Let’s Get Our Rights Straight

 

It is my fervent belief that all the people who strive to control human sexual behavior in the name of God are demeaning the very God they claim to worship.

It is extremely difficult to follow the logic of the typical conservative’s conclusions about reproductive liberty.  If I am ever going to get my own mind organized well-enough to refute the beliefs of people like Rick Santorum, I must reduce this presentation to the lowest comprehension level I can, and, against all the evidence to the contrary, pray the people who parrot Santorum’s prescriptions for female conduct are at least moderately capable of following along.

Santorum believes/says contraception is against God’s law

So does the Catholic Church, which is one of the reasons I am a baptized, confirmed and purposely non-practicing member.  For the sake of fairness, let’s assume it is true that there is a  God; that contrary to the scientists’ theories, God created everything and everybody, from the beginning of earthly time.

Paleontologists who discovered the headless skeleton of “Lucy” in Ethiopia estimated the age of her bones at around 3.2 million years. As far as I can tell, Ethiopia was and still is a part of Earth.

That means that:

God’s humanoid creation was wandering around for millions of years before the Bible was written by human men.

God’s creation included all the parts necessary to have sex, including the parts that registered pleasure in their brains, however primitive those brains might have been.  The pleasure part was not a mistake made by God, but a major element of the reproductive process.

Since reading and writing were invented by humans eons later in around 3200 B.C., God made no rules that prevented purely recreational sexual intercourse among his first creations.

Therefore, the so-called laws of God cited by Santorum and his ilk are actually laws invented by humans in the name of God.  Further, said laws are just as amendable by mankind as any other laws developed by mankind to try to control the behavior of its ever-increasing community.

Santorum, et. al. believe/preach that abortion is a sin against God and cites the Bible as the source of that knowledge; the same Bible mentioned above…the one written by God’s creation: human males.  To them, every sperm that makes the long, hot swim to penetrate the surface of an ovum has an intrinsic right to proceed through the 9-month gestation and to produce a new human.  That right, they claim, outweighs every right of either donor of the egg and sperm to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; including, in Santorum’s case anyway, the health of the mother and the eventual circumstances into which the fetus is delivered. 

Again for the sake of argument, let’s say Santorum & Company are correct about that.  And let’s pretend (I know, it will be a stretch) that every human in history, including today, honored that so-called right of the sperm and egg.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 50 million pregnancies have been legally terminated since 1973, the year abortion was legal in every state.  That, of course, does not include any illegal terminations that would likely drive that number up significantly.

That’s a lot of people-- a potential U.S. population more than 15% larger than it is currently.  Not only that.  Since these pregnancies would have otherwise been terminated if termination were an option, many or most of these potential people would have special medical, social and financial needs.  Who would provide those resources?

Santorum, Gingrich, Romney and Paul think it shouldn’t be government.  The burden for such resources must be placed on the parents and those parents should get jobs so they can provide them.  What’s that you say?  There are no jobs? These people who have children irresponsibly should have thought about that before they laid down and got themselves pregnant.

What’s that?  What about rape?  Well, the National Center for Biotechnology Information conducted a study about that.  Here’s what they learned:

RESULTS:

The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion.

If any one of the Republican candidates for President defeats Barack Obama, there will likely be an immediate attempt to overturn Roe vs. Wade, making abortion illegal.  That would mean that 17 of the 34 victims of rape who became pregnant would have been forced, by law, to have their babies.

Now imagine what life would be like for those 17 children.

The policies of the Catholic Church and the politicians who share a belief in its teachings against both birth control and abortion are behaving irresponsibly in a 2012 world that is over-populated and straining under the burden to its natural resources.  Their religious arguments to the contrary are simple-minded and based entirely in myth.  Are we really going to allow these people to aid and abet the imminent destruction of our country?

When Funny Backfires

 

I’m not very funny.  No, no.  It’s okay.  I realize I have my moments of hilarious repartee.  Those are mostly based on my penchant for sarcasm, which sometimes bursts forth, evading my oral governor.  But in the main, I am a serious thinker who uses a tell-it-like-it-is approach to conversation.

No one appreciates a good joke more than I do, though.  I just can’t tell them well.  Someone like Jon Stewart on a great night has me laughing out loud, wishing with all I have that I was capable of writing such satirical junk food. 

However…

My sense of humor does not extend to an appreciation of race-based double entendre.  Professional comics argue that the line not to be crossed in everyday social discourse is somehow pushed farther out for them.  Maybe.

The other night on the NAACP Image Awards telecast, actor Terrence Howard, in a tribute to Hollywood legend George Lucas for fighting valiantly to get the film “Red Tails” to the big screen amidst protests that no one would want to see a movie with an all-black cast, said to Lucas:  “Welcome to the dark side.”  I laughed.  The audience laughed and applauded.  A black actor turned comic for the moment was poking droll fun at a characteristic attributed to members of his own race – darkness of skin.  Was that okay?  I’m not sure, but I thought about it for hours after the fact.

