Thought For The Day
There's an interesting set of conditions at play in our world that give one pause. There are probably a number of places one could start to enumerate those conditions. If you have a set or just aren't interested, that's OK, but here are a few that might make the list. A couple of them might headline it.
Both parents in a lot of families are working. Working is neither good nor bad, but it strongly influences the amount and type of parental care that children receive. It also affects the substitution of parental care for alternate care that rather opens wide the philosophical, moral and ethnic traits of the child.
Now someone from my generation would think that churches would be a logical place to join in as a family in order to tap that resource of like minded thinking, moral grounds and boundaries to live by. Churches in many social groups represent ethnicity as well as moral and social values. But as it turns out the churches that offer traditional religious practices are being replaced by churches much larger in scale that are auditorium sized venues that in many ways depersonalize the action between church and individual. They are very active in breaking the large mass into smaller more manageable groups that extends the boundaries of the church and offer a more personal relationship within that group. Whether or not that makes the church and individual's relationship more intimate is largely conditional.
There is a lot of digital support for our youth. Video games, interactive things like X-box and Connect, Wi and so many others that stimulation of the body and brain are easily accessible if you have two parents who work so they can pay for the games and interactive excersize.
Then, of course, there are the parents who are extorted at every turn for fees for athletics, music and art if they are fortunate enough to have schools that provide for it. Then there are Charter Schools, Target Schools, Parochial Schools all who seek their pound of flesh from the exhausted, ravaged parents who are struggling to stay afloat in an economy that has done little but feed the already overgourged bankers and financiers that seem incapable of providing even a tiny bit of service to the community they siphon blood money from.
What's crazy is that I don't even have an ax to grind, I'm just commenting on what is out there. Well, I do have a lot of axes to grind but here I am just asking a question:
Aren't you tired of the lack of leadership at every single point of light that you look toward?
There's a comment section on this blog, I hope you will use it. I'd be fascinated to hear your point of view.
©Herb Ratliff, April 16, 2011, All Rights Reserved
No axe to grind, but I find I keep asking my "Why" in America do we have one in five children going to bed hungry every night, molestation of our children in churches and then the Church wondering why people don't attend Church like in the past, and, of course, government officials in all sorts of scandals over pasts decades. Where have the people gone that were role models to adults and children alike? Life seems to have gotten more complicated as we walk forward in progress, as we seem to walk backward in our quality of life. There's a need for both parents to work in order just to provide the essentials to our children, but I have to keep asking myself "Why" are be going backward and there's not enough jobs, food, and money for us in the land of the free.
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