We did it to ourselves....

I was born in 1968 to my parents who lived in a small suburb of Sacramento here in California. It was a really nice neighborhood with nice people. At the end of our block, literally, was the grade school I would attend through the fifth grade. That year would change our environment forever.

In my neighborhood we had the typical gang of kids that hung out together. We had all sorts of adventures and mishaps around. We thought out street was the world and we never wanted or desired to leave it. There was the trench-like causeway that would carry rainwater that crossed under our street and flowed behind several of the houses, my best friend’s included. Well, my friend and I would on a regular basis climb the fence and go “exploring” for hours in these causeways, much to the chagrin of our parents. We found all sorts of cool things in there, but I am getting off the subject here. What changed everything had to do with those causeways and what we referred to as the neighborhood dog. We didn’t know his name, and we didn’t know where he came from….we really didn’t care. What we did know is that he had stayed in pretty much everyone’s back yard for the night at one point or another and we never did figure out who’s dog he really was. He came back to our houses countless times for a free meal and some play.

It was a normal, sunny day on our street and the “gang” had been out in force playing games up and down the street. We happened to be down by the school where the causeway went under our street and saw the neighborhood dog running down the causeway. We tried to call him but he ignored us and just kept running. Just then a guy appeared around the corner of another street and came walking towards us, at least we thought, and as he approached he pulled out a small revolver. He proceeded to climb the fence to the causeway. As he was climbing we asked him if he was going to shoot the dog and he said he might. We asked him why and he didn’t answer. He dropped into the causeway and disappeared from sight around the bend that it made, going towards where the dog had gone.

Well, we all went home right then, it was dinner time anyway, and told our parents what had happened. My family moved within a couple of weeks. That was the last time I had seen the dog.

The guy with the gun, I found out years later, was “the last straw” to bread the back of a camel that was due to be put down a while earlier. Sacramento and the surrounding areas had been getting worse and worse for some time. My brother had been sent home from his school several times because of riots. This is a middle school we’re talking about, not a high school. Riots at a middle school, what a concept.

Anyway, we moved to a small town in the foothills and started what would be a great time in life for us kids. I really don’t remember much as far as how my parents enjoyed it, but I sure did! With the exception of my insane brother who hated me for reasons that to this day I don’t understand, life was pretty cool. He is my older brother and that’s a place I just don’t want to go here. Maybe some time, but not now.

My point is this, when I was a small kid growing up in a city neighborhood, I was allowed to be out for hours without my parents know where I was or what I was doing and I never died, never maimed myself for life, or even encountered anyone really bad, until the guy with the gun. I would even be out there after dark and still be safe. Kids now don’t get to have the experience anymore. People have a hard enough time trusting their neighbors, much less trusting “friends” parents that who knows what they are like or what their moral belief system is. It’s sad that it is what it is but this is the world we live in because it’s the world we have made for ourselves.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to be harsh, to say it like it is and slap some people in the face verbally, if you know what I mean. It kills me that the same people that complain about the state of things are the same people who are morally bankrupt. I don’t care what you think, believe, what your political view are, whatever, if this country and world continues to adopt a morally “interpretive” societal direction, we are headed for more decay and even greater atrocities than we have seen so far. I’m not talking about war or the battlefield, I am talking about right here, on this street, in my own town. I found out that just recently a man accosted a young woman at the ice cream parlor that’s just around the corner here in broad daylight. He raped her and was found later on, days later. This is in the same strip mall that my two daughters had walked to with their friends around the same time. That bothers me. Guess what my girls are not allowed to do anymore?

It starts in the home. I had it drilled into me as a kid, over and over again, “don’t push your beliefs and morals on your kids, they need to figure them out for themselves”….What a load of excrement!

Yes, they have figure out that there are no absolutes, therefore there are no absolute laws, there are no absolute rights, there is no absolute ownership, do what feels good, what feels good is right, what’s right for you may not be right for me and that’s okay, etc., etc. Do you not see where this goes? I mean, look around you, you are witnessing the product of my parents’ and my generational muck of not having the balls to stand up and say, right is right, wrong is wrong, if you don’t like it, tough!

You know I was watching a video online of a pastor talking to his congregation and he made a wonderfully profound statement that made me pause the video and think for quite some time about it. He said; “How one views death and eternity will determine how one lives”. Think about that. If there is no God, no heaven, no hell, then what difference does anything make. If this is all there is, there are going to be a lot of very depressed people.