Who Invited the Old People?

I’m not sure when it happened, because certainly no one cleared it with me, but my generation---my flannel wearing, grunge loving, Pearl Jam concert going, COOL generation are now…the old people?? A quick glance around Facebook, the grocery store at 11:30 PM, or a PTA meeting, and I realize the mid thirty to forty crowd are not my parent’s friends like they SHOULD be.

What the heck universe?

We are now somehow the people hauling our kids to sports in the mini vans, while defending our radio channel selections to the eye rolling passengers in the car.

On some levels, this newly revealed truth is disturbing. (Mainly because I have maintained the notion from youth that if I was cool, my parents must be lame.)  

But I am oddly at peace with it. Dare I say…I actually like it?

 I like that I’m at stage in my life where the world is bigger. It is surely a relief that life does not in fact revolve around what classes I’m in, if the cute boy I liked gave me the time of day, whether or not I can go to the football game or my social standing with 16 year olds.

Sure I pay bills now, raise kids, complain about gas prices, own life insurance and actually understand what “diversify my portfolio” means. I'm comfortable in my own skin and that is worth it's weight in gold. 

Since the world is indeed bigger than the walls of my high school or the 3-mile radius between home and my afterschool job, life is now an endless beautiful display of raw opportunities. The little things that I thought would always matter are crushed under the weight of the understanding that in fact: Nobody cares.

The things that felt big (and were big) at the time are actually small compared to that moment when your soul mate asks you to marry them. The first time your baby is laid across your chest, or grabs your finger in their small palm as tight as they can. When you are handed keys to your first home, or that first ER trip for stitches when you realize the doctor is asking you to make the decisions, and not some adult behind you.

Suddenly Kevin Costner’s “build it and they will come” is no longer just the things of movies, but an actual life plan. As big as you can dream it, you can make it happen. Adulthood has its hard realities and responsibilities, but oh how I’m content with the trade off of power naps and pants with elastic in them.

So. High school graduates of the 90’s, look at the world around us. We are the big people now, and we are the big people of a world that is largely different than that of our parents. We cannot be content in the thick of thin things. We can’t hold on to dated ridiculous notions that we care what people think. We have children and homes and jobs. Our kids go to schools that we fund with our tax dollars.  Our take home pay is what feeds our families and fuels our daily lives. America has been changing and it is our generation that must care and want to do something about it. We can’t sit around like the perpetual teenager, waiting for someone older and more responsible to take care of things or clean up the messes. 

We’re it! We are the older responsible people now and we have to rise to it.

Please stop with the:

I don’t want to offend anyone…

I don’t want to annoy people with my political posts…

No one wants to hear what I think…

What I do or say doesn’t matter…

I don’t think that really concerns me..

Who on earth cares what people think? Didn’t we pack that way of thinking up with our yearbooks and Nirvana CD’s?

What about the issues facing our nation today? What about the ever-increasing erosion of our Constitution? What about the subtle and not so subtle attacks tearing at the fabric of families? What about those in power who are supposed to work for us, hiding information and working their own agenda? And to what end? What about the cost of gas right now? What about our relations with other nations, and the upheaval that is happening all around us?

You mean to tell me we care about me “checking in” at a fun trendy restaurant, but don’t bog you down with the future of the nation we live in??
US consulates are burning all around the country, but I won’t annoy you with that. Let me tell you what my latest score in Bejeweled was.

We are allowed to care about the big things. We SHOULD care about the big things. We should TALK about the big things.

I enjoy a good day about the small things as much as the next person. Life is sweet that way. But our life needs to be a full and rich tapestry of all those things that touch us and the lives of our loved ones. We need to embrace our stage in life and fight for the things that truly matter. We don’t have to always agree, we don’t even have to take life too seriously, we just have to always, always care.

22 Days

When I was around twelve, I had a teacher who came to class with a plate full of chocolate chip cookies. Smart teachers know, no matter how good a lesson may be, we always hear better with treats.

