Description: Ecology, environmental health, and modern day living
I do not normally blog directly from my heart, nor do I usually fill any of my social media profiles with my beliefs about politics, religion, or race … Honestly, I don’t feel I’m informed enough about any of those areas to put myself out there in a way that invites attack. However, the shooting yesterday of yet another innocent black man by an out of control police officer has hit home in a strange way.
Yesterday was my son’s 14th birthday, and as many young teens are wont to do, he is pushing every day for more freedom, fewer restrictions, more ability to stray from home without me. Like many parents, I worry incessantly over whether or not I should allow him to wander without me.
For his birthday, I posted a bunch of photos – wonderful, amusing snapshots of the creative, sometimes silly and often introspective child he was (amusing to me, anyway; for him some of them I’m certain are a horrible embarrassment). One of them, my favorite, I used as my “profile picture” on my personal Facebook page. It is the photo of the face of a handsome child intently studying a butterfly that is balanced on a leaf the child is pinching between his fingers. My son is a budding entomologist (though he