Perfect World

In a perfect world, Sarah Palin would have never left Alaska, Tiger Woods would have remained faithful, slavery would have never existed. But the world isn't perfect and it leaves us often cruel lessons to learn.

Sometimes our families turn on us. Sometimes our families stifle our ambitions, desire. They laugh at our passions. In a perfect world, everyone would receive the unconditional love, unending support and assistance.

But we don't live in a perfect world. Our children cannot play outside without fear of being kidnapped. We would celebrate each other's unique features, strive to learn more about each other. We would realize that we are more alike than different. In a perfect world, there is always peace and harmony, love and joy. Each day we would take a burden from a friend, learn something new, teach someone something useful.

I understand that the Utopian world that I envision must take more than just me and a few scraggly friends to produce. It would have to take an entire population to begin. We would all need to be close to, if not on, the same page. Right now, we're not even reading the same book.

I take a cue from former Veep Gore. I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" and cried. The legacy that we are leaving our children our grandchildren is just wrong. We started that very next day at home, hoping to be the pebble dropped in the water causing a ripple moving out into the unknown. Now almost everyone on our block recycles. That's up from 3 familes last year. It's a slow process, getting people to understand and believe that it's possible.

We can't change the past. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to change it.