• Psychology of Life,  Speaking as a Parent

    A Letter to my Grandsons: (There will be more.)

    Be aware of the primal part of you, being aware allows you to have some control over the primal animal that lives within.

    Sex is necessary and good, hopefully you will meet others who believe the same thing.  Acknowledging the presence of something reduces the power of that thing.

    Life needs to be out in the open.  Secrets are a tool of control and almost always inappropriate.  Witness the epiphany of the early part of the 21st century, understanding what people were really doing was an instrumental feature of justice.

    Make decisions and change those decisions when necessary, clarity and flexibility are fantastic attributes to have.

    Love your family and treat them as your faith tells you.  Not all members of your family will honor you.  There will be times when they will treat you badly.  Decide wisely how you will live with your family.

    Giving is a gift unto itself.  Don’t expect anything in return for your gifts.

    Acceptance of you is one of the most important things that you will ever do.  By accepting yourself, you stop all enemies from gaining leverage via your self esteem.  “Yes, I know I have that fault, dastardly isn’t it?”  Or “yes, I am aware that it is more popular to like the color white, however, I like the color brown.”

    What is the collective unconscious?  What is natural knowing?  What is instinct?  These are all questions in which you will be part of the answer.  Be aware of the universe, your awareness will serve you well in life.  Religious dogma has not served humans for centuries.  However, kinship and fellowship are found in churches and synagogues; use them to keep yourself and your family well.

    Do not be that old angry man.  Bitterness is anger that hardens into a stiffness that cannot be softened.  Do not be that.  You should know that in the end what matters is how you decide to live.  Bitterness is an angry decision that must be renewed every day.  Decide not to be that and not to have that in your life.

    If you do not know what drives your anger and pain, find out.  If you don’t do that, then relinquish.  Hanging onto your anger and pain is the most awful decision that you can ever make.  Discover, relinquish and then banish that which hurts you and angers you.

    Your chosen journey is as good and as necessary as anyone else’s.  Don’t allow any devaluation of you.

    Protect and love others: just as you cannot allow yourself to be devalued, do not allow others to be devalued.  In your presence, all must be equally valued.

  • It is What it is...,  Love and Relationships

    Complicated Relationships, But Not You

    The current hurt feelings from our relationship didn’t hurt so much when I used to look forward to a better and brighter future.

    Once I knew that there is no better and brighter future here in this relationship, I became devastated.

    I should not have hoped in the first place.  I wasted irreplaceable hours being anxious and hoping.  I could have enjoyed those hours by accepting that you would not change your hurtful behavior.

    After all, you are concerned with you, as was I.  But no more, now you can be concerned with you and I can be concerned with new.

  • Economic Equality (A Goal),  Womens Issues,  World Affairs

    Cash, Guns and Food

    Justice is a human construct and therefore only exists if humans make it so.  I often tell people, “do not expect justice, it doesn’t exist on its own.”

    I know this and I preach this.  The wishes for karma, the wish for a vengeful God, the wish for the rich to be rejected from heaven, are all just that: wishful thinking.  Religion is a structure that gives the peasant, the working masses; reasons to keep going from day to day.

    America gives a chance to live beyond a survival mode and an opportunity to actually experience life.  It is an epic growth opportunity, but it requires choice.  What I mean by this is that, you must be consciously willing to go past the ego’s survival to another consciousness that includes more than just the self.  It is a conscious choice and cannot be made by an unconscious ego that concerns itself with only self, and is in survival.  This living, which is a step up on Maslow’s hierarchy, requires the self to be concerned with others, to think of others and ultimately to have compassion for others.
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    This is all in the background of my mind and so affects how I view how the presidential election played itself out.  I am deeply ashamed by what we have done here in America (and of course, we have done worse).  I am embarrassed that people I love actually support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.  I understand that justice does not exist, so I do not fight the idea that the electoral college “trumps” the popular vote.  The majority of America prefers Hillary Clinton, but…too bad, so sad.  Bruce and I each have a young nephew that supports Trump, one posting on Facebook “I’m not racist or bigoted, I just like Trump.”  The other posting on Snapchat “I am a deplorable.”  There is a thought by these young people that Trump will change Washington ~ and I am sure he will.  I don’t know if they noticed that the same old republican senators are following Trump around.  Capitalism will continue to reign supreme in this country.  It will not be beneficial to the working person, not at all.  Capitalism in America is just like Trump, concerned with self and with no other.

