I’ve always most appreciated the people who allow me to be me without judgement. We humans seem to do a lot of nit picking with people whose ideas and values are unlike our own. I’m not certain why we are like that because I suspect that every one of us wants to be able to determine the best way to live our lives. It’s irritating to have someone always questioning our motives or even second guessing why we do things a certain way. The fact is that we never really know all of what is happening with the people that we know. To attempt to interpret the reasons for their actions is generally impossible and mostly none of our business and yet we all too often wag our tongues. Continue reading “Setting Them Free”
We humans have done some strange things throughout history, often in the name of good. Slavery is an obvious blunder and for the life of me I will never be able to fully comprehend how anyone at anytime was able to believe that owning another human being was not wrong. Indentured servitude was bad enough but at least my ancestors who found passage to America by binding themselves to a contract for their labor knew that they would one day be free once they had worked off their debt. Slavery is just so heinous and so much of history is replete with stories of conquered groups of humans being used to build cities and fortunes. It took Moses to free the Israelites from Egypt and Abraham Lincoln to do the same for African Americans in the United States. 
There was a time when I thoroughly enjoyed perusing the the newspaper each morning. I was originally a Houston Post fan and the daily delivery that outlined local, national, and international events was my eye on the world along with a subscription to Newsweek. Alas, The Houston Post eventually closed its doors so I switched to The Houston Chronicle but I was never as fond of the columnists and editorial writers of that paper. Eventually I grew weary of seeing so many grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors inside its pages and I let my subscription lapse. When I see copies of it on the news stand today I realize that it is a shell of its former self. I fear that it is slowly dying and that worries me. A city the size of Houston should have a vibrant local newspaper and it doesn’t. Over time Newsweek became so pathetic that it went out of business. The last few copies of that once robust magazine were thin and cheap looking and the articles all had a sameness about them. It seemed as though a single journalist had penned every story, all of which had a definite liberal political bent. 
Imagine how different your life would be if the world insisted on judging you forever based on who you were as a teenager or a young adult. What would it be like if after making a mistake here or a wrong choice there you were forced to conform to the fate resulting from your immaturity? For most of us it would be rather grim indeed. Few people manage to do the right things from the time that they become adolescents. Most of us have regrets and may even be a bit embarrassed by the way we once were. Luckily we are usually given second chances, even third or more, to redirect the trajectory of our lives. We learn from our mistakes, build on our experiences and become stronger and better persons over time. Sometimes though there will be people who want to shove us into a pigeonhole and refuse to see us any other way than how we were in our youth.
