I can remember looking up into white fluffy clouds slowly drifting by and being around 9 years old in the Greater Los Angeles area in California. It was the 1950s. I liked the way it made me feel to sort of drift along the sky with the clouds as they turned into my dreams of lions, tigers, dragons, elephants, trees, people etc. I felt really at peace which was nice because mostly life was stressful I found. A lot was demanded of me in school and though I pretended to be a good boy mostly I did this so I wouldn't be physically tortured by the teachers in the third grade. My teacher then picked up boys by the ears if she didn't like what they were doing. And when boys were picked up by the ears they screamed and cried in pain. Later this teacher was retired for doing this. I don't think she liked men or boys very much and likely it was time for her to retire anyway. I turned 9 in the spring and was 9 waiting through the summer to start 4th grade. 4th Grade brought a young and wonderful new teacher named MRS. KRELL. But halfway through the 4th grade Mrs. Krell got pregnant and had to retire at least temporarily from teaching. But not before recognizing me before the class as a budding writer and story teller. I was really shy then but amazed people liked what I wrote even then. I started sketching ideas and little doodles to go along with the things I wrote in a journal. I wrote not every day but sort of in fits and spurts. But later (a year later or so) I would re-read what I had written and be amazed at who I had been when writing what I wrote because I had changed so much since I wrote what I wrote. These changes only increased as I grew older by the years.
So, whenever I found the time(usually summers) I would lay on the grass of my front lawn of my parents house and look up at the clouds as they floated by and feel completely safe and at peace in my life. The 1950s was very different than now. I think the best way I can describe my life then was that it was boring. However, the Chinese curse is: "May you live in interesting times!" So, as I got into my teens and JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other people were assasinated I then lived in interesting times. And they were right. Those times including the Viet Nam War were horrific in most ways to live through. Especially because people expected to get nuked out of existence most of the time since the late 1940s until about 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
So, for example, 9-11 and since was only about 1/2 or 1/4 as bad as the 1950s through about 1990. And then the Great Depression and world War II was about 10 or more times worse than the 1950s through the 1990s. So, coming out of World War II there were a lot of people with pretty serious psychological problems. But, there are a lot of people with serious psychological problems after the last 12 years too. So, I guess everything is relative to what you have experienced in your life. "You only know what you have experienced directly".
However, also with 7 billion people on earth instead of only about 1 or 2 billion in the aftermath of World War II is also a bomb waiting to go off too. So, maybe it is important not to underestimate that bomb either.
So, sometimes a whole lot of people would rather just watch the clouds float across the sky because trying to think about all the problems of the present day might be useful and might not. So people do what they have to to survive another day.
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