Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. William James

Is the phrase, “The devil made me do it,” still used? As a mother and grandmother, I think, what would make a child or grandchild turn away from how they were brought up and do the unthinkable? A father turned his son in for the heinous murder of Charlie Kirk. Short years ago, did he watch his son finish high school and expect him to build a bright future?

We can’t keep our children safe from influences that mean to take advantage of them. Sometimes we start down paths that aren’t good, realize it, and turn our lives around. Not all parents see this manifest in their children’s lives; some see their children’s lives continue in the darkest direction they can go. Other than prayer, what can we do when we see our children going down the wrong path?

Some paths only devastate the life of the one on it, and some want to take others out with them. What is the phenomenon going on in our society? It is easy to blame guns, but what is behind picking up the gun and aiming it at someone, whether it is a school shooting, a political figure, or someone like Charlie Kirk?  

If we believe that out of bad can come good, does that give us a way forward? All things can be used for good, but how do we use them for good in our own lives? Some believe conservatism is bad, that if we want to conserve something, it means we want to take something away. What it means to me is we want to conserve and preserve for coming generations so they too have a bright and shining future. We conserve and preserve the harvest, for wintertime when we can’t pick anything from our garden to eat.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts. Winston Churchill

We plant trees for a harvest in the future. Everything about our society is not bad, but our youth are feeling their inheritance has been squandered. We lived too large, we overspent, overdeveloped, and wasted what should have been conserved for the future. What impact will AI and robotics have? Is the problem that some of our youth are giving up on life before they even begin?

How do we turn this around? How do we offer a bright future to our children and grandchildren, and if there is a bright future, how do we get them to see it? A lot of life is about perspective; my perspective on some things has changed over the years. The years between high school and building a life as an adult are fraught with pitfalls. Does it only seem worse now? How do we build our youth for the future? Has the optimism of youth become the pessimism of youth?

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future? Franklin D. Roosevelt

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did. Newt Gingrich

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