Last Night at the Zen and Tao Acoustic Café

I stopped in at the Zen and Tao Acoustic Café for a coffee with a whiskey chaser. That, and to suck down half a pack of cigarettes while watching the current evening's band, whose name I didn't know. But they were fairly decent. Songs about New Zealand poachers, as far as I can recall.

But what was really interesting is that halfway through the evening (halfway through my half a pack and working on my second coffee) the guy beside me at the bar - your typical sad-looking with the wanna-talk eyes suddenly states, "You know what the problem is in this county?"

That is always such a loaded question. You never know WHAT's going to follow.

But he followed with, "In this country, we worship our children like little gods. When they fall down, we don't teach them to pick themselves up, we LIFT them up. We teach them that they are little princes and princesses, we don't raise them to be heroes. We don't teach them that they have to earn respect, we teach them that they deserve respect simply because they were born."

I really didn't want him to go on, not because I didn't care, but because his paragraph was very eloquent, almost poetic, and filled with cultural truth. Anything that followed would merely be a drunken spilling of moribund detail, amounting really, after all, to nothing.

He did continue, for the rest of the pack, I might add (which I shared with him) but I will spare the post the details. I will leave you with the other quote.

"When you have nothing, you are happy with anything you get, because now at least you have something. But our children - we have given them everything, and as a consequence they aren't happy with anything."

True words for thought, my friends.

VG