While watching a Texas Ranger’s ball game on the tube last night the camera panned the bleachers as they usually do throughout a game and they caught something that just wrinkled my skivvies as I watched it.
Three people sitting next to each other who apparently came together are each spending time checking their iPhones rather than enjoying their ballpark experience with each other and the fans surrounding them.
How desparate are we that we can’t go anywhere anymore without taking these electronic objects that obscure and block the human contacts of social activities? Why bother to be a participant anymore in such events if all you really want to do is know what your BFF is doing or thinking at every moment of every day?
I have two short pieces here that sum up pretty well I think how social media today has robbed us of some of our humanity.
The first is a humorous piece with comedian Tig Notaro on Conan O’Brian’s late night show. Click on Tig Notaro’s name at the top of this video to get the full size YouTube version
and the other is a verse from Native American poet Sherman Alexie – The Facebook Sonnet
Christians are funny people. They believe in an unseen God and even agree among themselves that he answers them in their prayers to him. But let someone say that have a personal line to the man and, well … let this experience with a candidate for the North Miami mayor’s seat speak to this last part
It’s traditional in politics, especially in pockets of the South where the culture is steeped in religion to convey to the voters that they hold “traditional Christian values” – an expression that is often code, telling voters that they are not a liberal Muslim socialist and that a “higher authority” guides their policy decisions, not the reality of grounded facts.
But clearly this candidate running for North Miami mayor has taken this tradition to a new level. Claiming Jesus has endorsed her campaign is a game of one-upmanship that didn’t play out well with voters. In a field of seven candidates Anna Pierre came in dead last with only 56 votes cast for her. Think what would have happened had Jesus not been supporting her.
While bongos are seen supporting Anna Pierre here in an earlier photo, the support she claims she had from Jesus didn’t seem to help her candidacy for mayor
Ms. Pierre’s self-confidence is apparent in her on-line bio. She has claimed to have overcome many obstacles in her life. “I hate to hear ‘No’ she tells us. “I refuse to let people tell me you can‘t do this, you can‘t do that because I am a woman, because of where I come from, or because I have a French name. It’s like putting fuel in my tank. And full speed ahead.”
I think being a french-Haitian woman is the least of her worries. Everyone likes a rags-to-riches story, especially when achieved by minorities. But should she choose to run again in the next election cycle someone might suggest using a more realistic endorsement. It may have worked for Bush in 2000 but Anna Pierre didn’t have his great wealth and political connections in the Supreme Court.
I believe the family is the primary determinant for establishing order out of chaos and serving to mold the larger social realm we are all a part of. Within that context, a most critical responsibility falls upon the father to teach their sons that though their strength may be based in part on a physical advantage over the other members of the family, it is not one that should ever be used to destroy their self-esteem that is so vital for a fully productive life.
There are only a few people in this world that I can’t express any tolerance for and at the top of that short list are the men who abuse children and women. The pedophiles, the abusive boyfriend, the wife-beating husband or child-pummeling dad. I, my two other brothers and one sister were raised by a father who, though never a likely nominee for the father of the year award, never physically abused us or our mom.
Yes, there was physical discipline that he administered but often as a directive from Mom. Those quit occurring however at an early age when dad informed mom he was no longer going to be her punisher. She could issue the physical discipline herself when she deemed it necessary or not at all. As I recall, we never were “whipped” again by our father or even from mom for that matter. Other forms of discipline came into play, like groundings and household labor tasks.
Dad hated the whippings and I’m sure mom did too. They were both raised by a generation who deemed such practices as part of parenting. This was one tradition I’m glad they saw little lasting value with. There was however a more noble tradition that my parents were raised with and that was that a man never hits a woman – EVER. Not that this ugly practice didn’t still exist or that some Southern Christian men even felt it was their natural right to physically correct women who would “forget their place” in the social order of the day. But dad always viewed those men who would beat a defenseless woman as someone beneath him and I remember a conversation we had in my pre-teen years where he made this known to me. Just that once, but it stuck with me.
