I couldn’t believe it. I had just been thinking the other day of how stupid it is to believe such a thing, but it had happened again, so maybe it is possible for such a thing to happen. Perhaps I should backup a little in order to explain, more clearly, what this thing is.

I had been cutting my grass with my lawnmower, when one of the wheels started to wobble, which is not unusual for anything or anyone as old as my lawnmower is, but it was irritating, so I stopped cutting my grass, and went into my garage to get my tools. I found it was necessary to remove one of the nuts from the bolt it was screwed-onto, but that nut was under the mower and I could not really see it, but I could feel it enough to get my socket wrench to work on it. I carefully backed the nut off the bolt because in the back of my mind I could recall a similar event, when the it I earlier referred to, had occurred. Since I did not want it to happen again, I proceeded with caution. No such luck…

As I slowly pulled back the socket, expecting to easily extract the nut, I found that the nut was nowhere to be seen. It must have fallen off, but as I felt every square inch of the ground below the bolt, I could not feel, nor find, it. I then moved the lawnmower, making sure to mark the spot where the nut had fallen. Thinking back, I really should have originally moved the lawnmower onto the driveway, instead of leaving it sitting in the grass, but what is the challenge in that. I must have explored the grassy area for at least five minutes. I even got out a magnet, which I used to scour the area. Despite my best efforts to avoid it from happening, it had. The nut had just disappeared.

How many times had I said that phrase, “it just disappeared” in my life? How many things had I dropped, or set down something, someplace, and never found? Too many to remember and too many to name, but I will try. Other nuts, bolts, twist ties, tools, pins, pills that had fallen on floor, coins, which, too, had fallen and rolled somewhere, but were never located. It was weird…in the back of my mind, despite my most sincere intellectual effort to believe that such a thing was impossible, I had to reluctantly admit there must be a place where things can occasionally, just disappear…or do I?

The reason I bring this up now is not to find out if I am alone in my unrealistic beliefs, but to tie it to current events. We have all dropped things of little significance in our lives, and it was the lack of value we attached to those things, which caused us to NOT take the time, or effort, to find them. None of them were actually lost; we just stop looking.

In my generation, Americans have misplaced, dropped, or devalued a lot of things. Things like our belief in the importance of our basic freedoms, of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness; or the Declaration of Independence; or the Constitution; or the Bill of Rights. Other things we have devalued include the importance of voting, and holding our representatives accountable for what they swore to do, but haven’t. We have just let things slide down some unseen hole, where we don’t want to look into, for fear something down there will bite us; not in the hand, but in the butt. So many things just are not considered to be worth the effort to hold onto, nor look for, anymore. Our religious freedoms, our believing that being taught the entire history of America, is important to our country’s success, nor ours. The list is too long to mention here, but I am positive everyone can recall something, which has also just disappeared, like personal responsibility, and independence; or will someday… perhaps Christmas.

I believe we have two choices: One is to treat everything of value as something worth looking for until we find and secure them again…like in the parable from the Bible (Yes, I said, Bible), which begins, “What woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?” The story doesn’t tell us how she lost the coin because we have all lost something. What is important is that she searched and searched until she found it. It must be noted that it was also necessary for her to light a lamp, which greatly assisted her in finding what she was seeking; unlike me and the nut, or you and the “fill-in-the-blank”. I must really make a point here to note that the media used to be something that provided light, which used to help people either find or understand something, or make something of value easier to see, but it is no longer doing nearly so much, anymore. Instead, they are, more often than not, projecting darkness, where things can just disappear, if no other source of light is provided, or found.

The second choice to be like the Eloi; characters who lived above-ground in the year 802,701 A.D., in H.G. Wells’ story, The Time Machine. They are described as “people who have no knowledge of the past and no ambition for the future.” This description is alarmingly similar to too many people today. The sad part is that it has happened to us in a little over one-hundred years, since the writing of that story, and not the 800,000 years H.G. Wells imagined, in his tale.

The Choice has always been ours, but too many of us have devalued that Choice, and it has, unfortunately for them, and us, just disappeared. Just some thoughts I felt were worth sharing.