I remember a lady who put up a sign on her children's doors that said:"Clean Up Your Mess".  It is a lament heard in most families.  Kids, like their parents, seem to take to allowing clothing, papers and most anything brought in from outside or taken off shelves or out of closets to just lie where they are dropped.  Our society is like this.  We are a messy crowd. We always have been.

As the New Year closes in on us we have yet one more chance to clean up our messes.  Some cynics say it will never happen.  The optimistic among us say sure, we have problems and they clutter up our lives but we can solve them.  We have to work at it and realize as the old folk song puts it, "You got to walk that golden highway; you got to walk it by yourself. Nobody here can walk it for you- you got to walk it all alone." You can either leave a mess as you go or clean up after yourself.

As my grandson states, you can't blame it all on Mr. Bush.  He certainly inherited the messiness in the American way.  Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, he conflated the mess and now is going to pass it on to Mr. Obama.  As Mr. Obama has said, it is up to all of us to get together, join his team and clean up the mess.

I wish it would be as easy as Mr. Obama clearly laid it out for us.  It is easy to go to war but hard to end it.  It is easy to say horrible things and do horrible things to others and believe you will be forgiven.  Those who had horrible things done to them and have had horrible things said about them are not so forgiving.  Humans have longer memories than elephants.  You never know where elephants will go but we can go right to that mess we made. The message is to start cleaning it up now.

There is not just one mess as Bob Herbert put it in the NY Times this morning.  It is the wars, the economic melt down, the energy mess, the green mess and the education mess.  The messes about the aged and their care as well as the rights of children that have been abrogated all should be included in the menu of cleaning up messes. Nobody can do it for them: they got to do it by themselves.

We should never resort to pointing fingers at others who we place blame on. Yes, they are stinkers and they live along with us, but we must not let the morass of garbage they created smother us while we do nothing.

Carol and I have been cleaning up the small messes we have in our lives.  We have also helped others who seem not to see that the problems facing them were created by them.  That is part of the cleaning up.  You can show others that if they contribute their little mess to that of others until there is a whole big mess it will smother us all. Nobody else is going to clean it for us; we got to do it by ourselves.