Author: cheriebell69@hotmail.com

Listen.  We’re all afraid.  Not of the virus so much or even death but of financial ruin.  How are we supposed to pay the bills?  Millions have been laid off, hopefully most with a promise of returning to their jobs in the glorious aftermath—a month, now two, perhaps three, by midsummer …  The only people who are comfortable coasting through this universal economic disaster are the ones with guaranteed monthly income like retirees, the independently wealthy, and the top brass who have the gall to tell the American people to stay home, don’t go to work or school, work online if you can (while figuring a way to pay the bills).  See, they’d never tell us that last part because they are so far removed from the common man, they have no idea the fear of unpaid bills and loss of home, auto, food, furniture and a mountain of other obligations can drive some people to extreme counter reaction.

Listen.  What’s been asked of us—to live without income for a few months while bills mount; to risk homelessness; to break the economy—it’s just too much.  A real war would be preferable.  At least it comes with combat pay.  Two trillion dollars, an obscene amount, somehow will not be enough to tide over American families for more than one month.  Why can’t they understand that?  Many if not most of the American people would prefer to take their chances and keep working their ‘nonessential’ jobs if it means food on the table, money in the bank and a roof over their heads.  But we’re not allowed that option, because the new virus with no vaccine or cure is so contagious plus our nation of plenty lacks hospitals, medical equipment, beds and trained health professionals to care for the projected hundreds of thousands who soon will get deathly ill.

Listen.  Hear that?  Do you sense it?  Prayers! Voiced and silent, with and without tears.  In every language.  Every person around the world is praying simultaneously for divine intervention, a cure, a quick solution.  Americans are notoriously impatient.  But we’re resourceful, too, and will figure out various means to survive: moving, dropping expenses, begging, borrowing, whatever we gotta do.  Pride has no place in hard times. We’ll find our individual resilience and collective dogged determination to get through this crisis.  Overnight we have been forced to rely on one another, family, friends, neighbors, and our government local and state and federal. The government really has done all it can do to help us.  We have been aware of an insurmountable budget deficit for a long, long time.  We’ve needed to toughen up.  Stiff upper lip.  Come on, now. Crying time’s over.  Re-arrange, reshuffle, toss in the air.

Listen.  What’s the worst they can do?  Kick us out of our homes?  Courts are closed and backlogged for months.  Besides, the President has declared no evictions during this pandemic.  Will they cut off the electricity for lights, gas for heat, water for bathing and life itself, internet in order to work at home and for necessary communication?  Maybe but doubtful.  In the age of social media, cutting power and water from tens of millions of American families unable to pay the bills would be a corporate and municipal public relations disaster.  And if they do cut us off, let us reclaim the intestinal fortitude of our backwoods ancestry who built this country.  Portable toilets if we have to.  Bread, water and canned food if that’s all we can scrounge up.  Candles and matches and flashlights to see at night.  Tents and towels for shelter.  Live along rivers, lakes and creeks if need be.  When there’s a will, there’s a way.  Besides the hard times are supposed to be temporary, extremely temporary.  Sleep on it, sleep in shifts, and ask for help: Salvation Army, major churches, food pantries and all the other nonprofits providing sustenance and relief.  The TV ads proclaim “We’re all in this together.”  Let ’em prove it.      

Listen.

Breathe.  Feel.  Observe.  Hear.  Taste.  Touch.  Think.  Read.  Watch.  Work.  Rest.  Walk.

At this moment we’re alive, healthy and aware.  We’re in control more than we realize.  And listen, folks lose their homes every day.  Attachment comes with a price.  Embrace what really matters.

Listen.  This sudden empty time we’ve been given, it’s like a gift.  Isn’t that what we’ve wanted throughout our busy lives, week after week, year after year?  Time to watch children grow and learn and be part of the process.  Time to think.  Time to relax, sit outdoors and watch each day as nature blooms fresh with beauty, contently swaying gently in the breeze, happy just to be alive … again.  As we gaze upon nature, our thoughts turn inward.  Before the crash, were any of us really happy, rushing through the work week, feeling tired all the time, tense about money because there was never enough and now none?  Instead, we’re left with this priceless commodity, an unexpected intangible present because Someone somewhere thought we needed it now.  Soon enough, we’ll never have this gift again—time to change our lives for the better.

