It breaks my heart. What more could a young guy ask for? Sports, fame, glory, money, girls. That’s it. That’s all you need. You got it all. You won. Now go enjoy your life. You’re living the dream of all young guys that I know. I remember when I was a young guy, I cared about two things: sports and girls. In that order. I got up every day thinking of where I’d play ball. What game I’d play? Who was around? I couldn’t wait to get to the park. Plenty of days we just played on the streets. You remember those days. But what makes a kid like Hernandez choose the gangsta life over playing football and $40,000,000?  Not for the money that’s for sure. Was he going to make 40 million being a thug?  It had to be something in his brain that gave him more pleasure than football and money. I’ve thought about it a lot. Not because I cared that the Pats inexplicably lost a player with rare talent. More importantly, I want to understand the psyche of a twenty year old in today’s society. I want to know for a very personal reason. Maybe, just maybe, I could understand why my son did the self- destructive things he did. A kid blessed with looks, personality, opportunity, athleticism, doting parents. And I’ve see too often this tragedy repeated time and again. Just the other day, I was watching the news, and barely recognized the picture of a kid who was charged with abusing his girlfriend’s dog, kicking and throwing it visciously by the neck. I knew him about 10 years ago, tall and handsome, a great baseball player, who had just lost a baseball scholarship to a big Florida school due to drugs. Today, 10 years later on TV, his picture was grotesquely bloated, presumably the result of years of putting poison in his body. Like my son, a good kid who became barely recognizable. After years of tears and thinking about it, I’ve come to three sad conclusions: 1) today there are too many easy choices, too many easy distractions, too many hi-tech playthings. At the touch of your fingertips there are easy paths to satisfaction, pleasure, drugs, phony friends. The simple life of sports and girls is gone. 2) the hardworking immigrant generation is dying off. They were our role models. We grew up watching our dads and moms go out to work every day at 7am and come home at 6pm. That learned work ethic helped us succeed in life. We worked hard. We had goals.  Good jobs and homes. Unfortunately, our generation made a huge mistake.  We gave our kids more material things, but not a better life. We’ve raised a generation with a softer work ethic. America has grown weaker. 3) finally, this weakness is being exploited by drug dealers and terrorist nations whose strategy is to destroy us from the inside with drugs. 9/11 killed about 3,000 people. That was a diversion. Drugs kill far more every year. America’s real threat comes from the drugs that these murderers smuggle into our country, corrupting far too many of our beautiful kids. They’re killing the hearts and souls of our best and brightest.
And it breaks my heart.