What Has Happened To Us?

The NYTimes reports that half the college students who seek counseling are mentally ill. I only read the headline and snippet so don’t know that on a campus of 5,000 perhaps ten students seek counseling in a year and five are mentally ill. Or it’s 2,000 students, I don’t know except that many people who need some kind of counseling just don’t go.

It’s just that the major companies who make most of our food use nasty stuff, girls are becoming women way before they’re emotionally ready to be women and get pregnant or use drugs or both.

Shools are failing our children, kids want and get the latest gadget on the market just because they want one. Kids are up in their room on a computer on Facebook or MySpace with pedophiles posing as 13 year-old girls.

When we’re at their grandma and grandpa’s house our nieces won’t clean up their room or help in the kitchen unless told to do so, then they blast music and do a bad job hoping that the adults will clean up their mess. The resentment is palpable.

I had to make my bed the moment I vacated it. Probably before I even used the bathroom. We dried dishes every night, after we set the table. And we had a job jar (a coffee can with a hole in the top) every weekend. We didn’t lock our car or our house and were happy, I thought, until my parents divorced after 35 years of marriage.

I was too young for the sixties so long for playing Dylan and Cash on my new guitar, bought for my 50th birthday. Loved the 70’s. Hated 80’s music but did a lot of good for people in my work those days. It’s a different world now. There is no loyalty with companies today so moving is always a possibility. Five years was our longest in one town, we’re hoping for 2-3 at least here. In my parents’ generation people stayed at a job for a lifetime, but not my Dad, he was out there fighting for the next opportunity and still is, in retirement.

We’ll never get back to the old days, but drugging children with Ritalin should not be a substitute for good parenting, good schools and a medical system that makes sense. Here’s hoping for a better tomorrow, that’s my Christmas wish. Cheers, Dee