Someday When

Someday When

Needles dripping with false promises fill the emptiness of so many woebegone lives. The up-in-flames hopefulness of the four-year-old fireman answering the walkie-talkie's frantic cry for help. The erased dreams of the six-year-old teacher with her classroom full of unruly stuffed animals. The avid sticker collector, the aspiring artist, the talented musician, the creative inventor, and the earnest detective - all expectantly waiting to "grow up" to reach their "someday when." 

"Someday, when I'm a vet, I'll save all the horses in the world." 

"Someday, when I'm a great gymnast, I'll be in the Olympics!" 

"Someday, when I'm a baseball player, I'll be in the World Series!" 

The little would-be teachers and firefighters wait and listen to their parents talk about someday when they go off to college, and they wonder when that "someday" will be theirs. Meanwhile, the parents encourage the hopeful children to pursue the possibility rainbow full of color and joy. 

Never did any of the tots aspire to reach emptiness. Never did their parents wish for sleepless nights and sorrowful days. So, why did it come to this? Why did these confident strivers' "someday" become "no days?"

The somedays are long gone - replaced with a cruel vacuum that sucks the joy and depletes the soul. They once craved to feel again. Now, they strive not to feel the loss of someday when. They crave the tantalizing needle that seduces them into the deception of "not feeling," if only for a moment. 

There's no feeling, hope, ambition, or daydreams that may come true. The needle claims another someday when. It tumbles another dreamer into a soulless nightmare. 

And, again, we ask, "Why?" Why are so many young star-gazers slipping into oblivion and sliding into the abyss? Nirvana isn't found in a needle, we tell them. Yet, it still claims young hearts and minds with reckless abandon. 

The destroyer. The ransacker. The demolisher home-wrecker spreads its lies and sows its seeds in young hearts everywhere. We cannot fight the exterminator if we don't acknowledge the source of its roots. The roots have gained a strong foothold in our decaying, godless society.

A fractured bone cannot offer support, nor can a fractured society support its most vulnerable persons. We are a country on the brink, and the root system is deeply embedded in division, strife, and discord. Fatherless families, run-down neighborhoods, black vs. white, rich vs. poor, liberal vs. conservative, woman vs. man, gay vs. straight, MAGA hat vs. non-MAGA hat, god-fearing vs. godless, gun-owning vs. non-gun owning, hopeful vs. hopeless. 

Hopeful people look forward to the future, so they have children, love them, nurture them, and dream of someday. Hopeless people cry over a lost future. To the hopeless, the future is sown in tears. 

As a parent who has lost a child to the hopeless promise of a needle, I still want the future of this country to be full of "someday when" and not sown in tears.