Who Cares?
Deborah Venable
06/06/08
Oh
boy, life is funny, isn’t it? Almost
half the year is over, and it seems like it just got started. That’s time for you – it just never stays
put. Time is the most precious
commodity we have and most of us run through it so fast we don’t even try to
use it – really use it wisely. Human
expression has so bastardized the concept of time that we have grown whole
generations who don’t even recognize it as a commodity.
Reflect
for a moment with me on a few euphemisms involving time:
Humans
are notorious for trying to save time, borrow time, fill time, bide time, pass
time, give time, take time, mark time, spend time, share time, trade time,
waste time – I know I’ve left some out, but you get my drift.
We
can’t do any of those things to time.
All we can really do is use time.
Hence, time IS a commodity.
For
all the folks who have tried to figure out time travel, I commend you for
actually recognizing that fact. And if
you really wanted to get nit picky, I suppose you could do all those
aforementioned things to time as a commodity – if you were actually getting
something in return for it. But,
wait! You are getting something in
return – LIFE.
So
let’s swap the word time for the word life in the above examples, shall we?
By
now you may be thinking, wow, the old broad has finally gone all the way off
her rocker.
My
point in this little exercise is to point out the importance of life. My belief is that life is a gift from God,
just as our time for living it is. Of
course those who do not believe in God may not see my point, and that is a
pity.
If
time, and thus life is really a commodity, then we should be able to place some
sort of price tag on it. After all, we
are paid in monetary value for time we spend working in the economic
system. But what about all those off
hours? For that time and for any we
spend working without “pay” our payment is life without a price tag.
Here’s
one for you – “time flies when you are having fun.”
Moments
of joy may pass quickly indeed, but life has taught me that bad times can pass
just as quickly in retrospect. In the
blink of an eye events that were much anticipated or dreaded come and go and we
are left in the wake of however we handle them. We can build the best of memories or forget the worst of
pain. It all depends on how we manage
our commodity of time.
One
thing we cannot do is live in the past, but we must learn from it. Many progressive liberals and “thinkers”
believe that conservatism implores us to live in the past, thus their refusal
to embrace “old ideas” and preserve the best of what got us to the here and
now. They insist that enlightenment
must shun tradition and rewrite history along the way. At the same time their thoughts on the
“fragile” environment is anything but enlightened. Their proposals are anything but progressive. They will not learn from history, but they
would return us to a past that did not exist.
Man
has never fought as hard against personal freedom and security than the liberal
philosophy is now directing us to do.
At every turn this philosophy is seeking more and more control over
individual thought and actions. Our
time is being heavily taxed, unfairly harnessed, and continually squandered to
satisfy some new definition of progressive change. I don’t like it, but it will pass – just as all other painful
periods in life have. We will survive
not necessarily because of what we are doing now, but because of what we have
learned from the past. All it will take
is for enough of us to use our commodities wisely.
Who
cares enough to do that?