Role Models
As a child of the 1950’s when TV was just starting to become a common fixture in most households, most of what we became engrossed in were the movies from the 30’s and 40’s that had strong male figures who served as role models for most of us. Mine were Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda. Their masculinity always shined through in their performances but not in any overtly aggressive fashion. If the plot involved a scene where a woman struck them across the face for some offense the man had said or did, he would not retaliate in like manner.
Only the villainous character would strike a woman and if our hero was in the same room when this happened, Bart the bad guy would soon realize the mistake he had made. I identify with that reaction to this day. These on-screen examples and my dad’s own words etched in stone for me, as it did I’m sure for many of my friends growing up then, that hitting a woman is never acceptable.
In a scene from the 1939 film Dodge City, Errol Flynn offers Olivia de Havilland security with his respect for women and his six-shooter. Today however there is less respect for women and over half of the violent acts perpetrated by men against women occur with guns
So was this life-lesson lost on too many other males of my generation? Did some miss it and thus fail to pass it on to their sons? Perhaps it isn’t that there are actually more instances of women and children being battered and abused today as a result of men who were not properly raised to respect women. Perhaps we are just hearing and seeing more of this intolerable behavior because public attitudes have changed where it no longer remains behind closed doors. This and the fact that we are more exposed to such behavior through the social media sources present today could account for what seems to be an epidemic of male aggression towards women and children.
I don’t know either if there is a link between those who abuse women and children and men who were raised under some strict orthodox view about the roles of men and women. No matter what the political, philosophical and religious influences, there are examples of each where men have abused members of their family. Yet, while I am sure no man with so-called traditional values would align themselves with wife beaters and child abusers, there exists a mindset inherent with conservative males where many take offense to the role of modern women today – working outside the family and raising children by themselves – and still hold that some forms of corporal punishment are acceptable for children. The traditions of their youth where they were raised with such notions have perhaps been ingrained more permanently than others who take a broader view of social conditions today, especially as it relates to the family.
Do such men ultimately cross a line where physical abuse feels right to them? If so, did their fathers fail to instill in them as mine did for me that you never hit a woman, or worse, did their fathers themselves serve as a role model for wife beating and child abuse? Do their conservative values that fostered the notion that women are subordinate to men and sparing the rod spoils the child create a crack in that taboo wall of wife beating and child abuse? Are the ones who cross that line also victims of abuse themselves or suffer mental health issues that prevent them from controlling their actions?
I have no real sympathy for people like Ariel Castro who’s been charged with kidnapping three women in Cleveland recently, two who were teenagers at the time and held them as his personal sex slaves for 10 years. There’s that part of me that wants to see him hung by his male genitalia and die a slow death from a thousand cuts. Then there’s that part of me that knows that Castro is not normal in the head. This makes him a victim too, albeit an unsympathetic one. Sane and mentally healthy men raised in a manner as I and millions of other Americans were don’t easily fall prey to victimizing weaker people, especially women and children.
The brain is a durable organ under most of what life gives us. But when it is traumatized from physical or emotional injuries, something breaks down that no longer allows one to see their world “normally” anymore. Castro has already stated that he was an abused child but how much of this is a move by the defense and how much is real and related to what led him to do the awful thing he did to three innocent girls remains to be seen. I’d be willing to bet that he was traumatized in some way that effected a healthy brain. I’d also bet there was a father who never had that conversation with his son about respecting women and limiting any discipline to a child to things NOT physical or emotionally disturbing like, “you’ll burn in hell for that”.
I don’t know that people like Rush Limbaugh who belittles today’s modern woman the way he does is capable of caring out a heinous act like Ariel Castro. But what makes a man publicly vilify a woman for her stand on birth control and refer to her as a slut and a prostitute? Limbaugh’s audience numbers in the millions and I suspect more are men than women. Mentally healthy male listeners who tune into Limbaugh’s talk show regularly are not going to victimize women in abusive fashions from Limbaugh’s frequent femi-nazi slurs.
