Every girl wants to look like a Barbie Doll and the boys want to be one of these "super' characters. What do they see a real? Killings, wars, lies from the very "top".........The real world they see is scary. Money looms in every form over them, over us, over everybody. The world has gone crazy! Great write, Odin!!

Love ya!

Jane

You are so right, most of society is living in n wannabe, plastic world of make-believe, far from reality even though they will claim that they are genuine. It is always something like fires that are raging that bring reality to a head.

I recall when I was in Northern California in the 1960s there was a song about Daly City and its "little houses made of ticky-tacky." An engineer friend of mine discovered that his house was being held up by chicken wire and stucco because termites had eaten all the studs and footers. A secretary of mine with a swimming pool, long neglected from five marriages, found it sliding downhill. Already housing prices were skyhigh and the only new place to build was on fill in San Francisco Bay or 50 miles away. On a couple of visits, LA appeared worse. I interviewed California State-Long Beach and California State-San Fernando Valley and found that I could live there on the salary offered in 1980.

Houston is growing, primarily from immigrants. The business of Houston is no longer oil but business. There is a false sense of prosperity but generally, the whole city is one strip city mall after another with pavement taking over what used to be swampy bayou. A year ago, we got 50 inches of rain throughout the city in two days with hurricane Harvey, an estimated 280,000 homes were lost. Insurance companies have abandoned much of the city. Disaster relief is just costing too much.

When are our people and lawmakers going to focus on our real security problems: population growth and global warming?

Ron

Still, there are those, who succeed even though all around them life is a tragedy.

What a world we live in. Not especially inviting.