Both youth and Spring have an innocent beauty, each being totally unaware and subsequently often unprepared for what lies ahead. Summer, like young adulthood, offers the bounty of new challenges and new-found freedoms not commonly associated with any other season, yet the handling of each can greatly affect the remainder of the year–or years of life.
Then comes Fall, my favorite, with its radiant Fall flowers and foliage in all of their multi-colored beauty, yet laced with the wisdom gained through the years and the stamina required to survive the long cold winter. Alas comes winter with its unique wonderland of beauty, evidenced also in so many adults in “the winter of life.” Many of today’s senior citizens–parents, teachers, grandparents, counselors and others in influential positions with youth, have witnessed and experienced the greatest and most phenomenal explosion of knowledge, science and technology ever in such a brief period of time.
Within less than a couple of centuries (of a world millions of years old) we have gone from primitive to super-sonic and from smoke signals to inter-planetary communication. We have also witnessed the greatest advancement in civil and human rights–through laws highly influenced by civil disobedience and “non-violence” in this “Land of the free and home of the brave! It was the incomparable wealth of knowledge, experiences and determination of today’s senior citizens and predecessors that swung the pendulum of injustice in a more positive direction–now being heavily directed in reverse!
We are currently being caught up in the throws of a society that is steadily fast-forwarding into scientific and technological maturity while digressing into spiritual infancy, creating a potentially explosive imbalance that threatens the wellbeing and actual annihilation of humankind on the planet!–leaving anyone or anything surviving with only contamination! The dire importance of “the power of the press” and all media (when rightly directed) is fully recognized in the Baha’i Holy Writing for this New Day thusly: “In this day the mysteries of this earth are unfolded and visible before the eyes, and the swiftly appearing newspapers and media are indeed the mirror of the world…But it behooves the writers and editors thereof to be sanctified from the prejudice of egotism and desire and to be adorned with the ornament of equity and justice.”
In this wonderful age, I am immeasurably blessed, not only to be a senior citizen in this wonderful Age (and minutely aware of its significance) but also blessed with the power of the pen and the press, a vehicle through which The voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” –Solomon 2:12
