As a kid, you form certain views on life that most often aren’t the way life really is.  You views change as you grow older and hopefully wiser  but it’s interesting to me that you can have completely independent ideas that you somehow form on your own without the benefit of your environment.

For instance, a kid grows up in an area and environment where racist views are accepted as fact, yet that kid doesn’t buy into them.  He somehow sees that these facts aren’t really facts at all.  Where does that come from?  God, maybe?

The world as I knew it as a kid wasn’t really the way it was.  In many ways it has improved and in others it’s gone downhill.  Racism isn’t as rampant as it once was which is good.  Freedom and individualism is on the decline which isn’t good.  A government which was once in the extreme of baseless accusations of communist plots is now more active in moving us toward communism than protecting us from it.

The Internet has opened up a whole new world of information to us making vast amounts of information readily accessible at the click of a button.  With this comes new ways of tracking our every move and more creative ways of both sharing information and governmental censorship.  In attempting to allow the FCC to “protect us” from those evil companies who want to prioritize or even worse, charge us for handling our data, once freedom loving Americans are trying to hand over their freedom for said protection.

American Soldiers are dying all over the world protecting our freedoms and we’re back home giving them away in return for a false sense of security.  We buy cars with tracking devices built-in to keep us safe in case we have -gasp- a flat tire!  OK so it’s mostly so that we can have that sense of security that we can be found were we to have an accident.  We are willing to allow ourselves to have every move tracked for that one moment which may never come when we need assistance and can’t get it on our own.  Risk is no longer acceptable at any level.

We want our kids to grow up to be good people, yet we don’t let them work to build their own economy.  Instead, we take the easy way out for us and for them by giving them their every whim.  This, my friends, builds a sense of entitlement that is not easily replaced by a self-sufficient, responsible attitude.  Take one look at the Britney and Lindsay’s of the world to see what spoiling a child will gain both you and them.

I could go on and on as I’m sure you could as well, but in the end it still all comes back to me, and to you, to be responsible for ourselves and to pass on our experiences as best we can to future generations before it’s too late.