Wish that I were as intelligent as Bill Gates.  But like most humans, I do not share his acumen, the enviable and financially rewarding inclination toward mathematics, science, computer science and computer programming.  He reportedly reads 30 books a month.  He was a Harvard University drop out.  He was a teen-age geek.  And like all geniuses God blesses upon our planet from time to time, at a very young age Gates could see the future: Every home would have a computer, not a clunky metal box the size of a closet but something resembling a typewriter.  And lo his vision became our shared reality, by the 1980s and each year with tremendous improvements to today’s light-weight laptops and pads, not numbering one per home but several for each family member even little ones.  Foresightedness is a gift, and a highly intelligent human being knows exactly how and when to use it.

Today at age 64, Gates, the co-creator of Microsoft, is worth $96.3 billion. Throughout his lifetime, he’s often been listed as the richest man in the world.  But now he has fully separated himself from his tech biz to concentrate on far more important matters to billions of people living in poverty.  Bill and his wife, Melinda, formed an international nonprofit specifically to aid the plight of the poor in the world.  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation formed 20 years ago, according to the website, to “eradicate disease, poverty and hunger globally.”  The motto is: All Lives Have Equal Value, and the nonprofit’s premise: We are impatient optimists working to reduce inequality.

Americans don’t really see a lot of truly poor and destitute people especially children.  But the well-traveled Gates’ family has:  masses of humanity living in deplorable and inhumane conditions in Africa, India, Asia, South America and many other neglected places on the planet.  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars to reduce infectious and chronic diseases in the world, most fates unknown to Americans and the fortunate First World inhabitants.  The couple is to be applauded, too, for seeking ways to improve America’s public schools.  Education is the key to a bright future individually and nationally, and no one realizes that more than Bill Gates.  His parents afforded him a good education, but they also understood his genius.  He was not like other kids.  He was way too smart, operating in the stratosphere, existing in another realm, so smart that he took to building electronics and computers in the family garage.  A genius like his was bound to get noticed and financial backing when the right idea came along.

As a young wealthy businessman, Gates came across as uncomfortable in the public.  He gave few interviews, seemed quiet, affable but studious.  He was driven, could be argumentative, and indeed had few friends who could match his level of super intelligence.  Perhaps he was so intent on making Microsoft a national name and international product, a worldwide necessity, because he was a bit lonely.  Genius is hard for us regular earthlings to understand.  We’re prone to be jealous: Why’s he so smart (instead of me)?

Even as one of the world’s wealthiest men, for years the wealthiest bachelor on the planet, Gates was not known to date much.  He married later than most but picked quite a mate.  Gates has said fatherhood taught him unexpected lessons, softened him when he wanted to teach his kids how to be fierce and shrewd in business and in life.  That was his formula for success.  But he learned to be human raising kids.  Business competition, nose to the grindstone, seriousness and watching who’s ahead of whom no longer mattered as much as it did during his young adult years.  Those heady traits and tools to success and money mean absolutely nothing to babies and little kids.  He learned a new perspective in life: What really matters is life itself.  The Gates’ children are now adults.  In recent years Bill and Melinda signed The Giving Pledge and have been joined by several of the world’s billionaires called upon by mega-billionaire Warren Buffet to leave more than half of their wealth to charity, even 99 percent of it.

Gates was always aware of his privilege.  He’s been a smart businessman, won and lost along the way, and now has completely severed himself from the company he founded.  No longer content to sit on the board, Gates is growing into another dimension of those who have lived the good life.  Not quite yet the elderly senior statesman, still with a lot of energy and vigor to work and accomplish monumental goals, he intends to be in the front lines of improving life on earth.  Portable toilets and vaccines readily available worldwide are just a couple of sanitary and disease-combating accomplishments Gates is ensuring all humanity has access.

