Some years ago, a book appeared on the best seller list called All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten which still remains popular today. In this book, the author, Robert Fulghum, held to the belief that all we really need to know about how to live life, what to do and how to be, we learned in kindergarten, not graduate school. Things like share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. The journey to my becoming Mayor of Dublin first started when I got hung up on one of these basic concepts—clean up your own mess. About five years ago, Dublin had a beloved mayor, Red Seigars. He had a weekly column in the Dublin Citizen called “Ask the Mayor.” I was a faithful reader. Week after week he pleaded with people to mow their yards and clean up their property. This frustrated me because I felt that Mr. Seigars was compelled to use his valuable time as Mayor asking people to do what they already knew they were supposed to be doing…cleaning up their own messes and taking personal responsibility….something we learned in kindergarten or at least we were taught in kindergarten. Maybe some of us didn’t learn it so well. Anyway, I shot off a fiery Letter to the Editor stating what I thought about the subject and that I felt that I was sure that Mr. Seigars would rather be writing about more important issues that the city faced. That’s how my relationship started with the City of Dublin, why I ran for City Council and then for Mayor. Mr. Seigars and I both love Dublin so much that we want it to look the best that it can and thus we feel inclined to address the problem in the local and social media. I sincerely hope that it will not be a topic that I have to address very often. I daresay that many of us learned the same lessons and more from another book, The Bible, at Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. Indeed, everything you really need to know is in that book somewhere: the Golden Rule, love, basic sanitation, ecology (for example, conserving water in a drought year), politics, and sane living. If you haven’t been doing much reading lately, you might want to check out one of these books I’ve mentioned and brush up on life’s basic lessons. Think about what a better and more beautiful world it would be if all of us in Dublin–Texas–America–the world–took personal responsibility and cleaned up our own messes and loved our neighbors as ourselves. Dublin is already a great place to live, but it could be AWESOME.
This is a great post, and you are absolutely correct!