Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The People I Love



I'm starting to suspect I'm not going to live forever.  When I was in my 20s, I was pretty sure I would.  Everybody is like that when they're young, but at some point, like everybody else, I started to wonder.  A little while back I tried to ask my cardiologist about it, but he just kept changing the subject.  I started to think maybe he knows something I don't.  I mean he went to medical school and all.  Awareness of my own mortality has changed everything.  It has made me think about who I am, what I've done with my life, why I'm here in the first place, what happens to the people I'm going to leave behind.  If the movie has to end, if it was mine to control, I know how it would be.  I'd like to go out in a hail of gunfire at the age of 112, defending myself from an outraged husband who came home unexpectedly for lunch.  Most people (including my wife) don't understand why I think that's funny.  But none of us knows when that day is, what I can do is enjoy the time I have left, and take care of the people I love.

"The people I love" is the point of this, of course.  And some of them are very young.  Like 2 years old, that kind of young.  Almost unbelievably, for the first time in this country's history, their future is threatened by what is happening around them.  They don't have any control of those forces, but we do, and how this all plays out depends on what we do about it all.  

The feeling I get when I look at it all is kind of like the feeling Humphrey Bogart must have had in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, just when he thought he had it made, he was just a couple of miles from town, he had just found some water, and he was about to get away with all the gold, he heard a voice behind him that said: "hey!  I know you…you're de guy in de hole!"

Ronald Reagan said "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."  I believe we can pull this out of the fire if we talk to each other, if we are willing to acknowledge our own personal role in how we got here, if we talk to our young people, and teach them what it means to live in a free country.  I refuse to accept the notion that we will end up having to explain to them why we were the last free Americans.

We owe them more than that.

4 comments:

  1. >>> Most people don't understand why I think that's funny.<<<

    That's because most people realize that by that age you're probably going to most resemble a science project with scrawny legs and protruding eyeballs while you believe your appearance won't change at all b'twix now and then, and that is more puzzling than actually humorous.

    Just sayin...

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    1. I found it funny...

      Then again I find fart jokes funny. Or whenever someone says "fart".

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    2. What about if someone says "Phart?"

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  2. I totally predict that springeraz will go out in a hail of gunfire at age 112, defending himself from an outraged husband. Oh wait - that was predicted in Stand on Zanzibar!!

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