Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

We human beings are strange aren’t we? At times we can be our own worst enemies and our biggest champions. It seems to me that somewhere along the way of our evolution we find new ways to do things, invent new technologies in order to make our lives better and more efficient, yet in a way we slowly; and in some cases not so slowly, destroy ourselves and our lives a little at a time. In this fast paced society where it has become less meaningful to sit down and actually have a conversation with someone because we can fire from the hip with our comments via email and text, we are starting to loose that sense of patience with one another I believe.

You start life full of hope and expectations and start down a road. It may have been in the past that one hit some rough spots and found a way to work through them, but today it seems to me that everyone is so worried about themselves and their own instant gratification that no longer are we willing to work through issues and problems, and find it much easier just to throw our hands up and say we’ve had enough. I’m certainly as guilty of this as the next person.

We want that instant change. We want things to be all better within days if not hours. We want to skip dating and go right into relationships, we want to change things about ourselves or our lives without having to do the hard work that comes with change, and when we don’t see that change coming fast enough we simply give up. That says an awful lot about the society we live in today doesn’t it?

And if we aren’t doing the best we can to destroy our lives in great leaps and bounds, we have more than enough people out there worried about taking away liberties and trying to parent us via government.

July 1st is always an interesting day in this state. We get hit with a new set of laws, and rules handed down to us by people, who are supposed to be our friends and neighbors, yet in some way feel that they know better than you and I, how we are to live our lives. Of all the dumb things that government is now trying to help us protect ourselves against is reading emails and texts while going down the road.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there are times when I’m probably not paying as close attention to what’s going on as I drive down the road as anyone else, but at what point do we suddenly decide that this is far worse than any other thing we humans do in our vehicles as we head off to work?

Am I more distracted than anyone who has got their visor flipped down and rear view mirror kicked over so they can put eyeliner on? How about the guy rolling down the road trying to eat a taco? Or even someone on the phone while rifling through a briefcase?

Is my texting any less dangerous than someone riding a motorcycle without a helmet? I can’t take my car down the road…a metal box I am INSIDE of without putting a piece of strapping across my body to keep me in the seat, however I can hop on and engine strapped to a bar with two wheels without a helmet, or a shirt for that matter and run down the interstate at the same speed. Where is the outcry from the medical and safety folks about that?

And now we’ve got some group of do gooders who have decided that since the smoke from fireworks contains harmful chemicals in them, that we should all have to view them from two miles away and they are actually going to court to make this happen? Seriously folks! Maybe it’s high time for all of us to take a step back and worry more about our own actions and our own little part of the world and less about what everyone else around us is doing. We, you and I, may not be the smartest people on the planet, but I’m sure none of us really like being told how to do things and how to live, and perhaps we need to take time to look at the laws we have, the important ones, and worry less about finding new ways to make living and just going about our daily lives a little harder.

See you next week…remember, we’re all in this together.