April 14, 2013;

A house full of women and their children while I try to stay focused on my doctorate.  I always wondered why there were farmers who worked their kids in the summer until they dropped and now I know.  There's an old saying "hard work never hurt anyone"  quite frankly I think young people have too much time on their hands and there's another old saying "idle hands are the devil's workshop" and that ain't no lie. 

Living in a small community with limited job availability (and I'm only talking minimum wage jobs) and a failing school district tends to manufacture teenagers and young adults with a limited scope on the possibilities out there in the big bad world.  There is no vision for a better future, there isn't enough time spent on investing in one's future or one's children's futures and that should scare the hell out of everyone.  At one point in time our small community had the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the state, we also have a thriving welfare office, and given it's our community that office is not manned with intelligent helpful people.  They snarle and berate and make the girls feel worse about themselves than they already do.  I don't really think anyone wants a life sentence of welfare or dealing with welfare people, small children, minimum wage employment and subsidized apartment living.  I don't believe most of them thought that far, but I can tell you that the school disctrict gave up on those girls by the time they reached 4th grade (and I'm being conservative). 

I find that girls, particularly young women have too much to talk about (and none of it good), even within a small family there is too much biting among the herd.  It's like Donner's pass when they had to make decisions about eating human flesh.  Now at least that flesh is dead, what I'm seeing is fangs that bury themselves in live flesh and then hang on for the kill.  Tongues of fire filled with idle talk.  But then just ask one of them to make lunch and suddenly......poof they're gone.  Wait what about the laundry, what about the yards they need cleaning and oh the windows?  Yeah, they're tired and magically they disappear into thin air and my house is as quiet as a morgue. 

Now if you're willing to lay out the food, clean everything provide the money and the entertainment, they'd sit and talk all day.  It wouldn't be productive or positive but they would talk....and talk....and talk.   Would they go to church and pray?  Nooooooo, but they'll talk.  Now I understand why my grandmother didn't have much to say.  There was too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it, she stayed focused on her mission and that didn't involve idle chit chat that stole her daylight hours.  She had things to do, yards and a garden to maintain, laundry, meals, sewing and the list went on, there was no time to just sit and run the jaw into the ground.

I never really did get into all the idle chit chat and gossip, I found it brought me down, made my mind go places it had no business going and ohhh, wait a minute, what was I supposed to be doing??? Oh my gosh what time is it???? great I blew that one.  Well, we don't get the time back we let slip through our fingers and days spent in multitudes of idle chit chat, and worthless bantering and running around will be a life of the same and one that did not produce anything good. 

We are given a life and then we are given charge over other lives when we have children, that's a lot of responsibility.  As the bible says We can choose life or we can choose death, choose life.