Care About What Matters

I was just about to sit down to do something that I really need to do, homework. But, part of the homework/writing process for me is procrastination. Today as I was driving from coffee shop to coffee shop looking for an open table to work at I turned on the radio and began to listen to some good old fashioned talk radio. I listened to NPR for a few minutes than shifted to Rush Limbaugh, then to Sean Hannity. Typically I listen until I get bored with what is being said or until I think what the people are saying is stupid. More often than not it is that I get bored. I am not a politically minded person so if you are and you happen to be one of my four followers and are offended please don't be. I just personally don't care that much about politics.

What bugs me the most is that we (we is a generalization based on radio personalities who are talking to a lot of people) seem to care about stuff that doesn't really matter. To be honest I don't care about some senator who owns a ranch that had a rock on it that had the "N" word painted on it in 1983. Its not that I want to be dismissive of politics or people who care about them, its just that almost every time I began to listen to commentators either liberal or conservative I get frustrated because I rarely hear them talking about things that matter. Instead we argue about rocks and really stupid things people did in the middle of nowhere two years after I was born.

How weird that we can spend an incredible amount of money, emotional effort, and energy in all kinds of directions and completely miss the heart of life. How different would our world be if we began to actually care about things that matter. I would like to stop arguing about rocks so that I can feel better about myself and I would like to start to talking about the condition of peoples hearts.

This was the most difficult thing for me as a teacher. I was being paid to give students an education in the area of history, which really does matter. However, what I noticed while working with students who had been kicked out of many other schools was that while history was important it was not as important as what was happening in their hearts. Who they were becoming was of higher importance than the history assignment I was supposed to be giving. A popular quote among teachers goes like this:

"Kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

People can argue about rocks all day. I want to talk about our hearts.