A Cup of Conversation – November 2017

We recently watched a Netflix production called Jerry (before) Seinfeld. The iconic comedian showed his genius once again by revisiting where it all began. Aside from initially laughing our tails off, I was reminded of a time long forgotten… but then stopped laughing. Jerry quipped about growing up in the 1960’s, how kids freely roamed the neighborhoods from dusk to dawn with little or no parental supervision. Therefore, Jerry concludes, parents never really liked their children back in the day. Laugh, laugh…chuckle, chuckle. Seinfeld made comedic hay out of the irony of then compared to now but the truth is we live in a far darker time today.

Our children are not safe. No healthy-minded parent would dream of allowing a child to aimlessly wander unsupervised urban, suburban even rural streets like we used to enjoy doing. What has changed in a generation? How is it possible 1 in 5 girls today experience sexual abuse? How is it possible sex trafficking is alive and prospering in our own backyard and up and down the I-5 corridor? Traffickers imprison lost, runaway girls aged eleven to seventeen in rape houses right here in the Medford area. The sex-slave girls are moved from city to city insuring fresh inventory for an established clientele. These depraved customers are our neighbors. This too is not a misprint. Law enforcement can’t keep up yet only narcissist pigs like Harvey abusing Hollywood starlets make it into the news cycle. I guess local sex-trafficking is not sexy enough to make it to the front pages of our awareness.

Thirty years ago, the official word out of the White House on the subject of drugs was just say “no.” Today, ask any law enforcement officer about the war on drugs and they’ll say we lost the war decades ago. According to the same local enforcement agencies, White City is the Meth Capital of the world. White City? Again, not a misprint. State legislation just made recreational marijuana use legal from seed to smoke. This isn’t the same weed we saw in the 1960’s, by the way. Those thinking this law will not negatively impact every aspect of public and private life are high on their own supply. From property values to water tables, work productivity to school performance, emotional health to escalated drug use, everything’s changing and not for the better.

Gratuitous violence is the new normal. Video games to primetime cable and network television, shocking violence and perversion for the sake of entertainment is standard fare for our youth, yet we gasp when some psychopath in Las Vegas grabs a real gun. My eleven-year-old nephew was a child prodigy at ‘Call of Duty’. Before puberty even hit, he killed tens of thousands of virtual enemies with every weapon known to human-kind. Each kill was amplified by cries of wounded agony and massive blood splatter. The carnage became a staple in his mental diet until the day I took him to the shooting range and showed him the real, destructive power of a high-power weapon. After letting him feel the brute force he’d so casually wielded in virtually realty, he trembled while carefully releasing the weapon back in my hands. “I didn’t know…” was all he could say for the rest of the day. Call of Duty took on a whole new meaning. Video games were never the same for him.

So here we are reaping a poison harvest of political and societal policy making all things evil acceptable. We do have some standards left like forbidding any mention of God in schools, courts or the publicly-funded domain. After all, some things are sacred in the religion of the state. What have we done?

The good news is healthy revolution found in the American Declaration of Independence is here. The silent, slumbering majority of good and decent people are rubbing the sleep from their eyes. It’s for every citizen to speak up, not cowing into mute fear of being labeled by a mob’s fascist bullying. Claim your inheritance as a free people and defend your neighbor’s right to respectfully speak his mind even if you despise what he’s advocating. Let the marketplace of free expression decide what is right, wrong or somewhere in-between because it will. Do not accept evil being called good nor allow good to be called evil.

Wake up, America, and smell the coffee.