So in our current state of coronavirus fear, the human masses, at least in America, have shown themselves to be the opposite of benevolent. Those who hoard toilet paper, sanitizer and food are not fooling anyone with the excuse of providing for their family.  There are countries in this world whose people do not use toilet paper or if they do use considerably less than Americans … for some reason.  Have we forgotten our own grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t use toilet paper either along with indoor toilets and all the mid-20^th century sanitation we take for granted and can’t comprehend any other way when it comes to ‘doing what comes naturally?’  Shame on the hoarders, Americans who cannot deal with uncertainty.  They’d never make it in the Third World or the world of our not-so-distant ancestors.

In this digital Information Age, the very era Gates had a starring role, there exists the critical masses, the cynics, the non-fans, the ever-suspicious of the wealthy.  Someone like Bill Gates is far removed from his detractors, the majority of Americans who never will equate his financial success and revolutionary creations, his ideas that catapulted everyone on the planet ready or not into the digital age.  Gates is not like us regular people, easy to envy and anger and give up on presumed pipe dreams.  As certain as he was in the 1970s that everyone in the future would have a home computer, he knows that the misery of world poverty—the unsanitary living conditions, disease and starvation—can and will be solved.  Today Bill Gates has nothing but time on his hands coupled with 100 percent mental focus, not unlike the days of his youth when he was more like you and me yet destined for greatness, sparkling with imagination and innovation.

Since its formation in the 1850s, the New York Times has been the city’s main newspaper but in modern times has perceived itself as America’s newspaper.  Problem is most Americans don’t feel the same way especially nowadays.  The New York Times, along with CNN, is constantly chided by our current president as fake news.  Truth is the New York Times is about as good journalism as we have in this country.  I check it every day along with The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other news sources across the country.  There have been rare moments when the New York Times and even the Washington Post did indeed publish fake news stories.  But at each paper, the culprits were individual reporters: the infamous Jason Blair formerly of the New York Times who wrote pure fiction and got it published in the paper on more than one occasion, and then back in the late ’70s that gal formerly of the Washington Post who inadvertently won the Pulitzer Prize for what turned out to be a fictitious feature series on a child heroin addict.  But other than those two black eyes, these newspapers have kept their nose clean with ensuring real and viable journalism.

So when the esteemed New York Times Editorial Board published its endorsement for the next U.S. President and Vice President, I was pleasantly surprised.  The board of course was not going to endorse a second term for Donald Trump but wrote pleasantries on Democrat presidential aspirants Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg along with a couple of atta-boys for Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang.  Then the paper went on to recommend Americans vote Elizabeth Warren as the next U.S. President … and Amy Klobuchar for Vice President!  A capital idea!  Very novel.  Very much with the times.  Not one but two female firsts as President and VP.  I never in my life envisioned such a goal.  Wonder why?  Maybe younger adults have foreseen the possibility.

Front page news

During the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times featured a daily meter on the front page indicating chances of a win by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  Hillary was usually 80% and higher, Trump often with as little as 11 points to 20 or so.  And look who won.  And both candidates essentially from New York City.  Boy, were the citizens of New York (City) surprised that their own local-boy-makes-good, the story Trump naturally thought the Times would print but never did … and never will.  The paper does not want to be burned again for printing a story they know their readers would consider fiction.

Shortly after the election, the New York Times editor acknowledged his national media institution was smarting from its dead-wrong prediction.  All smugness gone, the editor decided on a few changes to ensure this sort of thing would not happen again to the New York Times.  The paper had to concede its reporters know nothing of middle Americans, those who live in the vast territory between the two coasts—how they think, how they feel, what they believe collectively.  So the Times would hire scads more reporters who would be stationed throughout the U.S., similar to how the equally longstanding Associated Press reports on the country.  An AP reporter resides in a major city or region for a couple of years, reporting on the important local events before being assigned elsewhere.   The New York Times also was going to expand the religion staff.  Most big city papers have just one person who covers religion and writes about the subject of faith.  The Times’ plan was to hire a few more reporters for a religion staff, each reporter capable of covering specific realms of the world’s major religions.

The 21^st century New York Times had to acknowledge in 2016 it did not have its finger on the pulse of the nation, in contrast to its understanding of the coastal elites who ironically included Hillary and Trump.  Maybe this year a presidential election meter will not be featured on the front page of the New York Times or anywhere in the paper.