He passed the plate around saying “Dig in!” and you don’t have to tell a bunch of kids twice. With cookies halfway to our mouths he interjected, “You should know, that I have left one ingredient out.”

Huh?

“Yes, just one of the ingredients was skipped, and I’m wondering if you can tell me which one it is.”

Should have known it was too good to be true. Cookies in the middle of the day? Just for the heck of it?—we were going to be tricked into learning, I could feel it.

After a bite or two the results were in:

Not good!

Gross!

Is this a joke?
I don’t like it!

Not cool…

The teacher then asked us what ingredient we thought he had skipped.

Hello?! The sugar! They taste awful!

The general consensus around the room was that a major key ingredient had been left out. How else could one explain the level of distaste?

The answer? Salt.

One tiny teaspoon of salt was the only missing ingredient. An ingredient one would not immediately associate with the sweetness of a cookie. There’s so little salt required compared to the amounts of other ingredients.  Surely their failure or success would be more likely contributed to the larger quantities of butter, sugar, flour, or chocolate chips.

The lesson struck me then, (Especially since he made things right, with backup cookies with all their rightful ingredients.) and has stayed with me even now.  

In the collective story of our lives, we may see ourselves as that teaspoon of salt. It’s easy to think that the things we do don’t always matter and that if we didn’t do them, no one would notice.

I’m just a teaspoon of salt in the cookie dough of life.

Yeah, you like that? That just came to me. Remember it, cuz we’ll come back to it.

22 days until the most important election of our lifetime.

I do not err on the side of the mellow dramatic. Our world as we know it hangs on a dangerous precipice. The current powers that be ever so slowly and methodically, have led us down unknown paths. The stage has been being set these last four years for a different America to emerge:

-We have stopped harvesting natural resources from our own land.

-The national debt is 16 trillion dollars.

-We are now printing money, with nothing to back it up.

-Unemployment has been at an all time record high.

-We were told the deficit would be cut in half in two years. 3 and a half years and the debt is more than all other presidents, combined.

-Foreign relations have been weakened. Our allies don’t trust us, and our enemies see our new vulnerability.

-The president went 7 months without meeting with his Job Council.

-The current administration is involved in one of the most blatant and sickening cover ups we have ever witnessed.

-4 Americans were murdered. One of which was a U.S. ambassador which hasn’t happened since 1979.
-After this terrorist attack, the president boarded a plane to a fundraiser, and then the WH went silent for 15 days with no press conference.

-Our credit rating as a nation which some said would never be lowered, has been lowered twice in 3 and a half years. Not once. But twice.

-“Obamacare” which initially was promised would not raise taxes on the middle class by “a dime” has now been discovered that it will not only raise taxes significantly, but will cause such a strain on businesses, that many are taking precautions now, and taking full time employees down to part time to prepare for the extra cost.

-Gas prices are at an all time high.

And before I hear the excuse one more time that the President, “Inherited such a mess, what do we expect?”

Obama told the American people he could turn things around in two years, and had a super majority for those 2 years. Instead he bailed out GM, added trillions to the debt and is calling his economic recovery plan historic.

In many ways the economic situation in the early 1980s was as dark, if not darker, as the one that Obama faced when he took office.

Under Reagan, the economy grew by an average of 5.6 percent for the first three years from the bottom of the recession, unemployment dropped by 3.8 points, and inflation was cut by two-thirds

Every president inherits or comes into obstacles. It’s what they sign on for when they apply for the job. Do you think Bush anticipated four airplanes being flown into buildings in the largest scale terrorist attack on the U.S. to date?

Bottom line: The blame game is lame. Quit it already, you’re embarrassing yourself.

Our current President has his own agenda for America that much is clear. And until he secures these last four years, he has resorted to diversion; finger pointing and just flat out lies.

The sci fi geek in me keeps thinking of a scene from Batman when Alfred tells Bruce Wayne, “Some men can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Just food for thought.

