A farmer had some puppies he needed to sell. He painted a sign advertising the pups and set about nailing it to a post on the edge of his yard. As he was driving the last nail into the post, he felt a tug on his overalls. He looked down into the eyes of a little boy.

“Mister,” he said, “I want to buy on of your puppies.”

When the poet Edwin Markham reached retirement age, thinking he was set for life, he discovered he was penniless. So the story goes, his banker had defrauded him. From that point on he was obsessed with the evil done to him by a man who was suppose to be his friend.

Recently, in a county and a school system not to far from Nashville, a little girl was made stay in her room because she didn’t have tennis shoes for her P.E. class. Our granddaughter attends the same school, and was upset when her classmate told her she didn’t have shoes for PE, and that the flip flops she had on was all she had. Our granddaughter went home and told her mother, who in action called the teacher and learned that the little girl was from a poor family. Our granddaughter sent a new pair of tennis shoes too the little girl.

We hear countless remarks today about the high coast of living. However, we fail to hear enough and warn of the high cost of low living.

Benjamin Franklin once observed, “What maintains one vice would bring up two children.” Stop right here! Don’t read another word of this issue of Viewpoints until you have pondered seriously Franklin’s statement.

Two elderly men were discussing the lack of standing for something today, and one of them quoted an old staying, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow line and dead possums,” if that is the case, then the yellow lines and dead possums must be growing. To take a stand today on moral issues based upon “right” and “wrong” is to immediately become unpopular. Our entire population, at least at times, seems to be searching for “middle ground,” and as a result few are standing for anything.