CHOICES ARE HARD BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO LIVE WITH THEM

CHOICES ARE HARD BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO LIVE WITH THEM

Choices in life are hard. That's because you have to live with what you choose. This week, though, choice came easy...!

Some friends are moving from their home of 35 years to enter a senior community. Now their home is a tad gray and old, while the community is fresh and new. So, as with all choices, there's a trade off. But for me (and I suspect a few million others) there would be more loss than gain. The loss of the known, of the shared, of the maze of memories that have sustained me and the people I've loved for a lifetime.

In today's youth-minded America, this sentiment is easily judged counter-intuitive and surely counter-culture. Americans by nature and by history grab for the next opportunity. But time happens in a life, and often 'next' translates into 'no.' No to excitement and yes to comfort....no to collegiality and yes to privacy...no to the organized and yes to the happily haphazard.

I remember my parents downsizing after all the kids were gone. The morning I walked our proud but empty old bungalow for the last time, the desperate dislocation in my soul seared it for life. I never wanted to feel that feeling again. Look -- this is the spot where Dad first handed me the keys to his car. Look -- this is where I remember showing the family my graduate degree. And look -- here's where the mahogany dining room table stood joyously groaning under the weight of all those steaming holiday family dinners.

Mom and Dad are gone now, but what they experienced is not something I want to replicate. Old homes are old friends. They are time-burnished altars upon which you and your loved ones have offered up your tears, your sorrows, your joys and your togetherness. Each squeak in the floor tingles a memory...at each corner there is a moment frozen in time...with each piece of furniture there is the echo of a long ago conversation...and in each room there is a history. How do you walk away from a friend like this?

Respecting what once was in no way disrespects what is still to be. One of the dangers of youth is its propensity to dismiss the values of the elderly. Here's a respectful suggestion. You can march bravely into new sunrises while at the same time looking over the shoulder of your memory, and still not miss a beat...!

STORING THINGS CAN GET COMPLICATED

The statisticians have just presented us with the numerical magic of 2.3. In some remarkable confluence of mathematical circumstances, they report that right now there are 2.3 million Americans in prison, and there are 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space. We seem to have a troubling parallel here-- how to store our citizens and our stuff...!

Stuff, as the late George Carlin celebrated, is what we Americans do. We collect stuff day after day, until the day we realize that's exactly what it is -- a clutter of disposable dispensables. But as for our prisoners -- that's human clutter that is neither disposable nor dispensable.

Right now it costs on average $29,000 to house a single inmate for a single year.Then there are the costs of maintaining a probation system for another 5.1 millions people recently released from prison. With only 5% of the world's total population, the U.S. has a staggering 25% of the world's prison population.

Different experts will offer different reasons. Historians, sociologists, psychologists, and theologians. Then there's Senator Jim Webb of Virginia who wants a national commission to study the problem. The way he puts it: "Either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States, or we are doing something dramatically wrong."

The Senator had no comment on the parallel issue of storing stuff. This is a problem that requires no commission, just a commitment. To once and for all admit it to ourselves -- we're never ever going to use this stuff. Now if only our prison problem were as simple....