I've always believed...

...and trusted in the fact that karma exists. It keeps me from exacting justice on people who have crossed me in ways that weren't illegal. When the justice system can't do a thing for you, karma is all you have left. Sometimes karma works when the cops can't find you...like what happened to this guy:

Father Shoots Wife, Kidnaps Son, Then Gets Hit by Bus

That's the headline, you don't really need to read the details of the article, that one line says it all. That's a great story, isn't it? And it was all told in one sentence...with a beginning, a middle and an end. I love it, especially the ending.

My karma dreams are rarely that productive. They usually leave people alive to experience some unpleasant retribution. But, I have to say, karma was rather efficient with the guy who shot his wife.

According to the headlines lately, A-Rod should be experiencing a bit of karma himself. I'm not asking the karma Gods to make a bus hit him...but if his wife is right and he HAS been sleeping with Madonna, his life should be a tad bumpy for the next few months, if not years. A-Rod's peeps told the press that he and the Hoe both practice Kabballah, a form of Judaism. That's not a religion that condones adultery. A Kabballic scholar said:

"That adultery is a perversion of love and murder is a perversion of might is obvious."

I got to see a little bit of karma when I saw Rick a couple of months ago. I know he lied like a rug when he told me that he was "so lonely" out there in Montana. I didn't believe that he was lonely, just that he was miserable and obviously sorry that he screwed me like he did. I'm not saying that he admitted that he was sorry, but in his own way, he was. I could tell. I must say that it didn't make me as happy as I'd hoped it would. Perhaps if someone cheats on his sorry ass like he cheated on me, I'll feel better.

Really sorry people don't continue to lie. So, I was assured that he was still a liar and that there was some poor female somewhere who trusted him. I can only hope it was one who he cheated with but I'll never know because according to Rick, he has lived quite the chaste life since he left me. I swear, I looked into his eyes and wondered, "Does he really think I'm buying this crap?"

I don't know if he's gotten worse at lying or if I've gotten better at seeing his deception but if I had just met him, I wouldn't have trusted him as far as I could throw him. Unfortunately, when I was 24 I wasn't that perceptive.

Oh well, I feel badly for Guy Ritchie and Mrs. A-Rod. Those two thought they were married to people who they could trust. If these rumors turn out to be true, they were WAY WRONG! But, no more wrong than was I when Rick played around in local trailer parks. Oh well.

Sometimes when I'm listening to guys, I wonder what their character is like. I'm not talking about guys that I date, I mean ANY guys. They could be young or old, short or tall, it doesn't matter. I find myself wondering if this nice person standing right in front of me has the strength of character to tell the truth without fail and keep all vows that he has ever made. I almost always think, "Yeah, I bet he could be a decent guy." But statistics say that I'm wrong. Oh well again.

I'm sure that there are men out there who not only have the strength to live a decent life, they have the brains and sense of responsibility that it takes to raise their own sons to have that strength as well. Mothers can teach young boys, but only a man can lead by example to a young boy wondering how he should behave when he becomes a man.

In a society that places so much value on the rights of the individual, so many of our institutions are falling apart because we're more interested in a person's right to his own egotistical whims and bodily urges than we are in maintaining a strong society.

My father once told me that we couldn't defeat the Nazi's today because there aren't enough people raised with the sense of community and selflessness that he experienced as he was growing up during The Depression. It's a good thing that we can send a missile into a door from miles away because I can't imagine that we could gather a force of men like the one that it took to storm the beaches at Normandy today.

Do you ever stop to think that the Allies won because of their shear numbers? There were enough men willing to run onto the sand while bullets were flying everywhere and men were falling all around them. There were just SO MANY of them that no matter how many the Nazi's killed, more just kept coming. Over 100,000 men faced likely death in an operation that even Churchill said would leave the French beaches, "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood". And it did.

I'm not trying to take away any honor from the men and women who serve in our Armed Forces today...not at all. Those people are doing their jobs and doing them well. Let's just be grateful for the efficiency of our weapons that keeps most of our young people alive. I don't think we could rally another force the size of the one that attacked Normandy on June 6th, 1944.

Here's a link for anyone who would be interested in reading about Operation Overlord:

http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm

This is pretty much a shot of what the Allied soldiers saw when they disembarked at the beach:



Individual rights are a good thing, of course. That's why those men were running into the surf. But how can we as Americans balance those rights with the responsibility to be good citizens? I don't mean simply good citizens that don't break the law...I mean the kind of good citizen that is the basis for any good society.

I've been around long enough to see things change immensely. When I was in high school, I only knew of one girl who got pregnant and the official story was that she had rheumatic fever. Going to school pregnant was not an option. Our parents wouldn't have allowed it. That sort of thing might make teenaged pregnancy seem like a positive thing.

Today the girls not only go to school pregnant, they drop the kids off in the school day-care center before classes.

I'm not judging teenaged pregnancy, it's not my job to judge anyone. My point was simply that things have changed drastically in my memory. And things are still changing. They're changing exponentially faster and it's rather dizzying once you start to see it happening. Future Shock was a great book that explains what happens when things change so quickly in a civilization. It's a must read for anyone with the brains to consider the impact that certain things have on society. It's also frighteningly prophetic considering that it was written when I had a serious crush on Donny Osmond.

It's odd to think that your day-to-day decisions and actions would have such a serious effect on an entire civilization. But when individuals exercise their own personal "rights" en masse, things can get a bit tramontane.

You know, I never intended to be so serious when I started writing about karma. Now there's no way to turn this post around so I'm going to try it again, only with some humor this time.

BRB.