Not who but when

Getting back to the novelty of two women leading the Free World as U.S. president and vice president, endorsed by the New York Times, both women make the paper’s grade when seeking to build bridges across the nation’s vast mid section: Klobuchar from Minnesota and Warren from Oklahoma.  Klobuchar was the candidate who stood outdoors in falling snow to announce her bid for the White House.  She’s got grit.  Perhaps that should be her motto.  Warren is similar, highly educated and a hero of economic affairs.  She is practical about family budgets and carries that pragmatism into ideals to restructure the national budget, which still is heavily pro-military spending.  She is no-nonsense, thinks like the common man instead of the wealthy, and has real-life experience with family hardship and lost economic dignity.  As for her claim of a smidgeon of Native American ancestry, not only is it true, she looks very much like any white American who claims a tiny bit of Native American heritage.  Both candidates will knock the socks off their Republican contenders (Trump/Pence) in debate.  Smart money is on the women.

Sen. Warren, D-Massachusetts, is 70.  She is married with children from a previous marriage and by now a grandmother.  She had been an esteemed law professor at several universities including the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard.  As the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, she served on committees on aging; banking, housing and urban affairs; and health, education, labor and pensions.  Her bachelor’s degree from the University of Houston is in speech pathology and audiology, and she once taught in a public school working with these special-needs students.  But Sen. Warren’s blue-collar childhood in Oklahoma City and Norman, Okla., sets her apart from most who seek the highest office in the land.  Her father worked in sales before a debilitating heart attack. The family never recovered financially.  Her mother, a housewife, had to pick up work as a sales clerk while barely a teen-ager Elizabeth started working as a waitress.  In high school she was an outstanding debater for which she won a college scholarship.  She married, had kids, and the family moved to New Jersey.  After divorcing in the late 1970s, she kept the last name and a few years later married a law professor who is her husband today.     

Sen. Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, is 59.  She is the daughter of a sports reporter and a teacher.  She became a lawyer and later was elected to the U.S. Senate where she gained notice for passing more legislation in one year than her peers.  She is married with a grown child.  She cites a hospital policy for motivation to seek high office.  When her child was born, the hospital allowed only a 24-hour recovery for mother and newborn.  She took the issue to the state which passed a law mandating at least a 48-hour hospital recovery after giving birth, which President Bill Clinton later signed into law making it standard policy across the U.S.

Warren’s platform includes policies on the issues of farmers, opioid crisis, student debt, corporate taxes and big tech regulation.  She has become controversial on her stance for universal healthcare.  She understands something most Americans do not: While half the country works for large industries that provide decent insurance, the other half are self-employed or work for small businesses with no insurance or outlandishly expensive and unaffordable insurance plans.  Klobuchar’s reputation is much more moderate, yet she is pro-choice and supports LGBT rights.

Both ladies … excuse me, women … excuse me again, candidates think ‘Americans first’ when it comes to real family concerns: health insurance, prescriptions, living wages, fair taxes, schools.  Will either Warren or Klobuchar be great presidents or a good team as Prez and VP?  Should anyone care if they are the first women to hold the nation’s two highest offices?  Will it be men against women in the voting booth?  If nothing else, at least in the year 2020 the esteemed New York Times had the wherewithal to endorse these two presidential candidates who happen to be women.  Will the Times’ presidential endorsement matter to those living in America’s heartland?  When it comes to New York City and its snooty newspaper, they’ll likely pay it no mind.

Hi Death.

Hey.

How’s it goin’?

Oh, same old, same old.

Imagine so.

So, you wanted to see me?

Not really.  OK, no more than anyone else, right?

Right.  I hear from lots of people every day.  What’s the problem?

Just tired, I guess.  I think I’ve seen all this world I wanna see, done all I wanna do.  Nothing to look forward to. I just don’t like the times I live in now.

You sound depressed not suicidal.

Aren’t they the same, I mean, in the end?

Depression is life itself.

Huh.  Death, I never thought of it that way.  Seems we think everything’s supposed to be one big party of happiness, we don’t know how to deal with the long stretches of ‘nothing special going on.’

That’s right.  I hear that a lot … for centuries … since the beginning.  You wouldn’t believe the people I hear from who are alive right now.  They have everything going for them: looks, health, job, family, home, money, lots of things.  And still, they’re just not happy.

