Life is like a box of chocolates

Sometimes you bite into one and it is solid chocolate, the dark kind that lasts and lasts. Other times you get a gooey mess. After a while you learn to squeeze them just a little when no one is looking to tell what you are probably going to bite into. Experience is a great teacher. I wish I could convince young people, and I mean 30-somethings, that we 60-somethings have learned a few things that we would gladly share that might save them a few miles of bad road. Unfortunately, it is like teaching a pig to sing... you don't get anywhere and it annoys the pig.

My children, and your children think that their parents are senile, went though life with their heads in the sand, and couldn't possibly have anything worthwhile to say in the context of our modern "speed-of-light" society. Sometimes when I try to help by making a suggestion, I feel like that guy (Bruce Willis' character) in Sixth Sense who is dead throughout the whole movie but doesn't realize it and then it dawns on him why nobody seemed to acknowledge his presence. I hope I did not spoil the movie for you but if you haven't seen it by now, then you share in the blame. It seems I am jumping from movie to movie, but there is much to be learned from watching movies. I remember one particularly interesting line from "True Lies" when Tom Arnold says to Arnold Schwartzenegger " You think you are their parents... their parents are actually Axel Rose and Madonna" implying that, as Jesus said..."A prophet is without honor in his own country." Total strangers can have more influence on your kids than you have.

I bring this up because I have just returned from Miami. It is a booming third world country in the south of Florida where blue eyes are a rarity, and NOT going through the red light will get you hit in the ass by the car behind you. Almost everything is different. One cannot live there successfully at a level lower than the UPPER middle class. Middle-middle does not cut it. The public schools are so awful that unless you want your kid knifed during recess in the third grade, you have to send the little dear to a private school like Ransom Everglades, or Carrolton where tuition is that same as the gross national product of Honduras. By the time you pay your car lease, your taxes, and your condo fees, unless you are doing something that generates income while you are not there and uses OPW (other people's work) or you are 7 feet tall and and play basketball, you can't afford to send your kids to school, except for the free one...with the onsite police substation and emergency room.

I say this because (of experience) when I raised my kids, they were smart enough to go to a gifted school where the worst violence was when another student hit you with his slide rule or pocket protector. This is a whole new world, somewhat less so in Sarasota. A kid might be safer going to school in Baghdad than going to a Miami public school. So now is the time to start thinking of a "better mousetrap" in ones chosen profession rather than working ones fingers to the bone by the hour. There are not enough hours in the day to salt enough filthy lucre away to pay private school tuition. Trying to recreate the life you lived in Smallville SRQ, in Nueva Havana, is an impossibility unless you have the ability to insulate yourself from the herd the way they do in the real third world. We have traveled there and seen the chauffeurs and walls and guard dogs, and all the rest that separates the haves from the have-nots in those countries south of the border. It is a natural way of life thought South and Central America. Folks living in Miami need to understand that they are not really living in the US. The rules of middle America do not apply. Those of Buenos Aires or Santiago are the ones Miami lives by. Two classes, haves and have nots. To get into the "have" class takes more effort than most people are willing to exert. Without it though, you get to be a "have-not" with just a little more stuff than your homeys.