But it has been amazing to see so many of us in the last few weeks, start to walk out of the haze of deceit and recognize what is truly happening. There has been a passion for our country catching like wildfire around the nation. We are waking up and noticing that our inheritance is quietly being stolen from us.

And to add insult to injury, the newest strategy is to go forward like the American people are stupid:

Let’s just call the other guys liars.

Let’s just tell them it was a YouTube video.

Let’s tell them the unemployment numbers are going down.

Let’s tell them we saved the auto industry even though we ultimately rewarded them for bad business practices, with consequences we have yet to fully see. It will hopefully cloud the fact that we sank 90 billion into green energy companies that are now mysteriously bankrupt.

Let’s keep telling them we fight for the middle class while we tax them for Obamacare.

Or my personal favorite: Let’s get America riled up about Mitt Romney wanting to cut funding to Sesame Street.

Reminds me of the SNL skit where the actors are being sold a book with a concept they can’t quite understand: Only Buy Things We Can Afford.

And just in case you’re curious, this year the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will receive 444 million dollars in tax payer funding. Yeah. You read that right. If we want it, let’s pony up and donate more to keep it. Crazy concept, right? But I digress.

22 days and the power will shift to us. No more commercials, no more rallies, no more news speculations, no more polls, no more debates. 22 days and we the people will decide what kind of America we want to live in and whom we think shares our vision.

Maybe the goal of saving our nation seems a task much bigger than us. Perhaps we stay home on Election Day because we doubt our own individual power and influence. Perhaps, if I may, you feel you are but a teaspoon of salt in the cookie dough of li---okay, okay, it was clever once. You get it.

But the truth is we need you. We need each other.

Together we are stronger than the powers that wish to destroy us.

Let’s come together in 22 days in the collective effort to take our country back. You think you don’t matter? You think you can just sit this vote out and no one will be the wiser?

Lest I remind you that the 2000 election came down to a little over 500 votes?

United we stand, divided we fall. Don’t doubt how much each of you is needed on Nov. 6^th.  Our right to vote is the great equalizer, as everyone’s counts the same.

This election, vote for your America.

~Melanie

I'm slow on the uptake, but I'm learning.

Let me see if I have this straight. Romney says that there are a certain percentage of people who don’t pay federal taxes and so he feels his campaign of lowering federal taxes is not going to appeal to them.  

The percentage of Americans who will never make an effort to get off government assistance probably will also never see the appeal for lower taxes. 

Therefore:  Romney hates lower income people and the needy. In fact he wants them to die. 

I enjoy the hypocrisy (and by enjoy I do mean disdain) in our country, that hard truths can be said and accepted about "the wealthy" in our country without a bat of the eye, but state any hard truths about the needy or poor and suddenly you are a calloused hater of people and would rather spit on them then look at them twice.

Let’s see if this logic can be applied to my every day life. 

What if I wasn’t invited to a meeting at my child’s school that dealt with kids who needed transportation to an after school day care program? My kids do not attend an after school program. A conversation with the principal ensues. 

“Ma’am, the meeting is addressing the needs and concerns of those children attending an after school program. Your child does not attend such a program, so you were not included in the email.”

“I know! And I find it ridiculous that you seem to want to alienate stay at home moms. If there is a meeting, I want to be involved.”

“But it doesn’t concern or affect you right now so I just thought—“

“Don’t tell me what does or does not concern me! You are purposely signaling me out as someone who doesn’t need after school transport.”

“But you don’t…”

“Unbelievable.  How do you sleep at night? You hate carpool parents.”

Am I playing the game right? 

If we are going to start judging politicians on who they like and don’t like with this new set of criteria, I wonder….

From the campaign trail to now Obama has repeatedly out and out lied about his health care program, that he would cut taxes and not raise them, single handedly increased the national debt higher than all other presidents combined, weakened relations internationally with our allies, nixed the Alaskan pipe line project that would have created hundreds if not thousands of American jobs, and has done little to nothing that he promised would be done by now.

I wonder. Who do you think this means HE hates?