Spring Forward

Sometime around 2:00 AM we experienced our annual temporal shift forward in time. I hope it went well with you and that you did not experience any anomalies that might somehow change the time line for all of us. I especially hope that you are not an hour behind everyone else today, as you will be late for everything and change the time line in negative ways for all those around you. The best way to remedy that is to set you clocks forward one hour. I know that in the Star Trek genre time travel was always much more difficult. It involved moving a space ship into hyper-warp speed and moving faster than the speed of light at such a rate that time actually would move backward or forward. Getting back to your normal time on Star Trek was always pretty tricky too and there was always the concern that somehow your presence in the future or past would somehow change history. Fortunately, we are able to leave high technology out of the loop and simply turn our chronometers forward. It works rather well if we all do it together, but there are still those that don't get it done and invariably they show up late to church.

The times are definitely changing. We live in a different world today than our fore bearers did 100 years ago. I'm really not sure that it has anything to do with the quality of time however. It has more to do with the things we have abandoned because we have become more concerned with ourselves than we have the things of God. People do not have the time or the inclination to search out matters of faith. Men and women no longer raise there own children in the traditional sense. They leave it to daycare providers and the public schools. Families and marriages have become a matter of convenience. They are no longer the core of our society and the families that do exist tend to be dysfunctional, lacking proper role models. The result is that people never really grow up mentally and always require supervision even long after they have left what passes for a home.

What we get is a society that cannot take up the responsibilities of being a free people. Government then fills the void with more and more controls. Totalitarianism in one form or another then takes hold. We are experiencing this shift now in our society.

The cure for that lies in the people. A conscious decision has to be made that we will choose to take responsibility for our own actions, what ever those may be, and develop the maturity to deal with that on our own. A mature society does not rely on the government to take care of them. Rather, the people of a mature society contrive ways to take care of themselves rather than putting that burden on their neighbors.

Times are changing. Ultimately, I do not think we will like this new 'spring forward' and getting back to the way things were will become impossible.

These were just a few things nagging the Ground Hog this morning as he lay in his burrow with the alarm going off an hour earlier. He's at an age now where he can't afford to lose an hour. But then, if he lives long enough, he'll get it back in the Fall.