I was sure, however, that I didn’t like a couple of attempts at humor I spotted on Facebook two days ago. 

Anyone who hasn’t heard of new pro-basketball phenom Jeremy Lin must have been on a total media fast for the past few weeks.  Lin is the Harvard-educated floor-general of the NBA’s New York Knicks who rose from relative obscurity to being the first player of Chinese descent to play in the NBA.

One of my Facebook friends posted about the unforgivable “honest mistake” an ESPN editor made by writing a headline that included the phrase “…chink in the armor” for a story about Lin.

The headline - "Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin's 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets" - appeared on ESPN's mobile website at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and was removed by 3:05 a.m. The editor, Anthony Federico, was subsequently fired.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/knicks/jeremy-lin-slur-honest-mistake-fired-espn-editor-anthony-federico-claims-article-1.1025566#ixzz1mwR6VIjk

What I find unconscionable are the comments that were made on this Facebook post, the author of which described in his introduction as “A really, really, really bad example of not proofreading your headlines.”

One person made the comment of what “a terrible..er…slant to take..”  Another wrote that he was “slightly dis-Oriented.” Then one of the same two people went on to describe the ESPN gaffe as “an example of yellow journalism.”

Really?!?  These were mistakes, alright, but there was nothing honest about them.  Unveiled racism in response to an article bemoaning such cultural insensitivity is about as funny as a coronary infarction.  When are we going to learn?  We cannot run around quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Had a Dream speech, then turn around and “joke” about another person’s racial characteristics. 

Maybe I should cut these commenters some slack because they might not have faced personal ethnic slurs of their own, so are not sensitized enough to avoid such mistakes .  On the other hand, one or both of their surnames could mean they are of Jewish origins, making them just as susceptible to slurs and stereotypes as anyone else. 

It is time for all of us to start paying more attention to “the content of the characters” of others, and less to their physical characteristics. Really.

Pain

{click on image for credit}

Pain is no stranger to this writer.  I wake up in the morning and just lie there taking inventory.  Which will it be:  my head, my lower back, the shin splint, the permanently broken foot?  As I have joked before, sometimes the only thing on my body that doesn’t hurt is my hair!

On rare occasions I am pain-free and I rejoice.  I hop out of bed and do a jig – which sometimes causes an abrupt change in my pain status.  You’d think I would learn.

Yesterday a new acquisition was added to the pain stock-- nerve pain in the second toe, the one next to the big toe that is moving westward, thanks to the bunion I inherited from my grandmother Muzz. Nerve pain is the worst, I’ve found, because the pill that soothes it also makes me very drowsy, so I can only take it at bedtime.

When I woke this morning and realized the pain in my toe was still there, I was compelled to call upon my highly developed skill of minimizing by way of comparison.

Last week I had the pre-Valentine’s Day blahs. They endured for several days straight.  I was in a different kind of pain, one for which there is no quick-acting medication.  It takes hold without warning, inhabits my being and my soul, and has its way with me every moment of my existence, even while asleep.

Carrying a pain in my essence is hard work.  It makes me unable to think straight.  Concentration on anything except my pain is barely possible.  Tears sting the backs of my eyes, ready to spring forth at the drop of a hat – literally.  I dropped my beret while trying to affix it to my head, and I cried.

I remember when I completely surrendered to this type of psychic pain and plunged deep into the cavern of clinical depression.  Not only was I virtually incapacitated, unable to function at any meaningful level; I was also feeling physical pain for which there was no medical explanation.  Once I climbed out of the abyss with the help of therapy and anti-depressants, I vowed never to return to that preview of hell. So when I have what has become a rare episode of overarching sadness, I take the steps I learned in therapy to slam on the brakes and stop my descent.

So far, any physical pain I have experienced has been manageable.  Unlike many I know, I have no aversion to medication that will take the pain away.  I do not have an addictive personality, thank God, so I never abuse the drugs, but I do take advantage of their ability to ease the pain.

So far, I haven’t suffered the kind of physical pain that ignores the medication, scoffing at the pills as it sidesteps their properties and manifests itself in some equally excruciating way.  I’ve never contemplated taking myself out of this world because of physical pain.

Thoughts of suicide during my bout with severe clinical depression spent each and every day with me back then.  The unrelenting pain of physic dysfunction  stripped me of hope and made the act of breathing too much to ask.

So, yes, the toe on my left foot is bothersome.  Ibuprofen takes the edge off, if I sit still and don’t curl my toes.  I never realized how often I unconsciously curl my toes until yesterday.  This kind of isolated, treatable pain I can handle.  This too, shall pass, probably by the end of the week.

