Kids are desperate

I've started this post about a hundred different ways, and then promptly deleted each paragraph, because I don't quite know what to say, don't quite know where to begin, don't quite know how to verbalise these feelings ... don't even know if I should yet again enunciate syllables that have reverberated in the corridors of our nation's history for centuries. Sometimes, words just seem inadequate.

"Children are desperately vulnerable," said Glenn Tucker in his letter to the editor in The Gleaner recently. He couldn't be more right. Children are desperately vulnerable. Vulnerable not only because of their inherent innocence and naïvette about the world they live in, but also because the care and protection that these inherent weaknesses necessitate are not being and cannot be met by a society full of irresponsible, selfish, greedy, apathetic and unconcerned adults.

Why are we so unmoved by the plight of our children?? Where did our hearts go? When did the little red valves and capillaries stop performing their critical functions? When did collective responsibility become a relic of an era buried under centuries of callous, inimical inertia?

Have we forgotten that our children are the future? Maybe that statement has become so regularised that we no longer remember what it means - that our children are us - in a future light, yes, but still, they are us. Ask any mother and she will tell you that her child is a living, breathing and irreplaceably precious extension of her life ... that that little bundle of ingratitude and laughs makes her existence meaningful, worthwhile and complete.

Kids complete us. They finish the life cycles that we begin and help to fulfil our lives in ways that we never truly understand until we're over the eighty year mark and ready to consider the 'important' things in life.

And what irks me is, we've all talked. Everybody has an opinion on the issue. Everybody gets hot, sweaty and pasionately riled up about these things. And, after venting their frustrations, concerns, heartaches and heartbreaks, we shut up, put up and do nothing. We go home to our warm, comfy beds and sleep peacefully and do nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all!

I don't want to sleep anymore. I can't anyway. Not now. Not anymore. I lay awake thinking. I lay awake dreaming. I lay awake groaning in my spirt for kids I've never seen. Angst and desperation bitter my respiration as I try to wrap my brain around the situation, and find the solution. There is a solution. There has to be a solution. Or else, what are we living for??

If not us, who?? If not now, when?!! I pray God give me the strength, courage and wisdom to once and for all shut up and act - decisively, effectively - to help rid our nation of the evils we have for so long gabbed about.