Month: October 2022

So I’m turning 60 in a couple of days, another big birthday, and I’m feeling kinda blah. This will be a sick birthday since I caught a cold, and it will be a working birthday plus additional hours on that particular day. Yet I know it will be my special day, that date on the calendar that marks me as a Scorpio, that hour of birth at dusk my most powerful moment of the day, an exact week before Halloween, for whatever cosmic and metaphysical reason the day of my birth on planet Earth in 1962.

Turning 50 was a milestone ten years ago. I know a lot of people who never made it that far, now this far in life. Turning that particular age had such a monumental impact on me that I decided to go back to college for a master’s degree. Didn’t know it at the time, but I’d end up traveling the world, going to India of all places (yet the country I always wanted to visit). So you never know where life will take you. A bit later I started writing this blog and then founded my own educational nonprofit business about the importance of journalism in our country’s democracy. Throughout the past decade, I became that person I always wanted to be: someone who marches at rallies—that greying frumpy woman with rimless glasses or shades protesting in March for Our Lives (calling for sane gun laws to end mass school shootings) and Reproductive Liberation March and Bans Off Our Bodies (to keep abortion a private legal choice for girls and women). Chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” and “Hell no, we won’t go back!!” with my elderly hippie colleagues and a mass of middle-aged and young adults. Proud to have participated and mostly glad to have the physical ability. A few elderly in these protests walked with canes or sat on the sidelines in wheelchairs. I respect them so much for Being there.

All last year at age 59, I felt every bit 60. My muscle strength is notably declining, sight dimmer, more vitamins & ’scripts necessary, bones stiff, chronic aches (a middle finger is twisted; doc asked if it was from over use—rim shot, very funny), my mind a bit forgetful or occasionally a tad confused especially when driving errands. Hey, I’ve got a lot on my mind these days. Sixty is going to be tough. I see. I either succumb or get tougher.

One of my parents is dealing with a compilation of diseases requiring long hospital stays and 24-hour care. That reality weighs on a child turning 60, too. I see. This is nearing the end of life, very likely. I realize each day the importance of every moment, how touching the lives we encounter with kindness can be and will be transformative for them, even though at home I resort to my curmudgeon self, the Scorpion sting. Sor-ry.

Curtain call

While I was enthralled in grad school and enthusiastically traveling the world, I made a plan to work on a doctorate at 60. And here I am. IDK. That aspiration has to wait a bit. Reality is paying for other obligations. Not sure why I was so gung ho on a doctorate anyway other than personal fulfillment and ego. For 50 years I was never interested in earning a doctorate. Maybe being in the real world these past few years, away from all those college professors, has set me straight.

I had a dream recently, what is called a Big Dream, very meaningful to the dreamer. I am sitting alone in a white corridor, and I know I’m dead. I don’t know how I died, figured suddenly like a car crash. But I’m confused and sorry to be dead. Then a man casually is walking down the corridor toward me. I know he’s Jesus; he’s got long hair, a beard, but wearing today’s casual men’s clothes. As he gets closer to me, he morphs a bit and wears small round glasses; I know he wants to appear like John Lennon to make me feel more comfortable and perhaps to make me realize that I, too, am dead. He’s got a hand in his pocket and a pleasant smile. He says, “I’m here to take you Home. Ready to go?” But I stay seated, confused, unwilling to move, to move on into eternity. He’s surprised by my reaction and asks, “Aren’t you excited?” And I respond, “I just wanted to accomplish a few other things in life.” And JC says to me: “You’ve done A LOT with your life.” Hmm. Wonder if he meant ‘Come on, enough already.’

So what are those things I want to accomplish? I guess that is what I should be focused on more instead of just work and busyness and succumbing to debilitating body ache. Actually, I have done as much as I could in some areas of interest. The internet has allowed a lot of people to pursue their dreams and talents in writing, performing, all the arts, business, teaching, preaching. It is an incredible age we live in. Now getting those online ‘hits’ is another factor. Eh, I leave it up to the cosmos as far as fame and success here in cyberspace.

Turning 60 is important. Time to stop putting off anything wished we’ve done or said. My family says “I love you” every time before parting. And we never ever did that for 50 years. I remember the first time. It was blurted out by my dad as I was leaving. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. The family unit is a mystically close relationship that I both observe as an outsider and participate in as my role. In Hinduism, the religion is layered with complexities because the culture believes life is very complex. Their millions of gods and goddesses represent every facet of life, and they believe each person has many facets, plays many roles. We are parents, children, relatives, friends, enemies, spouses, bosses, employees, pastors, congregants, etc. We each live many roles—and we do not act the same way, as the same person, in each role.