The other?  It is deadly, and I am not a cat.  I only have one life and I’d like to keep it a good while longer.

 Technorati Tags: clinical depression,foot problems,nerve pain,depression,physical vs. physcic pain,managing pain

Frozen in Time

My date of birth says one thing,

My spirit, something else.

The mirror shows the trophies of a life well lived, but lived.

The outside world barely sees my countenance.

Fear has replaced a heightened sense of adventure.

Fear prevents my heart from taking risks.

Love has always been mine for the taking, more or less.

Love is what I crave but cannot take the steps to seek.

Life has been a stretch of good fortune, dotted by heartbreak, several years apart.

Life is now an endless stretch of aloneness, self-imposed and fueled by

Fear.

Gifts from Muzz

She was a fastidious housekeeper. All her fancy lace and embroidery hankies were starched, ironed and kept in a clear Plexiglas box. Climbing her stairs to reach the bathroom was always paid off with a whiff of White Shoulders, her signature scent.

My mother’s mother—we called her Granny, but grownup relatives and friends called her Muzz.  I’ve never known how that name came about, since her name was Mabel. 

Muzz was a real beauty.  Her Czech mother contributed her hazel/green eyes and her porcelain complexion.  Her full-blooded Cherokee father donated his almond-shaped eyes, his aquiline nose, his high cheekbones, and his long, lustrous hair – except Muzz’s was light brown.


Since she was only 36 at the time of my birth, she was still a knockout when I grew old enough to understand what that meant.  Her silhouette was a voluptuous hourglass, and she worked constantly to maintain it.  She was so figure-conscious, she put me on a diet when I was still in high school.  I don’t think she completely understood genetics and its role in determining body type.  She thought all her female progeny would have a slim waistline, as she did. I had a thicker, boyish waist, much like my father’s.

Everything Muzz did was perfect in my eyes.  She always seemed freshly bathed.  Her hair would hang to her waist in one long braid when at home.  For work she parted it down the middle, made two braids and pinned them to the top of her head with a dozen hairpins to form a tiara-like crown.

She was a sun worshipper.  Her native blood allowed the sun to create a golden burnish on her face and arms.  She wore house dresses at home – jeans were for working men then – so it was not unusual to round the house to the backyard and find her in a metal porch chair, arms bared and skirt primly hiked to just above the knees, her face raised to accept the master star’s warm kiss.

Whenever I entered the only bathroom in my grandparents’ two story home, I loved to open the closet door to inspect the things Muzz used to turn herself out every morning.  She had a lovely comb and brush set with sterling silver adornments.  Since she seemed always in a hurry, one of the things she did only periodically was remove the hair lost in the grooming process from her brush.  As the years went on, I was alarmed to notice how much more hair was left in the brush and how many of those strands were as silver as the brush’s handle.

My grandmother Muzz was very generous in sharing several of her genetic traits with me.  Only she and I had the “problem” of large, weighty breasts that caused indentations in our shoulders from the straps of the bras we needed to control them.  All the other women in the family, my sister included, were far less well-endowed.

There were two things I wish she had kept to herself.  It turns out the bunions that stretched her shoes into misshapen versions of their original styles are hereditary.  She thought it was from wearing shoes that were too small or too high.  Nature knew better and shared them with my mother, my sister and me.
The second inheritance has only recently appeared in spite of my fervent prayers to the contrary.  My hair, which is about 75% silver to gray, has thinned on top dramatically.  Each time I pass a comb or a brush through any portion of my shoulder-length bob I must carefully remove several strands my scalp has helplessly released. 

I should have known.  Thinning hair did not skip a generation, so my mother’s 87-year-old head of hair is sparse, at best.  Both she and Muzz wore wigs in their later years, whenever they left the house. 
Despite the current popularity of hair extensions, clip-on pieces and full wigs, it is hard to find them to match my own blend of colors.  I am afraid hair color will accelerate the hair loss.  Besides, I like my hair the way it is.

I know it is common for post-menopausal women’s hair to thin, but it is troubling for me.  Each strand that leaves my head and nestles itself in my brush is a cause for grieving. 

Frailty, thy name is woman. – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Madonna is Absolutely Awesome

I’ve never been a fan.  Not of the ever-morphing, suddenly British-accented bad girl of the last century.  Nor have I ever before watched a Super Bowl in its entirely, unless my hometown team was representing.  I watched past years for the commercials and the half-time show , but not even that if I happened to be attending a Super Bowl party.

Tonight has been different.

I set out to write a post about the Super Bowl commercials, usually guaranteed for at least a few 30-to-90-second spurts of brilliant entertainment.  I also set out to watch every single down of the game. It was just me and the dog.  No party, no company.  Just me and the dog.