I get it.  Guess I always suspected such.  Happiness comes from within.  I should know that by now.

But you forget.  I hear ya.

The older I get, the longer the slumps, the darker the path.  You know what I mean?

Where I’m at, it’s lights out, totally dark.

Oh yeah.

C’mon!  You aren’t ready to be with me.  Cheer up!  You got lots going for you.  I know. Make a list of all the good things you still want to do.

Before you and I go waltzing off into my final sunset?

Yeah!  Always liked your dark sense of humor.  My style.

Takes one to know one.

Then after you check over your list, don’t put off anything because of money or the feeling of no hope for money.  Think more magically.  Or like you think, more mystically.  Envision you living your best life on earth.  And don’t forget to enjoy the gifts—and you have a lot of them— all around you.  Life is lived in the Now.

Mmm.  Very Zen.  You read what I read.

You know me, girlfriend.  I know who I’m talking to.

And remember, you have more to do with the end than I do.  The time, the circumstances, the age, the place.  I just come collecting when you’re ready.  Not the other way around.

See, Death, that’s hard for me to believe.  There are so many who suffer and then die.  I think if they had something to hold on to, like a cure or surgery, they would have endured.  We celebrate that life-affirming story all the time.  That gives us hope, not the other way around, the final goodbye.

You’re looking at this all wrong.  First, life is for learning.  You don’t learn anything during the good times.  Second, no one lives forever.  Third, life is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.

Life is the hardest thing we’ll ever do.  So it’s like we’re doing time on earth, like a prison sentence?

Is that how you wanna think about your time on earth?

Some people live their lives that way.  I never wanted to think of mine as a prison sentence.  I want to be optimistic, but I get down sometimes, especially when things aren’t going my way.

It’s only human.  Don’t beat yourself up.  You’re one of the most optimistic people I know, and I know everybody who is and ever was.

OK, so I’m optimistic, a dreamer, and I’m not the only one.  That doesn’t mean I’m … happy with the way life is going right now.  Sometimes life is harder to live than other times.  It seems there are roadblocks, personality conflicts, situations I am not in control of.

Where’d you get all that psycho babble?  In control?  Life is like one long crazy roller coaster ….

OK, OK.  I get the metaphors about life.  I think my problem is more about society, American society, modern times, media, social media—my era.  The message engrained since maybe TV, color TV, is how neat and clean life should be, could be, can be.  My generation and my parents’ and the younger ones have spent most of our lives watching life: dramas and comedies, characters, other times, other places. Wait. That’s it!  Isn’t it, Death?  That’s the reason for a collective depression: spending the majority of our waking hours watching other people do stuff.  That’s the problem!  And it leads to overwhelming sadness within each of us.

Well, that’s very insightful.

And the best thing is we can solve it!  Just monitor our time spent ‘watching’ life and spend most of our time ‘doing’ life! Wow, I’ve had an epiphany, don’t you think?  And, I owe it all to you.  Death, you are the best listener a human can have.

OK, I wouldn’t go that far.

No, no, really, people should appreciate you, how close you are to each of us, with us like a shadow each and every day we live and breathe.  Why, you’re nothing to fear at all!

Now, hold on, I have a reputation to maintain.  I like a little fear in my human beings.

Yeah, but the fear leads most of us to keep on living, to choose life!  Oh, how life affirming a talk with Death can be!

Shhhh!  See YOU later.

Much later! (Wink)

To the young girls out there, the title refers to a feminist ad campaign for smoking a specific cigarette brand aimed at women.  For girls of the Boomer generation, we liked the spirit of the wildly sensational magazine ads: an old heirloom photo depicted a 19^th century woman washing clothes on a scrub board or performing one of a dozen menial housewife chores, her long hair pinned up, neck collar tight, corset cinched ’neath a long-sleeved blouse, long skirt, black hose.  Then in another ‘vintage’ photo, the lady is scolded and scorned for sneaking a cigarette break.  In the foreground of the ad was a large color photo of a 1970s’ model: a take-charge woman donning a pant suit or maxi dress, windblown hair, slinky blouse unbuttoned to reveal tan skin, lips glossed and a devil-may-care smile, her long cigarette held loosely between the forefinger and middle.  The ads were alluring to young girls figuring out if they wanted to smoke or not.

