Remember When

As children we grew up roaming the hills and prairie, playing in the creek, always bringing home a new found treasure, be it a special rock or a baby cottontail. I remember more than one morning mom pulling a garter snake or cottontail out of her boot before she could put it on, sometime during the night escaping from it's shoebox home.  The world was our playground, I have never known in my life anything but clean air, green grass and clear running water. These things I thought I would always have and no one could ever take away from me. Now they have become nothing but memories, no longer here to pass on to our future generations. How sad that our children will not experience these simple joys of growing up. God's gift to us, the basis of health, wealth and happiness, our natural resources. A beautiful summer day, blue sky, sitting under a shade tree enjoying a picnic lunch breathing fresh, clean air, birds, butterflies and flowers. The day has come where we will only know these simple things through perhaps a movie we will watch, it has become a part of history. Money, greed and power have destroyed our source of continuous life. In high school I had a History teacher, I will never forget the statement he made to us one day in class, "we will become a communist country without a war, in your lifetime you will see a day you will have no constitutional rights" I thought at the time this was a crazy thing to say, impossible, it could never be. Our forefathers had fought too hard for our freedom and rights and put in place too many laws to protect us that this would never happen. How I now wish I would have listened closer to what he was saying and would love to sit down with him and have this conversation over. Our teachers have studied to teach us, and if we would only learn from them, and history what a different world we would live in. They say History repeats it's self, how far are we from total destruction?  From my kitchen window, it appears to not be far away, the land, water and air around me is destroyed more with each passing day. Without these basic building blocks, there is nothing to build.  Pick up your camera today, take a picture of a tree or a bird sitting on a fence, preserve a part of history, this may be the only way our children will ever know what these things were.