I confess to having been completely underwhelmed by the prospect of seeing an aging Madonna try to recapture her pop persona in front of the world.  I anticipated not so much a wardrobe malfunction, a la Janet Jackson with Justin Timberlake, but a full-body malfunction from a 53 year-old who needs to move gracefully into her golden years.

So the f irst half of thegame proved to be highly entertaining, with its lopsided, Giant-ruled first quarter, followed by a brilliant 98-yard march to the goal line by the Patriots.  I had eaten my allotted guacamole and nine tortilla chips, and devoured my eight hot wings by half-time.  Thus far, I found myself laughing during only two of the dozens of commercials during the breaks, so my interest in posting about them had all but vanished.

I hated TaxAct's preposterously irrelevant depiction of a young boy who has a sudden onset of the need to relieve himself and winds up doing so in the family pool.  Really?  Don’t parents have enough trouble breaking their youngsters of that rude habit?

I loved the Volkswagen spot.  A dog who wants to get outside to chase cars is stopped abruptly by his too-generous girth in the doggie door.  He goes on a marathon boot-camp regimen to slim down, walking on the treadmill, running up and down stairs, and swimming.  When a gorgeous red VW comes down his street, the dog easily dashes through the doggie door in time to chase it.  You had to be there.

My favorite was once again offered by Doritos this year.  When his older brother sat in a tree house taunting his baby brother with Doritos, their grandma used the spring-mounted swing he sat in to launch the baby as if on bungee cord, far enough to snatch the bag of chips from his brothers naughty hands.

Again.  You had to be there.

Then it was time for the half-time extravaganza.  My attention had drifted other things when I heard the announcer dramatically start the show.  I sat, mouth agape for every awesome second of it.
Madonna killed it, people!  If she was lip-synching it was as convincing a job as I have ever seen.  Starting with her old hit “Vogue” she strutted and posed through, I don’t know, three or four costume amendments.  The production was elaborate, exciting and almost flawless.  Who knew that Madonna, in her dotage, could upstage and out dance young Nicki Minaj, and have the ubiquitous Cee Lo Green playing second banana with her onstage?

The Material Girl Woman made it all the way through with only one unfortunate snafu.  When she made her last onstage costume change, she unknowingly caught one of her curly blonde locks in the zipper of her choir-type robe, making it appear she had sprouted some very strange looking chest hair.

Add to all this the fact that she pulled off lifted summersaults and assisted cartwheels, marching, running and dancing in what appeared to be 5-inch stilettos and, damned if I haven’t come away in absolute awe of a mother of four who still gets around like a virgin.

P.S.  I’ve missed the entire third quarter while writing this post.  Oh well, maybe next year the Bears will make it to the Super Bowl. Yeah.

Take That, SGK! A New Kind of Public Relations Has Emerged

Within 72 hours from learning the Susan G. Komen organization was pulling their funding from Planned Parenthood, they were pinned to the mat, screaming “uncle.”  The power of the social media, with all its detractors, once again said “over our dead bodies” to the rich and powerful.

Something similar happened back in November 2011 when the Bank of America suffered its own smackdown after Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase and finally, my bank, SunTrust, backed away from the greed pool and refused to follow suit by charging their customers a $5 fee for using their debit cards. '


“We have listened to our customers very closely over the last few weeks and recognize their concern with our proposed debit usage fee,” David Darnell, co-chief operating officer at Bank of America, said in a statement. “As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so.”

Yesssssssss.

The people of the world have had it with sitting silently by while the behemoths that spend hours on end coming up with ways of filching every last coin from their pockets are as mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore!


As was pointed out today in a Salon article by Mary Elizabeth Williams, the street savvy Planned Parenthood organization is used to being attacked and vilified, and they know exactly how to harness the power of the social media.  While they used ammunition from their online supporters to bolster their cause, SKG founding chair Nancy G. Brinker was appearing on news interviews looking as if she had been tazed.


When I read earlier today that Brinker and company had indeed caved to the mounting pressure, I realized we have entered a new era of business-customer relations.  No longer do we have to wait until the shareholder’s meeting to register our complaints.  Phone calls and letter writing takes too darned long to reach the eyes and ears of the powers that be and they are too easily ignored.  But the modern-day grapevine made up of Twitter, Facebook and organizational message boards heat up in no time flat. Once one person posts the news, Katy bar the door!

There are a boatload of problems associated with the explosion of technology and the social media – identity theft, cyber bullying, lack of privacy, and opportunities for lawsuits – but this new ability on the part of consumers and constituents to make their ‘druthers known en masse and lightening fast is one of the best outcomes I could have ever imagined. 

Kudos to Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, who gave us the ubiquitous Facebook, for having visions that extend far further than either of you probably could have envisioned.  Corporate public and investor relations will never be the same.