It does not matter if you’re a man or woman, white or black, thin or fat, republican or democrat…most Americans need a swift slap in the face!

We need to wake up and realize what we have…the GREATEST country the world has ever seen! We know that because EVERYONE in the world wants to come here.

But we have forgotten the cost in blood, sweat and tears to get where we are. Yet we continue to take the day off from work and “celebrate” days like Veterans Day, Memorial Day and The 4th of July! We take the day off to stuff our faces with fatty food and drink cheap beer until we drop in a drunken stupor!

We have a disgusting, shameful sense of entitlement. We feel we “deserve” everything we not only have but everything we want. We no longer appreciate what we have and mindlessly demand more. It’s a national sickness far more destructive than any monkey, chicken, cow, or swine flu. It distorts and even destroys our moral compass, our sense of right and wrong. It slowly but surely kills our soul.

We need to rediscover our honor, our dignity, our pride, our humility, our sense of right and wrong, good and evil (beware of the dark side!). But we cannot rediscover these virtues as a nation until we rekindle them as individuals, in our daily lives.

Today was my daughter’s first day of summer vacation. I guess she’s officially a third grader now (although my wife insists she’s still a second grader since the third grade has not yet begun). All year long I got her ready in the morning, packed a lunch and drove her to school, the usual routine. When the year was slightly more than halfway over, my daughter and I decided to take our own personal poll:
Driving onto the elementary school campus we frequently arrive at a moment which calls for an act of common courtesy, a moment where I wave on another driver, giving him/her the right of way in the interest of an efficient flow of traffic in and out of the drop-off/pick-up area. We decided to count how many of these people offered a gesture of thanks.

The year is now over and we are shocked at the results of our little social experiment. Out of a total of 40 individuals whom we graciously granted the right of way, ONLY 8 gave us a little wave of thanks! Only 25%! This is very sad.

OK, so perhaps this experiment was not the most scientifically accurate indicator of our nation as a whole. However, we see this kind of behavior in our lives day in and day out, people believing they are somehow entitled to something, anything. It’s destructive and it’s eating away at the foundation of our country.

People are always looking for the meaning in their lives, believing it surely MUST be something grand, something exciting, something they will be remembered for. What they don’t realize, however, is that the things they are truly remembered for, loved for and respected for, is the simple kindness and respect shown to another human being.