• Speaking as a Parent,  Wise Words

    Grandsons (contd.)

    I want you to know that your current worry will go away.  All things can be evaluated this way: will this matter in two years?  Ninety nine percent of the time the answer is no, and once you know that, relieve yourself of your worry.

    I know that many things will worry and concern you over the years and in some ways they should.  It can be a moral compass because it tells you where and how to focus on what is right.  Guilt will do the same thing for you.

    Be careful of guilt because guilt is a one way pass to telling yourself that you are “good”.  A good son, a good brother, a good father, a good boyfriend: are all conversations that you have with yourself.  Make sure that you don’t use guilt to make you feel like a good person, and then forgo the actual action it takes to be a good person.  To be a good person, you must actually do something, not just think it.  Guilt will make you feel that you have suffered and therefore have paid the price to “be good”.

    I want to add something really important here.  There are times in life (often) when persistence is important.  You may not think you are good enough or smart enough to have something, yet you want that something.  Your inner thoughts should not dictate how hard you try to get what you want.  Sometimes when I am ready to give up, I push a little bit harder and there is the goal right around the corner and it is good.  Keep looking, keep trying, keep working at it, you can attain it.  This is also where clarity will serve you well ~ know what you want and work towards it.  Persistence will get you there when nothing else is working.

  • Economic Equality (A Goal)

    Heya; Misunderstanding, This is Supposed to be Healthcare

    I have never felt more misunderstood about my views on public health care than I do today.  I had a very interesting conversation last night with an RN and a risk manager.

    The RN’s current heartache is this feeling that lots of the ER patients “have no skin in the game” and he doesn’t mean this literally, he really means it figuratively.  What he is referring to is folks who have no money and who are on public health care .  He feels that this is the reason that healthcare is so expensive.  If we “the taxpayers” didn’t have to pay, then healthcare could be cheaper.  I tried to explain to him that we are in a capitalistic society that values profit more than human life.  Because of this, our society allows doctors to make twice as much as Canadian doctors, and hospitals are all about shareholders, not about patients.  Healthcare needs to be for sick people, not for the profit that it brings.  Capitalism has perverted healthcare almost beyond redemption.  When we get treatment, we only get the treatment that will bring the physician the most profit.  Why?  Because this is America.  I may benefit from surgery, I may benefit from a simple procedure, but the physician who is in control of my care will choose based on his/her pocketbook.  All will believe that the physician is indeed smart and successful.  In the meantime, me the patient, will receive mediocre care that may or may not resolve my complaint.  Cortisone shots instead of surgery says the doctor who does not perform surgery; carpal tunnel surgery says the surgeon who owns a surgery center.  This is America, capitalism is applied to everything and in every way possible.

    The RN insists that America has the best health care in the world.  Of course, that is not the truth.  I throw out the statistics on infant mortality rates in America.  If you are non-white and in poverty, the infant mortality rate is so high in America, that it is comparable to third world country mortality rates.  Someone on my left chimes in with, “well that’s the mother’s fault, they are always doing drugs and that is what kills the infant.”  Oh my, what a sad thing to say and, so incredibly uninformed.  I look at both of these individuals and we are having a great discussion, however, I suddenly see that their perceptions are limited only to what they do and see.

    That is another American trait and it is horrible.  We all believe that the truth is our truth, because no other reality exists, except the one that we live in.

  • 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.
    maslow

     

     

     

     

     

     

    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?

     

  • Speaking as a Parent

    Your Relationship with Your Child

    I pride myself on trying the best that I actually can, in every situation all the time.  It is a way to live life.  My mother often said that she lived life without regrets and as you can imagine, that can change the way you live life.  For me, it meant that I wasted no time.  My life was always about bringing all of me to the table.  I may have been doubtful and even confused, but it wasn’t from lack of trying.  I tried everything to do the jobs and the chores that life had assigned to me.  None were as important as motherhood.  My life wasn’t easy; I was unskilled in making money and militant about my relationships with men, so it was confusing ~ to say the least.

    There it is.  My daughter tells me that all of that trying was not enough.  She could have had a better life, if her parents had stayed together, if her parents had bracketed her teenage years.  Yes, I most definitely agree.  I also see that all of my reasoning and that all of my thinking are irrelevant.  If every bit of my effort were not what she wanted, nor what she needed, then that is all.  All of my effort was not enough.

    What do you do when your best effort does not get you to where you want?  What do you do when all that you do is not enough?

    The answer is that I do not know.

    I guess I thought: that if you tried hard, that if you put your best effort in, that is enough.  After all, addicts, sociopaths, liars and thieves, and cruel people have children and do nothing to care for them.  Isn’t my effort better, at least I worked myself silly to accomplish something?  The answer is, of course, no.  You may try very hard and your child dislikes you, maybe because you are unskilled at making time or money.  You may try -not at all- and your child is in love with you, enjoying every breath that you take.  Is that the same as not being enough, or is that a whole different ball game?

    I have to say that I think that for the most part, love is never misplaced.  You try very hard for your child, you love your child and it may not bear fruit, yet it is still worthwhile.  It is worth every effort that you have invested.  I do not know why, but I know that this is so.

    Brothers
    Brothers Jax and Cai
    Halloween
    Sophia at Halloween
  • Baby Boomers,  Love and Relationships

    Epic Misunderstanding

    We have a misunderstanding and it is of epic proportions.  Damn, my daughter told me today that what she remembered about her teen years is me going into the bedroom and staying there no matter how much noise they made.  Okay, I was newly divorced, my mother died, I worked full time, and had a second job and I was cooking for these kids endlessly.   Not to mention putting food on the table.

    And what my daughters remember is that I was not there, in my bedroom or gone.  How did that happen?  I’ve noticed this disconnect before, for example, I didn’t know that I had to explain being a hippy…

    I was horrified when my daughters wanted a “boob job”.  What happened to bra burning and long hair and being free from “the man”.  I tell you what happened, it’s 40 years later and I didn’t explain anything to my girls, I just thought they would understand based on who I am.  Geez, I wouldn’t let them eat at MacDonald’s ~ wasn’t that enough proof?

    It turns out that kids do not understand anything about their parents’ life unless it is explained.  That’s all, you have to explain it, all of it.  I knew these kind of misunderstandings happened, I just didn’t think they happened to ME.  Are you kidding?  I did everything in my own power to ensure that I was talking to all of my kids all of the time.

    Then I remembered, my mother often worked two jobs to make sure there was food on the table and a roof over our heads.  All I remember is that she was not there.  That was me.  I was not there.  My daughters were wild during that period and often my kids seemed lost.  The truth is that we were all lost, all of us were lost.

    Here is the thing, just hang in there.  No matter what, hang in there.  Continue to love the people that you love and know that life does work.  All of your love is worth it.  Giving is the best gift, never doubt it.