Shakespeare said the world is our stage and we the players. We are acting out our lives. If we’re lucky and healthy in body, mind and spirit, we become who we want to be, do what we want to do, accomplish all we want, and in so living become what once were our dreams. Through time and age, we learn this and our comings and goings on Earth will make life better for those who follow us. Happy birthday everyone! Make each one special with a new revelation … and another aspiration. Rock on!

At long last, Alex Jones, star of his own ultra right-wing radio show called Infowars, is found ultimately responsible for lies, slander and defamation against parents whose little children were shot to death at school. After the mass shooting in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Infowars, starring Jones, erroneously claimed and maintained all these years that it was a leftist plot to change gun laws. Jones figured the Black U.S. President Barack Obama was hated enough for the Infowars’ audience to believe Sandy Hook didn’t happen. It was so horrible, it couldn’t have happened, he knew millions of Americans would believe. Some disturbed young man, depicted in MSM with the same peculiar grainy black-and-white photo, and dubious past never thoroughly analyzed even in a TV series or movie? It’s simply made up. No way could a skinny guy use a military-style assault rifle and successfully shoot open a locked steel door, kill every brave adult (principal, counselor, teacher) who got in his way then calmly proceed to his old classroom where as a youngster he was allegedly bullied—and shoot, repeatedly, 20 little kids unknown to him. No, that just didn’t happen, Jones angrily pressed … over and over and over again—his listeners in total agreement. No way a 20-year-old guy takes loaded firearms into a school and shoots a bunch of students until stopped or shooting himself.

Practically every one of the deceased school children were shot five to six times, their bodies red meat. They were no longer recognized as human beings.

And so because they did not resemble real children, perhaps that is the reason millions of Americans chose to believe a lie. No way did this school shooting happen. Besides, Connecticut is so very far away from Texas, the base of Jones and his Austin business.

When I heard of the elementary school shooting, whispered by a fellow teacher in the halls of the elementary school where we taught, and that the dead were little children, tears welled in my eyes. I knew it happened. No doubt. School shootings not only occur on a regular basis, our nation continues to do nothing to stop them.

The message to troubled adolescents is this is normal instead of abnormal. America has made school shootings a part of life at school for at least one generation.

Strong delusion

But school shootings are not the only repeated nightmare Americans live through. Believers of the gospel according to Alex Jones chose to pursue the parents of all those dead little ones in a school called Sandy Hook. (What kinda made up name is that? And Newtown? The whole thing sounds fake. Fake news! Government conspiracy! There’s no other explanation).

So from the get-go, Infowarriors went after the grieving parents with a vengeance. They shouted them down in public, mocked them as ‘crisis actors,’ questioned their tears. The warriors said the parents never had a child attending Sandy Hook Elementary School. They’re all Democrats, Jones’ warriors presumed, and therefore are in on the big government plan to confiscate every Americans’ guns or just the military-style assault rifles that kill and maim lots of people in seconds. The Infowarriors took to social media, harassing the Sandy Hook families, as the sad parents with dead children from this school shooting came to be known. Not a stone was left unturned in the private lives of those parents. The parents were yelled at while mourning their children at the funerals, scorned at their children’s gravesites, stalked everywhere they went. Their homes were repeatedly vandalized, their addresses and phone numbers and workplaces made public for even more crazy Americans (the manic types with a lot of time on their hands and minds) to stalk and harass and intimidate them—for years, all these years. Parents moved from home to home, from town to town, state to state, trying to get on with their lives and, yes, take the high road in avoiding the crazed and ignorant Infowarriors but to no avail.

They had no choice but to sue, and they sued the Big Fish. Let the police deal with the little people who harassed them and vandalized their homes and property. Then the plaintiffs waited for the slow wheels of justice. They were in the right. They deserved to live in peace after their children’s murders.

Their story, every bit of it, is true.

So Alex Jones owes the Sandy Hook families he tormented on air with spiteful words and sarcastic self-assured cynicism—all of it an ‘act,’ he told the Texas judge presiding over a child custody battle with an ex wife. He’s just an entertainer, he said on the stand—and Infowars, just his current gig. He can’t help what his fans believe is truth and bluster and therefore can’t be responsible for their actions toward real people he constantly and loudly defamed on air. He maintained his right of free speech even if lies with terrible consequences.

But the Sandy Hook parents, who like any parent of a murdered child, could care less about the millions of dollars they may or may never get from Alex Jones. Today and in the foreseeable future, they contact parents whose children are shot to death in American schools—because the same Infowarriors use social media to bully, harass, intimidate and in the end terrorize any parent whose child is killed in a mass school shooting. The same bunch went after the parents of Uvalde immediately after that elementary school shooting this year. (Uvalde, what a made up name. A Texas town? Yeah, right. Never heard of it. Can’t be real. Never happened. Government just wants our guns! Never!)