Past and Present

As a high school teacher in a rural area I always hear my students complaining that they have no where to go and nothing to do and that is why they get into trouble.  I listen to them talk in class every day(I think they think I am deaf).....they talk about their drinking and their wild parties.....and all the other crazy things they do.  It saddens me to hear their conversations.  I can remember once talking about when I was younger and they looked at me like I was around when fire was invented.  Believe me guys I am not that old.....that would have been MY parents!  When I was a teenager we had somewhere to go....it was called outside, church, and home.  You HAD to go home because you had chores.  Some of us mowed the grass with push mowers, some of us had to cook, had piano lessons, had to do homework before we could do anything else, some of us had to read. I remember during my time of piano lessons....hating it because my friends were all outside (some right outside my bedroom window) enjoying life.....and I was playing The Spinning Song. We had a neighborhood park a few blocks from my house and we would ride our bikes over there and play until the sun began to set.  We knew we had to be inside for supper then.  I was so very  fortunate in that my hometown had a great Parks and Rec system(it was not state of the art) filled with tennis courts, basketball courts, trails to walk...we had a beach to go to, we had swings to fly in, and Banyon trees to climb.  In my hometown there was a YMCA and a YWCA where we took dancing lessons and swimming lessons.  We had a wonderful library filled with adventures within the pages of a book cover.  My family was not rich....but I never knew it because my life was filled with things to do.  I learned from my parents that the world did not owe me a living...but I owed the world something.  It was my job to strive to make it a better place....it was my job to see that cancer would conquered at sometime....and I owed life my time and energy to make sure there would never be anymore war....no sickness.....no homelessness.....and no loneliness.  Todays kids (and some of its adults) need to develop a backbone not a wishbone.  America needs to start behaving like a responsible group of people and realize....that when they sit around waiting for somebody to do something someday.....someday has arrived...that we are that somebody.  Don't you think?