Freedom in Choices

Fourteen million of our school children receive free lunches - about 21%. In Tennessee it is 37%. Poverty in America or poor choices? If one were to act smart as opposed to stupid would he or she be a different person? If a man were not born a man, would he not have to have been born a woman? Just asking - because flashes of the self-evident seem to be lacking in today's culture. Also, wisdom often comes from those condemned to a early death. John Richard Jefferies an English writer and nature lover, dead at thirty eight from tuberculosis, said: "The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty, are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things, so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time. This is the real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance."

Of course Jefferies referred to nature's wonders as the reason to live, not to Truth which the poet John Keats, another young victim of consumption, said exchanges with beauty as the only things one needs to know. How to relate these observations to our false epidemics of poverty and obesity? Truth is beautiful when we find it; beauty is living with the truth.

1. People are poor via poor choices. 2. People become fat by consuming too many calories. AND 3. (just to throw in a bit of impish perversity) personal responsibility is as lovely a poem as a tree.