My new memoir WOODEN & ME is available here at Amazon

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Reasons to Count to 10 . . . or 100

If you were expecting 700 words of nice this morning, phone your sweet grandma. I’m in a sour mood. But before getting angry, let me share Thomas Jefferson’s “Ten Rules For A Good Life” I recently came across:

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

Never spend your money before you have it.

Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will never be dear to you.

Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

Never repent of having eaten too little.

Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

Don’t let the evils that have never happened cost you pain.

Always take things by their smooth handle.

When angry, count to 10 before you speak; if very angry, count to 100.

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After counting to 10, let me say I get angry when adults complain about today’s youth being lazy/rude/entitled/fill-in-the-negativity. The 88 high school seniors honored at this year’s 32^nd annual Star Scholar Awards are evidence that Millennials are awesome.

And while the Star Scholars stand out for their academics, volunteerism, athleticism, artistic talents and more, consider this: for each of them honored there were countless other worthy of nomination.

Here is another example of our amazing youth: over the past 17 years, students from Buena High have donated 11,000 hours restoring the Anacapa Island landscape to make it more hospitable for seabirds.

For these efforts the National Park Service has recognized Buena’s Environmental Club with the national Hartzog Volunteer Youth Group Award.

And while Ventura County is indeed special, rest assured every county across this great nation has its own star scholars and young volunteers.

The future is in good hands.

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After counting to 30, let me say I get angry when the Ventura County Board of Supervisors rushes through a proposal, such as it did by scrapping a three-member ethics commission that ruled on campaign finance complaints and replaced it with the appointment of two people – one who will investigate and a czar who will rule.

The law – co-authored by supervisors Steve Bennett and Kathy Long, and passed by a slim 3-2 vote – is troubling because it raises conflicts of issue, most especially because one of the two appointees has previously campaigned for and given money to Bennett.

Most agree campaign finance reform is a good thing, but this change is like trying to improve officiating in college basketball by allowing one of the coaches to handpick an alum from his school to call all the fouls.

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This statistic made me count to 50 in anger: on one single day this past January we had 1,147 homeless children, women and men in Ventura County.

Granted, this is 20 percent less than two years ago but that is meaningless to these 1,147 fellow humans.

We can, and must, continue to do better.

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I had to count to 70 after reading about a 6-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother who were picked up by Maryland police and held for more than five hours before their parents could even see them.

The siblings’ “crime”? Walking home from a park.

“Two kids that are unaccompanied and they’ve been walking around for about 20 minutes,” said the man who called 911.

It is not an isolated incidence of lunacy. A mother in South Carolina was jailed for letting her 9-year-old play alone in a park and a Florida mom was arrested because her 7-year-old was alone on a playground, to mention just two recent stories.

There weren’t enough jails to lock up the all the parents in the 1960s and ’70s who let their kids explore the world.

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I have to count to 100 every time a law enforcement officer (or volunteer cop) mistakenly shoots a person with a handgun when he or she meant to use a stun gun.

Who had the bright idea of making a stun gun in any way resemble a handgun in the first place?

How about forcing manufacturers to design stun guns shaped like flashlights – then a cop’s mistake of devices won’t be deadly.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon