Notes In My Head

Trumped Up Charges

2016-11-04T21:00:00.000-04:00

Donald Trump’s largest donor is a guy named Robert Mercer. He is a hedge fund zillionaire and a republican activist. He and his family have put more money into the effort to elect Donald Trump for president than anyone else in the country, including Trump himself. In this election cycle, one of the ways Robert Mercer spent his money was by funding one of the many republican super pacs that played a role during the primary process this year.

Robert Mercer funded his own group of related super pacs known as Keep the Promise and the person he put in charge of running them was Kellyann Conway who you know now as being Donald Trump’s campaign manager. When Kellyann Conway accepted the job as Donald Trump’s campaign manager, she had to quit her old job, running the Robert Mercer super pacs. So Robert Mercer had to replace her.

The guy Robert Mercer chose to place Kellyann Conway to run his super pac was a guy named David Bossie but very shortly after they hired him, he also left the Mercer family super pac to go work for the Trump campaign just like Kellyann Conway did. He became the Deputy Campaign Manager to Kellyann Conway in the Trump Campaign.

Robert Mercer is also reportedly the principle funder of Breitbart.com. Breitbart.com is a website which is on kind of a ragged, slightly unnerving edge of conservative media depending on where you’re coming from. They’ve been around for a while but if you want a little flavor of what Breitbart.com is like in the conservative media universe, Breitbart.com is these guys:

Breitbart famously called conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “Renegade Jew” for the crime of not supporting Donald Trump.

After the massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina where nine black church goers were killed in cold blood by a white supremacist who fetishized the confederate flag, Breitbart.com responded to that massacre with this:

The Breitbart.com editors are also seemingly encouraged to make as big a splash online as they can. One of their editors, Milo Yiannopoulos, very famously was banned from twitter permanently after he led an online campaign of racist and sexist abuse against the comedian Leslie Jones: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/18/milo-reviews-ghostbusters/

And

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanently-suspended-conservative-writer-milo?utm_term=.mb8aZLlEg2#.vdNwRmAVEv

In general Breitbart’s whole take on the Ghostbuster’s movie that featured SNL star Leslie Jones, was that it shouldn’t have been called “Ghostbusters”, it should have been called “Weight-watchers”.

So that’s what Breitbart is like.

When Donald Trump said he would “ban all Muslims” from the United States that struck most people as not just obscene but also kind of obscure. Where did that come from? It seemed like such a nutty idea. Where would someone even get that idea if they were going to propose that in a political campaign? Turns out, that’s not a nutty idea at Breitbart.com. Looking at their online footprint, in particular, one of their writers, Katie McHugh, who now goes by @deplorableKatie, frequently uses the hashtag #DeportAllMuslims, not that you can’t come here if you’re Muslim, but if you’re a Muslim who is here already, we’ll find you, round you up and deport you. Samples of her tweets:

“Immigration is terrorism, forever, until you’re conquered, close the borders”

“British settlers and their descendants built civilization, Indians never bothered to build more than a few teepees”

“British settlers built the USA. “Slaves” built the country much as cows “built” McDonalds”

This is Breitbart.com. Notice how in that last one the word “Slaves” has scare quotes around it…like they weren’t really slaves.

So that’s the flavor of Breitbart. Donald Trump biggest donor, Robert Mercer, is also reportedly the main funder of Breitbart.com. The head of Breitbart.com, Stephen Bannon, took leave from that publication at the same time Kellyann Conway came over from the Mercer super pac to become campaign manager. He took leave from Breitbart.com at the same time because the two of them, at the same time, were installed at the top of the masthead of the Trump campaign. At the same time Kellyann Conway from the Mercer super pac became the Trump campaign manager, the head of Breitbart.com, Stephen Bannon, became the campaign CEO. So, from two Mercer funded outfits, came the Trump campaign manager and the Trump campaign CEO.

It’s one thing to connect desperate dots but these dots are very close together and not hard to understand…Robert Mercer, the Mercer family and the Trump campaign.

Robert Mercer and the Mercer family also fund something that’s called the Government Accountability Institute. That sounds good, right? Sounds like it might be kind of a generic “good government” thing. It’s not a generic good government thing. It’s a right wing activist group, run by Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart.com, who is now CEO of the Trump campaign. It is also run by Peter Schweizer, who himself is a senior editor at Breitbart.com. So both places that Peter Schweizer works, is funded by Donald Trump’s biggest donor, Robert Mercer.

So, with that support, all funded by this one guy, Robert Mercer, Peter Schweizer wrote a book. And you will be very surprised to learn that this book spins some very elaborate, very damning, very dubious conspiracy theories about how "crooked", terrible and awful Hillary Clinton is. Once he produced this anti-Hillary Clinton book, called by the way “Clinton Cash”, with all these elaborate dubious theories about Hillary Clinton’s terribleness, the head of Breitbart, Donald Trump’s now campaign CEO, Stephen Bannon, decided to turn the book into a movie of the same name.

It’s all very neat and tidy. It’s all one piece, it’s all one freaking donor. This is the very specific pedigree of one corner of the conservative media world and now Republican presidential campaign, that doesn’t look very much like anything else in Republican politics. And yes, it is super right wing stuff, its conspiratorial stuff, but in a lot of ways, it is not normal Republican messaging. It’s unusual, “Banning all Muslims from the country”. This is the corner of the conservative media world that says that Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan is secretly working for Hillary Clinton and has been for months and he must be destroyed. And they maintain that every republican you’ve ever heard of who is NOT named Donald Trump, must be destroyed. Everyone from John Boehner, to Eric Cantor, to Paul Ryan to John McCain, in Breitbart.com “ville”, they aren’t just the Republican household names that have led this party, who every American has heard of if they care anything about politics, in Breitbart.com “land” all of those folks are Traitors. They’re evil secret liberals who must be destroyed. Breitbart.com has campaigned for primary challengers against John McCain, against Eric Cantor, against Paul Ryan, against John Boehner. They were the ones that led the online media campaign to throw John Boehner out as speaker of the house.

Also, I should let you know that Breitbart.com wants you to know about the rising threat of “Eco-sexuals”. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/03/bored-of-lgbtqi-try-ecosexuality/ Yes, people who have sex with trees. Yeah, people are “doing it” with trees you guys! Terrible! And if you like that story, you’ll notice in the upper right corner of the page, Breitbart will send you your very own copy of Clinton Cash FREE! Get yours now! And if you don’t read you can always click the button to get the DVD! Hurry! Supplies are Limited! Yeah, right! I don’t think supplies are limited. I’m pretty sure they have tons of them laying around.

This week, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that there has been a “break-out” from this otherwise insular little Breitbart.com corner of conservative media and political activism. Those two papers reported that apparently there are Breitbart.com fans, true believers, who buy this stuff who are working in the New York field office of the FBI. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were the first to report that the New York field office of the FBI actually used that anti-Hillary Clinton Book and the DVD of the same name, from the Breitbart.com guys, the Breitbart.com senior editor and his boss, the now CEO of the Trump campaign, they actually used that book as their source, for launching a local FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton. That was their evidence; that was their research. These agents in the New York field office of the FBI decided that they needed to look into what Breitbart.com was saying about Hillary Clinton. “Sounds terrible, sound totally legit, we should look into that. We’re the FBI”. It had previously been reported that these New York Field office FBI agents had brought this anti-Hillary stuff to a meeting with career Justice Department prosecutors back in February 2016. One of the participants in that meeting described it as “One of the weirdest meetings I have ever been to”. But all we knew prior to this was that they had brought some stuff about Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation to that meeting. We now know, with this new reporting that what these agents brought to that meeting was not just generic anti-Hillary Clinton stuff, or anti Hillary Clinton stuff they had cooked up on their own. No, this was stuff that had been cooked up at Breitbart.com. This was stuff that came from the “Eco-sexuals having sex with trees” website. That is what they had. That is what they brought to this meeting with the career Justice Department Prosecutors. And the career prosecutors were scratching their heads and saying “ummm I’m not sure that’s a case”.And they promptly denied the Field Agents request to investigate the dubious claims about Hillary Clinton and Clinton Foundation in the conspiracy laden, fact free book of Peter Schweizer.

Thanks to whatever is going on in that New York field office of the FBI, that little “adventure”, which is now reportedly over, that little adventure from the Breitbart.com readers in that New York FBI field office, that’s what’s out now, five days before the election. That’s what was breathlessly reported last night on Fox News. “Based on FBI sources, a whole new FBI investigation, one that was definitely going to lead to an indictment”. Fox News has since walked back the part about it definitely leading to an indictment but the Trump campaign? They’re still running with it. And of course they would. You’d expect them to. They bought and paid for it! The donor who is mostly funding the Trump for President Campaign, paid the people who created this story TO create this story! So, of course the Trump campaign is going to use it. But it’s one thing to cook up a dubious conspiratorial attack and fling it at your political opponent. It another thing altogether when you cook up a dubious conspiratorial attack and have the FBI fling it at your opponent. That’s a different thing. And that is what the FBI is doing in this election. They are using stuff from Breitbart.com as their research, as their evidence, and then they’re leaking about their “new” investigation into this “evidence”, to Fox News right before the election. And here’s the really creepy part, here’s the prospect that the Breitbart.com readers in this one FBI field office, they’re not just leaking this stuff to Fox News, not just leaking the stuff to the conservative media, here’s the prospect that they are leaking this stuff directly to the Trump campaign. Wayne Barrett, a writer for the Daily Beast, reports that two days BEFORE Director Comey sent his letter to congress, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox News, unprompted, bringing up on his own, two days BEFORE Director Comey sent his bombshell letter to congress about the Anthony Weiner computer and the emails that were found on it, and said this, “We have a surprise or two that you are going to hear about in the next few days. I’m talking about a pretty big surprise”. When asked by the Fox News Anchor what he meant by that he replies “You’ll see. We’re not going to go down. We’re going to keep fighting. We have a couple things up our sleeve that will turn things around”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMWzTvOZ5sw

That was Rudy Giuliani TWO DAYS BEFORE Director Comey sent that letter to congress. That bombshell letter, which arguably put the Presidency back within reach of Donald Trump. How did Rudy Giuliani know that? Did somebody at the FBI leak to the Trump campaign, two days in advance, that the FBI was about to throw an anti-Hillary Clinton grenade into the Presidential race?

Yesterday, Mark Hosenball of Reuters, reported that when the FBI Director decided to send that letter to congress, “He was driven in part by fear of leaks from within his own agency”. He quoted his sources saying “Two law enforcement sources familiar with the FBI’s New York field office, which initially discovered the emails, said a faction of investigators in that field office are known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton”.

Over at the Guardian Newspaper, reporter Spencer Ackerman reports “Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election”. One currently serving FBI agent tells the Guardian “The FBI is Trumpland. Clinton is the anti-Christ personified to a large swath of FBI personnel…the reason why they are leaking is that they are pro-Trump”. The FBI has refused to comment on any of this reporting about its New York field office essentially trying to throw the election in favor of Trump.

But that’s where we are right now. If part of the FBI is a Breitbart.com fan club, and they are trying to use the power of the FBI to throw the election in Trump’s favor, how does Hillary Clinton fight back against that? How does anybody?

The Bully Pulpit

2016-11-03T07:08:00.000-04:00

For most of our existence, the bullies had no national voice. People who bullied others, did it in the privacy of school yards, in the privacy of corporations, in the seclusion of their own neighborhoods. Then along came the internet where bullies could bully people anonymously, hiding behind their computer screen, saying whatever they want to whomever they want without being held accountable. Bullies aren’t interested in having an intelligent debate. They are only interested in showing the world that they are the more powerful person; debasing others with name calling and shaming. They are only interested in tearing down others so they can feel more powerful.

Hillary Clinton has been bullied for more than 30 years. She has suffered indignities that most women could not and would not put up with and she has come out stronger for it. People say she is untrustworthy. These are people who can’t tell the difference between “guarded” and “untrustworthy”. These are people who don’t have all the facts about her and are making a judgement. When you look at her and her story with an open mind and an open heart, you realize that while she may have flaws like everyone else in the world, she has been blamed for things that either had nothing to do with her or were completely out of her control. Has she made some “mistakes” or done things that people consider mistakes? Sure. Hasn’t everyone? But the mistakes she has actually made are nowhere near what people accuse her of. And she is most certainly NOT a criminal nor should she be “locked up”. If you are going to lock her up for the things she has done, you would have to lock up a lot of people who have done a lot worse. Let’s look at some of the things she has been accused of.

Let’s start with the email scandal since that has been prominent in the news as of late. Hilary Clinton had a personal email server. The server was actually set up for Bill Clinton when he was president. Ok, so what does that mean? That means that the server was actually Bill Clinton’s originally. That he used this server before and after he was President. Did he use it for email? Probably. Were there classified documents on it from his use of it? Maybe. But here is the thing. I work for the government and I can tell you, that their email servers are no more secure than a server in the basement of the house of the former president. In fact, the server in the basement is probably more secure because it is not set up on a huge network with gapping security holes, with hundreds of thousands of people accessing it and accessing phishing scammers, and malware emails, compromising the security of all the hundreds of thousands of machines on the network. My agency had to replace almost 2,000 machines last year. Why? Because someone got an email with a file attached and clicked on it, unleashing a wide swath of infections on everyone in the public address book which was pretty much everyone in the agency. When others got the same email, they clicked on the link and the virus spread like wildfire. This would not happen on a private server that only one person was accessing. People don’t consider this when they look at Hilary Clinton’s email “situation”.

The other thing people don’t consider is that it was neither against any policy or rule at the state department at the time to use a private email server nor a private email address, which let’s be clear, Hilary Clinton is not in IT. She was using a private email ADDRESS which happened to be on a private server. It was better than using a private email address for example, a google email or Hotmail, or msn. These email addresses again, are private, but they are connected to a huge network with millions of people accessing that network. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was hacked, while she was running for VP! It’s easy for a person who doesn’t have extensive IT knowledge to think that she did something horribly wrong, particularly if you listen to FOX or any of the other people who try to compare her use of a private email address to Watergate. This comparison is totally and utterly ridiculous. In the Watergate scandal 69 people were indicted on charges of things ranging from perjury to burglary resulting in 48 people being either found guilty or pleading out, many of whom were Nixon’s top administration officials. A president resigned in disgrace after being found guilty of abuse of power before being impeached and was probably lucky that he did not go to jail. He probably would have ended up there had President Ford not pardoned him. To compare that to Hilary’s use of a private email address is ignorant. I lived through the Nixon scandal and I can tell you, it does not even compare.

Consider this, many people very high up in government STILL use private email addresses even though there has been a policy in place since after Hilary left the state department. Previous to that, almost every Secretary of state used a private email address/server from before Colin Powell all the way to John Kerry. See https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-20/homeland-security-leaders-bent-rules-on-private-e-mail to learn the facts.

Trump claims that Hilary Clinton deleted emails after receiving an FBI subpoena. This is factually incorrect for a number of reason. First of all, the subpoena did not come from the FBI, it came from the Benghazi Committee, a congressional committee convened to look into the Benghazi incident. There have been 7 Benghazi investigations led mostly by republicans in congress, NOT by any law enforcement branch. It is also factually incorrect that Hilary deleted the emails. In fact, an employee of the company that managed the server is the one who deleted them and he got the order to do so from Cheryl Mills, an aide to Hilary who oversaw the review of Secretary Clinton’s email archives to produce documents to the state department. Let’s look at the timeline

Feb. 1, 2013: Clinton serves her last day as secretary of state.

July 23, 2014: The State Department reaches an agreement with the Benghazi committee about producing records for its investigation into the 2012 attack on a U.S. embassy in the Libyan city.

Oct. 28, 2014: The State Department sends an official letter to Clinton’s staff requesting "emails related to their government work." Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, and aide Cheryl Mills oversaw the review of Clinton’s email archives to produce work-related documents to the department.

Dec. 5, 2014: Clinton’s team provides 55,000 pages of emails, or about 30,000 individual emails, to the State Department. Mills tells an employee at Platte River Networks, which managed the server, that Clinton does not need to retain any emails older than 60 days.

March 2, 2015: The New York Times breaks the story that Clinton used a personal email account while secretary of state.

March 4, 2015: The Benghazi committee issues a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over all emails from her private server related to the incident in Libya.

Between March 25-31, 2015: The Platte River Networks employee has what he calls an "oh s---" moment, realizing he did not delete Clinton’s email archive, per Mills’ December 2014 request. The employee deletes the email archive using a software called BleachBit.

March 27, 2015: Clinton’s lawyers send a letter to the Benghazi committee saying that the State Department already has the relevant emails, as they were included in the Dec. 5, 2014, turnover.

Trump’s timeline is correct. The congressional subpoena came on March 4, 2015, and an employee deleted the emails sometime after March 25, 2015, three weeks later. However, the implication that Clinton deleted emails relevant to the subpoena in order to avoid scrutiny is flat wrong. The FBI’s investigation did find several thousand emails among those deleted that were work-related and should have been turned over to the State Department. However, FBI Director James Comey said in a July 2016 statement that the FBI investigation "found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them." Comey added in a later congressional hearing that the FBI learned no one on Clinton’s staff specifically asked the employee to delete the emails following the New York Times story and subpoena. Rather, the employee made that decision on his own. Clinton told the FBI that she was not involved in deciding whether individual emails should be sent to State Department, nor "did she instruct anyone to delete her emails to avoid complying with FOIA, State or FBI requests for information."

So, let’s look at Benghazi, which resulted in the email “scandal” to begin with. To understand how much time and money was spent on trying to find Hilary Clinton guilty of something, only in the end, to admit that the only reason they had all those hearings was to bring her down politically, see this: http://benghazicommittee.com/benghazi-by-the-numbers/

Trump likes to blame president Obama and Secretary Clinton for what happened in Benghazi when the truth is, Benghazi happened because congress declined provide the full funding for the embassy security funding that both President Obama and Secretary Clinton requested. This is a fact that has been simply ignored by the republicans in congress because acknowledging this fact would make the American people aware of just how much this congress has NOT done the job that they were put in office to do. They have fought every measure, including embassy security in order to make President Obama look incompetent. They can spend their time and the people’s tax dollars renaming public buildings but they can’t seem to find the time or the money to approve appropriate funding for something as important as securing our embassies around the world. Then when it all goes pear shaped and people get killed, they try to pin it on the President and Hillary Clinton.

This has been the most “do-nothing” congress in our nation’s history. They can’t even pass common sense gun legislation after 25 small children are killed in a school, or after 50 people are killed in a nightclub by a madman who should have never been able to buy a gun because he was on the no fly list. In 2016 they were in sessions 111 days. Yes, that’s right, 111 days. Let’s look at the numbers. There are 260 working days in a year. That’s 149 days our congress was not working for us, or to put it in terms of weeks, they had 29.8 weeks of vacation. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m lucky to get 3 weeks off in a year, let alone 29. And every single one of them is making a six figure salary paid for by the people of the United States. I would like to know, exactly what are we paying for again? After seeing those figures, if you don’t think it’s time to remove these do nothings, then you are not being very fiscally responsible. They are laughing at us. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/congress-supreme-court-budget-do-nothing-221057

I was and am a Bernie Sanders supporter. His presidency would have also been historical – The first Jewish President. But, we’re not ready for Bernie yet. And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, there really is only two choices, one of which would be completely insane to choose considering all we know about Donald Trump. The poor blind people supporting him believe he is actually going to do something for them. He’s not. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. And he has told us over and over in the last 15 months exactly who he is. And we have found out through the miracle of good research and reporting exactly who he is, where he came from, and what he has been doing for his 70 years on this earth and it certainly has NOT been doing ANYTHING for anyone else. Trump is, was and always has been about his brand, his fans, and his own opinion of himself. He is a bully and he encourages others to be bullies as well. He has given a voice to those bullies in our country who previously did not have a national voice. And there is a reason they had no voice. The majority of people in this country believe in the good. They believe in equal rights for everyone, they believe in religious freedom, they believe in personal responsibility and that every person in this country has a right to make their own healthcare decisions, they believe in every person’s right to a good education, they believe that laws should be fair and fairly applied to everyone. Donald Trump believes none of that. He has spent his life, cheating people out of money he owed them, bullying people with lawsuits or threats of lawsuits. He has used the laws in this country to take advantage of people. He has not EVER done something because it was the right thing to do, he has only done what would benefit himself in some way. This is a man who is a selfish bully, and becoming President would inflate his over exaggerated opinion of himself. He has a horrible disgusting dark view of our country and its people and believe me when I tell you, that will not change if he becomes president. He lives in a fact free bubble surrounded by people who cannot contain him because he doesn’t take their advice. Do you think that if he gets in office he will suddenly start listening to people? No, is the answer. He won’t. He calls Hillary a liar and “crooked”. The only thing I can say to that is “Hello Pot, this Kettle, I just wanted to let you know that you’re black!”. He is the most untruthful candidate that has ever run for office. 76% (yes this is an actual statistic backed up by research into statements he has made) of what he says are pants on fire, lies, or mostly false. On this same scale, Hilary rates 26% and no “pants on Fire” ratings for her, not one. Pants on Fire rating is reserved for the most egregious falsehoods. Donald Trump’s “pants on fire” rating is at almost 50%. So, 50% of the time Donald Trump is egregiously lying to the American people. Do you really think that will stop if he becomes president? I think not. In fact, I would go out on a limb here and say he would only just lie even more.

And crooked? Really? Seriously folks, I hardly think a private email address compares to someone who has ties to the Russian government and lies about it, cheats people out of money he owes them, scams people out of their life savings by promising them some kind of “education”, encourages people to “poll watch” when he knows full well the RNC is under a Consent Decree because his own brother-in-law lost a case in the 80’s where the RNC was convicted of interfering with elections and targeting minority neighborhoods trying to suppress their vote, denying housing to minority people so much that he was sued, not once, but twice by the justice department. He has been either the plaintiff or defendant in thousands of lawsuits, not tens, not hundreds…THOUSANDS. This is a man who fully admits to not paying taxes for almost twenty years, who won’t release his tax returns, while every other presidential candidate in US history has. He feel the rules don’t apply to him. Like he said himself, he is a star and he can do whatever he wants. Do you really think that attitude is going to change if he becomes President? That he will suddenly become humble, that he will suddenly apologize for all the bad things he has done to so many people, many of whom trusted him? Just ask Barbara Corcoran who saved Trump from bankruptcy, was expecting a thank you card and instead got a subpoena to appear in court because Trump was suing her so he didn’t have to pay her the 4 million dollars he owed her after selling a property she brokered for him for 92,000,000 dollars. He lost the case, and ended up sending her commission checks for more than two years till he paid it off. And this guy is supposed to be a “Billionaire”? He was so broke, he had to pay the money in installments. I mean seriously folks, you can’t believe anything this guy says.

And I mean come on, look at his comportment, the sniffing and face making, the orange face with the white eyes and the terrible comb over. He talks about women’s looks. I mean seriously, has he EVER looked in a mirror? This is a man who talked about his penis size in a presidential primary debate…on national television. This is who we want representing us to the world? I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t. I’ll take the lady in the pantsuit thank you.

A Nation of Nosey

2016-11-02T06:18:00.000-04:00

When did we become a nation that feels the need to know everything about everyone’s everything? Tweeting pictures of our food, ourselves in every state of dress and by the way, undress. When did we become a nation of bullies, not speaking out against what is wrong, but speaking out FOR what is wrong, bigotry, sexism, ageism, body shaming, pet shaming, racism and a host of other things that we as human being know is wrong?

Donald Trump is the father…err well, possibly “Grandfather” of this movement. With his twitter feed, for a 70 year old man, he behaves like a teenager; a hormone induced, unwieldy, defiant teenager. Saying outrageous things knowing that he won’t be held accountable because he is on a computer, not face to face with the people he targets for his bullying. Believing that no one will call him out on his BS. Erroneously thinking that no one will fact check the things he says.

Donald Trump demands to know things and when presented with the facts, refuses to believe them and refuses to apologize for his behavior. He hounded our current president for years saying he wasn’t born here and yet, the last time I looked, Hawaii was a state of the United States of America. When he was finally presented with the President’s long form birth certificate, did he apologize? No. Did he admit that he was wrong? No. Instead he then started a campaign of demanding the President’s college transcripts to prove that people knew him in college. Donald trump goes from one extreme demand to another never stopping to think of the harm he is doing to this country, or to the people he targets, their families or their friends. And this goes for his business dealings as well. He has left a trail of lawsuits and unpaid bills behind him. Small businesses and the families who ran them left in ruins, having to declare bankruptcy, not just from Donald Trump’s unpaid bills, but from Donald Trump black balling their businesses because they had the nerve to take him to court to demand their payment for services they rendered to him.

This is a serious, very serious matter. The Unites States government can’t declare bankruptcy to get out of its debts. Yet, Donald Trump WILL lead us down this path. Just ask him. He will tell you straight up how he has used the various systems in this country to increase his own wealth. From the courts to the political systems, Donald Trump has made deals. Yes, he has made deals, but those deals were for himself. Has he ever fought for the little guy? Has he ever given his time or money to help people in need? Has he ever done anything for anyone else that did not have the promise of bringing himself something in return? The answer to those questions is no, a resounding NO.

Donald Trump is a danger to America. Not to just our way of life, or our economy, or our fragile society, but also to our standing in the world. This is not a man we want within striking distance of the nuclear codes. This is not a man we want hosting dinners for other heads of state. This is not a man we want dealing with North Korea on the subject of their nuclear weapons. This is not a man we want dealing with the Middle East Crisis. This is not a man we want dealing with our own problems of race, inequality, immigration and anti-LGBT issues that we have in this country. He will not work to solve these divisions but will only serve to drive the divisions and force the gaps to open larger more gaping wounds between our people. His behavior over his whole lifetime is evidence of this. We don’t need to guess about this. He has shown us proof; 70 years of proof.

Understand that when Donald Trump says something, he doesn’t walk it back, he doesn’t apologize, and he doesn’t admit that he is wrong. He has said some pretty outrageous, factually incorrect, and utterly ignorant things. The list is endless. We have come so far in this country. Do we really want to go backwards?

Mind Games

2014-12-15T02:23:00.003-05:00

Every human being reacts to trauma and loss differently. I find this fascinating. This reaction shapes us and plants the seeds of our future selves. For some of us, those seeds turn into the flowers of strength, motivation, and self-actualization. For others of us, they turn into despair and depression which lends itself to a variety of mind games played with one’s psyche and can make us believe things about ourselves that are not a true and accurate picture of who we are.

I believe this is why I have become interested in such shows as Hoarders and My 600 LB Life. These shows depict people who have suffered some kind of trauma or loss, their reaction to it, i.e. hoarding objects even to the detriment of their relationships and home, or eating until they become super obese, and how people try and help them out of this terrible hole their minds have put them in.

In my own personal life I can relate to a certain extent to the attributes of each of these disabilities (hoarding and weight gain). For most of my life I have “collected” things. I have enough books, for example, to fill a small library. But I will say, my books are not in piles all over my house. They are organized neatly on bookshelves all over my house. Every room has at least one book shelf and some have more. I would also say that the collecting of books was not something that came out of a trauma or loss. They are just things in life that I love and surround myself with. Plants are another object that I “collect”. There are plants in every room and again I would say that this is not something that came to me out of trauma or loss. It is something I have done since I was very young. I love the feeling I get when I make something grow; when a simple cutting turns into a beautiful plant. It isn’t irrational. In fact, it is perfectly rational because when you wander through my house you realize exactly who I am.

The people depicted on Hoarders have developed over years and in some cases decades an irrational attachment to things. While they say they love these things, they don’t take care of them, and the process of hoarding does more damage than just a messy house. They have pushed the people who love them to the brink of leaving them for good, they have in some cases caused irreparable damage to their homes even to the point where the home had to be condemned and could not be saved. Their children have left them, their families have deserted them. When things break in the house they can’t get them fixed for fear of someone discovering their secret. These are people who are in the throes of a great depression stemming from some trauma or loss that they experienced in many cases years and years ago. When a new trauma or loss presents itself to these people, the hoarding escalates. Their minds are telling them that these objects are the most important things in their lives when really the most important things are their relationships and their homes. To them, they would rather have the outside world believe just about anything about them other than they are a hoarder and they will go to great lengths to keep their problem a secret. For me, I love the before and afters. I love the rehab shows for this same reason. I love to see something that seems impossible at first glance turn into the possible. I love a happy ending. Call me a Pollyanna if you wish but I just can’t get enough of the happy endings.

For most of my life, up into my late 30’s I was skinny. I was one of those who could eat and eat and never gain weight. Then I got married and the roller coaster ride started. I can blame it on many things, consciously rationalize it in my mind why I was/am overweight, but in the end, it really comes down to one simple principle, I take in more calories than I expend. Since 2008, I have lost weight and gained it back a few times. I am now at the heaviest I have ever been. This IS due to a trauma and loss I experienced in 2011 and my reaction to it has been to not leave the house unless absolutely necessary and so my exercise was curtailed and my motivation to stay in shape was completely and utterly depleted. I will get back on track and I will lose the weight again and hopefully it will stick but it has to be for the right reason. It has to be for myself and not someone else. It is a process. A process of grieving for what was lost, a process of learning not to blame myself for what happened and a process of learning to except and love myself for who I am and what I have to offer the world. Staying in the house and allowing myself to gain weight is not the answer to protecting myself from the people in this world. Letting the right people into my life is the way to protect myself. When I’m strong enough to make these decisions, I will venture out again. There is a world out there. I know this. I see it when I do go out there. And rationally I know it is not the world I should be afraid of or guard against, it’s the people in it.

The people depicted on My 600 LB Life are also severely depressed people. Over the years as their size grew and grew, they were never able to get to a point and say “enough is enough” and motivate themselves to lose the weight and get healthy. As in hoarding, they use the weight somehow to protect and shield themselves from the outside world. They have convinced themselves that there is no other way. As their bodies grew and grew and in some cases lymphedema set in, they still don’t come to grips with their situation. In the case of the lymphedema cases, I have a difficult time relating to this because if I see or feel the smallest of lumps on my body, I run out to the doctor. These people have lumps the size of basketballs and in some cases even larger than that. In the show they reach a turning point and decide in their minds that they can do it, that there is a way to live healthy and they turn the corner and get help. They learn to love themselves. They pull themselves out of the depression and they venture into to outside world once again. A happy ending.

As John Lennon said in his song Mind Games, “Love is the answer and you know that for sure. Love is a flower; you got to let it grow”

All About The Bejamins

2014-10-30T13:13:00.000-04:00

Politics has always been linked with money but since the Supreme Court issued it’s ruling in April 2014 stating no limitations on Corporate Donations to campaigns, the world of politics has gone crazy. The average politicians spends 75% of his time on the phone or on the road trying to raise money to be re-elected instead of spending 75% of his time doing what he is paid to do, work for the American people. And the Democrats are not innocent in all of this either. Once they have your number it is an almost constant cycle of robo calls and people calling trying to get money. They first ask for a ridiculous amount ($250). When you tell them “I have NO money right now”, they continue to badger you and say “Well, how about $200, how about $150, how about $100” and on it goes until you either hang up or they just thank you for voting.

I’m sorry but I am not giving ANY money to politicians who make a six figure salary and don’t spend most of their time doing the job they are paid that kind of money to do. The annoying calls, the mail box full of flyers and flyers on my door must stop. If this country is to get anywhere, politicians need to spend their time doing their job instead of harassing people for money.

And THIS congress? Well, it is the worst…literally the WORST. It has gotten the least done of any congress in the history of the United States. And that is not an exaggeration, it is actual statistical fact. They couldn’t get a bill passed if it saved their lives, and I mean literally saved their life! One of their own was shot in the head and almost killed and yet they still couldn’t get the flimsiest of gun laws passed. They refused to take up immigration reform. They still have not debated and voted on the air war we are already in in Iraq. It’s ridiculous. It is now almost November and they have had session all of 92 days for the whole year! Nice work if you can get it.

On the republican side they are so busy trying to find fault with this president they have completely lost sight of what is important and what their job is supposed to be. They take every single opportunity and then some to try and find some way to blame the president for everything. They force this belief that everything is the president fault down the throats of the American people through their news outlets like Fox news, and people like Darrell Isa who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow regarding pretty much everything. If you heard the things he said about the Ebola crisis, you would be dumbfounded by how literally ignorant this man is. He can’t get the country of origin right; he kept calling it “Eboli” and he insists that you can catch it on the bus.

And then we have Ran Paul, who claims to be a board certified ophthalmologist but what he isn’t telling you is that the board he is certified by is a board that HE created with his wife and father in-law. He is NOT certified by the board that certifies ALL ophthalmologists in this country, the American Board of Ophthalmology. He is certified by the “National” Board of Ophthalmology…something completely different and actually not recognized as an accredited board. But, he goes out there and says words like “occulum” and tells you that he knows Ebola is air born; listen to him because he is a doctor. This is also the man who when he isn’t lying about Ebola, is giving speeches containing passages that he has stolen directly from Wikipedia, word for word.

And then there’s Louie Gomert, my favorite. His name sounds like someone on Gomer Pile RFD and he sounds like it too. When he opens his mouth, you realize this is just about the most ignorant man that ever walked the earth. In a committee meeting with Eric Holder, he literally accused Mr. Holder of “Casting aspersions on his asparagus”. I’m not kidding…google it. If it wasn’t so sad that this man is part of a ruling body of our government, it would be hilarious.

The Supreme Court is full of idiots as well. They stuck down the Voter rights act saying that racism doesn’t exist in this country any more…huh? Really? I think the President might disagree with that considering he has spent most of his 2 terms being guilty of everything simply because of the color of his skin. They stripped the corporate campaign donations rule which held the politicians somewhat in check. Now, the politicians just pander to whoever gives them the most money. The crazies are running the asylum where the Supreme Court is concerned. I lost faith in them long ago when they gave an election that was clearly won by Al Gore to that buffoon George Bush. It’s sad that the highest court in the land has fallen prey to the political money machine. They are OUR court, the people’s court, not the court of the politicians. But they have lost sight of that fact. While they came a long way with LGBT marriage equality, there are still many states in this country where you can be fired from your job because your are Gay or transgender. You can thank congress for that. They had a chance to fix that and voted against it. But while they’re enacting laws that give gays the right to marry, they are stripping our voting rights, stripping a woman’s right to have a legal safe abortion, and giving politicians the right to take as much money as they can from corporations who are destroying the environment, shipping jobs overseas, selling guns to crazy people, not paying their fair share of income tax, not paying the people that work for them a living wage and discriminating in every way possible against people that work for them.

I understand that no country is perfect. There are flaws in every democratic form of government but when you can’t get the people who are working there to actually do any work, how in the world can you expect to even come close to solving problems. When you have a slew of elected officials who do not abide by the separation of church and state, who think they have a right to tell women in this country what they can and cannot have with regards to their own healthcare, when those same people want to rig elections by gerry-mandering districts so that they always win, when those people want to take away the voting rights of the poor, the elderly and the Blacks and Hispanics simply because they vote democrat for the most part, when those same people are dead set against doing any actual work because they are hell bent on trying to make the President look bad, when they bring God and religion into the halls of congress and use it as a weapon against the people (us) who are paying their six figure saleries….it is a sad day in America.

We the people need to educate ourselves on who these rogues are. We need to get them out of office and put people in there who ARE working for the people and are not just about the benjamins. Ted Cruz, Ran Paul, Louie Gomert, Darrell Isa, and certainly ANYONE who has been indicted on any kind of Federal charge, I don’t care if they have been convicted or not, they have no business representing people in congress. I mean come on. Nor should they be running a state like Governors Rick Perry, Chris Christy, and Bob McDonell. These are men who should never have held office, should never have been elected. People need to be smarter than that. When you elect a criminal to high office you can hardly be surprised when he steals from you.

Even if you don’t have a computer at your house, take a trip to the library. Look up each candidates voting record. It’s easy to do. Find your state at Congress.gov and see what these people have voted for. Their record speaks volumes about what they stand for and whose pocket they are in. Look up the candidates and see which corporations have contributed the most money to that candidate’s campaign (Followthemoney.org). If you don’t like what you see, DON”T VOTE FOR THEM. If you don’t have anyone else to vote for, write a name in of someone you do think would do a good job in that office. But above all, educate yourself. Know what you’re doing when you go into the voting booth. It is a right and a privilege to vote. Choose your candidate wisely and even If he doesn’t win, you will still feel good about yourself because you voted your conscience and nothing is nobler than that.

My name is Barbara Buckley and I approved this message.

Kings and Queens and Scientists Oh My!

2014-05-25T13:08:00.000-04:00

Everyone who is adopted knows that we carry around this thing in the back of our minds that reminds us every day of our lives “Someone didn’t want us”, “Someone gave us away”. No matter how great your adopted family was/is, it is still there, lingering, haunting. No amount of great living will ever make it go away. It is always there in the back ground. We learn to live with its little voice popping up at the most inappropriate times.

My search for my father started in earnest in the late 90’s. I could find nothing on the internet or anywhere else I searched for Ray Morris Hilton, which was the name I was given as my father’s name. For years it was achingly frustrating. After a time I even had doubts that this man actually existed. But I also knew that all it would take would be one little break and I would be able to find him. One little piece of extra information and I would be able to know where and how to search. So I kept going.

That break came a few weeks ago and has revealed some pretty awesome stuff. My adopted father told me once, “Don’t search for your birth father or mother because you may discover things you don’t want to know”. Dad, you were wrong. I ALWAYS want to know. It is the not knowing that will drive a person crazy.

