When an old man died in the geriatric ward of a nursing home in an Australian country town, it was believed that he had nothing left of any value.  Later, when the nurses were going through his meager possessions, they found this poem. Its quality and content so impressed the staff that copies were made and distributed to every nurse in the hospital.  One nurse took her copy to Melbourne ..
The old man’s sole bequest to posterity has since appeared in the Christmas editions of magazines around the country and appearing in mags for Mental Health. A slide presentation has also been made based on his simple, but eloquent, poem.  And this old man, with nothing left to give to the world, is now the author of this ‘anonymous’ poem winging across the Internet.
~ CRANKY OLD MAN ~
What do you see nurses? . . . . . .What do you see?
What are you thinking . . . when you’re looking at me?
A cranky old man, . . . . . .not very wise,
Uncertain of habit . . . . . . . . with faraway eyes?

Who dribbles his food . . . . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . . .’I do wish you’d try!’
Who seems not to notice . . . the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . . . . A sock or shoe?

Who, resisting or not . . . . lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . . The long day to fill?
Is that what you’re thinking?. . . Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse . . . you’re not looking at me.

I’ll tell you who I am . . . . . As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, . . . . . as I eat at your will.
I’m a small child of Ten . . . . with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters . . . . . who love one another.

A young boy of Sixteen . . . . . with wings on his feet.
Dreaming that soon now . . . . . a lover he’ll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . . . my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows . . . . . that I promised to keep.

At Twenty-Five, now . . . . . I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . . . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . . . . With ties that should last.

At Forty, my young sons . . . . . have grown and are gone,
But my woman is beside me . . . . to see I don’t mourn.
At Fifty, once more, . . . . Babies play ’round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . My loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me . . . . My wife is now dead.
I look at the future . . . . . I shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing . . . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . . . And the love that I’ve known.

I’m now an old man . . . . . . . and nature is cruel.
It’s jest to make old age . . . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles . . . . . grace and vigour, depart.
There is now a stone . . . . . where I once had a heart.
But inside this old carcass . . . . . A young man still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells.
I remember the joys . . . . . . I remember the pain.
And I’m loving and living . . . . . . . life over again.

I think of the years, all too few . . . . . gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . .  . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people . . . . .. . . open and see.
Not a Cranky Old Man! - - Look closer . . . . see . . . ME ! ! !
Remember this poem when you next meet an older person who you might brush aside without looking at the young soul within . . . .

we will all, one day, be there, too!

Meanwhile, out in The People's Republic of California.

You wonder why I get upset with progressives running our once golden state?
 
Even MORE reasons to avoid the left coast!
 
SURPRISE!!!  SURPRISE!!!
 
CALIFORNIA  Legislative Year Closed on Friday.
 
So what did they accomplish during this high-pressure year in Sacramento?
 
Here are some of the highlights of the session:
 
* Passed Cap-n-Trade Tax which will increase gas 0.63 to 0.93 cents a gallon change and the taxes that go with it.
 
* Proposed increase on a new tax every residence will pay for tap water!
 
* A $3.46B parks bond to pay for parks in "disadvantaged communities".  The debt service alone will be over $200 million a year.  The good news is some money goes to help fix the Salton Sea which should have always been a State responsibility!
 
* Law to release any lifer (murder, rape, child molestation, etc.) who is 60 years old and has already spent 25 years in prison!  Charles Manson would have qualified if he just waited a few months before dying, and the Melendez brothers that murdered their parents could be released in about 12 years?  Victims?... What victims?
 
* A new $ 50 charge on all residents living in mobile home parks to address “living condition enforcement” in those parks?  What the hell does that mean?  As if having to live in a mobile home park isn’t bad enough?  Regressive tax on the poor?
 
* Requires Tesla to either unionize with the United Auto Workers Union or forfeit State incentives to buy their electric cars!  Maybe political blackmail doesn’t count as breaking any law.  Unions are loving it.  “Watch out solar companies... They may be coming after you next!!!  Hang tight Elon!
 
* Reduce from a felony to a misdemeanor the purposeful intent to transmit the AIDS virus to an unknowing partner
 
* Give preferential treatment to prisoners convicted of serious crimes that are less than 25 years old because their brains are not mature enough to understand right from wrong.  Whaaat?
 
* A bill to require our true sex be omitted from drivers licenses?  Whaaat?
 
* Free legal services for illegal immigrants..  Of course!
 
* Establish safe "injection zones" run by the government to oversee people injecting heroin.
 
