When i Grow up.

I have found myself lost in thought time and time again these last few days pondering a single question ...”What do you want to do?” We ask children all the time, “And what do you want to do when you grow up?” So here I am, all grown up, and I look around and I wonder to myself, how did I get here?

I’m not saying that I am unhappy with every facet of my life, not by a long shot, I have more to be thankful for than most. I would even put myself in league with the blessed ... and yet, and yet I am not doing what I want to be doing. Are you? I call out to all you prisoners of the cubicle and ask you, what happed to the plans to be a doctor, lawyer, soldier, policeman, fire fighter, race car driver, actor, model? How did it all go wrong for us all? I work in a place where I watch the homeless, the forgotten, the discarded of our society shuffle past the windows in an endless stream of humanity ... what happened to them? They had dreams once too and I can guarantee that no youngster’s dream is to be dirty, sun burned and hungry walking down Florida Ave just south of Busch Blvd.

So I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know what I want more of ... freedom, time with my daughters, money ... mostly I want to work for something meaningful, something other then profit. I feel like I’ve sold out most of the time, like I’ve sold out and the price was far too cheap.

I have been an opinionated loud mouth all my life, I spent more time in trouble for voicing my opinion than I did out of it, and now I hold my tongue to hold my job ... I have mouths to feed before you judge me too harshly. Mouths to feed and school to pay for and shoes and clothes and dentist appointments and minivan payments to make.

How many of us give up our ambitions to change the world to provide for our children when in reality they would be so much better off to be poor and to have a parent fighting for a better world. My children will not be proud of how many tires I sell tomorrow, but they might grow up to believe that anything is possible like I tell them if they saw me doing it. When I start thinking of turning the world on its ear one of the little cherubs comes to me with a smile and a twinkle in their eye and announces that they want to go to dance class, and we buy the dress and the tights and the shoes and the little dear looks so cute with her hair in a bun .... what’s a little more overtime to give the angels their dreams? Less time to think, less time to see them, less time to do anything ... working to get right where we started.

What's the point?

I started the blog because my lovely wife got interested in blogging and I thought I would find out how hard it was to start one and then I starting posting because I thought it wold be fun and then I started doing actual research because something inside me told me that if I was going to spout my opinions I should be able to back it up ... and then it all went wrong.

What had once be cathartic was giving me heart burn. Finding out that the US was going to invade Yemen was stressful, watching the media help by making Yemen out to be evil gave me high blood pressure ... and then when I realized that noone really cared, I had a heart attack. I wrote about and tell people about Bechtel’s involvement in war in central Africa and noone cares. So now I have to ask, why?
What is it about our collective psyche that allows us to worry about sports teams and gas prices and gay marriage and the “immigrant problem” and simultaneously allows us to shrug off the deaths of innocents? Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan ... we deliver death all over the world.
Muslims want to build a mosque at “ground zero” and we are outraged. I don’t really care, but one of the reasons given for the Imam behind the project being a “radical islamist” is because he once suggested that the United States shared some of the blame for 9-11. I’m sorry but if you come to my house and kill my wife and then my kids grow up and decide to kill your kids to avenge the death of their mother you share some of the blame! Do we really think that the orphans we leave behind are going to love the west?
I don’t know. I wish that you cared about war crimes and death, I wish that you could see that your government has used your patriotism and the blood of your children to “open markets” for profit expansion ... I wish you didn’t believe it made any difference who the president was ... I wish you saw that the entire system was broken and desperately needed to be torn down and rebuilt rather than clinging to history and the sacredness of Americanism. I wish you cared that the “news media” kept you in the dark on purpose to pacify you ... I don’t know if there’s any point in writing, delivering a message that you neither want or intend to allow to change your heart or priorities.