Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Marybeth Hicks :: Townhall.com Columnist
Rather than Fume, Teach Civic Virtues
by Marybeth Hicks
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Next week, the US Senate is slated to take up a long-planned and unprecedented overhaul of the American health care system. In such an effort, I’m certain these law makers will overlook a huge but hidden cost of their massive national healthcare program; that being, the indubitable spike in high blood pressure among those tax payers who read newspaper articles about healthcare reform and then pace across the kitchen, fuming. To wit: My husband.

I hope Altace is one of the drugs the government plans to hand out like candy on Halloween when it imposes its new system to assure our good health.

Of course, pacing through the room while muttering eloquent, yet undelivered remarks to Congress and the President doesn’t actually give my husband any control over the folks who plan to collect yet more tax dollars disguised as “investments,” but combined with a low-fat diet and increased aerobic exercise, it’s about all my poor breadwinner can do to keep from blowing a gasket.

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Since the government spending train to multi-generational public debt left the station, we began to realize that the future direction of our nation is something we simply can’t control. At the rate our federal government is spending and growing, the Republic that Ben Franklin dared us to maintain could be a distant memory by the time our 11-year-old is eligible to vote. Already, Franklin and the founders probably wouldn’t recognize their grand experiment anyway.

Unfortunately, unlike my husband, muttering and fuming doesn’t make me feel better. So I’m focusing on something I can control: The caliber of the citizens being raised in our household.

If you think about it, much of the power among “we the people” rests with “we the parents.” Continued...

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About The Author
Marybeth Hicks is the author of Bringing up Geeks: How to Protect Your Kid’s Childhood in a Grow-up-too-fast World (Penguin/Berkley, July 2008).
vonryansexpress
May you have time for many, many more dinners with your Mom.

We the successors.
I had dinner with my mom tonight. Just the two of us. At her table, we live moments that we dare not think may not be available to us, some day come tomorrow.

All those times, all those childhood lunches and suppers and mornings out the door with a warm something in the tum and caress to accompany me on the day. When she invites me over now, I am a legatee to all those tables set over the years with her love and sense of family togetherness.

Can we teach virtue now during a family moment together at the table? The villainy of hard edged culture and live wire competitors for the heads and hearts of our young citizens are great.

As I child I could wander a small Texas town in the dwindling light day or come in at dark from an Airman’s softball game on an Air Force base with little devilment to accompany me. When I schooled away from family in Europe as a child, I carried that America with me, ever the little American stranger in the wonderous strange land. Anchored to home, as if the tetherball pole back on the Texas schoolground was my own spine.

Sense of nation generates when the portal from childhood is not turned into a vacuum that draws the innocent into states of being and nothingness just for the sport of destroying serenity and the common American ethos.

Serial child book series such as Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the great Bobbsey Twins were already 60, 50, 40 plus years old when I stumbled on them in the 'little shelves' area of one of my childhood libraries. What a discovery. I could read, reread, all the adventures, learn about an America that didn’t exist anymore and nary could a ghoul, terminator or vile epithet be found. I was left alone to become a child while being one.

Modernity is harsh. Perhaps the dinner table is the last real place to congregate and ask the young among us, is this a good day to be an American and what did you find in the library that you want to share with us?

Pass the tofu please.
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