March 2006

One of my friends from high school, Susan Spahr passed away on Friday. While I was planning on getting up there for the wake tomorrow, and coming back late tomorrow night, I realize I can’t do this due to the fact that I have far too much work to do in Accounting. I have accounting on Thursday and I would get back far too late Wednesday to make it there by 8:30AM.

After graduation these people who you’ve known for years, all go on to bigger and better things. An unreturned phone call here and there, and you don’t really think much about it, until something like this happens. She had a baby about a month ago, and I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I think the last time I spoke to her, is when I was in Brookdale and she was telling me all about how she joined the Campus Crusade for Christ. Some unread blogs left me in the dark about her pregnancy until Sunday night, when I had heard that she had passed away.

These last few days I’ve been away from the computer, as some of you could tell in my not responding on IM, but just checking email when the time came. This is the third time in the last 13 months someone has died that I cared about. I think it’s a wakeup call. I don’t want to be going through life wondering what if or whatnot, I want to live. Last May I did the most irrational thing and picked up for a week and went to Ohio to meet a girl. Was it the safest thing to do? No. Will I ever forget driving through West Virginia through the mountains? Never. I implore you to go out and do one thing that scares you, one thing that is unlike you, one thing that you’ve never done before. Carpe Diem.

In the Allegory of the cave, Plato said that men that were chained up and spent their whole lives looking at shadows being cast on the wall would accept this and not challenge it at all, for it was all they knew. One day one of the men was taken out into the real world, into the sunlight. He was allowed to run free for a while, but was then brought back into the cave, chained up as he was before. Did the man like being chained up? Of course not, he wanted to be free. He told the others of his adventures, but they didn’t want to hear such tales. Eventually with all his ramblings, the others would kill him.

Now look at the world that we live in. We are not so different than those in the cave. Anyone who comes along who is different is ostracized for what they believe in. In the 1950’s if you believed in a different form of government then the US, then you were the enemy and could go to jail. Everyone believed that Communism was pure evil, but if you look at the theory of it, that all men are and would share equally, then it actually isn’t that bad of a theory, improbable, but in theory it works.

With religion, it is the same way. Christians, in the old days were brought up to believe that everyone who wasn’t Christian were evil. Through their own experiences, social gatherings in which not everyone was the same, people were able to step out of the cave and see the light. Just because you aren’t the same doesn’t mean you aren’t good people.

Now look at your own lives. Is there an instance where you are in a cave? In high school there are so many different caves, jocks beating on goths, populars beating on punks, all because they don’t step out of the cave and look at the real world. In the US some people hate people with different colored skin, because of the way they speak, or because of the country they come from. These people are in a cave all their own. If you don’t step out of your own caves, then your children will be in caves, and this world will never get any better, or safer.