The People We Love

I'm starting to suspect I'm not going to live forever.  When I was in my 20s, I was pretty sure I would.  Everybody is like that when they're young, but at some point, like everybody else, I started to wonder.  A little while back I tried to ask my cardiologist about it, but he just kept changing the subject.  I started to think maybe he knows something I don't.  I mean he went to medical school and all.  Awareness of your own mortality changes everything.  It makes you think about who you are, what you've done with your life, why you're here in the first place, what happens to the people you're going to leave behind.  If the movie has to end, if it was mine to control, I know how it would be.  I'd like to go out in a hail of gunfire at the age of 112, defending myself from an outraged husband who came home unexpectedly for lunch.  Most people (including my wife) don't understand why I think that's funny.  But none of us knows when that day is, what we can do is enjoy the time we have left, and take care of the people we love.

"The people we love" is the point of this, of course.  And some of them are very young.  Like 2 years old, that kind of young.  Almost unbelievably, for the first time in this country's history, their future is threatened by what is happening around them.  They don't have any control of those forces, but we do, and how this all plays out depends on what we do about it all.  

The feeling I get when I look at it all is kind of like the feeling Humphrey Bogart must have had in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, just when he thought he had it made, he was just a couple of miles from town, he had just found some water, and he was about to get away with all the gold, he heard a voice behind him that said: "hey!  I know you…you're de guy in de hole!"

Ronald Reagan said "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."  I refuse to accept the notion that we will end up having to explain to them how it is that we let this happen.

We owe them more than that.