Where At Least I Know I’m Free (right?)

I almost forgot to blog today! How terrible would that have been? All your poor hearts, broken.

Thankfully, I’m not a jerk, so I’m going to stay up a few extra minutes and pose some questions to you.

I’ve run into a bit of America hating lately. Nothing extreme, just some quips and jabs. And in light of the whole government thing going on in America right now…well.

I’ve never been good about keeping up on current events, so I’m not going to pretend I’m well informed and have all kinds of opinions about America’s success vs failure in the past five years or fifty. I know that I see things rampantly flooding the culture that I’m not okay with. In my experience with Europe, both in Scotland and Germany, those things don’t seem so prevalent as they do in America, but Europe has plenty of its own problems (take this article I read about young boys in the UK and pornography…I’m sure The States has the same problem, especially from things I encountered in my teenage experience. Just different issues getting highlighted).

Now, I want to pose a question to you readers. What makes America great? What does America need to work on? And most importantly, what are you doing about it? If your answer to that last question is complaining, I don’t want to hear from you. For anyone who’s not an American or who has spent a lot of time outside of America, do you feel like other governments and cultures deal with the same issues?

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately about femininity, gender roles, breaking stereotypes and sexism, etc. This one was probably my favorite. I personally feel like the absolute best way for anyone to change the world is for each person to change the way they treat others, and especially children. They are the ones who are going to be cleaning up the mess we’re leaving them. And if some of them successfully learn to value themselves, work hard, be patient, and respect others, then we might have a shot at fighting that proverbial fire Billy Joel sang about.

Now I’ll end with an uplifting picture of a flower that I took today. 🙂