet realized what I poor learner I would be. He gave me instructions on how to operate the manual transmission in order to navigate the slight incline out of the parking lot, but failed to tell me to turn the wheel back after completing the turn onto the street. I gunned it and careened out of the drive into a three foot deep pile of packed snow left behind by the snow plow. There we sat, completely submerged in the snow, while everyone watched from the classrooms facing the street. We had to abandon the car and call for a tow to get the car unstuck; it was rammed in so deep.

If you are familiar with Kansas City, Kansas, you know that some of the hills can be quite steep. Our house was at the bottom of a dead end street that forked off of another dead end street that led down an even steeper hill where it met the main road at an angle of less than 45 degrees if you were coming from the west. There was no way to pick up enough speed to climb the hill unless you drove past that street, turned around and approached the hill at breakneck speed from the other direction, hoping you had enough inertia to make it up the two block long hill with enough traction remaining to make the turn onto our street. It was not unusual for several of the neighbor’s cars to be parked on the main road waiting for the spring thaw so they could make it safely to their driveway.

My driving got better and so did my navigation during snow. I became quite proud that my yellow Volkswagen convertible could pass cars slip-sliding away as they tried to climb hills I conquered with ease.

We think we have difficulties now when it snows. but what we really have is a lot of inexperienced drivers. The struggles driving in the snow as I was growing up made me a better driver. When I moved to Missouri after college, I elected to take the my drivers license test on a day with ten inches of snow on the ground. Not confident in my ability to parallel park, I hoped the examiner would be more lenient because of the snow. I was right. The patrolman came back accompanied by the woman taking the test before me. Her car remained in the ditch from her effort to parallel park. He didn’t ask me to try.

Snow filled days bring back many memories: riding sleds down the hill and jumping off just before we hit the creek, making donuts in the snow at the intersection of 10th and Mechanic, getting stranded in New Mexico by a September snow storm with only sandals for shoes. Snow is one of those things that is definitely for the young. Now we complain and worry when we should be making snow angels.

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A New Year

2018 is finally over. It was not one of the better years, but it does not compare to the one a lot of us lived through 50 years ago, not for me or for most of the older generation who remember the horrific days of 1968. We each have our own memories of those times, and what was traumatic for one may not have been as difficult for another, but we were all traumatized in some way, whether we were one of the peaceful hippies, a flag burning anti-war activist or someone with a loved one in the military. We all have frightful memories of that year.

Fifty years later We can look back to that year and celebrate, if that’s what you would call it, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention, LBJ’s stunning announcement that he would not be running for another term as president, and riots that decimated our cities sending them on a downward spiral from which many are only now being able to recover.

1968 changed the landscape as we knew it. It precipitated a frantic move to the suburbs to get away from the racial tensions, prolonging the inevitable reckoning that we are witnessing today. For many of us, it also precipitated a change in our way of thinking. We began to question everything that we had previously believed in: the military establishment, institutions of higher learning, politicians and their motives, our government in general and whether or not their was even a higher moral authority. I believe that 1968 was the beginning of the “each man for himself” philosophy that characterizes so much of our society today. When everything and everyone you have ever trusted fails you, who do you have left but yourself?

After 1968 it seems like we experienced a rapid decline in the family as it had existed for generations. We were no longer content with what we had and that discontentment drove even more women into the workforce on a permanent basis. It was no longer a matter of working until one married and settled down. Women wanted a career more than they wanted a family. Maternal nurture declined.

So here we are fifty years later, beginning a new year and wondering as we did in 1969, ‘where will we go from here?’ We have choices. We can continue down the path we have pursued for the past fifty years, becoming more isolated and self centered. We can continue to see everything as ‘us vs. them’; we can continue to be suspicious of everyone and everything. We can continue to yell and scream and protest that the other side has it completely wrong. Or, we can decide to leave behind all of the negativity and selfishness of the past fifty years.

Nothing improved once the year changed to 1969. Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president and the downhill slide continued, imperceptible at first, but our lives and the ways we dealt with others were changing. It was not because of Nixon or the Republicans. It was not because of the Democrats. It wasn’t because of the draft dodgers or because of the Ivy league business school graduates flooding in to workplaces. It wasn’t because of a steady stream of immigrants from countries decimated by our intervention in their wars. None of these outside forces changed the promise that our country once held.

We are solely responsible for the change. We decided that material possessions, money, wealth, success, position, and prominence are more important than family, neighbors, relations, friends, and faith. Our reasons may differ, but we have all abandoned what is best for the whole in favor of what is best for the individual. In doing so, we have lost the most important thing, our soul. You can blame the current state of affairs on anything you want, but collectively as a nation we no longer have a soul.

It’s a new year, a new start. It’s time for each of us to take responsibility for this nation we are so blessed to be a part of; time for each of us to make it stronger in the coming year, not continue to tear it apart. It is within our power and does not require more than we are capable of: listen more than we speak, ask questions rather than shouting answers, try to understand both sides of any issue rather than ‘knowing it all’. Let’s do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let’s look through compassionate eyes rather than through those that are self-focused. Let us be the change the world needs this year!