Getting Old

Ever wonder what it is like getting old and feeling blue some days as you reflect your life and view your thoughts within a split moment of nostalgia? Maybe not all the time but certainly a good portion of your time is reflection of good and bad memories hidden deeply within the annals of your mind. The fact is, you can’t help yourself thinking about yesterday as much as you want to try to focus on tomorrow. You concentrate on the present as you begin to doubt about the future.

Getting old means a change in lifestyle habits and common sense priorities that were once on top of your daily agenda and now perhaps a bit lower down the list if not completely stricken off it. Lifestyles that included physical activities such as jogging around the track or volleyball on the beach, swimming in the lake or ocean and hiking or mountain climbing with those people that always brought the competitive spirit within you to be the first in the race.

Those days of running and jumping are gone forever as you sometimes struggle with your balance getting up out of bed or even the car whenever you are tired. Rubbing your eyes free of the sleep that accumulated as you are sleeping more now than ever before and watch what you eat as the digestive system is more sensitive now than ever before. Muscle tone and super strengths are things of yesterday and will now require you to exercise in a more sensible manner.

Your list of medication includes aspirin or some other kind of prescription to deal with the aches and pain that have appeared as a gentle reminder of your youthful past and the sports you played a tumbles you took. A headache could be a warning and an upset stomach can let you down for the rest of the day as you adjust your life to meet the daily challenge of staying alert and aware of your environment.

Getting old means having more tolerance to people’s voices and their noises. Sometime struggling to hear what they are saying, you also must admit that those ears aren’t working as well as they did before. Noises can be annoying and crowds are sometimes not tolerated as you become a little more recluse than ever before.

Your social life is stale compared to before and although you seek to go out and find a good movie theater every now and then you have adjusted to watch those nostalgic channels of TV land and the AMC channel as you watch your memories on the screen letting you drift away and remember what you were doing those days when you were young.

Mind you now, I am not complaining. As a youth I never realized that growing old could be such a wonderful experience as life gives you satisfaction of all your fruits of labors and family events. There are no better moments that those in your mind as you travel your personal journey over and over again to keep your focus on who you love and who loves you.

This time of growing old is precious yet unforgiving. There are no comforts in sight that will assure you that there will be no more tomorrows. Living the moment every day and every minute has become a treasure. A treasure stored within your heart and someday will be found and unlocked with the key that is in your heart’s control until the day you leave this Earth and go to Heaven.

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Collateral Damage in Arizona

Arizona‘s prison system is suffering from collateral damage as it continues to fall into a financial abyss created by poor leadership and wasteful spending since 2009. The writings have been on the walls for many years but everybody in state government has either been looking the other way or failing to read the signs. That is with the exception of Chad Campbell, a leading Democrat lawmaker who recognized this failing performance by our prison agency leader and director, Charles L. Ryan and therefore calling for his resignation on Tuesday, July 23, 2013

State legislators, the governor and the public should not be surprised at this announcement to remove Director Ryan. It has been long coming and if your look back to the infamous Kingman prison escape, I have been calling for his resignation from that moment as he has done nothing to fix our state’s public safety issues and manage our prisons in a sound and responsible manner while bolstering the private prison industry inside our state. Today the state suffers severely from collateral damage and changes must be made immediately.

Collateral damage is politically harmful in many ways. First and most it implies urgent and serious ethical implications of not doing your job as you had sworn to do when you take the oath of office. Second it is harmful to innocents and this is a most coincidental side effect that can run a course of destruction. It basically is a statement of not doing your job with due care and commitment.

Collateral damage consists of at least four categories of failures with a doctrine that shows negligence, oblivious to the truth, malevolently knowing what wrong and reckless behavior is as you ignore these warning signs. Since taking office, the director has created an order of chaos that is not morally permissible under the rule of law and moral standards.

He has implemented a personal doctrine that has had a double effect. The first being a negative and wasteful prison system failing to perform up to legal and moral expectations as a government service and the second is the increase reliance and use of private corporate prison contractors to fill in the voids of his failing prison policies and send unlimited state funding into a hybrid governance doctrine that is without scrutiny or reviews.

One could argue that this double doctrine should be permissible but the loss of human lives, the destruction of internal personnel procedures and performance / disciplinary structures, the excessive litigation related to medical and other essential services as well as the higher costs associated with such inefficient operational methods are not feasible at a time of responsible fiscal constraints and higher taxes to run government. This is especially true when other states have demonstrated lesser spending with better prison management alternatives than Arizona has and this is highly noticeable at the budget hearings in Phoenix.

The question is whether this call for his resignation is legitimate or politically motivated. It is my trust if Governor Brewer would consciously and deliberately review his record of performance she would agree it is time for change in leadership.

Good change can bring Arizona prisons back into the spending commitments of lawmakers and the return of rule of law back to those relatives that rely on ethical decision making to keep their incarcerated relatives safe from excessive suffering, physical and mentally incurred harm and a high risk of accidental or natural caused deaths that includes suicides that rank as some of the highest in the country. After all is said and done, our leaders must recognize that collateral damage is in no way permissible and tolerable in good government practices.