About a month ago, I was searching the Washington Post archives for a story about my maternal grandmother, Helen. I found that story and it turned out to be a sad thing that happened to her. I don’t know why but it took me another week to have the thought that “Oh, maybe I should search the Washington Post for a story about Ray.” So I did. Low and behold, there it was, right in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. It was an “In Memorandum” article and there were four entries. The entries were addressed to Ray Morris Newton (nee’ Hilton) and they were poems that my father had written for the people who were posting the article and it was on the anniversary of his death which occurred in 1965. I knew immediately that I had the right person because the first post was from his sister, Jean. I had known for some time that he had a sister named Jean. No wonder I couldn’t find anything on Ray Morris Hilton, that wasn’t his given name at birth. After some more research I found out that He was born Ray Morris Newton. His mother, Addie, had remarried a man with the last name of Hilton. My father had two step brothers named Harry and George Hilton. For some reason, maybe to feel more like part of the family, my father used the Hilton name. Maybe this man adopted him. I’m not sure about all that but he used the name for several years. It was during this time, that my mother got pregnant and so it was this name he gave the adoption agency. He then went back to using Newton because three years later he had a son, whose last name was Newton.

My father had kind of a crazy life in his short 25 years on earth. Changes in his family life and then there was me. In reading the work that I could find by him, the fact that he had two illegitimate children running around, one which he knew and one which he didn’t, pressed on him. In 1960, perhaps to get more stability in his life, or to get money for college, or both, he enlisted in the Air Force. He served for four years and was medically discharged. I don’t know why yet, I’m waiting on the records from the archive. After being discharged, he moved to Tampa Florida and started college at the University of Tampa. He made quite a name for himself and became a co-editor of the Poetry Review, a literary magazine put out by the college. His major was English Lit and he even belonged to an English Literature Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta.

My father died in 1965 of a Cerebral Vascular Hemorrhage, which came on suddenly. Had he lived he would have been 75 this September. He lies at Arlington National Cemetery which is an honor for our family and I know he would be pleased to know that he ended up there, as morbid as that may sound.

My father wasn’t afraid of morbidity. Much of his work that I’ve found so far is filled with it. From what I can tell so far from the things I’ve read and the pictures I’ve managed to get a hold of, he was a gorgeous, creative man, a writer of poetry, a dancer, tall, tight waving medium blond hair and a killer smile, not the open mouth teeth showing kind of smile, but mischievous and knowing, like mine actually. My brother looks like me and we both look like him, same nose; same eyes. He was sensitive and thoughtful and I have no doubt that had he lived we would have been great friends and he would have wanted a relationship with me. I believe it was painful for him to give me up. The mother of his son, not only kept him but also gave him Ray’s last name (Newton). I think this may have helped him heal some of the wounds he felt in giving me up.

Had he lived I would have been able to share all of my recent research with him which I’m sure would have made him laugh at the irony of it all but also understand the gravity of our ancestral history, which is very long and quite grand. I believe he then would have been able to lay to rest some of his demons knowing that our family line dates back almost 2,000 years and is filled with interesting stories and notable people. In looking at the history, all of the Newtons have been through much and come a very long way.

In recent history, our ancestors were all farmers from Stafford Virginia going back through the 1600’s but there are some notable people in our paternal line. Our first cousin, eleven times removed from him, twelve from me, was Sir Isaac Newton. Yes, THAT Sir Isaac Newton. You know the one, invented the telescope, discovered the theory of gravity, and discovered the theory of light and color which is still used by science today. He was also a religious scholar, something most people don’t know about him as it is not widely published but he had serious questions about “Trinity-ism” and so studied the bible and other religious texts deeply and wrote about his studies. Because of the time and place he lived (England in the 15^th century) his work on this subject was not published until almost 200 years after his death. I wonder what he thought about Judaism. Looks like I have some more research to do.

The 11^th and 12^th century brought us Kings and Queens, of Wales, which the areas they ruled over eventually became part of England. We are the direct line of King Caractacus, in Welsh the name is Caradog, who was captured by the Romans and made such a speech to the Emperor Claudius that he spared him from a military execution. I guess that explains where my powers of persuasion and long windedness come from!

I have only researched the paternal line so far. I’m having some issues with trying to find Addie’s maiden name (my father’s mother) but I will keep going till I find that one little piece of information. I am anxious to see what I find in the other parts of my history. So far, it’s been Jews who escaped the Holocaust who had a penchant for playing German beer garden and Yiddish music who fell away from Judaism and married outside the faith, an Irish grandmother who fell out of a car drunk and died whose sister was a champion Irish dancer, a father who wrote poetry and was a ballroom dancer, British scientists, and Welsh kings and queens. It has been quite and adventure and I am so ready for more. I now know where all the key elements of my personality came from, musician, dancer, writer, thinker, creator, my sensitivity, my intellect, my intense interest in religion. It’s all there in my family line. Like someone once said to me, “you’re like Prego spaghetti sauce, it’s in there”. In not wanting to have a relationship with me, my birth mother has no idea what she’s missing.

Daddy, I love you, and even though we’ve never met, I miss you. I honor your service to our country and I will be there tomorrow, putting flowers on your grave and saying hello. Where ever you are, I know you are looking down on me, respecting my tenacity, loving the fact that after all these years, I finally found you.

Love, your Daughter

Kathleen Bernadette Aufrecht Newton

Dog Diary vs Cat Diary

2013-11-24T17:19:00.000-05:00

DOG DIARY

8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!

9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!

9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!

10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!

12:00 pm - Lunch! My favorite thing!

1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!

3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!

5:00 pm - Milk bones! My favorite thing!

7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!

8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!

11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CAT DIARY

Day 983 of my captivity.

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects.

They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape.

In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet.

Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. Bastards!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of "allergies". I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow -- but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released - and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded. The bird has got to be an informant. I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe. For now ...

Where There's a Will There's a Way

2013-07-28T17:41:00.000-04:00

My father worked two full time jobs for most of my life. At one point in my life he owned property in three states. He worked hard to do this. From his example I learned early on that through hard work and persistence you can have anything you want; anything is achievable through hard work, patience and persistence.

I carried this philosophy with me through my first career as a hair dresser, through my career in music, though my career in the restaurant industry and finally through my 25 plus years in my IT career while going to school to get, first an AA degree, then a BS degree, and finally working towards a second BS degree and a Masters. I applied this philosophy to everything in my life except romantic relationships. And it got me through. Considering where I came from, I was able to achieve a good many things. It wasn’t until I got married when I was turning forty that I applied it to a romantic relationship.

At that point in my life, I decided that it was time to work hard to make a relationship work. And I did. I applied brute force to my marriage, decided that no matter what happened that I was never going to give up and that I would MAKE it work. In hind sight, which is in fact 20/20 by the way, what I didn’t see was that you cannot apply this philosophy to relationships. Why? Because there is another person involved, It is one thing for you yourself to work hard towards achieving a goal; it is a completely different thing to get someone else to work towards that same goal.

I am afraid now. I recall someone saying to me once in the not so distant recent past, that they were afraid to get involved with me in a romantic relationship because they were afraid of “disappointments”. I asked at the time, who are you afraid will be disappointed, you or me? And his response was “Both of us”.

This is why you cannot apply the “work hard and you can achieve whatever you want” philosophy to relationships. Because in trying to reach that lofty goal of having a happy healthy relationship, there are a lot of “disappointments” along the way. It’s a tough journey, fraught with dangers. You find out the little lies you’ve told each other. The habits that were once so adorable you now find annoying like nails on a chalkboard. And sometimes you find out deep dark deal breaking heartbreaking secrets that you wish you had never known.

I have learned an invaluable lesson in the last few years. There comes a time in a relationship when it is time to STOP working hard. There comes a time when it is time to give up and move on because no matter how hard YOU work, the relationship is never going to work. There comes a time when the disappointments outweigh the love and you just have to mark it up to a goal not achieved and there’s no harm in that. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It doesn’t mean that you are deficient in some way. It just means that you got involved with someone who is on a different path than you. It means that you got involved with someone whose personal rules of behavior are different than your own. And everyone has done it. Even people who now have happy healthy relationships, have been through disappointments, either with the person they are with or with people they have been with previously. No one is immune to these disappointments, they are part of life.

For more than two years, I went to temple every weekend; sometimes on both Friday and Saturday. I would see couples, examples of people who, at least on the outside had happy healthy relationships with their spouses. The woman who would tell stories while we were all working in the kitchen together about her husband whom she had been married to for many years and had three children with. She would still have that gleam in her eye when talking about him that said “I am still in love with this man after all these years”. I saw many examples of this and this is what I have always wanted.

One of my most favorite sayings is “There is a lid for every pot”. I still believe this; I just don’t think I have found my “lid” yet. Perhaps, at my age, I never will. I was always a hopeless romantic. But when I gave up on my last potential “lid”, I gave up on everything. I gave up the hope of ever finding that one person who thinks the way I do and doesn’t have some deep dark secret they’re hiding from me. I gave up on the idea of finding someone with whom the love outweighed the disappointments and with whom I could finally have the happy healthy relationship I wanted. I gave up on finding that person who when talking about him to a group of women on a morning in a Shul kitchen, would still bring a gleam to my eye, years after we had found each other. Some people are lucky in love. I don’t think I am one of them. I believe I am destined to be on my own. A year ago, this was a devastating idea to me. It is something now, I am learning to accept. And when I’m not afraid anymore, I will venture back out into world. I will find my hope again. Not for romance; THAT hope is never coming back. But at least I will find hope for people again, for life, and the pursuit of other things that make me happy. And I know I will still have disappointments. But without them, you will never know when you are actually happy. The balancing act is best performed when you can manage the disappointments with life’s good fortunes.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2013-07-13T21:20:00.000-04:00

We human beings on this planet are all connected by an invisible thread. When we make an actual connection with one another, the thread becomes visible and tangible. When this happens, there should be a pop up box like on your computer that says “Enter at your own risk. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”. Why? Because these connections are risky. Sometimes they can turn out to be one of the best experiences of your life; other times?...not so much.

You only fall in love for the first time once. It never happens that way again. And that love, whether consciously or unconsciously, is used as a measuring stick to measure all loves that follow. Whether it is one year or thirty two and half years, it is what we measure our love for another by. You can come pretty close to that first love, but it is never the same.

Sometimes it is better to have just the memory of that first love but in the age of the internet, we can now go back and have a look. Some of us are pleasantly surprised at how well our first loves have done. We can feel good about ourselves because of that because we can justify them playing such an important role in our lives. We can say to ourselves “I always knew he/she was a great person”. Our disappointment at it not working out with them turns to pride at having been the first to love them and see their goodness.

That being said, some of us are very unpleasantly surprised at what monsters our first loves have become. This can be very disconcerting because we cannot justify them playing such an important role in our lives. Our original disappointment turns into a bitter pill that must be swallowed in order to move on in our lives. We question ourselves. Were they a monster back then or did something happen to them in the course of their life to make them this way? Was I wrong for loving them? Is there something I could have done to not love them? We then grieve. And we grieve because it is a death of sorts; the end of our innocence; the end of a dream.

But when the grieving is done, at the end of the day, it is what it is. Some people turn out good, some people turn out to be monsters and you have no way of seeing which way they are going to go when you are young and blind. You feel something in your heart, something you’ve never felt before and it takes over and follows you throughout your life. It isn’t something you have control over, it just is. It is extremely loud in your brain and incredibly close to your heart but it is better to have that disappointment, better to have even the bitter pill because without it, you have nothing; no feelings; dead on the inside. It is always better to have something rather than nothing because it means you’re alive.

In Celebration of Our Independence

2013-07-06T16:35:00.000-04:00

Growing up in Wheaton, Maryland, every July 4th my cousins and my Aunt and I would pile into the Woody and go to Wheaton Plaza and watch the fireworks. It was one of the highlights of my childhood: telling silly jokes in the car, drinking pop, eating hotdogs and wrestling with my cousins. The deep booms that reverberated in my chest and splashes of multicolored fire across the sky was for me the most exciting thing to watch and doing it with my family just made it all the more intimate.

But, do people in America really know exactly what they are celebrating on July 4th? For those of you who don’t know, we are celebrating the Declaration of Independence being adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4th 1776. This document stated among other things that the 13 American colonies, presently at war with Great Britain, were no longer a part of the British Empire and would form a new nation known as the United States of America. The original draft of the document was created by Thomas Jefferson and the congress edited it to become the final version of the declaration. One of the centerpieces of the document states:

“We hold these truths o be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

As the document was read in congress that day, no doubt by someone with a thick British accent which in recent history Americans have become so enamored of, the irony of that situation probably didn’t register. It is only today, looking back in history that we can see how surreal that situation was.

