Blog 181 – 12.10.15

The first time I traveled away from home, family, and friends was a scary but a thrilling adventure. I had just turned eighteen years old and signed up for the U. S. Army. I was given a bus ticket and told to take the bus from Chattanooga, Tennessee, my home town, to Knoxville, Tennessee for a physical, testing and induction into the Army if I passed the physical and testing.

I had to go away from home to grow up. I had a mother like many mothers who could not “let go.” I loved my mother and honor her memory but I had a great deal of trouble “letting go” too and she could have helped me learn that a long time ago. She finally did “let go” but it was only when she died and that by her own hand. And for quite a few years I still thought that if I had loved her better, been a better son, maybe she would have been happier and not chosen so dramatic and hurtful an exit. I grew up believing I could fix things, fix people. It is a man thing. Someone on social media made a list of Man Rules and high on the list was: “Don’t bring me a problem unless you want me to fix it.” More often people just want to talk about their problems and may not even want them fixed. Fixing others is not our job. Even fixing ourselves is above our pay grade. The only real change we can make in ourselves and our world is to change our thinking. “As a man thinks in his heart so is he.”

One of the most wonderful things about traveling is that you get to expose yourself to different points of view. People from different places look at things differently. I have spend the biggest part of my life in Texas. Texans have an interesting take on life. The culture is an interesting mix of several cultures really, Hispanic, Southern, Western, Cattle, Oil, and Gas to name but a few. And for all it’s conservatism there is at least in Austin a pocket of progressive/liberalism with a somewhat refreshing arts an music community. That is not to say that arts and music and even liberal ideas are not a statewide thing it is just religiously and politically the majority rule in Texas is conservative.

Since I work in the Oil and Gas Industry most of the people I meet are conservatives but I am wary of labels for people are all unique and even the most conservative person you meet might be quite liberal on some issues and the same is true of liberals too, I am sure.

Time was when conservatives and liberals seemed to meet in the middle a little easier and more often. And even if the President was not from our party he was still “Our President.” The great miracle of the United States of America is I think most threatened by our continual questioning of the motives of the “other guy.” We are too quick to listen to “the accuser of the brethren- Satan.” Who is I think ego. Yes, I think, the cartoon character Pogo got it right years ago, “We have discovered the enemy and it is us.”

Many of you are content to stay in your home town all your lives. Many of you have no desire whatever to see the other side of the fence or pond. For what little differences I have seen in the fifty states and eleven foreign countries that I have seen thus far I am amazed that people are so alike everywhere. They have the same desires for themselves and their children for a better life.

That is why most of our parents, grandparents, and further back came here to find and make a better life. Even the so called First People walked here across the Bering Strait from Asia we are told. That’s a long way to walk but many have found freedom and a better life on the road.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White