When the math begins to make sense in your life and the music is revealed for its genius, the road widens and home comes into view. The journey has been nebulous and yet very revealing.  I look around me and see that young and old, people are surviving on junk nutrients of information, education, and sound bytes. 

For those who have been on this earth as long as I have, you have sold out to the vending machine education.  It makes me wonder if the Friday nights at the arcade in 1982 had anything to do with it. I loved those arcades just as much as the rest of you, except I worked for every cent in my pocket, so I had more important things to do with my money. Where did you lose reason?

There was an old friend who asked me back in 1986 in South Texas, “Is it just us?” I took his remark rather tongue in cheek, but there was a base of seriousness to it that had been ringing in my ears.  Today I know what that ringing is.  When you record the sound of an explosion and then play it backward, this is what it sounds like.  Today, volume and intensity rise into shaking the very walls of everything, about to suck up that initial strike like A Day in the Life.

Today, the coming of age rises with conviction. As I walk down the center of Main Street, I am impressed, until I come to the realization that everything I see is made of cardboard propped up on wooden stakes.  The sound bytes crudely spliced together are becoming their truth. Someone needs to show them, but we are their mentors and our distraction with technology is manifest. This is where we find what we really did. Yeah, hindsight is 20 / 20. Rub it in.

Photo by Lena Polishko on Unsplash

The ways in which we let our children attain their education may seem really important, but I have learned it is exactly the opposite of that. In an education system that is broken, confused, misaligned, and unapplicable, with the exception of a couple of stellar exceptions which I am proud to call family, it is hard to understand the sum of growing up these days.

It all comes back to those words my father told to my sister so many years ago: “It’s the love.” Like the great prophet Christine McVie once said “Love Will Show Us How.” I see you, Christine.  Despite what society has tried to do to corrupt my children, when it comes to decisions that really matter, they make the right ones with great strength and conviction.

This can only mean that all of you TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram creators are not even making a dent in true influence when facing off with kids who grew up protected by love.  Yes, you may think you really are something, but when it really counts, you haven’t done anything.