Very basically translated into everyday language, what the above paragraphs is saying is that we are all as human being created equally; that we all have rights that cannot be taken away by a foreign government and those right include to live, have freedom and pursue what makes us happy. It states that no government should be abolished lightly and that people are predisposed to suffer oppressive governments because they have become accustomed to the evils but that the people, who have been abused and usurped by that government, have not just a right but a duty to abolish that government and start anew.

I am proud to be an American. Like the colonists, my German Jewish Great Grandfather came to this country in pursuit of a better life; my Irish Grandmother’s family did the same. Our history may not be as long as other countries and our governments have not been perfect but as Ronald Reagan stated many times “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere” and our forefathers put in place a process that is in place still today to change the parts of government that are imperfect. We the people can do that and we are duty bound to do so. Simply by being a citizen of our great nation we are bound to change the things that our government does that are oppressive to us and to people of other nations through protest, through the voting box and through any peaceful means necessary.

Eldridge Cleaver said “There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem.” People who complain about our government yet to nothing to fix the problems, don’t vote, don’t protest publicly, don’t educate themselves on the processes and how to change them, listen and believe misinformation fed to them by conservative and liberal media outlets instead of finding out the truth for themselves, are part of the problem. Is our government perfect? No, it certainly is not. Is our President infallible? Absolutely not. In fact, in the last week, I have discovered something appalling and disgraceful that our President in fact is sanctioning and I was discouraged, disheartened, and thoroughly disgusted by it. And yet, this thing has barely made a blip on the radar of most folks in this country. Read or watch “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” by Jeremy Scahill. It is available On Demand or get the book at Amazon.com. There are also many interviews with Jeremy on You Tube. I encourage you to watch them. There is also a web site dirtywars.org. He is a very thorough, non-partisan investigative reporter who has done a number of investigations into our military complex which is vast and far reaching. Jeremy has exposed things that are being done presently that would shock and appall most people. The fact that he himself has not experienced an "untimely accident" is amazing in and of itself considering what he has exposed. The things that are going on now must be stopped if we are ever going to end this “War on Terrorism” and make the world a better, safer place for all countries. Only “We the people” can stop it and we must. We cannot kill our way to peace and what we are doing now in fact is creating more of the very people we are fighting against. We are essentially giving them a reason to hate us and rise up against us.

http://www.dirtywars.org

Interview with Jeremy on Democracy Now

I like our president. I think I have been very vocal about that. I respect him as a man (from what I know about him) and I respect him as a leader and essentially my boss but what is happening with JSOC and our military is not what I and I think most people in this country believe we stand for as a nation. My great grandfather and grandmother did not come to a country that murders innocent people; that convicts its own people to death without due process; that jails people for years without charges or a trial; that would kill an innocent 16 year old American citizen in a foreign country along with his young cousins simply because his father said things our government didn’t like. Those are the countries that they came from not the country they went to seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Thank you all for reading and Happy Independence Day!

Mother Mother

2013-03-24T18:28:00.000-04:00

She was always sick. There was the gall bladder surgery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, pleurisy on her lungs. And drugs; endless amount of drugs. In the 60s and 70s it was Valium. After that it was Zanex, years and years of Zanex; along with a host of other drugs for just about everything you could think of. Along with all of this she drank; Jim Beam, sometimes right from the bottle. Her “nerves”; I heard more about her nerves than I ever did about how she really “felt” about anything. And endless stories of illness and operations she’d had. This was the center of her life; herself and her “nerves”. She was my first mother.

My second mother had bleached blond hair and wore ruby red lipstick. She paid attention to me and I think if I hadn’t been her husband’s daughter, she might have loved me. I know she tried to convince herself and me that she was more of a mother to me than the drugged up alcoholic, and to a certain degree she was right. But she could never get past her jealousy of me. She could never take me fully into her heart and feel about me like she felt about her other two daughters. She just wasn’t capable.

And then there was my third mother, who was actually my first mother. She gave birth to me, held me, then gave me away to strangers she had never met. She lied to the agency about her heritage and set my life on path of a never ending quest to find out who I really am. When she had a chance to right this horrible wrong, not only did she not want it, but she refused to tell me the truth and turned the woman who could have been my true sister against me. For no other reason than she didn’t want her to be close to me. She’s been hiding something for years, something about my real father, and I will probably never know what it is.

Mother’s day is coming in about 6 weeks. Did you know that Mother’s day in England is on a different day than here in the United States? For most people, mother’s day is a day to remember how good their mothers were, to make them breakfast in bed, and celebrate her motherhood. And for women who are mothers, it’s a day to be pampered by those who love you. For people who have lost their mother’s, it is a time to remember their mother’s life and celebrate the fact that they had them as long as they did.

Mother’s Day was always a hard day and continues to be so even though now, I have a son. I raised him from the time he was twelve and took him into my heart as my own. From the time he came to live with us (he is my Ex-husband’s son actually) Mother’s Day got a little easier. Because instead of thinking about the fact that I had had three mothers, all of them messed up in some serious way, I thought about my son. Looking back, I made some mistakes, I wasn’t perfect, but they don’t give you a manual for these things do they? And because I didn’t get him till he was twelve years old, there was damage already done that I just was not able to undo. But I love him anyway, very much and in my heart he will always be my only son. So though he’s twenty-four now with a son of his own and his father and I are separated, I still think of him on Mother’s Day.

For the past couple of years though, I have also been thinking about my own mothers. They laid down this horrible blue print on my psyche. From years of torment, neglect and abuse I became this woman who lets people into her life without fully examining who they really are. Once my brain decides I want them in my life, it shuts off the part that recognizes the alcoholic, the man who uses people because he is alone and isolated in a remote part of the world, the habitual liar who lied when I knew him TWENTY FIVE years ago and never changed, and the man who was completely unavailable to me and yet called all the time. It pretty much did me in and even though it’s been months, I’m still trying to come to grips with that one.

I let these men into my life before I fully realized what I was dealing with. I pushed down all the red flags and ignored what was right in front of my face. And now, now that I know this blue print exists thanks to my ever dedicated therapist who saw me for over a year and helped me understand what was actually happening in my brain and why? Now, I can’t let anyone in. I can now see the normal man, the man who loves his children, the man I’ve known since I was in my twenties who tells me he loves me, the man who texts me every day with something nice and has been there for me through thick and thin for the last five years. There are lots of normal men, and women as well that I could let into my life in order to not be alone. But I think at this point, I want to be alone. I don’t want the responsibility of being involved with people. I’m scared. I don’t want the heartbreak, the drama, the roller coaster ride.

I’ve had people who have read my blog ask me why I bare my soul in this public setting. I do it because I am compelled to write. I do it in the hopes that something I write will strike a chord with someone else who is maybe going through or has gone through similar things. I do it because sometimes it helps to know that there are others like you in world. I believe for the most part, most people have had good experiences with their mothers but not all of us have. And so I write for those of us who haven’t. I write for those who never knew the security and warmth of a mother’s love and nurturing. I write to let others know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Even though I actually may not be able to see it at the moment, I know it’s there. And I’m just praying like hell that light is not the light from an oncoming train.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Trials and Tribulations

2013-03-07T20:12:00.000-05:00

I have been fascinated, possibly in a morbid way, by the Jodi Arias vs State of Arizona trial. For those of you living under a rock for the last month, Jodi Arias (a Mormon) killed her lover and former boyfriend, by stabbing him 29 times, shooting him in the face and slitting his throat just about decapitating him. She then drug his body into the shower and left him there naked and bleeding to die. She is on trial now for the murder and the prosecutor in Arizona is going for the death penalty. If convicted and if she gets the death penalty, she will be the thirteenth woman put to death in the United States since 1976, the most recent one being Teresa Lewis, whose sentence was carried out in 2010 in the state of Virginia.

Eva Dugan was the first and the last woman executed in the state of Arizona in 1930 and was the cause for Arizona changing it’s method of execution from hanging to the gas chamber. This was due to the fact that when Eva was hung, the snap of the rope decapitated her and her head rolled to a stop at the feet of unsuspecting spectators. This grisly scene caused five people, two of them women, to faint. Present day Arizona uses lethal injection as it’s method of execution.

I am for the death penalty in cases of serial killers and mass murderers when there is irrefutable proof that they committed the crimes they are accused of. I am not for it in any other cases because our justice system is not perfect and people are wrongly convicted all the time.

For all it’s worth, I feel so sorry that Travis died the way he did. I feel bad for his family No matter what he did he did not deserve what happened to him. But he is gone now and not only can not defend himself but the woman who readily admits to killing him is on trial for her life so she is saying things now that may possibly ring true with not just members of the jury but in the court of public opinion. I know that some of things she has described have at times given me great pause for thought. There are many parts of her story whether true or not that I personally can relate to.

Jodi claims that she was so in love with Travis that she did not know any other way to be. She claims she loved him so much that even though she knew he was a pedophile, she had not only a desire to please him but also to protect him and his reputation. She claims that the “beautiful parts” of him, over whelmed the “bad parts” and that she was trying to encourage him to get help for his “issues”. She claims that he got progressively violent with her after she discovered that he had an attraction to young boys. She claims that she loved him so much that even after breaking up with him and moving away, she still participated in a sexual relationship with him because she believed that if he continued to have sex with her, it would abate his attraction to children. She talks of being elated and on a “high” when he would call her and be nice to her, that this made her want to please him, even in ways she was not comfortable with. She talks of struggling to end it with him, to move on and find someone new but that he had this invisible hold on her.

Travis and Jodi’s relationship had a religious component as well. Travis was a devout Mormon and at some point in their relationship, Jodi converted to Mormonism and Travis was the one who actually baptized her. They had religious and philosophical discussions and as Jodi puts it, they had a “meeting of the minds”. This caused the sexual attraction to become even more intense according to Jodi.

Jodi lied…a lot…to a lot of people before finally confessing that she killed him. There are many things that she has said since then that calls into question her honesty. For example: Travis being a pedophile. Anyone in IT knows that forensic labs now can pull anything off a computer or memory card/stick even if it has been deleted. There was no evidence on Travis’ computer, cell phone or any of his electronics or any disks that gave evidence that Travis had visited, or downloaded or had been viewing ANY kind of pornography, let alone child pornography. Also, there is no evidence what so ever of Travis and Jodi having a volatile violent relationship. She mentions a number of incidents where physical violence was involved and yet, there are no police reports, no pictures of injuries, no reports from roommates of anything they overheard, no reports from either Jodi or Travis’ friends that this violence was going on.

If what Jodi went through is true, I can relate and I feel sorry for her but there isn’t any circumstance I can think of where she had to kill Travis, particularly in the manner that she did. She lived a thousand miles away, she could have blocked his number, she could have at any point given up and walked away. Having been in an abusive, manipulative and controlling relationship on a couple of occasions myself, I know that there comes a time when you just have to throw your hands in the air and just give up. When a guy is an asshole, he is an asshole, and you are not going to change him. No matter how many good qualities he may have, there is always a line and once that line is crossed, if only for your own sanity, you walk away. She knew I wasn’t going to work. After she moved away she should have never spoken to him again.

I fear now that Jodi Arias will in fact become that thirteenth woman, put to death in the state of Arizona. An infamous distinction and one I’m sure she did not think about as she was stabbing Travis, cutting his throat from ear to ear and then shooting him in the face, leaving him to die in the shower naked and alone. For what ever his faults were, his life had a very hard beginning. He had managed to overcome and make something of himself. And considering all he had accomplished, his ending was not deserved. Executing Jodi will not bring him back. It may bring some closure to his family but it will serve no purpose now to execute her. In my mind a better punishment for her would be to live a long life locked up with only the thoughts of what she did to Travis to occupy her time.

Good vs Evil – The Classic Struggle

2013-03-01T18:37:00.002-05:00

As people in this big complicated world, we see so much bad; so many souls filled with hatred, violence, and evil. We can’t help but see them. Sometimes they hunt us down; chasing us until we have to confront them. Over time, they can become all that we see.

As with all evil though, some good will always come from it. It can bring us together with some of the most generous, kind-hearted and honorable people we could ever hope to meet. It can fill hearts with a love so strong that it will endure forever and create unbreakable bonds that will last even in the face of life’s most difficult challenges.

Some times the good comes when we least expect it and need it most. If we are lucky enough to notice it, set our eyes upon it and appreciate it, it can almost make us forget all the bad; the evil ones that have used, manipulated and hurt us and then left us for dead. The truth is, truly evil people are the ones who are dead; dead on the inside and incapable of knowing or feeling what they’ve done to another; particularly to a tender-hearted, good and generous person. The only concept evil people can appreciate is one that gets them their way, anything else is non-negotiable.