Of course no rules about filth, massive numbers of illegal immigrants and street living homeless people...probably part of the NEW California lifestyle.
 
Yep, it all passed!  You may consider forwarding this so that ALL Californians can be proud of CALIFORNIA elected officials.

Expert Destroys Climate Hysteria

What I Learned in the Peace Corps

> Did a Former Peace Corps Volunteer Defend Trump’s Sh*thole ...
>
>
> Africa the Dark Continent.  This is horrifying, but needs to be known.  Makes us, as a nation,
> look unbelievably naive and pathetically stupid.
>
> All cultures do not share the same mores, ethics and standards.
>
>The real world….What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa:  Trump Is Right
>
> By Karin McQuillan
>
> Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a
> community center in a rural town.  Life was placid, with no danger,
> except to your health.  That danger was considerable, because it was,
> in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment"
>
>
> In plain English: s--- is everywhere.  People defecate on the open
> ground, and the feces is blown with the dust on to you, your clothes,
> your food, the water.  He warned us the first day of training: do not
> even touch water.  Human feces carries parasites that bore through
your skin and cause organ failure.
>
> Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades
> later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is
> no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations
> of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it
> are racism.
>
> Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand
> boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame
> Cathedral.  The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his
> head not to see.
>
> I have seen.  I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant
> things are not true.
>
> Senegal was not a hellhole.  Very poor people can lead happy,
> meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our
> terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human
> relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.
>
> As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved
> Senegal.  In fact, I was euphoric.  I quickly made friends and had an
> adopted family.  I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man.
> People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew
> you, their innermost thoughts.
>
> The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly
> obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us.  The truths we
> hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese.  How could
> they be?  Their reality is totally different.  You can't understand
> anything in Senegal using American terms.
>
> Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people,
> extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one
> generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to
> four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I
> witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age
> ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did
> not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western
> ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a
> few cents to have cash for the market. What I did witness every day
> was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and
> fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather
> wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded
> grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had
> conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their
> co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.
>
> Yemily was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.
>
> The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed “ they were unknown."  The
> value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal
> everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some
> Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.
>
> We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa.  The
> kleptocracy extends through the whole society.  My town had a medical
> clinic donated by international agencies.  The medicine was stolen by
> the medical workers and sold to the local store.  If you were sick and
> didn't have money, drop dead.  That was normal.
>
> So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's
> Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't
> bathing him, I wasn't surprised.  It was familiar.
>
> In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom.  Go to the post
> office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp.
> After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed
> or thrown out.  That was normal.
>
> One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.  One day, as the
> wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from
> the medical aides, who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree
> instead of working, collapsed to the ground.  They turned their heads
> so as not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.
> Callousness to the sick was normal.
>
> Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as
> you would have them do unto you.  It's not.  It seems natural to us
> because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.
>
> We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It's not.  My town
> was full of young men doing nothing.  They were waiting for a
> government job.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business
> was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world
> bureaucratic kleptocracy.  It is also incompatible with Senegalese
> insistence on taking care of relatives.
>
> All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians.  If a
> Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country.
> The reason?  Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for
> free, and you would have to say yes.  End of your business.  You are
> not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives.  The
> result: Everyone has nothing.
>
> The more I worked there and visited government officials doing
> absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the
> idea that a job means work.  A job is something given to you by a
> relative.  It provides the place where you steal everything to give
> back to your family.
>
> I couldn't wait to get home.  So why would I want to bring Africa
> here?  Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on
> our shores with a visa.
>
> For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace
> Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever.  I take seriously
> my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on
> the American heritage to the next generation.
>
> African problems are made worse by our aid efforts  Senegal is full of smart, capable
> people.  They will eventually solve their own country's problems.
> They will do it on their terms, not ours.  The solution is not to bring Africans here.
>
> We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world
> immigration by the hundred million with chain migration.  They tell us
> we must end America as a white
>
> , Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation to prove we are not
> racist.  I don't need to prove a thing.  Leftists want open borders
> because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate
> America.  They want to destroy America as we know it.
>
> As President Trump asked, why would we do that?
>
> We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in.  I was
> happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor
> Senegalese.  I am not willing to donate my country.
>
> If ever there were an email that needed to be sent around the globe,
> this is it.  What a story this woman tells of what is actually happening in places we send our
> hard earned tax dollars.
>
> We are fools to do it.

What The Head Of UN Global Communications Just Said About Our Border Should Scare You

Benjamin Netanyahu Puts Iran On Notice. Here’s What He Said.