Pandora's Other Box

It has been my privilege to be a citizen of this country since 1968, when my army duty was completed. Prior to that I had two years as an immigrant under asylum and four years as a resident. In all this time I have voted in every election and done so proudly and gratefully; this is a right earned, not given. As it is in every other country where free elections are held it is the right and, in several cases, the legal duty of every citizen to exercise this voting privilege. And also, in every one of these countries, in order to vote you must show an identification which proves you indeed have the right to do so. Why did I come or was sent as a youngster to the US? My country of birth saw the coming of a government which promised the Heavenly Gates and delivered all of us straight to the doors of Hell. This happened mid-20 th century but was the beginning of the so-called “Socialism of the 21 st . Century”; a trend, directly fed and promoted by that first government, that has ...

“For me, a very definite change of attitude is that I have come to understand that it is my duty to take care of my own needs before taking care of the needs of others, including those who may depend on me. This is a simple statement; but its profound meaning and ramifications have taken me a lifetime to grasp and accept .” The above is an excerpt of a blog entry written some 8 years ago, while undergoing the healing process from my bout with cancer as well as from the first of two hip replacement surgeries. Why look at it again now? Two reasons: first, I am in the middle of a general review, trying to choose entries to include in a “compendium” which may ( or not??) come out in printed form and, second, this entry was recently used as a reading exercise in one of my English classes. So, it was fresh in my mind. The over-all consensus on reading and discussing the content was that yes, a person in order to give must have something to, well, give. Cannot offer much -positivel...

Every 1 st  week of January becomes a time to once again check those issues and items which have gone undone during the past year. Or the ones which were done when they actually shouldn’t have been done. And all those changes we sworn to undergo in order to be “more acceptable”. The reality is that I, like many others, like to think that with the coming of the new year comes a time to usher in new thoughts, possibilities, directions and, in general, a new lifestyle. One perhaps more in keeping with those general guidelines acceptable to the world at large. Or, at least, to that world within which I strive to write my own life’s story. My own little world-at-large. Then come the following days ( after the first of the year, that is ) and some of those oh-so-determined resolutions begin to weigh in with their respective demands of time, effort and even funds and I begin to see them for what they really are. An exercise at trying to alleviate an already overburdened conscien...