Today is life. The only life we’re sure of. Make the most of today. Words of wisdom passed on by an innocent, tender, kind hearted soul whose life has been marred forever by an unkind, evil, and manipulative person. These are words I say every day now; words that will stay with me forever as I travel this big complicated world and work to change the course of my life forever.

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones

2013-02-24T13:26:00.000-05:00

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”. I can remember being a child and reciting this to myself when others would make fun of me. It got me through some rough times back then but wasn’t exactly accurate because words can and in fact many times do hurt.

And it’s not just words that can hurt. Often times words are absent in the hurting. Many times it is someone’s actions or non-actions that hurt the deepest. For example: someone who says one thing and does something completely different. This can hurt more than if that person just outright tells you honestly what their intentions are. The world is a dark and dangerous place and there are people out there who are on a path to hurt as many people as they can any way that they can. They are dark and deceitful and they want to take out on the world what has been done to them. They have no desire to heal from their wounds. They only want to inflict pain believing that because they have been hurt, they are absolved of any responsibility for hurting others. They believe that it is each of our own responsibility to keep ourselves from being hurt and they if hurt us, well it’s our own fault. They have no interest in healing and living a normal life.

Being deeply hurt emotionally and mentally can take a lot longer to heal than a broken bone. And once you do, things are never the same. Your brain chemistry changes after each deep emotional wound. But what about people who are “born hurt”; born with a different brain chemistry than most people; born broken?

Adam Lanza had Asperger’s Syndrome which in itself causes an inability to read visual queues. He also had an undiagnosed sensory disorder which caused him to not want anyone to touch him. He had an extremely difficult time being around people. He couldn’t walk down the busy hallway of his schools without being gripped by an overwhelming anxiety attack. One wonders what he would have been like as a full grown adult had he not taken a gun and shot twenty little children and six adults and then turned the gun on himself. Would he have ever been able to have a relationship with a woman? And what would that relationship have looked liked? How would they have been able to communicate with each other when Adam could not read visual queues and could not stand to have any one be close to him? Perhaps they would have just had a phone relationship or an online relationship where reading visual queues isn’t necessary and being in close proximity isn’t an option. Of course, by normal standards, this would not be considered a real relationship, would it? He drew haunting and beautiful pictures. How would he share these with the woman he was in a relationship with? I guess he could have scanned them into his computer and sent them to her but he would have never been able to see her expressions or experience her emotions when looking at his art which being a musician myself, is very much a part of the expression; to see and feel the reactions of others when experiencing your expression, your art. It seems that in examining his situation, he would never have been able to have a normal relationship with anyone, let alone a close relationship with a woman. He was by all sense and purposes, broken. He was born broken.

Adam Lanza found non-verbal communication frightening and could not read people. This caused him to retreat within himself; into is own world. Ninety percent of our communication is non-verbal. This is ingrained in our DNA because before there were words, there was only this type of communication. It has evolved exponentially over time and for a large percentage of our population, communication in this way happens unconsciously. Mastering non-verbal communications can improve our negotiating skills, our social interactions and is imperative in our close relationships with someone we are interested in romantically. People who are able to read non-verbal queues can create empathy, detect lies within seconds, and know immediately when it’s time to close a deal. People who are creating a rouse avoid people who can read non-verbal queues like the plague. They don’t want to be in the same room with people who can read non-verbal queues for fear their deceptions will be revealed, particularly if they are on a path to hurt that person. They won’t be able to accomplish their goal if that person reads them and realizes they are deceiving them. They are dark, deceptive and broken.

There are in fact people in the world who make it a dark and dangerous place and there are so many out there who can “break” us but it is our world and along with the dark and dangerous comes the light and safety of those who love us, who truly care for us and hold our best interests in their hearts. You can not have one without the other; the yin and yang if you will; the rain and the sun; the storm and the calm. Balancing can be tricky. Mitigating the harm that one awful person can do to your emotional health can be an almost impossible task particularly when you are someone like me who wears their heart on their sleeve and shares entirely too much with people who would seek to harm but for no other reason than the fact that they can. Sometimes, healing from these wounds takes time, introspection, retreating from the world for a bit so as to not endure any further damage. You will know when you’re ready to go out into the world to fight another day. And when you do, your shield is just a little bit harder, a little bit stronger, and you trust a little less easily; which can only really be a good thing if you’re someone like me who trusts too easily to begin with.

A Work In Progress

2013-01-20T18:03:00.001-05:00

Think of your situation, your position in life today. If someone had told you five, ten, twenty years ago, that you would be where you are today, would you have believed them; or would you have laughed at them told them how crazy they were for imagining such things? Yet here you are.

No one ever knows what is going to happen in the future. There is a saying “God laughs while we make plans”. Does this mean we should never make plans? Does this mean we should never aim for something? Well that brings to mind another saying; “If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it every time”.

When I was in my twenties, there were a few things that I thought I knew for sure. I would be a “home owner” someday, I was never going to get married, I would never have children of my own, I would be educated, and even though I believed I would never get married, I believed that at some point I would find that ever elusive “true love”. I believed that I would find my birth parents and would finally at some point have the answer the question that plagued me from the moment I found out for sure that I was adopted, “Who the hell am I?” How much of that actual came to fruition? All of it, except for the never being married part. I did get married but I also got divorced, well, soon to be divorced.

If someone had told me in my early twenties “You will find your “true love”, the perfect match for you, and you will find him in the same person twice in your life but you will choose to let him go twice as well”, I would have said “You’re nuttier than a fruitcake”. But, I did find him. I actually found him early on. I was pretty sure that it was him too. But I let him go. Why? Because at the time I was young, very young, too young to really realize what I found; to young to realize that was the moment. But in my heart I knew, I felt, I did believe. Once I let him go and he was gone, I often changed what I believed. There were periods that I believed there was “one lid for every pot” and there were others where I believed that you could find your “perfect match” more than once in your life. After marriage, I now know the truths I hold to be self evident. I don’t propose this for anyone else but myself. For me, there was and always will be only the one. And though we found each twice, and I let him go twice, it doesn’t change anything regarding my feelings toward him. You see, loving someone doesn’t just mean that you love them unconditionally; it also means loving them enough to let them go. While he himself is the perfect match for me, his behavior and the timing of everything was off each time so I had to let him go, both times.

There won’t be a third time and that’s fine. I consider myself luckier than most. Many never find anyone they feel really understands them, really “gets” them. Many never find someone that they have so much in common with there is nothing to fight about. Many never find someone they can talk to about their work and that person completely understands and is not bored to tears. Most never find that person who feels, understands and can participate in their talent, their gifts, the thing that makes them unique and interesting. So, if only for a while I had that. I was able to know and feel what that was like. And I can take that with me wherever I go.

I am a work in progress. So many things yet still to do with my life. It won’t be over till I’m buried in my plain wooden box so I’ve got work to do; shards of a vessels to collect; pieces of light to bring together; further enlightenment to find; more scholarly endeavors to attend to. I think back to a time last year when my kitchen sink broke and I spent the afternoon curled up on my kitchen floor in agony, pain and heartbreak like I have never known washing over me, surrounded by literally “everything under the kitchen sink”, hour after hour, waves of sobs uncontrollably emanating from me because I believed my life was over. I believed I couldn’t live without my “love”, that life was at its end for me. I begged God, apologized for all those I’d hurt in seeking to have the one person I’d wanted most in my life, pleaded, made deals, if he would just help me make it work or take the pain away or just kill me now because I didn’t want to live like this. If someone had told me that day “You WILL get over this”, I would have cried out “NO I WON’T, I WILL NEVER GET OVER THIS!” It really does go to show that you actually can never know what will happen in the future. I did get over it. I am after all, a work in progress.

He's Just Not That Into You

2013-01-13T19:34:00.000-05:00

I saw this movie again this weekend and every time I do I’m reminded of the biggest lesson I’ve ever had to learn in my life and probably the longest it’s ever taken to learn it, over 19 months but at the end of it, I think I finally got it.

As women we never forget the first boy we ever had a crush on. In my case it was Kenny Bickins. At six years old, Kenny, who was 12, was my world. Then when I finally got the chance to talk to him, when he finally noticed me after months of following him around the apartment complex we lived in, he had me lie on his back on a Rough Rider sleigh and sent us both head first down a hill that ran the length of the complex, right into a tree at the bottom. The wind was rushing in ears, the smell of his hair and his coat blowing into my nose, the feel of the front of my whole body lying on top of his back, our legs intertwined, at six years old, I had no clue what I was feeling, I just knew it felt good. And then came the bottom, the hitting of the tree, and the wind completely knocked out of me. I rolled off him, trying desperately to breathe, thinking I was surely going to die, feeling like an idiot because I was making noises that sounded remarkably like a trained seal. He asked if I was alright, slapped me on the back a couple times to get me breathing again telling me the whole time not to panic, that everything would be ok. Then he picked up his sleigh, ran back up the hill and never spoke to me again.

As women we tell each other all kinds of stories, fairy tales if you will. “Oh, he’s not calling because he lost your number”, “he’s not calling because he is intimidated by how beautiful you are”, “he’s not calling because he’s afraid of how smart you are”, “he's probably not calling because he’s been really busy with work”, blah blah blah. Fairy tales. From the moment we are little girls liking little boys, we’re told “Oh, he punched you because he likes you”, “he said mean things to you because really, he likes you”. Every time a guy acted like a jerk we’re told “Oh it’s because he likes you”. This is why we set ourselves up for disappointment; why we accept all kinds of behavior from men because really “he likes us”. That’s why he acts like an ass and treats us badly. "Really he likes us". Soon, we’re all going to have to wake up from this fairy tale and realize that any man that really wants you will make it happen. If he’s not making it happen, he’s just not that into you, period, no ifs, no ands, no buts, and no excuses. If a man wants you, he will make it happen.

We’ve all heard the stories about the friend of a friend who had a date with this guy and then he didn’t call for a year, when he finally did, they went out on another date and that was it. Now they’re married with a house in suburbia, a white picket fence and 2 ½ kids. We’ve all heard the story of the girl who meets a guy in the grocery store aisle and they both knew immediately they were “meant to be”. Now they’re happily married. And of course there is the ever enchanting “friend” story. You know, the one where the girl and guy are friends for years and suddenly wake up one day and realize they really love each other and they are now living happily ever after. What we want so desperately to believe is that this is the rule. It’s not. It’s the exception, and the sooner we get realistic about that, the sooner we can start living our lives for ourselves. We can all hope for our exception to come along one day, but we have to live by the rule. It’s much less disappointing that way and gives us empowerment and sends us out into the world on an even playing field. And that my friends is your happily ever after. Living your life strong in yourself, strong in your own knowledge that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

2012-12-31T13:22:00.001-05:00

Are you a loner or just lonely because you can’t find people that you click with, that is the question. They are now classifying the gunman at Sandy Hook as “a loner”. I heard a “talking head” the other day say that the young men who committed such crimes as Columbine, Aurora and now Sandy Hook, the thing they have in common was that they were not loners by choice; that the difference between these young men and others who choose to isolate themselves was that these young men tried to fit in and were shunned by their peer group. Hurt and isolated they began to formulate a plan that would get them noticed. Angry because they didn’t fit in, they choose notoriety over being a “loser” who had no friends.

This situation and the people talking about it on our never ending 24/7 news cycle has provoked me to think of my own life and my own situation.

As a child, I was always alone in my family. Divorced parents, my brother sent away by my mother when I was only five, being raised by a mother who had no interest in me at all, I turned to people on the outside of my family. I also turned to my extended family, my grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins who were around my age. I found acceptance through them; I found happiness; companionship and I didn’t feel so alone. But this pattern of turning to whoever was there at the time to ease my loneliness was to follow me my whole life and on many occasions has gotten me into trouble, physically, emotionally and mentally. But I didn’t want to be alone, or more accurately, I didn’t want to feel alone.

I believe every person on this hunk of rock has felt the pain of loneliness at times in our lives. It’s how we handle it that makes the difference in each one of us. On one side of the extreme you have someone who took an assault weapon and killed 20 little children and on the other a person who calls someone over and over not because they are actually interested in a relationship in real life but because it makes them feel less “alone”. I fall somewhere in the middle I think. Because I’ve been alone most of my life, I’m not only used to it, I prefer it. I can pick and choose who I want to be with and when I want to be with them. I answer to no one which some might say is a lonely existence, however if you’ve ever been in a marriage that wasn’t good, you’ll know that this existence is a relief and is much better than being at the mercy of someone else’s whims.

