Time Goes By

My intent was to publish shorter posts daily to this site. My intent was to keep up to date with the latest in life in and around our community and to look at the world's news and how it affects our area or our lives. So much for intent. In the ensuing months life has become hectic to the point of allowing me to read the news, but not write daily. Weekly has been more the norm. Daughters, dances and dogs seem to be taking up most of my extracurricular time these days. The Prom was last week. The ballet is next week. Graduation two weeks later. And then dog training with our daughter for her service dog, a yellow Lab named Shia for the following two weeks. This will be followed with a trip to Nashville for our oldest daughter's start in college. Explaining things to myself allows me to realize where the time does go. Of course, a weekly column, another monthly column on health issues, as well as seeing patients and parental duties. As I said previously, 24 hours in a day is insufficient time.
The news lately has been a sad commentary on the lives of our children. A father murders his daughter and her best friend and Zion, Illinois mourns. This occurs just a couple of weeks after a mother slays her child and Hoffman Estates quiet is disrupted. When children are no longer safe from their own parents, we are in a world of hurt. John Kass recently wrote about how we turn to perpetrators of these crimes into victims. The children who suffer at the hands of these monsters have no say in the matter, because they are dead and cannot speak from the graves that they were forced to enter before they were old enought to understand much of life. Much of this, I believe, comes from our current disregard for life from babies in the womb to the current perception among many and perpeutated in the much of the media that children are commodities and are to be left alone, carted off and often must fend for themselves. We say that our children are our most precious resources, but too often we don't put the nurturing into them that allows them to grow and prosper in a loving, caring environment. The onus ends up being on the daycare worker, the babysitter, the grandparents, the teachers, and peers, but we as parents are the ones who have to hold up our end of the bargain. In this regard, we have a long way to go.