Have a Blessed, Garbage FREE Day!!

At this glad time of year when there is so much celebration with Hanukkah and Christmas and all they bring, sometimes sadness creeps in, like the Grinch that stole Christmas. Sometimes there are sad memories or missing loved ones who are far away now, but that is usually balanced with the happy and joyous memories of Christmas past.

However, should sad things come along that might ruin the celebration, remember the Rule of the Garbage Truck applies. A recent e-mail explained that “many people are like garbage trucks, they run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger and disappointment.

As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they’ll dump it on you. Don’t take it personally, Just smile, wave, wish them well and move on.

Don’t take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home or on the streets of Happy Camp.

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day. Life’s too short to wake up in the morning with regrets.

So Love the people who treat you right. Pray for the ones who don’t. Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it. Have a blessed, garbage-free day!”

Are You a Teenager that Drinks?

by Donald O’Reilly

Are You a Teenager that Drinks?

It’s a great feeling when you tip the bottle back and let the liquid fly. The people that you couldn’t get are now having a staring contest with you from across the room. Even the people you could get with are looking even better. Time’s flying and you could care less about what’s going on with the world. Troubles are gone and every drink you take is another mile away from reality.

Almost all the teens today are drinking before they get into high school. They’re ruining their lives before they even begin. I almost got sucked into the world of alcoholism. Then, somehow, I clawed my way out of it. Now I hope I’m an example to the little kids to stay clean in high school instead of drinking and partying all the time. It may be fun while they’re doing it but not in the end. I have compared my life and grades to my freshman year and I like the outcome of who I am now, to what I was then. I realize how immature I was acting, and how much of a fool I made out of myself.

Various websites show that more than 40% of adolescents who drink are going to be alcoholics. They may have the choice now to drink, but in 5 years it will be a habit they can’t stop. Some students may be fortunate enough to snap out of this nasty cycle. Fortunately, I was one of the smarter ones and stopped drinking little by little.

My grades for the beginning of my freshman year were D, A-, D, A-, A-, A+ and B. then at the end of my freshman year, when I started drinking, my grades were D, C, F, F, B-, C+, and B. What an effect drinking made on my grades! These are not the grades I would like the college I am planning on going to see.

Most adolescents start drinking because of an older sibling that does it and they think it’s cool. So when you see someone under the age of 14 drinking, you can thank their household. In public, no one likes a drunken person. They just laugh at them because they’re making themselves seem stupider than they really are. Sooner or later they’re going to be known by everyone as a raging alcoholic who can’t handle their liquor and has abusive problems when they have been drinking. They will get into a car wreck and seriously injure themselves, or die, and either of those outcomes is not good.

Everyone thinks that drinking isn’t so bad when they’re young. They don’t look at their role models and see how much drinking has screwed up their lives. Most of the drinkers’ now a days have at least one parent that is an alcoholic so when they drink they don’t think there is anything wrong with it, till they don’t have a job, a life, and are not happy with what they’re doing in this world.

Drinking is a disease and you might be able to cure it, if you get help soon enough. So contact your local AA advisors and get in a class before the disease kills you!

Donald O’Reilly

Family

by Alexis

As a Happy Camp High School student, I am here to tell you about Family. I haven’t’ really been into my family, until I reached the age of 14. I finally realized if I don’t talk to my family that I would regret it.

I was never into my family when I was in my childhood. I lived far away from my family at one point in time. In that time I felt like there was a big hole in me and I never could find out what it was. One day I was sitting on the front of the house. I received a phone call and it was my mom. She said that she was coming to get me and she missed me and couldn’t wait to see me. She finally got her act together and realized I was what she wanted to help her through what she was going through. She showed up and I got my stuff and came home. Ever since I have tried so hard to keep up with my family, but some times there are too much, emotionally and physically.

My family has so much to share with me if I sit down and just listen five minutes. I feel it changes my life. These are some things I learned from my family stories, pictures, baskets, dresses, regalia, recipes movies and many more. I drifted away and mom tried to get me to go here and there with her to see family and stuff like that, but I would just stay home. I felt like the only thinks I needed was me, myself and I, but I found out the hard way, losing family I never had a chance to sit down and talk to. I lost a lot of history, and things I will never be able to recover.

People don’t realize that our elders are the most important people to our communities. These precious people hold and know many things. When I look around I see how kids act toward their elders. They may have been born in the 50’s or the 60’s but if it wasn’t for them telling us to do thing or that, just think of what the world would be like today! If we can just sit down to hear our elders out, I bet that we would have a better understanding of one another. Our elders know how to help us or teach us. If we just gave them the respect they need they won’t be so hurt or torn. We need to give our elders more respect and more love.

Sometimes some people don’t have a mom or a dad, brother or sister, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have family. Maybe you live with your auntie or uncle or grandparents, but you still have family. We all need to sit down and talk more to the people that are close to us.

Sound of Music at Happy Camp High

by Cody

What happened to the Music?

Do you love music? I do. I feel that it is a statement in itself. It expresses culture and life through the words of a song. Music states an individual’s personality by what instrument they play. Someone who plays electric guitar may be a person who likes to play hard rock, or maybe a person who plays the trumpet likes classical music.

At Happy Camp High School it has been extremely difficult to explore musical talent. “Why is this happening?” you’re wondering. This is a question that must be answered. You may not know this, but when a student does not show up for classes, it cuts down the budget for that particular class. If one student or more ceases to show up, then the class is cut. Another reason the music program was cut in Happy Camp High was the fact that the federal government would not fund the program because they want the students to learn the basics, such as math, history and English. With the loss of the music program in our school, we must find a way to integrate these programs back into the school curriculum.

