What The Hell Is Going On In Our Country?

Is this keeping with my Last Half Journey title?

Yes, it is.

It has to do with what I learned at the beginning of the First Half and it serves me well in the Last Half. It is my thinking of what is wrong with our country and how to fix it.

It is really quite simple.

I had no desire to kill anyone growing up or now. Okay, maybe Gary Booth and my little brother, Chuck, a couple times but I never would have acted on it.

I only had the desire to take something that wasn’t mine one time. I wanted to mail something and didn’t have the money for a stamp. I took a stamp off something my mom had gotten in the mail and glued it on my envelope. I am sure I probably tried to erase the cancellation mark on the stamp. I grew up in a small town and the post mistress called my mom. I was taken to the post office and explained that I was stealing by doing that and I could go to jail.  I remember that to this day and I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 years old. Was never even tempted to take a piece of bubble gum that didn’t belong to me after that.

I have no room in my life for lying. If you lie to me you are dead to me. Okay, maybe not dead to me but I am very slow to forgive a lie.

I am not going through each of the Ten Commandments because I would have to confess to not following all them myself. I do know what they are and do know that when I was little my mom would have beat my ass for not following them.

I knew right from wrong, black from white.

I was taught that.

There were consequences for not obeying.

It seems to me no one cares about right and wrong or black from white any longer. There is no accountability. We are so dependent on the Federal government to dictate these things and they do a piss poor job of it. Who are they to legislate every part of our daily lives? Who are we to allow it? Most of them wouldn’t know honesty, morals, ethics, etc. if it bit them on the ass.

I believe if parents taught the Ten Commandments to their children and lived it themselves our jails would be a lot emptier, we wouldn’t need more legislation, our feelings wouldn’t get hurt at every little perceived slight (PC), we would be a lot kinder, and maybe just maybe a lot happier.

It would be so easy to get everything back on track if we chose to live by these commandments. Maybe they need to be printed and hung in each classroom - no that wouldn't work because it would offend someone and besides that, it isn't the schools responsibility. Maybe the sperm and egg donors could hang them in their childrens rooms and talk about them each and every day. That way it isn't left up to the teachers and the government to do. Maybe the sperm and egg donors could be parents. Just maybe our country would eventually be better.

What do you think? Do you have a better idea?  Let me know in the comments.

O Wow! Beautiful!

Reading about Steve Jobs final words, a friend dying and another friend telling me his wife’s unresolved grief over her mother was destroying their marriage brought so many personal experience memories to the forefront of my mind.

There probably won’t be any doubt after reading this but I am Christian and believe there is an afterlife. I believe that with all my being.

Like Steve Jobs, my mom’s death was a testament to that with her final word being “beautiful”. Her death was so incredibly spiritual and beautiful that I considered it a gift from God to be present.

I likened her death to a birth - she was being born into another life.

My husbands death was just as amazing. 

Having an open mind to death and not being afraid of it helped me view it as something to embrace. It is part of life so why wouldn’t we? Don’t we celebrate when a baby is born?

Does that attitude or belief diminish your missing them? Not at all. Does it diminish the pain of their death? I think it does in a certain way. I know people who are tortured by someone’s death years after the fact. Is that because of regret perhaps? Maybe things left unsaid?  My older brother was so tortured by my younger brothers death he drank and drugged himself to a very lonely death and his life was spent in misery. Maybe those of us who make the most of our daily lives fear death the least and handle it best. We can be accepting of it as the end of a well lived earthly life.

Whether it is Steve Jobs or my mom or my husband or your grandmother, having an open mind, free of fear and being present at such a moment in someone’s life is a gift. I credit that belief in helping me grieve in a healthy manner for my loved ones. The friends so angry wife or the wife who is destroying her marriage because of her mothers’ death are sadder to me than the deaths.

I know my final thought on earth will be “O Wow, Beautiful”!

Do you have a story you can share with me? Please post a comment if you do.