Well, I apologize for my vacay from the blog. I'm sure my readers missed me so very much. I have been building a fence recently. My friend couldn't get anyone to do the work for him and so I volunteered. I'm getting paid, but its been much more work that I anticipated. Hopefully, I'll be finished tomorrow.
Today, a small boy approached me. I was working, wearing my ear protection, nailing up pickettes. I found out later he is 8. He wasn't in school b/c their electricity was off and he couldn't take a bath. Well, I take that back, they had electricity in one recepticale so they were using an extension cord to do important things, like watch tv and cook with the microwave. I heard tale of 15 brothers and sisters, "b/c his daddy has a lot of girlfriends" and numerous aunts and uncles all over the place. His grandmother is certifiable. She is the one who started telling us we had the propertly line for this fence backwards and after I pulled the plat, used my 150' tape to measure the property lines and spraypainted my best estimate of where they were, she was still arguing with us, using higly persuasive arguments like, "I don't know what you are talking about but I know a stitch in time saves nine".
As you can imagine my patience for this woman was rather marginal. But, back to my social commentary. The sad part about yesterday, besides this boy not being in school, is that he is being raised by people who have no hope of becoming memebers of the "middle class". His mom works at Burger King, dad sounds pretty MIA, something is wrong with the electricity and isn't being reparied, little boy is out of school, and there are multitudes of children running around. Hardly seems like a way to get much of anywhere.
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Seriously. Isn't it sad that as affluent as our nation is that there are children who are being deprived of an education (by their own family)? As much opportunity as there is in America, we all are not truly offered the same chances at success. The little boy's education is that no one works (and if they do it's at Burger King) or attends school, so there's a good chance he'll grow up with little or no ambition, dream (beyond buying a bigger TV), or skills.
SO....the question is what are we going to do about it? I vote Ivy for Big Brother in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program:)
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