One good turn
Remember your very first day at school?--Sitting in a first grade classroom about to experience a whole new reality listening to your teacher lead you through your new day. She instructs you to take your pencil and start to learn the alpabet. You've now come face to face with your first moment of unprepardedness; you don't have a pencil! Enter Mr. Dunphy(his real name), the school custodian, who recognizes your unease and quietly offers you his pencil. Your life is saved! A five year old can breath once again.
The above actually happened on my first day at school and I will never forget what this kind man did for me. It's been 57 years, but all that time seems like just a few moments ago.
Fast forward over twenty years later to 1974 and I'm working for a convenience store chain opening a new local store. As I'm leaving the store I notice a little girl just up the sidewalk crying and holding a bottle of spilled milk. She was told by her mom to buy milk at the new store and return home, but she had acccidently stumbled and dropped the milk bottle. I told her everything would be alright as I was leading her back to the store where I replaced the spilled bottle with a new one. As I saw her walk away happily the thought of Mr. Dunphy entered my mind. What he had given to me I now passed on to this little girl; an act of kindness towards another person in distress.
This instance isn't recounted to 'toot my own horn,'but is meant to simply show that, as the old saying inplies, what goes around, comes around. If we really want to pass on a nation to our descendents that's civil, democratic and just we must learn to be more involved in creating and nurturing this civil society; government, with all its power and laws cannot, and will not, be able to do so. We MUST return the levers of power to our States and local communities. We MUST participate in forging this society between ourselves and local government. Anything less will simply make us wards of a leviathan state.
The hour is late, but let's hope not too late.
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