The easiest way to overcome loneliness is to share, really share who you are, with another person who genuinely cares and has your best interests at heart. I have never had a problem with this. I am not afraid to share who I am with anyone, flaws and all. There have been some people in my life who have not understood; who either used my sharing against me or used it to try and convince me that they actually cared when in reality, they did not, they were just trying to assuage their own feelings of loneliness. Like anyone else who’s had this done to them, of course I’ve been hurt by this kind of behavior but it will not change who I am. I will continue to share myself with my base of friends and family that I know genuinely care about me and the ones who have used me for their own purposes, known or unknown, will get thrown by the wayside as they always have in the past. Those who don’t care will be forgotten. When I was working in a bar in the 80’s, a very wise older Jewish gentleman once told me, “Don’t waste your time caring about people who don’t care about you”.

Tomorrow is the first day of a new year, 2013. For me it is not a continuation of the old year, but a new beginning. My strength, respect for myself, respect for others who deserve it and my love for the world and all the possibilities it holds has carried me through to this place. The old has no place in this New Year. The people from my past who have treated me badly have no place in this New Year. They became my past for a reason. They had no respect for me, my feelings, my desires, my time and didn’t appreciate the love I gave to them. So as it always has been before I will continue on my own; happy that I answer to no one; filled with the possibilities of the things I can accomplish in this new year; safe in the knowledge that I’m strong; loving those who love me properly in return.

Happy New Year Everyone! L’Shana Tova

Fight or Flight

2012-12-16T16:14:00.002-05:00

In the wake of the Connecticut tragedy, I’m reminded of my own childhood and my elementary school, Glenmont Elementary. In those days we performed drills as well, just like the kids did at Sandy Hook Elementary, but for a different reason. You see, I was raised in the cold war era, where the threat was a nuclear attack and so on drill days, we were told to get under our desks, the classroom door was locked, the windows locked and the shades pulled down, the classroom lights were turned off, just like at Sandy Hook. In my young mind, the thought of a gunman coming into my classroom and shooting my teacher, my classmates, would have been unfathomable. My Kindergarten class picture sits on my bookshelf. The Year? 1964. How times have changed.

One of the little boys in the classroom in Connecticut where the gunman burst into the room and shot first his teacher and then started riddling his classmates with bullets, got up and ran right past the gunman, out into the hall, then through the shot out front door of the school and to safety. Fight or flight. This little boy knew to run, run like the wind, run like the devil was chasing him and was just about to catch him. I cannot imagine what was going through this little boy’s mind as he left his classmates behind to be slaughtered by a crazed gunman hell bent on destroying the lives of children, teachers, families and a community and then destroying himself but I’m thinking this scene and his flight from it will haunt him the rest of his life. He will feel guilt, shame, sadness like none of us has ever known. I hope that over time, this little boy will come to realize that he was a child and there is nothing else a child can or should do in that situation but run; run to safety; run to live another day because a child that young has his whole life ahead of him. He could become president, he could become a great psychiatrist, he could be the person that solves the problems of the world and so he should run; run for his life and the life of others.

This brings to mind something I heard recently. The system in our bodies that gives us warnings is called the Adrenal system. This system reacts to stress by releasing hormones that makes us alert and reactive. One of the problems with this system though is that it doesn’t know the difference between just a regular case of nerves and a real impending disaster.

The body can’t tell what are nerves and excitement, panic and doubt, the beginning and the end. The body just tells you to get the hell out. Sometimes you ignore it, which in many cases is the reasonable thing to do. In most situations in life most of us are not faced with a life or death situation and so we train ourselves to ignore the panic, ignore the doubt and carry on. But sometimes, we listen. You’re supposed to trust your gut, right? When your body tells you to run….run.

Something must be done, now! We can no longer as a society stand by and watch our children, teenagers, parents, friends, family, teachers be gunned down by crazed madmen with assault weapons. We are better than this. The issue must be looked at as a whole. Yes, it is a difficult one. Yes, there are people on both sides of the issue of gun control but we have to, as “reasonable” people on both sides of the issue realize that there is no reason that makes any sense at all for a normal person in our society to have weapons of military grade that belong in a war theater, in the hands of our people on the streets. No one shoots a deer with an AK47 automatic rifle. No one shoots a bird with a Glock 9. These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only. Massive killing of human beings. We as a society have to put our collective feet down to the gun manufacturers who are in bed with the gun lobby in congress and shout “NO, YOU CANNOT MAKE ANY MORE MONEY OFF THE KILLING OF INNOCENT CHILDREN AND ADULTS IN OUR COUNTRY”. We have to hold our congress people’s feet to the fire and shout “DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, NOW!” Now is the time for us to have all the conversations surrounding this issue; from gun control to the mental health system to the security of our schools where children are supposed to be safe. Actually, the time to have had these conversations was BEFORE 20 children were shot to death from three to eleven times each, in a sleepy little picturesque town called Sandy Hook. Anyone who thinks it’s not the time to have these conversations, think about the mother and father going out to their car and removing the child seat strapped in back because they don’t need it any more, their child is dead; think about them removing the presents under the Christmas tree because the child they so lovingly picked out presents for is gone. Think about the future Christmas’ and Hanukahs of the parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers and friends of these fallen little ones and adults which will forever be marred by memory that this was the time of year when they lost something most precious and they lost it because our society did nothing after Columbine, nothing after Tucson, nothing after Aurora, nothing after Fort Hood, nothing after Milwaukie. Isn’t it time NOW for us to do something? We cannot expect the government to take up this cause on their own when they are paralyzed by the gun lobby. We have to take up the cause ourselves. “We – The People”. We have to force the government to take up this cause. After 20 children between the ages of 5 and 7 lost their lives in the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States, WE HAVE to do something.

Suggestions?

Ban gun shows – huge loophole, people purchasing guns at gun shows require no background check. 40% of guns purchased by people in the U.S. do not go through even a cursory background check

Reinstate the ban on assault weapons which expired in 2004 because the statistics show that more mass killings in which more than 2 people have been killed by these weapons since then than the total number of mass killings since 1966.

Shore up the mental health system in this country through the insurance companies, the police departments and the school systems so that kids and parents with kids who have mental issues can get the help that they need.

Now is the time to do something about this. Do not let any more people die because we could not come together as a society and make the decisions that need to be made to ensure the safety of our citizens.

My prayers go out to the families of both the victims and the survivors of this horrifying crime.

Moving On Is Not The Same As Letting Go

2012-12-08T15:09:00.000-05:00

Here’s a question. Can two people really be “meant for each other”, “soul mates”? It would be nice if this were the case. It would be nice to know that all of us have someone out there waiting for us; us waiting for them. I’m just not sure I believe this any more.

The argument for believing it is “Why not believe it?” Who doesn’t want more romance in their life? Who wants to feel alone in the world? Not any one that I know. Maybe it is just up to us to make it happen; to actually show up and be “meant for each other”. If you do that, at least you’ll find out for sure if you’re really meant to be or not. But so many are not willing to even show up; not willing to take the risk that they could be wrong.

It can be very scary to find out that you’re wrong about someone. But we can’t be afraid to change our minds; to accept that things are actually different than what we thought they were; and that they will never be the same. For better or worse we have to be willing to give up what we used to believe. We have to be willing to not just move on, but to let go of those old beliefs. Because once we know we were wrong about someone, there really is no point in belaboring it. If you don’t move on AND don’t let go, you end up in a vicious cycle of telling yourself, “Well, if he had only done this or that”, or “But he had these ‘special circumstances’, that’s why he behaved the way he did”. As Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory said, “If ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts, oh what a Christmas we’d have”. The fact is, they didn’t do this or that, and their special circumstance doesn’t give them special rights to hurt people. So forget it, move on, let go. Accept that they’re a crappy person and you were wrong in thinking anything else; that you weren’t “meant for each other” and that’s that.

The more we are willing to accept what is and not what we thought, we’ll find ourselves exactly where we belong. If your two hands are busy holding on to someone who wasn’t right for you, wasn’t “meant for you”, you have no hands to embrace the one who is out there waiting, the who actually does show up; is willing to take the risk of possibly being wrong and can make the saying “meant for each other” a reality.

Hope, Change and Compromise

2012-11-07T10:10:00.000-05:00

First of all, congratulations to our President for winning re-election. Once again, President Barrack Obama has made history. Not only is he the first African American President but he is now the first African American President to be elected twice. Congratulation Mr. President.

Now, this President has faced divisiveness throughout his first term. There were congress people and some on the senate who were determined to see the President fail. So much so that they held the best interest of the American people hostage. There were elected officials who said from the very beginning of this president’s first term that their agenda was to make sure that Barrack Obama was a one term president. Well, they didn’t succeed. Through it all, the President prevailed. He accomplished some very important things for this country in the face of all that adversity and in the end he came out on top winning re-election. I believe this not only speaks to the President’s character but also to his willingness to listen to other views and compromise.

There are those now who have nothing but sour grapes. They want to continue to espouse things that are not true about our President, and continue to block anything he tries to do for the good of the American people. There are people who still, even after this overwhelming re-election, refuse to give credit where credit is definitely due. They refuse to see that if this President did all he did during his first term without people who were willing to compromise and who opposed him on everything; completely blind and uncaring about what was good for this country, imagine what he can accomplish with a congress who is willing to compromise, listen to the experts, and work with the President to keep the momentum going and bring this country back to where it was before we had eight years of war mongering and excessive spending and tax breaks for the rich that came from having an “Oil Man” as president.

You can say whatever you want about Barrack, it doesn’t make it true. What is true about this man is that he was raised by a single mother, a situation which many in this country are all too familiar with. He worked hard; got the grades he needed and went to law school, and not just any law school but the best in the country. He was head of the Harvard Law Review. As a legal student myself, I understand the gravity of this accomplishment. He could have gone into the practice of law and reaped the rewards of all his hard work. Instead, he worked for his community, doing pro-bono work (free) for people who couldn’t afford legal assistance. This is a man who understands that to a man whom much is given, much is expected and he rose to the occasion his whole life to meet and exceed those expectations. He understands and appreciates the gifts he’s been given and he has used them to the best of his abilities to improve the lives of others. You only have to look at his kind eyes when he speaks about things he is passionate about, look at his eyes when he is looking at his children, or his beautiful wife. This is a man who is alive, vibrating with a spirit that is determined, filled with the hope that things can change, that people can be convinced to compromise for the good of all, that there is always room for improvement and that man, while ever flawed, should and can make the world a better place for all of us living here on this big chunk of rock we call planet earth.

It is time for those who have so vehemently opposed this president to come together, open their eyes, stop ignoring the facts, listen to the experts in the various fields of science, economics, and education and instead of holding the country down, help to put the country completely back on its feet. We were all knocked down after 9/11. It’s time for the divisors and dividers to stop their negative rhetoric and get down to the business of really fixing the many challenges we have ahead of us. This takes compromise, intelligent listening, the ability to be able to see and understand all sides if the issues, and the willingness to admit that they are not always right. My hope and vision is that this is possible. That everyone can come together for the good of this country and the world. In Judaism, there is an expression, “When you save one life, you save the world.” It’s time to stop looking at and dwelling on the negative things of the past and move forward to save the world one life at a time, for our life in the present and for the future of all of us.

God bless America, God bless the world. Mazel Tov Mr President!

Analyze This!

2012-10-26T11:54:00.002-04:00

A person with a tendency to analyze everything has a specific set of skills. Learning to see the puzzle in everything has its costs. They are everywhere, these puzzles and once you start looking at them, it’s impossible to stop. It just so happens that people and all the deceits and delusions that inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzles of all. Of course, most people don’t appreciate being seen that way. It is a lonely way to live sometimes. It does have its costs.

At times, the puzzle seem impossible to solve and some in fact, are never solved. Some you must just move away from, give up, mark it down as unsolvable like an ill manufactured rubix cube; one that was accidentally made with no way to solve it, no way to line up all the little colored squares. Then there are others, simple to figure out, beautiful once solved and glorious in their simplicity.

We all wear costumes to hide our puzzles; clothes that on the outside say to the world “This is who I am”, “I am a professional”, “I am a surgeon”, “I am Jewish”, “I work for the electric company”; uniforms that hide who we really are on the inside, and project to the world a strong sense of who we want the world to believe we are. “I make life and death decisions every day”, “I am deeply religious”, “I can fix things” are all ideas of ourselves we want to project to the world. But when the uniform comes off, we are still that puzzle underneath it all; flawed and complicated, soft and hard, a mix of emotion and disengagement, happiness and sadness. We can all be hurt, and we can all do the hurting. It’s how you recover from it that matters; it’s how you solve your own puzzle that counts.