Limbaugh attacked Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke last year after she spoke to a congressional hearing about supporting birth control legislation in Obamacare
But what of those men who themselves suffered some early childhood trauma at the hands of their father or a step-father or a bullying uncle? Are these men who also listen to the Christian-right preachers who rail against “promiscuous women” and warn of End Times to punish a “sinful” nation. Does all of this congeal into a state of mind that pushes such unstable men over the edge and validate a notion that says they have a right to control women and children in some sick demented version of doing it for their own best interest? Is this part of the thinking of some male conservative christian legislators in those states who pass laws that do all they can to control a woman’s right to an abortion?
We Need to Change
Back in March of this year there was a rally held in Dallas supported by conservative Mayor Mike Rawlings that featured notable sports figures including Emmitt Smith and Roger Staubach along with other local male religious leaders and politicians. It was an effort to bring attention to domestic violence in Dallas where boyfriends and spouses are physically injuring and killing their lovers and wives. Such an event, something unheard of when I was a child, tells us that our sons have not undergone that right of passage where a father talks to his son about respecting women.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings on stage March 23rd of this year in front of city hall with other notable speakers calling out men to act against domestic violence in the city
In Dallas [alone] last year, 26 women were killed by their intimate partners, up from 10 the year before. The death of Karen Cox Smith—whose husband has confessed to shooting her in a parking lot in January—has become a rallying point for those hoping to reverse the trend. Mayor Mike Rawlings is a big part of that effort, becoming a high-profile advocate against domestic violence in the last few months, and urging Dallas men to speak up and take responsibility. SOURCE
The group that had been formed from this effort is called Dallas Men Against Abuse. When I went to its website and clicked on the link at the top of the page “What It takes To be a Man” I was thoroughly delighted to see at the top of the list something my dad told me fifty something years ago – “A man never hits a woman”. It’s corollary was also on that list – “A man teaches his son to respect a woman”
It’s good to have these ideals I’ve held so long validated by other men my age. And its good to see some men standing up and trying to address the issue of domestic violence. But a closer look at this group shows that they are simply “good Christian men” who appear to view wife beaters and child abusers as men who suffer a character flaw and tend to characterize such deviant behavior as “sin” rather than as a mental health problem. Nowhere on their website does it discuss addressing mental health needs of known abused children and especially young boys who were raised with no fathers or fathers who were far more absent in their lives than they were present.
This cycle of violence by men towards women and children needs the message that Dallas Men Against Abuse is advocating to help deter further abuses, but like any deviant behavior that deals in violence, we can’t merely issue a “Just Say No” proclamation and expect everything to magically disappear. There needs to be early intervention and constant support for men who show any signs of aggressive behavior in their family settings. We need to watch male children who are known victims of sexual and physical abuse and track them during their formative years to ensure that the ill-effects of their abuse doesn’t lead to more of the same in any future relationships with women.
To never hit a woman is not something imprinted in our male genes. It is a learned trait and relies heavily on being brought up in a stable family environment where the father serves as a role model who respects his wife, loves his children and doesn’t routinely fall back on uncontrolled rage when life doesn’t play out the way he wants. Our culture sends a mixed signal to many men with the media images played out in the cinema and the extremist voices on radio and TV that chastises women and children who don’t tow a strict religious interpretation of archaic scriptures. It doesn’t help either when we force women to have unwanted pregnancies and men are too often absolved of their responsibilities for a child that has ever right to be raised in a loving, stable environment.
I haven’t presented a good song on my blog in a while so here’s one for you. It’s a good one for Friday to start your weekend with. It’s got a simple message that’s been around for a while, at least since Judy Garland sang “Get Happy” in the 1950 musical, Summer Stock
Forget your troubles and just get happy
Ya better chase all your cares away
This song is so much like that too. More than just a feel good song, it’s one of those tunes that connects with the sensory apparatus in your body and gets your juices flowing. And what better time to feel a little reinvigoration than the end of the work week.
Even if you no longer go through the grind of a 40-hour work week, like myself, we all need that little stimulus that was more familiar to us when we were younger. If you’re not getting the itch to stomp your feet and clap your hands when this tune gets going, then you need to check yourself into the nearest mortuary.
