Family First

I spent a lifetime, it seems, not participating in family events and putting my immediate family first. That ended many years ago, but I still spent twenty years isolating them away from us. Not because I didn’t love them but because who I was with didn’t feel comfortable. Even after the relationship ended, I still had the opportunity to rekindle relationships and secure my kids relationships with their family. It is one of the things that I regret most. My wife loves my family so much that we bought a house right in the middle of the country that least represents her personal values in politics but represents her family values to the most. She has established friendships beyond any day-to-day friendships in Colorado. I’ve often said that places like Colorado or California, albeit beautiful country, are wrought with individualism. All I can think is that when you have such a melting pot of people come together in a general area, that it tends to lose family values that have with strengthening from regional values. The commonness that people share gets lost in values established elsewhere in this country or even in the world. You develop pocket societies strong in their beliefs and values but gain little from a community standpoint. In Texas, when you walk down the street or walk into a store you will always get a hello, a head nod, or even get stopped to chat for a bit. I remember a few years ago, Jen was walking with her daughters in California, and she kept saying hello to people and her daughters told her to stop, no one says hello to each other. It is true that people maintain this invisible bubble in these melting pot states. People are stone-faced, looking at their phones instead of looking to the faces of those around them. They avoid eye contact like their minds will melt if they look someone else in the eye. One of the reasons is that they don’t have common values but are quick to berate places like Texas solely based on political conservative values.

I’ve come to realize that Texas political values are what they are as much for protecting family and friends from changing to something unrecognizable to them. Of course, lately those values are being threatened by the so-called conservatism we see today nationally on TV. The only value system that national conservative politics are trying to protect is the values of one man, but more importantly, it is governed by the Project 2025 playbook designed to protect the billionaires of this country. There are no true conservatives in Washington DC these days and it is barely something we recognize in the state government in Texas, especially with rancidly crooked politicians like Paxton and Abott leading it down the non-value path of Trump first. It saddens me, but for now I still want to believe that the people will rise up and reject how this country has been bastardized and get back to selecting people from mainstream political ideology and see a narrowing in the difference between Republicans and Democrats to the old thin line instead of the Grand Canyon-isk gap we see today. I say this because what people are starting to feel is that families are being pulled apart, not by family values, but by political values, and that has to stop. I’m not a big fan of politics driven by some strange relationship with religion because that is another big, disenfranchised business that captures weak minds with misinformation and deception to the real history of religion. Christianity is an infant societal religion when you look at length of other religious based societies that have existed ahead and currently compared to it. We aren’t talking days or hundreds of years difference; we are talking thousands of years. I believe and consider myself a Christian, not necessarily due to the Bible and the teachings of it, but the concept that a man lived and died teaching common sense values and beliefs and that the common good of man is better than the common good of a king, tyrant, or autocrat. He was a man that spoke well enough of these things that people listened and felt the message was something that would strengthen family values and for many, a purpose to live this life on earth with the hopes that there is something better lying on the other side. I think much of this information is plausible, but when you take the underlying facts of when and where a commission of scholars finally hung the title of God’s son upon Jesus, you have to think this was done for the common good of people. A belief that you’re entrusted in a life evermore if you live a good life on earth. On the other hand, things like religion can be used as a tool to get the masses in line and to rule easier. Today, we have a president who doesn’t know which end of a book to start from, but he understood how to draw people together that felt their common values and beliefs were threatened. Of course, while he was stating this or that to amass people, he was planning nothing but how to enrich himself and his family along with his ultra-rich comrades coming along to thicken their pockets too.

My belief is that family value strength will pull us out of this dysfunctional National disgrace and back towards our value system. We need to refocus on functional government with the common good to all and not to one asshole sitting at the top position in government always saying look at me. I remind that he isn’t at the top for your family and he certainly isn’t your friend. Nor does he care for the wellbeing to the masses of this country. Maybe the rest of government will finally find what they did with their balls and put an end to the orange snow-capped dipshit that has a strangle hold on them all. I was encouraged by my cousins husband saying that we need to get back to a mainstream where government can function and differences can be worked around due to personal positions not being that far apart. He was pretty hardline on the past folks running the show and said he really wished this country would find its family values again! Problem is his family values will never resemble any of our values.