All Things Considered

The greatest yearning of the human experience is to be happy. The first time I was in communist Russia, other than the dreariness of the country, the thing that impressed me most was the unhappiness of the people. The people, like the buildings, the streets, and even the nature that surrounded them, was dull, dingy, dreary.

Sharing the trip with me was a news commentator from Radio WRO in New York City. He said, “I never see a smile.” We also noticed that so many of the people on the trollies, on the streets, were drunk. I remember saying to him, “if I had to live in this dreadful place, alcohol would probably be my escape.”

In my lifetime, I have seen the American spirit of optimism and opportunity, turn into a morass of drug addiction. News accounts are full of such, even involving police officers.

Because I lost my eyesight in a war and have been totally blind for over 50 years, I must depend on other people to help me with many things. No one would believe how many young men and women have been employed by me, carrying along with their many other problems, the baggage of addiction. I had hired a 32 year-old young man, a father of two daughters, married to a public school teacher, to do some repair work on a rental house which I own. This very day, he told me that he had spent this weekend in the hospital as a drunk, is now beginning 45 days of rehabilitation, all at your, the taxpayer's, expense. You can consider me foolish, but I had given him money to buy material, which he evidently spent the money on alcohol. This is just one example of such problems which I have encountered year after year. The jails and hospitals are full, tax-supported facilities are filled with such human debris. As long as we have permissive parents, a permissive society, quackery in schools, masquerading churches, a politically correct society where it is improper to criticize, where the taxpayers will subsidize character flaws, things will not improve things.

Character determines destiny. The building of character starts in the home shortly after cutting the umbilical cord. Children are lovely and are to be loved, but the greatest and most important love is tough love. Yielding to a child's whims by attempting to assure a child's happiness with things just leads to the child thinking that satisfaction and happiness comes through things, when things stop satisfying, one tries to find happiness in the bottom of a liquor bottle, snorting exotic chemicals. It even becomes fashionable to dig into designer drugs, to have a police record. The time is long past when parents are shamed by a police blotter, a grandchild born to an unwed mother. I had rather to have died than to have shamed my parents by having them bail me out of a jail. God-fearing, hard-working, frugal living parents who had denied themselves in order to give their children opportunities which they had never had.

The enabler of every addiction is the hideous process of throwing money at it. We throw money at education, enabling poor performance; throw money at welfare recipients, throw money at useless business enterprises—and something which cannot be hid from the world—we throw money at our national enemies, hoping they will love us. As long as decent, hard-working, taxpaying, God-fearing Americans tolerate the throwing of money and thereby enabling addictive behavior, we will just have more of it.

Please answer this question: why would any young man or woman work or show responsible living, when, because of addictive behavior (alcohol or other drug absorption) they can lay around watching useless slop on television, live off the tax dollar, supported by ambitious people who work for a living, pay their taxes, and appreciate the opportunities provided them by this democratic republic?

Classic, time-tested behavior: studying, reading good books, taking advantage of spiritual and physical opportunities, exercise, decent sexual control, eating correctly. Few people who love their prized pets would feed them junk food, likewise parents who love their children will control their appetites, whether food or that which enters the body through the eyes or ears.

I am very familiar with one young man, a father of four small children. He was working several jobs in order to support the family, before leaving for work, he told his 9 year-old son to pull all the weeds from the shrubbery and the flowerbeds. Coming home, tired, weary from work and worries, he noticed the weeds were still in the shrubbery. Going inside the house, the son had his eyes glazed and fixed to the television set. He went over and kicked the front out of the television set, he said, “now we will see how much television you watch, because there will never be another one in my house!”

It is time for parents to put muscle behind their parenting, set examples for their children. Probably this young man working for me, who will spend 45 days in rehabilitation always observed beer in his family's refrigerator, saw his parents drinking cocktails. All things considered, most communities are fortunate that things are no worse than they are.