Will This Blog Put You To Sleep?

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2009/10/26/bright-sided/

I have to admit that oftentimes when someone posts a link to an article like the one I posted in this blog, I ho-hum my way through it and rarely see any relevance to my life.  But this article that my cousin posted on her Facebook page, caught my attention.  Why?  Because it is true. 

We sit around and worry our hands to death wringing them, we cry, and we groan and moan, but we cannot do anything about the problems that we have done very little to create in this world.

When I was a kid, I lost.  I lost often and crashed and burned numerous times.  Did my mom sometimes tell me I could be anything I wanted to be?  Yes, of course she did, but there were no delusions about how I might be able to achieve my goals. I was going to work hard and crash and burn a lot.  My mom was not a stay-at-home Sixties mom.  She usually was working outside our home, and she set a good example.  She kept her jobs and made herself valuable because she damned near killed herself doing that, not because anyone handed her anything on a silver platter.  Was she lucky?  Yes.  She was lucky she had the courage and the brains to realize her goals. 

I remember failing at just about everything I attempted except tennis and typing.  I went into everything knowing there was a 50/50 chance it was going to work out for me.  I had no delusions. 

When I had children of my own, I was surprised to find that nobody was allowed to fail anymore.  T-ball, which my daughter sucked at, awarded her with a beautiful trophy no different than the one given to the good kids.  My son had to count on me to help him build his soap box derby car for Cub Scouts, and you can imagine how that turned out, but he came home with a trophy, anyway. 

And while I was watching them be rewarded for failing, the guilt was piling up on me.  You might wonder why that was, and I wonder why, too.  Something had changed.  Because of that change, I am now one of those people scampering to the next job, even though I was horribly unjustly robbed of the one I had worked to keep for half my life.  I am wringing my hands and watching the world crumble while gathering crystals and mystical candles, okay, and a couple of voodoo dolls (I am really pissed about losing that job), and despairing and wondering what to do.

Someone told me today that nothing was going to change because nobody wants it.  I have to believe that there are plenty of us who want it, we just have to figure out how to make it happen and gather our resources and our pride and start getting pissed enough about being jerked around that we take back the power!  We surely have someone among us who is willing to run for President who will smack us all around and scream, “You CAN fail!”  After all, that’s how we accomplished all our goals, and dammit, we deserve to fail again!