© Copyright 2018 CNHI, LLC , 445 Dexter Avenue Montgomery, AL

 1968. The year I was born. The year that many news magazines have written about in great length. The year that transformed America. I watch the news everyday and read about all the cruelty, the abject poverty, the loss of life, the moral decay that is show on tv, the internet and all of its entrapments. I wonder what kind of world my kid will be alive in. Can I prepare him for it? Will I be able too? I’m going to be an old man when he is out of high school. I have to be even more diligent. Time is not a luxury that any of us have and that is even more apparent now.

I think about what my Dad thought when all the things that he saw while serving his country. The things he saw overseas. The things he experienced here at home. Watching Martin Luther King die on a balcony in Memphis. Watching Tommy Smith and John Carlos bring the plight of Black Americans to the forefront with their protest at the Mexico Olympics. Watching Bobby Kennedy die in a Los Angles hotel ballroom on the eve of his nomination for president. Women rightly thrusting themselves out of the home and into the mainstream. Every night watching the Vietnam war be broadcast on tv. Protesting in Europe. Political upheaval all over the globe. The Middle East was becoming a hot bed of violence and disarray.  The music changed. The movies changed.

The world he grew up in was changing, rapidly changing. I am pretty sure he though the same thing I am thinking of today. We have always been at the precipse of a collapse of what we have known. The world always changes. Sometime for the good, sometimes for the bad. Humanity is just that, human. We are not perfect. We are greedy. We are lustful. We are cruel. But in that, we are also able to love. To be kind. To be compassionate. That is the other thing that makes us human, Freewill.

My father did the best he could. He worked. He showed me the honesty in work. But he also gave me something better. He gave me the foundation to believe there is a God. A God that loves me, him and everyone else. He is always there. He always has been, he always will be. Your choice is to believe it or not. I can feel better about that. I can raise my child the same way and hope that he allows his heart to be shaped and molded by God into a heart that serves others. Teach him to love all people as God does. To stand up for what he believes in. To stand up for those who can’t fight. He will at some point be a father. I may be here or I may not?  I’m sure these same thoughts will swirl around in his head. I can only pray and hope that something I have taught him sticks.