Children

Children are precious, until they go hungry.

Children are precious, until they are abused.

Children are precious, until they are homeless.

Children are precious, until they are taught to hate.

Children are precious, until they are shot to death.

Children are precious, until they are victims of war.

Children are precious, until they are abandoned.

Children are precious, until they have no access to a good education.

Children are precious, until their parents are addicts.

Children are precious.

Raising children

A Married Man’s Guide to Raising Children

1. Changing stinky diapers builds character.

2. Hugs and kisses are good for them and good for you.

3. There are times when you need to be a child, too.

4. Cut the umbilical cord, raise them to be decent, and let them go.

5. The time you give them is more important than the things you give them.

6. They are supposed to grow up to be themselves, not you.

7. They don’t realize it, but they really want discipline and limits.

8. You can prepare them for life, but you can’t protect them from life.

9. They want to know who you are as a person, not just as a father.

10.A happy childhood is the best gift you can give them.

A Man's Guide

A Man’s Guide to Married Life

1. What you signed up for is not what you imagined you signed up for.

2. Yes, you will become a pack animal.

3. You must do half the housework and all the yard work and small repairs.

4. Your sex life is your sex life and unlike that of any other couple.

5. Marital bliss is not an everyday happening.

6. Parenthood is a birth-to-death experience—your child’s birth to your death.

7. Be clear about money matters.

8. Have a workable strategy for the mother-in-law.

9. Annoying one another is a form of love.

10.Accept the responsibilities of the new man you are.

A blip

If God is anywhere, God is everywhere. Certainly God is in nature, nature driven by evolution and nature full with majesty, complexity, diversity and even horror. Yet for all the creativity of our art and science, we are destroying nature and its living species by our arrogance and greed. What was billions of years in the making is being undone in only centuries.

If an apocalypse comes, it will be of our own making and not of God’s. We won’t destroy the Earth, but will leave it to its new masters, the cockroaches. They can commiserate about the fact that humans, in the end, were just a silly and destructive blip in the history of life on Earth.

Other

Individuals who have not had any kind of meaningful contact with the “other,” can easily come to see the “other” in only stereotypical terms. And this is just a step away from the “other” becoming a source of fear and of the loss of privilege.

We spend too much time on divisive issues around race, ethnicity and class when the real focus should be on character and civil virtues. Human dichotomies such as generous/greedy, good-hearted/selfish, gentle/violent, honorable/deceitful go across all boundaries of race, ethnicity and class.

So this is where our energy should go, to building good character and rewarding it wherever we see it, beyond the oppositional forces that seem only to divide us more.