Adrift on strange waters.

 A great tragedy has befallen our state and it must trouble any thinking person. It occurs at a time when the powers that govern us believe less in progressive policy than at any time in my adult life. Education is scorned. Science lies abandoned. The belief that government can be a positive force for humankind is denigrated as a doctrine.

But the floodwaters keep rising. And the rain keeps coming. And government grows less able to meet the dangers each day. We now find that running from them isn’t the answer. Mother Nature can find us even in homogeneous communities where everyone thinks and looks like us. She follows a Biblical paradigm and spreads her waters on the just and unjust alike.

Things are changing. They will continue to change. Who knows how that will affect Americans? I know change scares us. Americans seem to spend a great deal of time and resources protecting themselves and their children from change, strangers, and the different. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.

There was a time when I thought I had it made. I was young, educated, healthy, and living in the most exciting city in America at the time, San Francisco, California. A mass exodus of the young and ambitious from my state resulted in quite a band of expatriates living there, so I lacked not for friends.

I was invincible, bulletproof, and untouchable. Each day was a new adventure and each night a new discovery. Nothing could spoil this blessed life.

The Draft Board though, was like Mother Nature. It followed the sage teachings of the country hymn, “There’s no hiding place down here.”

A year after finishing a long ordeal of working my way through college, and setting forth to reap the rewards in this wonderful place, things changed. I found myself sitting, instead of “on a dock of the Bay,” atop a bunker outside Da Nang, South Vietnam, cradling an M-16 assault rifle on loan from the United States Navy.

Stuff happens. Things change. Life veers from its course. We find ourselves facing a world so different from what we expected, that we don’t recognize it. We find ourselves adrift on a sea upon which we never expected to sail. We can be “helicopter parents,” or “bulldozer parents," neither nature nor fate cares. Trust me.

In one of the wisest decisions of my life, I made the situation into a blessing. One morning, I took a long walk around Monterey Bay and contemplated my current orders. Looking out on the Great Tide Pool, I decided that, from that moment on, I would not base my happiness upon where I lived, who my neighbors were, or how protected I was from life’s vicissitudes. I would strive, each day, to make the most of what “little postage stamp of native soil,” I happened to stand. (Apologies to William Faulkner.)

I survived the war, survived a storm at sea, and survived a tepid, sometimes chilly reception from my fellow Americans, best expressed by a personnel officer of the telephone company in my home town. He informed me that there were no jobs in his organization that fit my qualifications, but did offer the suggestion that, in future applications to other employers, I keep my military service to myself.

Many friends and fellow Arkansans now face a ship of life on which the anchor finds no bottom. To be adrift upon a cruel and heartless sea is a lonely life, one whose only solace lies not in the promise of a distant harbor, but upon peace within our own heart.

Sailing on. ... not always easy.