• Economic Equality (A Goal),  World Affairs

    If You Are Uninformed/Ignorant, Stay Out of the Conversation

    May 21, 2017

    If you don’t care enough to look past the PR campaign and search out the truth, you are irresponsible.  That’s important and I’ll tell you why.  We are living with a crazy president, we are not buying soap.  Your ignorance is causing my life problems and that is unacceptable to me.

    PR is okay for purchasing cereal, it’s not okay for running a country.  Just so we are clear here, PR is ‘public relations’ and is most usually associated with lies and fairy tales.

    We have a responsibility as human beings to know the truth about the people that we trust with our lives.  If the leader of our country is making billions of dollars by cooperating with a foreign government on oil deals and other commercial enterprises not available to a private citizen, that is criminal.  It is also a way to sell Americans for the evil of “the love of money”.

    We Americans are unhappy and we have every right to be.  We live in systems that take advantage of us.  No matter how much we work hard and earn, there are mechanisms in place to break us: minimum wage, the price of healthcare, racism, sexism, bigotry, and the big one, greed.  Greed creates political systems that steal from us, Dakota Access Pipeline as an example.   Another recent example includes fighting in wars that protect oil wells instead of human beings.  These governmental activities cost money and we forget, that we pay those bills.

    As Americans we need to know when politicians legislate for their own personal profit.  We need to know when our trust is betrayed.  This requires work and information.  As Americans, we must sacrifice our ignorance to a greater good.  That good is to know when we must act, and that time, the time to act, is now.

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  • Love and Relationships

    On Missing My Mother

    May 14, 2017

    I remember the first Mother’s Day after my mom died, it was awful.  Going through the big retailers in the weeks leading up to Mother’s Day was very painful.  The balloons and flowers were reminders that I no longer had any reason to buy a Mother’s Day gift.  It seemed as if there was a huge absence within my essence.  It was an absence that would never get better.

    Every time my friends talked about how challenging their own mother was, it sparked anger in me. I said “at least you have a mother”.  I was angry.  How could she leave us so soon and at such an important time?

    Over the years (21) the struggle lessened.  I became less angry and my pain less acute.  There are some days, like today, when randomly the hurt becomes acute again.  I don’t know why or wherefore that the hurt just bubbles up within me.

    I wish that there was a comforting thought or prayer to make it go away, but there is not.  It just is.

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  • Philosophy,  Psychology of Life,  Wise Words

    The Truth

    May 8, 2017

    Why is it so hard to convince people that the truth is rare and certainly doesn’t exist in their heads?  So many people believe that they know “the truth”.  Not so.

    It is “a truth” that some police officers are violent with innocent people.  It is not “the truth” that policemen are arbitrarily violent with innocents.

    It is also true that if a person repeatedly shows violence, that person is violent.  Nothing that we think can change that.

    As humans, we want our own truth to be “the” truth.  No, specificity is the only real truth.  Generalizations do no justice to anyone or even to our own selves.

    Isn’t that why freedom is so important in this world?  Not just here in America, but everywhere.  We don’t want to be generalized, we want our own individual chance to demonstrate our choices.  And yet there are those who will close their mind to the possibility of goodness in others.  It is not okay to be this, it is not okay to do this.

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