    In the back of my mind is the thought that this is a white man’s war against anyone and everyone who challenges the authority of the white man.  It’s been a comfortable position for the white man here in America, and who would give that up willingly?  Capitalism has been the white man’s weapon and they have used it well to repress all others.  White men owned Madison Avenue and spun their own stories of reality.  It is almost unbelievable how many Americans keep falling for the fairy tales that Madison Avenue keeps spinning.  From the cigarette industry to the current mortgage catastrophe, advertising companies have sold Americans a bill of goods that Americans keep buying.

    No wonder the uneducated working class white male voted for Trump, and their women, who voted the same!  The problem identification is so wrong.  Working people will not have their life improved by an emphasis on capitalism, witness the last 10 years, capitalism has almost wiped us out.  Capitalism has decreased the middle class by more than 15% – all of those people are now poor.  The loss of homes still proceeds at an epic rate.

    I am more scared than I have ever been, even when Bush was president.  I believe that egos are in control and egos are always about survival and self.  This is bad news for each and every other person.  The person in power will always chose self when the ego is in control.

    Cash, guns and food ~ Bruce and I have decided to launch a defensive campaign, just in case.  We are putting together a reserve of cash, guns and food.  But make no mistake; we are able to do this.  There are millions who cannot.  Twenty percent of Americans live below the poverty level.  For those in poverty, there is no such thing as a reserve.  We are looking towards some very bad times here in America, and I am scared, not just for me, but for everyone.

     

  • Womens Issues,  World Affairs

    Women, a New Day

    One of those obvious things ~

    It never crossed my mind that I would need to explain feminism to my daughters.  After all, I lived a strong and independent life and worked hard for my own accomplishments.

    I never told them how lonely it is to fight for women.  I never told them about the personal prices that I had to pay to defend women who were being raped by the current culture.  I never explained to them the reality of how difficult it was for my mother to get a job as a bartender.  My mother was, literally, the first female bartender in a free standing bar in 1968.

    The biggest prices that women pay are the economic ones.  After all, if you have money, everything else can be bought.  Women have always, systematically, been kept out of the most lucrative jobs available in America.  This is why it was so important for my mother to get that bartending job; it was the highest paying job in the industry.

    At work in the 90s: when I spoke out against a male physician who was denigrating women in our treatment facility, I was marginalized and had to work in a hostile environment.  Ignorantly, I finally resigned and the women who came to the facility for treatment continued to be put down and insulted by the Latin physician who thought shaming was okay.

    My daughters were with me when these things happened to me.  I didn’t explain any of it.  I realize that in retrospect, it only meant that mom didn’t like her job anymore.  I must have discussed it; I must have made some words for it.  I didn’t explain it enough.

    Being independent was not about getting away from men, it was more about ensuring that I had choices in my life.  I thought I was demonstrating the right life, in spite of a male dominated culture.  It wasn’t that a man beat a woman: it was more that nothing would happen to that man when he beat that woman.  I was fighting the structure of a culture that allowed women to be beat; that kept those women in minimum wage jobs, that made child care impossibly expensive.  When I was young it was actually impossible to get child support.  Fathers of young children roamed free while the mothers were chained to child care and bare minimum wages.  That was my world reality at age 20.  Women stayed in hurtful marriages because the alternative was so much worse.  Add to that, the fact that many women were sexually blackmailed by men more powerful than they.  Landlords would demand sexual favors and no woman without money or family was safe in this environment.

    Today, life is much better for women, but not nearly as good as it should be, not nearly equitable.  My daughters are not aware ~ perhaps~ of this long and dark road that women have had to go down in the last millennium (or so).   Trust me on this, it has been a dark road.  When European daughters were being raped by uncles, brothers and fathers, Freud called it penis envy and the whole world believed that hundreds of women were just having sexual fantasies.  Indeed, it has been a dark road for women of all classes.

    Today, we are able to articulate so much of what was deprived of us before now.  Now I hear people talking about the “pink tax” and I am so thrilled that it is now “a thing”.  Yes, not only do women make less money than men, but then women must also pay more for everything that they need and purchase.  Dry cleaning a woman’s shirt is 4.99 and a man’s shirt is 1.49.  I am told by the dry cleaner that a woman’s shirt is more difficult to press.  Why?  No answer.

    This culture is a structure that many men do not wish to be a part of.  My son is passionate about fairness and would not participate in any of these crimes against women.  But these crimes continue unabated.  Women are still being beaten and murdered by their spouses at an alarming rate.  Incest continues and perpetrators walk about freely with no one the wiser of the crimes.

    We still don’t have enough female senators and certainly not enough female CEOs, and those women in power are often there as a function of being co-opted into the male world.

    Why would any woman in her right mind, in America, vote for Donald Trump?