Rusty Strait
“Not my problem,” has become one of the more common expressions from today’s generation, a culture in which the cell phone is often more important than what’s for dinner or breakfast or lunch.
Sadly, instead of learning from their elders, their elders pick up the worst habits of their offspring to “be young.” Folks, it doesn’t work that way and the deeper we sink into this attitude, the closer we come to losing everything we have as a country, including democracy itself.
I spoke with someone earlier today who was trying to get out of jury duty. She has a legitimate reason, but how often do we hear, “I just don’t have time to go sit in a courtroom for days or weeks. Jury duty is precisely that, a duty. We are obligated as citizens of this great country to contribute. Serving on a jury is not only an obligation but the way we ourselves are judged by our fellow citizens, instead of some dictatorial state court.
Remember the old adage, “Use it or lose it?” The tools of democracy rust when they are not put into action. Democracy is a well-oiled institution as long as we keep it oiled. However, when let go to rust, it reacts like anything else left to misuse and abuse and it dies of neglect.
To say that Russia’s incursion into Ukraine is a European problem, not ours, is not to have the faintest knowledge of history. Germany was a European problem, not an American one until Japan knocked us on our sleepy behinds and then Germany became our problem. It became a world problem. The Western world leaders were asleep at the wheel, and I’m afraid we are already feeling a bit drowsy. It is time to wake up to reality. “Not my problem,’ now belongs to antiquity, along with steam engines and high buttoned shoes.
NATO and the European Union just happen to be the buffer zone protecting our peace and preventing a possible knuckler war. Families around the world do not want that kind of war. No country can afford one. But, if the general population in the United States doesn’t wake up to the real world, we just might find thousands of American s displaced and traveling in whatever direction they can to escape the horror of a scorched earth.
I’m no seer, for sure, but I’m not in self-denial as to the possibilities of a nuclear age that is just aching to destroy everything on this wonderful planet we have inherited.
Wake up America – catch up to history before it is too late.
Raymond Strait – Hemet
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