When I Grow Up I'm Going To
Oh what I wouldn’t do for a quick alternative to long and tortuous hours of heating up my home by cooking a full meal for my family! After a long day of work and even longer day of studies it is nearly impossible to find time to put together a healthy and tasty meal for us all.
“When I grow up” (I’m only 49 ½) I will be a professional again. I will have more than a job, I will be helping people cope with their troubles, or I’ll write a professional journal article or more. I will write a book on social network etiquette and the ramifications of not speaking well to the strangers on the other end of the keyboard.
When I grow up I will have a maid and a housekeeper and a cook and I will live in a house that is big enough to accommodate all the things I’ve acquired in my life. I won’t have to think about any of the domestic things that keep me from doing the things that I truly want to do.
Before I grow up I want to sell my crafts online. I want to be a successful entrepreneur. I want to sell my tote bags and my jewelry for real money. I want to be successful. I want to be my own boss! I want to tell myself what to do and I want to remind myself every day that I am entitled to being my own person.
I learned, while growing up, that it is not easy to grow up. No matter what, there are rules to follow. First it is your mother’s rules and then it is the school rules. When you get out of the home you grew up in then you may choose to go on to college, join the military, or get a job. Guess what, kiddies? You still will have other people telling you what to do. You will be told where to be, what to eat, how to dress, what to say, how to behave. Life does not get easier when you grow up, it gets more rules.
The only way to keep your own rules is to have children. No, that is not entirely true. Once you have children then the state will tell you what immunizations the child needs. The federal government will tell you what you need to feed your child—have you seen the food “plate” that replaces the pyramid? The schools will tell you when you should have them there and you will go to court if you do not make sure they are in school. There are always rules imposed upon each member of society.
Laws are important and necessary only to control those who refuse to control themselves. It is unfortunate that the majority who do the right thing without being told have to be imposed upon by those who will only do what they are told to do. There used to be a time when you did not need locks on your doors. Now you need locks on your life.
When I grow up I intend to live in a world where the only rules I have to follow are my own. How do I intend to do that? I’m going to get rich and buy an island. I’ll move there by myself with whoever wants to come with me. I’ll be an independent nation where I get to make up the common sense rules that will dictate my actions and others will be able to create their own sets of rules. As long as no one gets hurt who cares what other people do? It’s their prerogative, like it is mine, to tell themselves what they want to do. How is it my decision to tell someone else who to marry, what to smoke (as long as they don’t smoke it around me) or how many cookies they should eat?
I’m here to tell you right now that it is not my right to dictate the rights of others. We were placed on this planet tens of thousands of years ago for the purpose of populating the planet. Our advancement socially and intellectually does not give us the right to impose our own sense of morals on anyone else. Again, as long as no one gets hurt.
When I grow up, I’m going to do my best to teach other people how to take care of themselves. Teach them how to acknowledge their own short-comings and learn how to improve their own lives by the sheer ability to take care of their own lives.
I am not only not responsible to tell my brethren what to do, I am also not here to take care of them if they are capable of caring for themselves. Do you have hands? Are you hungry? Plant a garden, make some bread, or slaughter a hog. Is it my responsibility to give you what I worked hard for? Only if you are willing to give me something in return.
When people can live in a symbiotic way with each other then everyone prospers. If I can sew and make things and you can build things, then I can make your clothes while you make me a home. Of course we should try to help make things equal. Making a shirt is not nearly the same as building a home, but there are ways to make things more equal.
Today I have decided that when I grow up my world is going to be better than the world that I’m grown up in. My world will be full of truly free people and if they don’t want to live that way they can just pack up and leave my island in peace.
