IF IT'S NOT ONE THING

My mother used to say, when some problem or ‘challenge’ came along, that “If it’s not one thing, it’s twenty-four.”  Meaning, at least to my understanding, that something was just always going to come along, and sometimes lots of ‘somethings’.

Which pretty well applies to today’s many difficult situations.  We say that we not only have the Enterovirus, Ebola, terrorists in the middle east and problematic weather patterns, we also have Republicans!  Republicans would probably rephrase the statement a bit.

But here’s the thing we must all keep in mind:  times have never been easy.  Oh, there have been intervals of peace and prosperity, of course, over the long history of mankind, but interspersed among those intervals have been so many wars, so many plagues, so many periods of poverty and suffering.  And yet, mankind has, so far at least, as a species and as individuals, managed to find ways to deal with whatever comes along. 

 

Maybe, sooner or later, we’ll get really serious about looking out for each other, such as making sure that there are decent basic living conditions in areas such as West Africa, where Ebola comes from and where it gets out of hand so quickly in part because of lack of clean water and practical toilet facilities.  Maybe we’ll work as hard at helping the impoverished as we do in following the latest technical trends and the latest celebrities. 

Oh, even then, there would be problems to come along, but maybe they would come along one at a time, instead of ‘twenty-four.’