Serena Ryder performing in 2009
The song is “Stompa” by Canadian musician Serena Ryder. The world weighs in on us everyday. Music like this helps us push back a little because “nothing’s gonna disappear.” So step away from it all for just a little while and let the music move you to clappa your hands and stompa your feet.
As of this morning, 5/6/2013, there have been 3,852 gun deaths since the Newtown massacre. SOURCE
In fiery rhetoric you would expect to see in a Thomas Paine pamphlet over 200 years ago or on the floor of St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia back in 1775 when convention delegate Patrick Henry gave his famous “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech, Wayne LaPierre has also stoked the emotional fires of NRA delegates in Houston, Texas this last weekend. The big difference is that LaPierre is rousing the crowds not for a threat to any real loss of personal liberty but for a straw man argument that protects the special interests and profits of the gun industry.
LaPierre and NRA president, David Keene along with other gun advocates were trying to appeal to a sense of patriotism that has been exploited over the yeas to ensure that facts about sane gun control measures don’t take root in the perceptive minds of most of their members. But this effort seems to be failing since recent polls show that 74% of NRA members are supportive of legislation that “requires a universal back-ground check for all gun sales”. Even in Secessionist Texas where the NRA has surprisingly only a slight edge of being trusted more than President Obama concerning gun issues – 47% vs. 43%, a clear majority of Texans – 49% to 41% - favor a ban on assault style weapons.
So the emotional appeals by LaPierre that affirm “We will never surrender our guns, never,” is a misleading affirmation that distorts what the public really wants following the senseless mass killings we’ve been experiencing in the last few years. The view that somehow any legislation currently being debated in Congress or in town hall-style meetings across the nation is a move to suppress gun owner’s rights or remove any firearm from their homes is a dishonest approach by an NRA leadership that serves more at the whims of the gun manufacturer industry than it does to its own membership.
How many more classrooms. How many more street corners.
How many more shopping malls. How many more movie theaters.
How many more college campuses. Enough!
Demand Action.
As a dad. As a mom.
As a husband. As a wife.
As a family. As a friend.
As an American.
It’s time. We can’t back down.
It’s time for our leaders to act. Right now.
Demand Action
from the YouTube presentation of Cartoonists Demand Action to End Gun Violence
In his appeal at the Houston convention, LaPierre kept invoking the inclusive “we” as he attacked those who advocate reasonable restraints on the sell of certain assault-style weapons to those who have a criminal background or have proven to be mentally incompetent to handle firearms in a safe and responsible manner. By identifying all members of the NRA as targets of attack by gun control advocates, LaPierre is trying to insulate himself and other NRA administrators from the criticism that has been aimed solely at their incomprehensible rationale for opposing any and all legislation on any and all guns.
“Our feet are planted firmly in the foundation of freedom, unswayed by the winds of political and media insanity,” LaPierre said. “To the political and media elites who scorn us, we say let them be damned.” Even uber-conservative supreme court justice Anton Scalia has conceded that some forms of gun regulation are NOT unconstitutional.
What is important to highlight here is that LaPierre and the message machine out of the NRA and other lobbyists for the gun industry are invoking a method that exploits that unknown fear element which resides in the human DNA. The promotion of a slippery slope meme plays into the worst scene scenario fears that tend to exist in all of us. Stoking such fears with reference to Hitler’s Germany and Saddam Hussein’ Iraq allows people like Wayne LaPierre to remind the NRA membership of how tyranny can grow when we “let our guard down”. But these are exaggerations of the reality about gun ownership and omits certain facts about citizens in those cultures being too willing to surrender to the charismatic allures of ruthless leaders long before it was obvious their personal liberties were being taken from them.
