TALES...SPECIAL PASSOVER ESSAY

I've recently been in a sort of situation where I have had to make a number of personal sacrifices in the name of something or someone else that I believe in. (No--I'm not going to tell you the exact things I'm talking about...it's NONE of your business anyway. And besides, I'm not exactly writing what follows anyway to either bring glory to myself in any way, shape, or form, or to in contrast bemoan, begrudge, or complain about making such sacrifices. So therefore, I'm under no obligation to reveal such things to you if I do not wish to.)

And it seems to me that in my recent making of such sacrifices, how distant, foreign, and remote the concept of sacrificing anything for any particular cause has now become, and how wide a perception it seems to be that the notion of sacrificing anything of yourself in the midst of a society of instant gratification has turned out to be very passe. After all, this is the era of "I want it now!"--INSTANT fast food, INSTANT one-hour photos, INSTANT pancakes and TV dinners...and so on. (And, yes, I'll admit it--maybe I'm not totally immune from this either. Coming from one who now owns a microwave and other "instant" modern convienences--yes, even the device I use to write this essay--I guess I should be careful what I myself rant and rave about here, lest I hear the words "He who casts the first stone...")

But in case someone out there gets even the remotest of an inkling of a clever idea that I have lived a charmed life--let me go ahead and dispel that notion at this time right from the start. Not to glorify myself by any means...but throughout most of the time that I grew up, I usually didn't have as much in the way of the so-called convienences and "necessities" that a young growing boy like myself just desperately thought that he needed.

Being the son of a single mother barely living on the fringes of the economic margin didn't necessarily allow me to have the Atari video games (yes--strangely enough...I still remember a time in the past where there weren't such things as online gaming, Windows compatibility, etc.) that the other kids had. The best I could manage in that department was a sort of limited setup of a video game that had two games on it--Ping Pong and jai alai--that I think I got as a result of selling something like Grit newspapers, Christmas greeting cards, or something along those lines. (Boy, was I forced to be a salesman in those days to even get by, much less get anything that I might have wanted at the time. I actually thought at that time that I might wind up to be a real salesman. But that was years before I tried to do that to survive and found myself constantly falling short in that department...)

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