This is, fundamentally, a repost of a blog entry from 13 Dec 2019.
Several years ago, TDW-Mark 2, Second Son Charlie, and his wife and I were out to dinner one night. Charlie had asked me how work was going, and I fell into my reflexive recitation of complaints about my employer. Yada, yada, yada, bitch, moan, and complain.
After a couple of minutes, I stopped to take a breath. Charlie looked at me, contemplatively, and asked me, “Dad? Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure. Lay it on me!”
“Do you suppose that, say, Cuban refugees, having entrusted their families, and their own, lives to rafts made, oh, out of a pickup truck and old water bottles, stagger onto the Florida shore, join hands, and ask each other, ‘Doesn’t McFee’s life really suck?’”
I considered my son’s question. “Really, I doubt that they spend an entire second on that concern.”
He smiled upon me, as if a Jedi Master upon a Paduan. “Yep, Dad. First World problems!”
Today’s deliberation is that, while there are, indeed, problems galore in America, please let us all consider the fact that, in most of the rest of the world, those things that we consider “problems”, are counted as blessings. It is like a real world experience of Bill Cosby’s bit about growing up poor in Philadelphia,
“Man, I got to share a bed with my brother! It is awful!”
“Man, YOU have a bed?”
“And, I get hand-me-down shoes, also! The worst!”
“Say what? YOU have SHOES?!?”
Etcetera. Sort of a reverse “The Dozens”.
May all of you have a pleasant, peaceful, tranquil, thankful, Thanksgiving Day.
Musings of A Stretcher Ape 