Strong People Don't Settle

2012-10-19T12:16:00.000-04:00

Strong people don’t compromise. We defy the odds, defeat death, strive for perfection, and are probably way harder on ourselves than anyone else is. We will go through hell and high water to achieve a good outcome, a good result, one that makes us and those around us happy, and confident in the knowledge that their faith in us is not misplaced. We can get the job done. We are strong. We are not built to fail but that doesn’t mean that sometimes we won’t. We don’t want to settle for imperfection, a failed relationship, we tell ourselves, it can be fixed, but sometimes, no matter how strong we are, no matter how hard we try, we have to listen to hearts and accept failure. Sometimes things just cannot be fixed. There are variables we cannot control but that doesn’t mean we just settle.

Sometimes what seems like settling is actually not. It’s actually choosing to move on, defying death, living to fight another day, putting distance between us and the event so we can learn from the mistake and strive for perfection in the next round, and come even closer to our “good result”. It takes strength to move on, to be on your own, and to not settle but it is necessary. It’s what we do, us strong people, it’s how we stay strong. Its how we keep faith to try again with a new person.

When we follow our heart, move on, and choose not to settle, it’s funny isn’t it, that a huge weight lifts; the sun shines a little brighter; the color comes back into the world again; there is hope, hope that the next time we won’t fail, hope that the next time will be better and for a moment, however brief, we find peace.

Time Heals All Wounds

2012-10-13T16:10:00.001-04:00

Is it time that heals all wounds? I’ve heard this expression all my life and I always wondered why this was true. It became obvious to me early on that in fact it really was true but was it really the passing of time that healed wounds or was it actually something else? I learned a number of years ago that it is in fact, something else.

In the passing of time after a deep hurt, or “wound”, you experience other things in life. You meet new people; reconnect with old friends, family members, share stories and experiences, you go to work each day, and find new things that you enjoy, new people that you enjoy and you take comfort in the people you already know and the things you were already doing. In this process your perspective changes. You apply all of these new interactions to the wound like a salve, healing it a little at time. And as it scabs over, you know it’s there but it becomes less and less painful. Now if you dwell on this wound, it is like ripping the scab off over and over and it never seems to heal but if you leave it alone, don’t pick at it, in time you forget it’s there and it heals itself. In time, you find yourself looking back and thinking “Now what was I so upset about?” Ding ding ding! That is the sound of your perspective changing.

There is a life coach who says that you can heal yourself from these life wounds instantaneously. That it isn’t in fact time, but perspective that heals all wounds and that you can change your perspective in an instant simply by looking at the situation differently; looking at it like how you would after the passing of time only don’t wait, look at it that way now. I have found this to be true. Like that old saying, “The best way to get over an old love is to find a new one”. Why is this true? Because in the bright light of your new love, the old one is like a dim bulb, paling in comparison…always. This is the nature of new love. When you don’t really know your “new love” well, they are perfection in every way because you don’t know any better. You haven’t seen their flaws yet, and even if you have, you are so enveloped in the attraction; you find these flaws “cute”, “attractive”, “sexy” even.

Happiness is a choice we each make each and every day. Even if we don’t realize we have the choice, we do. Ever wonder why certain people who have been given nothing in life, who have had to scape and claw their way to achieving the smallest of goals and yet these people live in absolute bliss, happy just to be alive, happy to have the opportunity to love and be loved, share and be shared with? Every day “above ground” is a good day for them. Then there are others in the world that seem to have everything, a good job, a nice family, a nice home and close friends and yet they are miserable, they see the wrong in everything and are completely unhappy. They turn to drugs or alcohol to try and change their state of mind but in the end, they sober up and they are still unhappy and so they do it all over again. These people end up on a downward trajectory, and sometimes, they never climb out of it. Yet the person who has been given nothing yet is happy to be alive manages to find a way to go to college, get a degree, a job they love and live a happy life. It all boils down to perspective. The happy person wakes up every day excited about making his/her life better. The unhappy person wakes up every day thinking “Oh God another day of being miserable”.

This is true with wounds as well. The happy person is able to look at things differently and change their perspective instantaneously which helps them heal and get over things faster than the unhappy person. The unhappy person picks and picks at the scab and it never seems to heal all the while making them more and more miserable with each passing day. They go through their lives as a ghost, walking wounded through every experience never really appreciating it or the people around them, expecting things to just change automatically. Happiness is a thought process that for some is easier than it is for others. For others it takes some work, but it can be done. You can choose to change your perspective and be happy, be grateful for all the things you have whether big or small, appreciate the people in your life, and forgive those who wound you because more than likely, those people are living quiet lives of desperation, the shell of a person while inside, suffering and not knowing how to change that feeling of “Oh God, another miserable day”.

Every single thing in life happens for a reason. I believe it is usually to teach us something that we need to know. If you can ingrain this idea into your perspective, you are well on your way to being a happy person. Yes, sometimes the things we need to learn are painful, sometimes life isn’t pretty and certainly relationships with people can get pretty ugly and messy but if you can tell yourself on a consistent basis that what you experience is not you, it is an experience and it’s meant to teach a lesson. If you can search and find what that lesson is, take it to heart and appreciate it for what it is, forgive yourself when you make a mistake and celebrate your achievements, know that life is short and we are given a finite amount of time on this earth so don’t waste it being unhappy and miserable especially about things you cannot change, be grateful, truly grateful for the smallest of things because often times, the smallest of things are the greatest gifts, you will find that living is easier, more fulfilling and gratifying. Love with all that you have, give all that you can, help wherever you see the need. The rest will take care of itself. Shabbat Shalom everyone.

Israel = "God Prevails"

2012-10-06T16:48:00.001-04:00

In its strictest form, “atheism” is defined as a rejection in the belief that there is “a” God. According to a report released in 2009 by the American Religious Identification Survey, Atheists make up approximately 2.3% of the world’s population. In 2009 the world’s population was about 6.8 billion people which would mean that in 2009 6.6 billion people in the world believed in some form of God or Gods.

Since I was a small child, old enough to speak and put ideas together in my brain, I had an interest in religion, particularly ones that were not my own. For most of my life I identified with Christians because really, there was no other identity for me because I was adopted into a Christian (Catholic) family and my birth mother never told the adoption agency about her Jewish background. However, even though I identified my self as a Christian, I never believed the very basic tenants of Christianity, one being that Jesus was God sent to earth to save humanity. It always seemed like a fairy tale, a myth laden with symbols and a story not to be taken literally but a story told to teach people about kindness to your fellow man, the love our creator had for us and importance of having faith that all will turn out OK in the end. I’m reminded of a line from a movie called “The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel” in which the main character says “It will all be alright in the end, and if it is not yet alright, it is not yet the end”. This has become my mantra.

In Christianity I found that a man, a human being, no different than me, was given special powers. Priests could absolve me of my sins; the Pope could make rules about how I was supposed to live my life, as a woman, as a person, all powers given to them by God supposedly. The prayers in Catholicism had lines like “I believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” and “He was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died and was buried and on the third day he rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of God” and the ever famous, “He will come again to judge the living and dead”. When you go to confession in the Catholic church, the culmination of being forgiven, and the measure of how great your sins are, is by how many “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s the priest that you can’t see or have eye contact with, gives you to say when he excuses you from the dark little booth with the sliding door where on the other side lies the priest’s face. I always wondered whenever I left confessional, was that meant to be a counseling session and if so, why can’t I see his face, why is the little sliding door closed?

My spiritual path has led me down many roads. I studied and in some cases practiced many different religions along the way but the one path I never went down previously was Judaism. I now believe that in the creator’s master plan, he was saving the best for last for me. I had to see and know about all the other religions to be able measure, understand and appreciate Judaism for what it is. It is first of all, the very first mono-theistic religion, born over five thousand years ago. Meaning, it was the first religion to ever believe that there was one God. It was the religion of Jesus which most Christians don’t even realize but all of their teachings, the teachings of Jesus Christ, were based in Judaism. Every good idea in Christianity came originally from a Jewish idea. And it would have had to be wouldn’t it, since Jesus was himself a Jew. Judaism is about the individual and about the world at large. Yes, there are sects of Judaism who believe in the good only for other Jews (Orthodox) and Jews who believe in the good for all of mankind (Reform). My sect, Conservative, believes in both. I prefer this idea because of everything I have learned in the last couple of years, Judaism in its original form, stripped down of all the “man-made” ideas, is in fact about both. It is about striving to be the best person you can be and helping to make the world a better place for all who live on this planet.

I’ve had many discussions with a person very close to me regarding the “marks” of a “good Jew”. He and I have known many people who identify themselves as “Jews” but question whether they are in fact “real Jews”. He is a Christian (Church of England actually) and has not had good experiences with the people he has known who identified themselves as “Jews”. Though I’ve explained it to him many times, and will probably need to explain it many more times, there are many facets to “being Jewish”. It is probably the hardest concept to get across to Christians because they think of being Jewish as only a religious identification. I understand this difficulty because for much of my life I thought the same way so I understand how hard it is to shift the paradigm of belief of only a religious identification to being Jewish is a religion but it is also an ethnicity, a culture, a people with specific DNA markers all originating from a specific place on this earth, the middle east, and specifically, Israel.

Israel is all of Jewish humanity’s home. The original Jews were in fact called “Israelites”. This is why the state of Israel has a right to exist, and should exist, just like Greek people have Greece as their homeland, Russian people have Russia, Spanish people…well, OK, so Spanish people have many homelands depending on where their ancestors were from but every Jew’s ancestor going back to the beginning was from Israel is my point.

Though the actual length of time the Jews spent in Egypt as slaves is still being deliberated by scholars, the fact is that we as a people were captured and taken into slavery for at least 350 years and the Bible says 400 years. This was our first departure from our homeland and the reason that people give as to why Israel should not exist as the “Jewish” country. In that time, our homeland was overrun by other peoples. They made homes, had families, generations were born and died in our homeland. This doesn’t make it any less ours. It is where we came from, it is our country. When you look at other country’s histories, we don’t say that England doesn’t belong to the English because they were occupied for a certain amount of time in history by the Romans.

And speaking of the English, at one point they had one of the largest empires in the world, but we don’t today call any of the countries they occupied “England”. By 1922, the British Empire controlled more than one fifth of the world’s population and was spread across one quarter of the earth’s total land mass, and yet, India is still known as India, the homeland for East Indian peoples, Africa is still known as Africa, the home of the African peoples. It is ironic to me then, to a certain degree, that since 1948, due in large part to British intervention, Israel has become in modern times the “official” homeland of the Jews.

The literal translation of “Israel” from Hebrew to English is “God Prevails”. It makes sense to me then that the homeland of the people who were the first to believe in one God, and one God only, would be called “God Prevails” and so far, for now, he…or she…does. Shabbat Shalom everyone!

It’s the Time of the Season

2012-10-02T17:55:00.001-04:00

Since I was a young child I could always tell when fall was arriving. It wasn’t in looking at a calendar that was the signal for me. It was that first color turn of leaves falling to the ground enveloping my world with the smell of musty wet leaves. It was the crisp air filled night sky which seemed to make the stars more visible and plentiful. It was the site of pumpkins every where, on people’s porches, in all the aisles at the grocery store and the site of them piled high at all the roadside farmer’s markets.

In those days my mother had her summer wardrobe and her winter wardrobe and now was the time of year when the switch happened. These days my closet is filled with winter and summer clothes all mixed together and I wear whatever the day and the weather calls for.

While the old signals still hold true for me that fall is coming or has already arrived, today I have new signals. Rosh Hashanna, Yom Kippur, Sukkot. I have my own house now so when the tree in the front yard starts shedding its leaves, I know its time to get the rake out and turn the air conditioner off. I know it’s time to clean the filter in the heating system and mow and weed the front and back yards one last time before winter sets in. Towards the end of October, I know it’s time to bring in the plants that have been outdoors since spring and have grown exponentially while being outside in the direct sunshine and humidity that is so prevalent in the Washington DC area.

Fall is for me a time for the ending of things that don’t work any more and the start of bright new beautiful beginnings. For the last few years, the traumas that I had endured through the year, ended around this time. And this year, well, this year is no different, except for one thing. This year, I know who I am. This year I won’t grieve over those endings like I have in the past. This year, I learned something very important; I learned that I am worthy. This year I learned that I’m a normal woman with the same desires as everyone else, to love and be loved in return and that love takes work, input, face time and open honest communication. I felt the lesson this year that everything really does happen for a reason and that there is a plan underneath it all. We may not know what it is, but its there and it’s set up this way so that we will learn and seek out knowledge, of ourselves, our families, of our creator and of the community we live in.

Love will get us there, on a wing and a prayer. I don’t know where we’re going but I know we’ll get there.