Scourges of humanity

Disease and famine are scourges of humanity.

Now many scourges are caused by mother nature, but we humans have done our bit, too. Much famine I read about is often human caused, for example.

And my perspective is influenced by having lived around the world, and most recently in rural east Tennessee.

For example, where I live now there are plenty of poor people, almost all white. Many choose to be poor, whether on purpose or not knowing better. Often they are from broken homes, which is another scourge of humanity. Drugs and alcohol are often involved. It's hard to generalize about so many humans. It is my opinion that this is just a sad fact of life for a relatively small percentage of our total population.

Here's one local example. A single mother (age 30) of two, overdoses on illegal drugs, and dies. Her two kids are forced to live with relatives.

Here's one more example. A single male, age 41, never really knew his father, refuses to work a steady job, and lives off of local government handouts, charity food banks, and his relatives and few friends. Some get insurance payments, too. He is obviously not starving, and tolerates that life style. So do many of his relatives.

So I didn't "fall off the turnip truck" yesterday, an old fashioned phrase.

It's been a remarkable trip through life for this fellow, born in 1948.

If one buys the polls (I do), then American culture is at a crossroads of sorts.

I think about this a lot. Mostly how to define what is going on, and what is important to me.

Several things keep popping up in my mind. Here they are:
1) Why is government involved in charity? Obviously, to me, that is a voter decision, and we have seemed to elect people that want to get government more involved in charity, and are willing to pay taxes for this involvement.
2) How about my group rights, vice my individual rights? Both are defined, to me, in our USA Constitution. In a nutshell, can one individual shut down a group for their own reason(s).
3) Schools should exist to teach the 3R's; and skills for life, like filling out tax forms, balancing home budgets, and making things. The rest of life's education of our children should occur at home, to include ethics.
4) One of government's jobs is to promote a man and a woman raising any children that result. I think of this as so fundamental. This old fashioned idea can be as simple as tax advantages to living together when raising kids. Just one dumb example for me. I remember getting in a fight around age 13, and the other kid got a broken arm out of the fight. Well the reactions from my mother and father were totally different, so having a mom and a dad around helped influence my upbringing.

So do we want to descend into an historical scourge of humanity where the rabble and riff raff run things into the ground? Of course not. But it does take leadership and action, and one sales pitch is to start where you are to impose standards, and maybe in twenty or thirty years our descendents will get the benefits. To me, I can't tell anyone what to think, but we sure can impose standards of behavior.