The worst scene scenario being generated by LaPierre if gun control measures of any dimension are instituted is that it will lead to those conditions of tyranny we read about in history books. There is little to no basis for this zealous reaction in America today. There are numerous safeguards in place to prevent this within our judicial system and state legislatures along with the fierce support for the basic premises of the 2nd amendment that are well imbedded within even those who do not own a firearm. What seems odd to me here is that if it’s loss of freedom that motivates the NRA leadership, where were they when our privacy rights were being eroded under the gun-friendly Bush administration and GOP congressional majorities?
What will be lost here however if background checks on all gun sells is implemented is market share for many gun manufacturers. Outside of those periods similar to what we recently experienced when gun sells spiked out of fear following Obama’s election in 2008 and re-election in 2012, purchases will level off amongst “responsible” gun owners. But sells to those people we want to keep guns away from will start to dry up, since they will no longer be able to easily purchase their weapon of death. Society will benefit from this not because it prevents all murders and suicides but because it will likely effect a smaller toll on humans without the powerful impact of rapid fire bullets that can kill so many so quickly.
Wayne Lapierre confidently assures us that the Manchin-Toomey bill that failed to reach a 60-vote majority in the Senate last month would not have stopped the awful slaughter of 20 children and six of their teachers at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut last December. This sleight of hand comment has little to do with what Manchin-Toomey may have ultimately effected however if someone like Jared Loughner, James Holmes or Seung-Hui Cho were prevented easy access to powerful assault weapons with 30-round magazines.
For those of us who think Manchin-Toomey didn’t go far enough it is laughable to hear the NRA leadership describe it as “an assault on our 2nd amendment rights”. Other than trying to keep guns out of the wrong hands by expanding back ground checks the bill also wanted to increase penalties against gun trafficking and invest in school safety. There was nothing in it to represent a gun registry that was falsely alluded to by NRA spokesperson Cleta Mitchell in a recent NY Times debate. There was nothing in it to register existing guns owned by individuals. Nothing to validate the generated-fear of taking anyone’s gun away.
Imagine the lives that would have been saved had Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho been forced to use the weapon above for his insanity had laws been in place to prevent him from purchasing the one’s he chose below.
To listen to the rhetoric that piled up, one speech after the other, by dupes of the gun industry, you couldn’t help but walk away from the NRA’s convention in Houston thinking we were on the verge of being over run by jack-booted government thugs. American citizens, including those members of the NRA, have nothing to fear from implementing a measure of sanity to our out-of-control gun crime in this country. But gun manufacturer gun lobbyists like the NRA do stand to lose healthy financial benefits if they fail to deliver for their benefactors.
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Here’s How the Rifle That Just Killed a 2-Year-Old Girl Is Marketed for Kids
Some people choose to squander the advances we humans have made since we first crawled out of the cesspool of our evolutionary beginnings
The human animal. The one with the most developed brain, even if many still only use that portion they first had at the beginning of our evolution over 6 million years ago. We are both beast and angel; awe-inspiring and all confounding. We are at our best when we expand the limits of that organ contained within our skulls. But some see that space better serving lesser needs. For the right price, the outside of the cranium, not the inside, best serves their interests.
Sure, they may earn some revenue for providing a part of their anatomy as a commercial billboard but they’ve also demonstrated the value they’ve placed on the essence of their being. The tadpole they’ve evolved from has only served their need to provide more body space to give meaning to something of no redeeming value. But in a world where we value the human being in us less than the cash we trade ourselves in for, who can be surprised that the lowest common denominator has persuasive powers over some?
Though they can feel good that they’re not a Pol Pot or a Josef Mengele, will they ever have doubts about their ability to aspire to anything other than being someone else’s tool?
And for those who were thinking these are merely new age Christians promoting that place that waits for all who earned a spot in it after their death – you know, the one with the streets of gold – prepare yourself for a letdown when you type in goldenpalace.com in your search engine. On the other hand, this may give others something to look forward to after this life.
The notion that we are a free people or that “free-markets” work in all our best interests is a myth that is slowly eroding genuine personal liberties. No better example of this misguided concept can be better demonstrated than by how wealthy special interests determine what we eat.
