Very well spoken! Kudos to your insight. I spend my day helping others, actually it is my career. Changing the life of one person multiplies exponentially and ripples through the world like a pebble throw into the ocean. I never have wished to attain value and recognition in the history books, yet I feel that my toil and trouble is much like an arrow that never quite hits its mark. I am just off center somewhat and need to redirect my aim towards giving, not taking from the world and those around me. Please grace me with more insight as this blog has a goal of connecting with others.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Life and It's Supposed Meaning; Digging Up Bones:Part Two
As I stated in Digging Up Bones: Part One, I have reconnected with some of my childhood/teenage friends. Some have become very successful, a talented singer/actress, a podcast producing California beatnik, lawyers, doctors, and State senators, just to name a few. These fortuitous individuals, at the time, seemed no different than me. Since hindsight is 20/20, I now realize they were much different. Somehow, someway, they were consciously focused on or led blindly to their destiny. They intuitively understood Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues idea that "the greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources". Looking back, I never remember seeing any opportunities, although, most assuredly they existed.
Upon pondering my compatriot's achievements, these Pink Floyd lyrics permeate my musings:“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun". My starting gun must have had a silencer, because I never heard it, or maybe I just wasn't listening. I remember, as a youth, feeling that I had time to accomplish anything. Time was irrelevant and never ending. It seems like just yesterday that my 15 year old body was atop a Honda Twinstar 250 motorcycle careening along I-40 towards Little Rock: destination, McCain Mall, a veritable plethora of perceived feminine interaction and opportunity. I was barely old enough to legally drive a motorcycle and immensely sure I was not old enough too care. I danced with the devil, laughed with the sinners and with hedonistic zest, roamed the unpredictable world of young adulthood. My journey through Wonderland would have made Jack Kerouac blush and Robert Frost step quickly to the embankment of the "road less traveled", or so I thought. How the inflated perception of yourself allows for a narcissistic impression of your conquests, when we are all really a speck in the universe and a wink in time.
Somewhere along the way, father time caught me sneaking out my bedroom window and grounded me to old age. With one leg planted in my proverbial room, balancing my escape from childhood with one leg and the other leg dangling out the window grasping for adulthood, all the while teetering over the window ledge as not to damage my manhood, I turned and exclaimed, "I was just going out for a while and I'll be back soon"! His resolve undeterred, I was forever stripped of my privilege of youth.
Don't take this blog as an admission of failure or an essay to produce pity. My guardian angel has been working overtime and I have been blessed with more riches than one microscopic man deserves. This was merely a divergence into retrospection.
Bob Seger said it perfectly, " I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then".
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Diggin Up Bones
Facebook has opened up a new world for me-the past. I have always liked this quote: What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now. ~Author Unknown. The power of technology has allowed me to re-open doors that were previously nailed shut. I kept these doors locked for fear of what I might find. There are some doors with nightmares and regret, there are doors filled with innocence, there are doors filled with love, and there are doors that need to remain closed. The decisions made in our past reflect whom we have become. I sit and wonder sometime , what it I had.... and I will never know. Should I even care? I am who I am and reliving the past will not change that. I have come in contact with friends that I have not seen or heard from in over 20 years. We have changed, or I prefer to say, we have grown. The innocent little childish connections that defined our friendships have grown into adult complexity. The time has come to set aside childish things. I now know that whoever I am, I have become this person because of your friendship, my friends, I thank you for this.
Health Care Reform: What is the problem?
As I sit listening to the rain fall delicately upon my un-mowed lawn, I struggle with the shearing off of the moral fabric of our great country. I ponder, how can a person be against universal health care? “America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.”- George W. Bush-Inaugural address, 2001. I fear that former President Bush will come to see that “our ideals” have become unbound and polarized. We, as a nation, are as divided as ever. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes." –Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), on what is needed to defeat health care reform, Aug. 31, 2009. Is this what Former President Bush meant by “bound by ideals”? I am also really confused by the pro-life groups against universal health care. Save the fetus, but to hell with the child once they are born."That's why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress, and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions." —Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a pro-lifer. Yet, "Today’s Census data show that there are 8.1 million uninsured children in America.”-Children’s Defense Fund. Am I the only person who recognizes this irony?
Does the government have the answer? They have not had an impressive record of running programs. I think of a quote by Thomas Jefferson: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
I am confused, as my good friend James M. stated about my position on health care reform. “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." —Sarah Palin, in a message posted on Facebook about Obama's health care reform plan. Doesn’t the “death panel” already exist with insurance companies deciding whether to pay or not to pay for someone's treatment, Am I the only person who has to get preauthorization for medical treatments? Sure Obama’s plan has gaps, needs work, but at least it is a start. You have to crawl before you can walk, right?
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