There is no music program at Happy Camp High School. The loss of this program upsets me for many reasons. First of all, there are many students that can play an instrument, but have difficulties trying to learn the instrument. Many students, myself included, have to teach themselves by using the Internet or buying music books from a music store. Even then, I don’t really know if I’m playing the notes right. There is no guidance. I love playing the electric guitar; however, it’s hard for me to teach myself how to play. I wish a high school music program was available to any student who wants to learn.

Music is not only an excellent activity to learn, it also helps with many of your brain functions. Scientists say that music works the part of the brain where math is processed. Math is a very important subject in life to learn. If you can play an instrument you are most likely able to do math with no hassle.

The thing that most people don’t understand is that music is not just an extra curricular activity just to do to get easy credits for high school. It is part of everyday life. All the music you hear on the radio everyday is because someone might have taken a music program in their school. If you are exposed to music in school now it could become your career later in life.

With the budget for schools going down hill, the music and arts programs are usually the first to be cut. The federal government believes that music is not important to the school curriculum, when in reality it is what students need. If students had an outlet to get away from stress, they may possibly stay away from drugs. It would keep students minds on something they enjoy doing.

This will be a problem for many years if we don’t act now. There are options to ending this outrage. Schools could appeal to our elected representatives in our state and federal governments to fund the music programs.

This could happen. but without the proper agreements from the community this program will never progress in our schools.

If music was back in our schools then people with gifted talents can grow. Please help me and other students bring the music program back to the school curriculum. Don’t let music disappear from existence forever.

Happy Camp Is Like A Fish Bowl

A View From My Hill

Wild flowers at Wingate River Access

Happy Camp Is Like A Fish Bowl

By Linda Martin

Happy Camp is a small town and there’s no bad side of town. Every side is just about like any other. And this causes some people discomfort.

You see, if you’re used to being able to live on the good side of town in a larger community, it is a step down to come to a place like Happy Camp where we’re all together – the good, the imperfect, and whoever comes to live with us.

We’re deep inside the Klamath National Forest – a group of less than 1500 souls. Some were born here. Some have had family here for many centuries and others for more than one century. But many of us have no idea where our ancestors came from. We were born in this country which is not our ancestors’ native land, and we struggle to find a place we can call home. We’ve been drawn to this remote mountain community either by the hand of fate or the will of God, where we learn that Happy Campers are all like one big extended family. We’re together here, deep in the most remote part of the forest, trying to make the best of it.

So if you’re reading this website thinking you might want to move here as many have done before you, consider this. In Happy Camp we’re not just talking about the unity of mankind. We’re living it. There are no bad people here, but there are plenty of imperfect ones and if we’re going to be honest we’ll admit that everyone is imperfect. There are those who let it show and those who try to hide their imperfections, but in general we’re all pretty much alike.

Though there are no bad people here, there are bad drugs that cause some of our citizens to act in ways others consider to be irresponsible and immature. And in a larger town most of those people would be living on ‘the other side of town’ – forced by economic necessity to rent places that we can not see or be bothered by because we never go there.

Well in Happy Camp, we don’t have that type of luxury. There’s no bad neighborhood. All neighborhoods are pretty much alike with both good and troubled people in them. And though we may complain about our neighbors, they are still like our cousins, brothers and sisters, and they’re probably not going away any time soon. So like any big family there are sometimes petty arguments, then we usually get over them because that’s what people in families do.

So if you’re used to luxury living, it is possible Happy Camp isn’t the place for you. True, you could buy a home outside of town and only drive into town to get your mail and groceries, but then you’d miss the true beauty of Happy Camp. By true beauty I mean the friendships and comaraderie you find by associating with all classes of people here. Yet this apparently is not for everyone.

As editor of this news site I have met people who learned about the town from this site and came here to buy property. Please consider this your warning. Though Happy Camp is a beautiful and isolated community in the middle of a gorgeous national forest, we’re not all upscale and if you find that bothersome, you may want to look for other lodging.

However if you love humanity, care about people, and want to join together with all classes to help and find new kinds of friends, this is a great fishbowl to be in.

———-

Linda Martin is the editor and publisher of Happy Camp News. She writes novels in her spare time. Her writing website is at http://www.lindajomartin.com.

Is This Freedom?

by Linda Martin

Can we have freedom while standing on territory safeguarded by killing of innocents? Aren’t we losing a part of ourselves, when we allow innocent people to be victims of our warring governments? I feel so sad whenever I hear about people suffering because of the war. Just like in World War 2 when thousands of innocent Japanese civilians were killed by US bombs, I am distressed to know that children have died in Afghanistan during this conflict. Even hearing that the ten year old son of one of the Taliban leaders was killed distressed me. I don’t care who his father was – I do not want children to be cut down before they even get a chance to live. I have a young son about that age! I guess I lost my enthusiasm for this fighting at about the time the wrongful killings began.

I was reading an article in the SF Examiner yesterday about children – about 450 of them – in an orphanage in Kabul, Afghanistan. Most of the children had at least one parent, but that parent didn’t feel able to feed their child. So – there was a picture of little boys with smiling faces, eating plain rice for dinner. Is that all? Just rice? It was the only thing on their plates. It seems like the USA, land of prosperity, could do something to help those poor children return to their families with food in hand. How tragic for the people there, to be so destitute that they think their child will eat better in an institution.

What kind of freedom is this? I will never be free of the memory of these starving and dead children.

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