I could have spent this past week researching a subject matter that is close to my heart. But then I would have gotten very little personal tasks done that needed to be done. So I consider myself fortunate to find a piece on the Organic Consumer Associations website that did an excellent job of conveying a timely topic that can’t be stressed enough
In their piece, Climate Chaos: Boycott Genetically Engineered and Factory-Farmed Foods, Will Allen and Ronnie Cummins have provided us with one of the most detailed assessments I have ever read that frankly spells out how industrialized crop production and factory farming impact global climate instability, even more so than the mere production of fossil fuels. I encourage everyone to read the entire article and absorb its wealth of information.
It hits virtually every aspect of the food we eat from the farm to the table and how the concentration of power to achieve this by those, motivated only for profits, has not only negatively impacted our health and economy, but threatens the sustainability of the planet itself To whet your appetite I’ve provided a few paragraphs below from their article to indicate just how rich the information is that Allen and Cummins’ efforts have produced here. Learn its message and share it with as many people as you can.
Irrefutable Numbers
Traditionally conservative World Bank scientists estimated in 2009 that animal farming worldwide emits at least 51 percent of the world’s greenhouse gasses every year. (3) In spite of these truly alarming statistics, the focus on efforts to mitigate climate change have not been directed toward reversing or reforming unsustainable, climate-disrupting farming practices. In spite of the fact that industrial agriculture exceeds the combined U.S. green house gas emissions from transportation, energy production and industry, the farm and food emissions are ignored and trivialized, and thus unregulated.
A large share of factory farming’s greenhouse gasses in the U.S. come from using fossil fuels in 25 million tractors, and millions of combines, mowers, balers and other farm implements. Another large and increasing share of those gasses come from nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer production and use, and the spraying of ever increasing amounts of insecticides and weed killers as pests develop a tolerance to all but the most deadly and polluting poisons.
The animals we raise, mainly on CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), and the feed we grow for these animals are responsible for a huge share of the excess greenhouse gas emissions and climate chaos we are experiencing. Currently 92.5 percent of U.S. farmland is devoted to grazing animals and grain production: corn, soybeans, wheat, rye, oats, barley and cottonseed for confined cows, hogs, chickens and turkeys. Consequently, most of our farmland produces food for meat- and milk-producing animals. This inefficient use of land produces a majority of the most destructive greenhouse gasses: methane and nitrous oxide. Only 7.5 percent of U.S. farmland produces vegetables, grains, fruits, nuts and berries for direct human consumption. (4)
We can survive indefinitely where all people have ample food supplies. But by allowing a small wealthy elite to control the vast amount of resources that are inherently all of ours, we are dooming not only ourselves but future generations as well. It is becoming more and more clear that our elected officials are working more for these special interests than they are for the rest of us. So how can we achieve the means to turn things in a direction that favors every man, woman and child? Will Allen and Ronnie Cummins offer this.
We need to change our food habits. We need to stop eating factory-farmed meat and milk products. Since over 90 percent of all non-organic meat, dairy and eggs in the U.S. come from factory farms, we need a nationwide boycott and marketplace pressure, in the form of a CAFO labeling campaign.
A drastic reduction in sales of products from CAFOs will lead to a major increase in the sales and consumption of organic, pasture-raised and grass-fed meat and animal products, which today account for only 5 percent of the market. As we boycott all CAFO products, which means choosing vegan menu options in most restaurants shopping more carefully in grocery stores and farmers markets, we need to eat more organic, climate-friendly vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans and whole grains. If you eat meat and drink milk, make sure that is pasture-raised and not raised in an animal prisons, such as confinement feedlots, hog hotels and massive dairies. Ask your grocer or butcher where the food comes from and how it is raised. Stop eating meat that is glued together with pink slime.
If WE the people change our ways, by default we can change the system. The only thing we have to lose is the repression of the mega-corporations that currently hold our lives in their greedy little hands.
“This is not a futuristic vision that must await more research. The appropriate technology for a world-wide shift to sustainable, organic agriculture already exists, and each year it gets more efficient and sophisticated.” – Will Allen & Ronnie Cummins
