Rabbit Hole

There is so much, so so much in the news.  ISIS, Fuerguson, Ebola, Earthquakes, Robin Williams.  So very much to discuss or blog about that I haven’t, can’t.  My emotions are high and my ability to articulate myself about the world issues turns into a rabbit hole and throwing my arms in the air and makes me wonder, is this how the apathy starts?   By having so much to get enraged and fight for or against that shutting down to some of it because it is overwhelming turns into shutting down to more of it until you not only stopped watching the news ages ago because of the sensationalism you now also start to avoid reading it.  The further behind I get in the events the easier it is to ignore them altogether.

The world probably isn’t any crazier than usual it just feels like it.  The woman who was arrested, in Florida I think, for letting her ten year old go to the park by himself.  The park which is only a few blocks from his house and probably closer than his walk to school.  She was arrested for child endangerment.  I just have to say my mother would have been arrested every day of our childhoods if that was the case.  You can’t tell me there are more pedophiles now than when I was a kid.  They are probably more well-known now with all the media coverage.   I’m not even sure I can articulate my feelings about this without going off on a rant, because seriously the neighborhood park.

I think every other parent in my current neighborhood would be arrested if this were Florida.  Because the kids scoot by on bikes and skateboards and clearly without any supervision at all, all ages, all hours of the day.

Della and I used to walk to both Broadway park and the school playground (which was actually further) when we were kids….all. of. the. time.   Of course there was Heidi Peterson who went missing and never found and we had just been playing with her earlier in the month.  Of course there was the guy jacking off in the shrubbery on the school grounds watching all the kids playing.   I am sure that the shocked faces of me and a bunch of others that day probably gave him a thrill.
These were the days that the street lights coming on where the signal to climb out of the tree or leave our hide and go seek game and head home.  If we weren’t there soon enough the “Whistle” came that could stop a four-square game mid bounce.

The Robin Williams rabbit hole is even bigger.  Huge.  There was a time I was right there, nothing else mattered but turning off the track in my head.  Brian helped, moving in, staying with me, keeping a watch.  Trudging through my childhood demons from the aforementioned pedophile who was not at the park by the way but in my own family.  And the movie Dead Poets Society……time after time I went to that movie.  Yes there was a suicide in that movie, but it was the Carpe Diem message that I was grasping.  Holding onto, re-programming my brain to seize the day and live each and every one of them.  After a week full of “O Captain My Captain” tweets and every other news article be of Robin and all I can think is Carpe Diem why, why couldn’t you Carpe Diem!! (Perhaps thats what you think you did)