Some people say that with old age comes wisdom. I say that it is something that is very hard to acquire, if you didn't have at least a little of it to start with. I have met too many people in my life that didn't seem to have common sense and as they got older they didn't seem to learn anything from their everyday living experiences. When you live to a ripe old age, you should have at least learned something about life. I know that I did and I know many others who also did. In some societies elders are revered. They are revered for what they know and what they can teach the younger generation, but this is not the case in most of western culture. I thought about this for awhile and decided to think about what I have learned in all my years on the this earth. Here is what I have come up with.

The first thing that I learned was that if you don't watch what you do, you can really get hurt or even die. This may seem very obvious to some, but when you are a little kid it is not that obvious, so you do crazy things, like running out into the street without looking, to get a ball or something like that. As I got older I still took insane chances. We would jump off of very high things and catch branches of trees and such. One slip could have spelled disaster. Even when I got into my middle teens, I still didn't have much respect for some dangers and to prove this, I even walked around the outside of my high school, about three stories up, on a very narrow ledge. This walk was about four square blocks, because the school was large and each side was about a city block. The ledge was little more than a few inches wide and I had to hug the walls all the way around. I did this all for the sake of an initiation. Hey now that I look back on this, nothing was worth joining that much. I realized that fact before my next birthday.

Another thing that I learned when I was about 15 years old, is that practical jokes can injure someone and even though they seem funny at the time, they really are dangerous. I I was a practical joker as a kid, and would do anything for a laugh. One day I pulled a chair out from under a very large guy and the second I did it, I realized that I could have hurt him. He fell on the floor and I truly regretted what I did. I didn't regret it for what he could have done to me, I regretted it for what the act was. He fell so hard that I thought that I hurt him. He got up off the floor and I stood there expecting the worst and he said to me, in a very calm voice, that I shouldn't do things like that, because I could hurt someone. I just looked at him and said he was absolutely right and I was wrong and I would never do that again and I never did.

When I got into the army I learned that there are some people who use positions of power to torture others. When I was in basic training I had one of the worst company commanders on the base. He starved us, made us go out in weather that had a wind chill factor of twenty below, while we had to be stripped to the waste and never let us out of what was known as the company area, while the entire rest of the fort could at least go to the PX once in a while. I couldn't figure out what this guy's problem was, until one day I found out that he wanted out, but they wouldn't release him. I guess this had something to do with the Vietnam War, which had started by that time. He was taking his frustration out on us. One of the things he loved to do was make us march 20 miles with full packs in sand. Believe me when I tell you that is one of the hardest things to do with all of that weight on your back and in full uniform.

As I got older I found out that there were three basic types of people in the world. It didn't matter what race they were. Type I was you average person who was generally very nice. Type II was the person that wanted to get ahead and would stop at nothing, even if it meant he had to hurt someone to get where he wanted. Type III was someone who had connections and always got the best positions, even if he or she knew nothing about the job and often was put in charge right off the street. This was especially true in civil service jobs where politicians, ex politicians and relatives and friends of politicians seemed to get the best of everything. The average person was very helpful on the job and would help someone without thinking of any gain. You can forget about the person with the unbridled ambition ever helping, unless it was to help a superior. The political types sometimes would help, but couldn't be trusted and many times knew nothing about the job anyway. Many times they would run into the big bosses office and tell them how incompetent the workers were and how they had to help them and then they would return and smile at you and act as if nothing ever happened.

One lesson that I learned is that there is no substitute for really good friends. I am talking about friends that would do anything for you. I happen to be blessed in this area and have some very good friends that I have known since childhood and I could ask them for anything and they would do it without even asking why. I guess I learned that the most important thing in one's life is his or her family. It is so important that you love your wife or husband and that you children know this and that you bring them up as well as you can. Again I scored 100% in this area. I am truly blessed.

Speaking about being blessed, I have learned that there is something bigger out there than all of us. There were times in my life that I never thought much about God. As I got older I began to see how many times I and my family were lucky enough to get out of certain situations. We had close calls medically, but things always seemed to work out. It was uncanny how lucky we were. I was actually in an automobile and was crossing a country road with a hill on the left on a cross road, when a car traveling so fast that it's wheels were off the ground going over the hill hit us in the side. At the time the car was in the air, it was estimated by the skid marks when it landed that it was going over 100 mph. We came out of that without a scratch. When that car hit mine in the side, it pushed my car sideways for quite a distance and caved in the driver's side door, but a steel beam in the door saved me, I was the driver. That was surely a miracle. Even the insurance representative who saw the photos of the skid marks and impact area couldn't figure out how we escaped uninjured. Yes I believe that there is a higher power looking out for all of us. I also believe that some events are random happenings and they are part of life, no matter how cruel that they may seem.

When I was a kid, I thought that government knew everything and was only there to protect us and represent us, but I was completely wrong. Unfortunately most of our representatives are there to do the bidding of the interests. These interests are companies and the rich and powerful. I learned that if people want to protect the benefits they have, they have to constantly fight for them, by backing organizations that are lobbying for our rights in congress. There are very few, if any, people in congress that really want us to have any types of pensions, social security, hospitalization and things like that. They want to use these funds for their pet projects and to give this money away to foreign nations. The proof of this is all around us. There are over 44 million people without hospitalization in this country, the cost of medicine is going sky high, the price of fuel is reaching a point where many will not be able to afford to get to work and the cost of food is increasing rapidly. Most western countries have some sort of coverage for their citizens, but here in the richest country in the world, almost 15% of our population has no medical coverage. We have laws to break up monopolies, yet they are never enforced. We have laws against price fixing, yet everyone charges just about the same for fuel, within a few cents. The same goes for medicine and dairy products.

I guess the most important things I learned were that most people are nice and good and they are just trying to get through their daily lives and that no person is an island nad we all need good friends and family. I learned that someday we will all be in the hands of God and we will all probably have a lot of explaining to do. All this may not be wisdom, but it is the best that I could come up with.