Distracted

How many ways are we distracted from important business? Important issues? Important duties?

Let us see. There’s sports, fanatic sports. Something for everyone. There’s movies that ‘entertain’ or at least provoke and titillate. There’s music of all sorts, mostly popular sounds that lure libido and visual images that transfix our gaze on anything but the music. There’s dance, and I don’t mean the classical ballet! There’s literature of all sorts that grasp attention whether true or fiction. There’s drinking, drugs, eating to end all. Of course there are vacations without end with beaches that go on forever. What about golf? What about….?

You see, the list goes on. A distraction or 10 for everyone. Something is bound to please, to entice, to disrupt our attention. From what you ask? Well here are a few issues, duties and jobs that need our full effort:C

• COVID defense; wear the mask!
• Global Warming
• School referenda and bond issues
• Municipal economic development plans
• Family matters and nurturing
• Neighborhood watch and collaborative projects
• County government affairs and emerging problems
• State government tax and economic affairs
• National policies on immigration, the cornerstone of America’s character and people
• National policies on economic development and sustainability
• National policies on international affairs, world affairs
• China’s plundering of third world country economies
• China’s militarization of open seas, international seas
• Russia’s sword rattling the world over
• Poverty and domestic violence throughout Africa
• South American politics and emergent dictators
• International drug trade
• International sex trade
• World peace
• Global village issues
• Education renewal, reinvention here at home and worldwide
• International economics
• International science adoption
• More!

A long list. A lot of things needing attention. Our attention.

Yet with the Super Bowl, the next round of new automobiles on the market, the unveiling of new products from Apple and Tesla, our attention is elsewhere. We sniff out new fashions. New foods. Exotic sex. Things that make us feel alive. All the while, issues that threaten life itself beg for attention.

When. Will. We. pay. Attention? When will we get back to work? When will we decide which is most important?

When that time comes, will it be too late? Too costly to fix? Or will war and destruction already have broken out negating fresh attention, other than to bear arms and save ourselves?

I am not a Chicken Little declaiming imminent disaster. I am merely a chronicler of fact and real threats.

But then, it takes listeners and readers to receive the messages and decide to take action. Then maybe something will be done?

I don’t ask for myself. I’m nearing life’s end. But for the rest of you, the hope of continued life for yourselves and your kids, and their unborn kids, should matter. Why doesn’t it?

Ah! The big questions beckon. They always do.

February 10, 2021