But today’s blog is not about the filthy habit and deadly consequences of smoking cigarettes.  For us American women, the year 2020 marks the 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guarantees women the right to vote.  American women had protested for almost a century prior, so engrained was the societal concept that female humans were possessions who change their last names when married, do not work outside the home, are to give birth time and again regardless of health or die trying, do not wear the pants in the family, are to be seen and unheard.  Basically, it was the old man adage that women are subhuman with tiny brains, fickle, dainty, silly beings incapable of taking seriously the election of governing leaders.  Indeed, we—society as well as American women—have progressed a very long way.

And yet … every day we learn of a fellow woman or girl who has been abducted by one or more men, a mother who’s missing, a wife vanished—only to learn later of foul play or rape or both.  Then there is the Me, Too movement, Bill Cosby prison sentence, Harvey Weinstein trial, and the recent realization that Hollywood was and has always been from its inception a Boys Club where the casting couch was the only way for a want-to-be actress talented or not.  Did you know that silent film star Mary Pickford warned America’s young girls to stay away from Hollywood?  She lovingly advised them to stay home with their families rather than risk their lives and reputation to go to Hollywood in search of a movie career.  But throughout the country in communities large and small, the silver screen with larger-than-life humans was too captivating for many a naïve, stubborn and adventurous gal.

The women in white

The women’s suffrage movement of the early 20^th century is captured in early moving pictures and black-and-white photographs.  The marching women were called suffragettes and chose to wear white clothing to stand out in the era’s drab photographs.  They looked like angels.  Some states and regions permitted women the vote prior to the Amendment but only if she were a widow and a land owner.  More and more women protested, for decades mind you, and were unrelenting until the ultimate boys’ club, the U.S. Congress, granted the vote to all women.  To be clear, the American right to vote had to be guaranteed nationwide by constitutional amendment.  Isn’t that just incredible and practically unbelievable to all of us alive today?!?  My grandmother would have been 19 the year women were granted the right to vote in any and all government elections.  The vote was about power, and white men made sure everyone was not going to have it or obtain it with ease.  Throughout the 20^th century, it took several acts of Congress to guarantee every single American citizen, including women of color, the basic democratic right to vote.     

Ever since 1920, the great American century kept blowing and going as women little by little gained more freedom of choice beyond voting, like a college education, independent housing, banking, careers, even marriage and the role of wife or housewife and eventually the choice of motherhood.  Another anniversary for women to celebrate this year is The Pill, the most popular contraceptive first widely prescribed in 1960.  Shoot, even Loretta Lynn sang its praises.  Then the sex revolution was in full swing right up to the tennis match dubbed Battle of the Sexes at a time when FM radio played every day Helen Reddy’s empowering pop anthem “I Am Woman.”  Women always knew they could be anything they wanted to be … if it just weren’t for men standing in the way.

Now 100 years after the women’s vote, we have more women in Congress than ever in U.S. history and have had a couple of chances to elect the first woman vice president and president. (Pssst.  Hillary Clinton was the first woman elected president by popular vote.)  Still … there’s the daily news, overshadowing all we’ve accomplished since the days of yesteryear, our grim reality, revealing how much work there is to do so ALL males, not just men in general, treat women and girls with respect and as equal human beings.  Young women can’t go jogging alone?  Women can’t leave an abusive husband or boyfriend?  Women have to always carry a weapon and be on the lookout for an attacker?  Women can’t wear anything they want or don’t want to wear?  A woman can’t live by herself?  Women are still asked by male employers if they have children?

So, we women have the right to vote.  That’s been great and cause for immense social progress in the past 100 years.  By now we certainly can work at most any job, including the military, and pursue our individual aspirations.  But even so, women must always remember to never flick the figurative cigarette, appear too carefree, in control and self confident in the presence of some men, not all but some, a few even—and those not always easy to distinguish.  We can live our lives freely but only to a certain extent, more so when young.  When it comes to the two sexes, that’s the way it’s always been and strangely enough to modern minds still is.