WAUG Kids belong to the What About Us? Generation(s), or WAUG generation. Their voices are silent because they have not been conceived yet - they are to be born on planet Earth in 20, 40, 60 or more years.
Everything we do each day contributes to the legacy these kids will inherit.
Kindness, good schooling, tolerance, understanding and justice will last only as long as we keep contributing our good behavior to the ongoing flow of culture. By "we," I mean people all over the world who are currently alive, making billions of good and bad choices each day.
Burning forests, tossing plastic into streams, pumping sewerage into rivers and lakes, carelessly disposing of every kind of material contributes negatively to the legacy we are leaving to the children to the WAUG generations. Being responsible and caring citizens of earth and working to improve the environment contributes positively to the legacy.
I call myself Dr. Waug, but my real name is James P. Louviere. I'm 72 years old, and for most of my life I was complacent, thinking "I'm doing my part as a parent, school teacher, professor, writer, religion teacher, musician and actor, and my legacy will be okay, even if I'm dirt poor." Then suddenly, about five years ago, I suffered a series of misfortunes that left me helpless for a couple of months. in a wheelchair, and then in intense physical therapy for 16 monts. I'm still not my former self. That's probably good, since my "former self" was too munch of a know-it-all, reckless, and what one of my professors called "cavalier." Since my collapse, I've been much chastened and forced to reconsider my position in life. In short, I've mellowed.
Through an undeserved stroke of good fortune, I was offered a guest professorship in Bangkok for a short time that prompted the President of Assumption University of Thailand to create special position in the Office of the President, where I was his editor and a special assignments ESD (English as a Second Language) instructor. The work opened my eyes to the larger world in a very powerful way - I coached graduate and undergraduate students and some staffers in English and helped a number of students with their theses and dissertations; I researched special topics for the University, edited university bulletins, graduate catalogs, and other publications, and was a guest contributor of weekly articles in The Bangkok Post's Education supplement from March to August, 2007. My work demanded that I help Thai, Indian, European, Myanmar, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodia and Philappine students.
Among my friends and colleagues were admirals, engineers, law professors, a physician, at least two martial arts experts, poets and musicians. I had lived and taught in Germany for over twenty years, and in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and New York City for another twenty six, but it was my Asian experience that really aroused my awareness of our current generations responsibility as the builders and guardians of the Legacy of Humanity that the "WAUG" Kids will have to cope with or enjoy when they reach their time of life.
There are some who care about particular areas of activity that involve our "Legacy." Some wealthy individuals want to endow Music Conservatories, Medical Research Labs, Art and Film Libraries, and some even try to send more food to starving children in Africa. Less well-off but equally well-meaning are some people who hope to stop medical research that harms caged animals; some groups want to ban fur coats, while others demand that people from one place be forbidden to live in some other place, which would be enforced at gunpoint and result in the round up, trial, and export of hundreds of thousands of people willing to do meanial work for low wages, work which "regular residents" refuse to do, even for higher wages.
Lots of untaxable income in the form of cash is made because various psychoactive substances are unavaialbe throgh commercial channels, and therefore, due to the basic law of supply and demnand, can fetch a very high price. Whole countries such as Mexico and Afghanistan are dominated by drug lords who form a kind of shadow government. Intervening in the face of such powerful and renegade groups is beyond most nations' capacity.Strangely, sports that kill animals, fishing and whaling that drives tuna and sharks and whales nearly to extinctin are allowed, and "sports" like driving gas hog cars around in 1000 consecutive left turns, consuming fuel, oil and tires and producing a lot of exhaust fumes as well as occasionally taking the lives of drivers and spectators are revered as "American Institutions" and viewed as a cash cow by broadcasters, and product sponsors like breweries and merchandise peddlers, approved broadcast media regulators, and tabbo subjects for environmental writers and "real American newspapers and TV critics.".
Arguing for sanity and responsibility with regard to fumes we pour into Earth's atmosphere, toxins we inject into the earth or pour into rivers, and the widespread sale of high-calorie, now-fiber, non-fresh and non-organic "food products" found in every supermarket is regarded by many Americans as "kookie" and "alarmist" behavior, even un-American and radical and unpatriotic.
alare a few "chicken littles" and "do-gooders" and "tree-huggers" who are scorned by "conservative" broadcasters and cartoonists and ridiculed viciously in letters to the editors and comments printed on the Internet. here seem to be only a tiny few who are even aware of it. Sadly, there are powerful individuals and groups that cynically ridicule those of us who do care. If we are concerned about the way we treat our planet, we are compared to "Chicken Little," who panicked that the sky was falling when he was hit on the head by a falling acorn. If we call for moderation and tolerance, we are called "bleeding hearts." If we welcome the poor and the ignorant and offer them solace, we are "unpatriotic" or at best "flakey."
So be it. I hope you will read this blog. I can't contribute to it every day, but I contribute to other blogs and websites, and work very hard to learn what we can and must do to preserve the good and lessen the evil in the Legacy of Humanity which the WAUG kids will inherit.
May you feel buoyed up by good fortune and the manifold little things that brighten each day, and may our Higher Powers look kindly upon you forever.
Thank you for finding out what WAUG kids are, and following my monologue. Please reply with your own comments, and, if you are so disposed, add a prayer or a "moment of silent reflection" to the flow of human energies that will be part of the WAUG kids' legacy.
James P. Louviere PS - google for Waug Kids Declaration of Dependance" which I published recently.
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