Listen to songs such as Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler On The Roof, The Men In My Little Girl's Life by Mike Douglas, Don't Blink by Kenny Chesney, As Tears Go By by The Rolling Stones, The Class Of 57 by The Statler Brothers, and Puff The Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul, and Mary, and you'll realize how quickly time goes by.
Babyhood, Childhood, and Youth make up a relatively short season in a person's life, yet so much is happening during these first eighteen years when it comes to shaping an individual.
I would like to believe that most kids grew up in an environment that was relatively safe and loving--and where life's disappointments weren't of the type to leave behind deep scars. I know that I did and that a great number of my friends did, too.
However, I know that there are children growing up who end up--through no fault of their own--either having little or no truly happy childhood memories or, at least, going through some extremely-challenging times (a gross understatement) that should NEVER have been a part of their growing up years.
One such example of this is the life of Roger Dean Kiser.
When you read his books and articles, you will learn of somebody who was orphaned-by-desertion when he was only three or four years old.
In time, he would become a ward of the state of Florida.
This would come to mean that--after time spent in an orphanage where he and others were abused physically, sexually, verbally, and emotionally--he would then be passed on to the now closed and infamous reform school near the community of Marianna where his treatment there would practically make the orphanage from whence he came seem like a place of TLC in comparison.
When Roger got into his middle years, it began to dawn on him that how he had been treated hadn't been his fault. He wasn't the "bad" character in this scenario--even though he had come to believe this on some levels for most of his life.
That was when he began to write about his troubled youth and childhood.
The more he wrote, the more connections he made that began to confirm for him that he was far from being alone.
These days, Roger has the tenacity of a snapping turtle--in fact, he has even MORE tenacity than a snapping turtle, because it's been said that, if a snapping turtle bites you, he won't let go until he hears it thunder, while Roger, on the other hand, keeps the bite going on even during the strongest thunderstorms.
Roger wants the state of Florida to come clean about the bodies of boys in unmarked graves that have already been discovered (where chances are as close to 100% as you can get while still allowing for error that there are plenty more bodies covered up here and there on the grounds of the old reform school).
If the state of Florida thinks that they can manage to discourage Roger from his mission, then, they have another think coming. Even if Roger becomes too worn out to stay as active as he his now, the quest for accountability will still continue, because there are plenty of other people who still have the energy to bite into this situation and lock their jaws around it.
There are many of us who are doing our part to make sure that those first 18 years of a person's life will be years looked back on later in a fond way, and there are many ways to make this happen.
Go here to my blog called IYN-The Dream Continues and be sure that you create easy instructions for navigating back to it.
Now that I'm about to go viral and enlarge my reading audience--not to mention having my Cyberspace more streamlined to make it easier for me to navigate to all of the places where I want to be with ease--I'm going to start making frequent blog-entries there that will continue where I'm leaving off in this discussion...
