2010: The Year Of The Child

Duane Brayboy, a conservative blogger in metro Atlanta, Ga., writes: "Here we are. 2010, a new decade. It doesn’t seem like that long ago I anxiously called my apartment to let my wife (who just gave birth to our daughter) know about the first of two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. For a moment, I was gripped in complete fear over the lives our two children for the world they had just entered. Nothing I had ever experienced could have prepared me to explain the sudden death of about 3,000 people right here in the US. Nine years later, both of our kids have grown from babies to independent children who no longer need mommy or daddy to change their diapers or feed them (Lord knows!). In ten more years they will be college age and my wife and I will be getting junk mail from AARP. Over the years I have worked with children and watched them grow up into adults with their own families. But it is nothing like watching your own children sprout right before your eyes. What we allow to be imparted in our children today will grow and multiply in this upcoming generation. That is why it is never cute or funny to me when I see our children doing things like this, or this."

He continues his commentary: "While listening to Michael Baisden about a couple of weeks ago, a gentlemen who worked for a non-profit that specializes in children in one Florida county said that he has been having great difficulty locating mentors for about 1000 kids in his non-profit program. Think about it. 1,000 people. That is a community, an economy, a corporation, an entire hospital staff that for now are being trained by the likes of these teachers. If we don’t make our children a priority now, ten years from now we will still be talking about the shortage of Black men who are willing to marry, kids who have nothing to do but to either get pregnant or kill somebody, etc. We cannot allow police officers to take the place of fathers and government programs to play the role of nurturing mothers. The time for only getting concerned when the path of our troubled youths cross with a racist police officer is over."