What’s the matter with kids today
Published 12:14 pm Tuesday, April 14, 2009
In her April 1, letter Lucy Kee, ECEAP Parent Vice Chair, Washington State Association of Head Start, summed up the solution to most problems we as a community and nation suffer. Her objective letter makes me think of how on a city/county/state nationwide level, we’re like a bad surgeon who heaps mounds of clean dressings on top of a wound while the wound festers and grows underneath.
By first turning our focus and finances toward everything it takes to raise a kid to turn out to be the productive, contributing, inspiring adult we like to dream of every child becoming, we will make a good big step for all the world to admire and want to mimic.
Instead of waging costly losing battles with drug addiction, alcohol, burglary, robbery, stabbings, shootings, murder, white and blue collar crime, we will produce a society that demonstrates real strength, power, self respect and courage.
While we invest ka-trillions in the likes of law enforcement, court systems, prisons, detention centers, rehab programs, highway improvement, construction, political campaigns, bail-outs and such, we withdraw/withhold/minimize monies from school districts, up-to-date educational systems and supplies, teacher salaries, and mental health programs.
We are a nation of paradoxes. We say we demand and want to encourage law and order, healthy food choices, high standards of morals, while violence covers our TVs, movie screens, computers, books and magazines. Our food chain becomes violated by unhealthy but supposed less costly farming practices, open and blatant use of the human body is used to sell clothing, all of this and more with not one iota of thought toward how the kids in our homes or down street or in our community will be affected.
The solution is too easy and we are too blind and too weak to seek it. Instead of drowning ourselves in battles that are rarely won, we should want to give all we’ve got to raising our kids in the way we’d like our nation to be raised. Something like that.
Kids are the light of the world. Let’s help them shine.
Natala Goodman, Bellevue
