Collection of Thoughts

Catch some of these thoughts and let your mind ponder them at least a few minutes.

From physicist Stephen Hawking:

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”

Ah yes! Loud because the ideas disturb the status quo. They make us think, demand it!

Anonymous gives us:

“If you have to make a law that hurts a number of people just to prove your morals or faith, then you have no true morals or faith to prove.”

If the belief is strong and right then people will follow it voluntarily. They will mold their lives around it spontaneously. No one will have to make them do so. However, if a law is required, then something is missing. Thus religion in America is unfettered and unlegislated. Let’s keep it so!

Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders made this statement:

“We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children.”

Several decades ago I worried about kids in low income areas. They were dirty, sick, uneducated and often absorbed into a life of poverty and crime. They provided a sick underbelly to American culture, one that I was not proud to own. I thought we could do better. No! We should do better. And we pressed many resources into the fight against poverty, illness and low educational achievement. The objective was to build good lives for kids. Lowering the birth rates in poverty stricken areas was a strategy to improve quality of lives. Abortion was a necessary tactic then. It is less so today but still a tool. May women continue to have the right to control their own bodies and reproduction values without such being dictated to them.

Anonymous provides this thought:

“People give up because they tend to look at how far they still have to go instead of how far they have gotten already.”

How many of our youth are stymied by this? It is a big world out there. Can they maintain self confidence long enough to find their way to an adult life of meaning and reward? How do we help them see this? How do we build alternatives to drugs and alcohol and crime? If we ignore this call to action we waste not only their lives but the resources they could have contributed rather than consumed by our stop gap social service agencies.

Another anonymous gift:

“The past is where you learned the lesson. The future is where you apply the lesson.”

And it is so much fun to apply the lesson and see the results! It keeps our focus on the future and the present. The rear view mirror is good for reminding us of lessons learned not of the time and place where we once were comfortable in memory only!

Helen Keller made this observation:

“The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind is working people. So long as their fair demands – the ownership and control of their livelihoods – are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”

This is now a dated view. You sense that from the sentence structure and vocabulary. However, her thought is cautionary and still true. The wealthy few need not be supported at the cost to the rest of mankind. What is of value to all is what we should focus on. That is the reward we should be striving toward.

January 17, 2013