Author: cheriebell69@hotmail.com

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Julie

“Please God, please.  Noooooo.  Please—don’t let …”

Julie cried silently to herself, mouthing the words without tears.  She read the testing stick: Pregnant.  She knew her decision would have to be quick.  The sniffers would come around soon enough.  The short round rolling robots perceive DNA and the pregnancy hormone in particular.  “God,” she closed her eyes.  She had hoped for the relief that life as she knew it, as she had planned it, as she foresaw it, would go on.  She wanted no one to know her secret, her mistake.

She confided in Miranda, her college roommate.  “What are you gonna do?”

“I don’t want to have it,” Julie answered somberly.  “I want to finish college.

“I don’t believe I should have to have it.”

“You have to have it,” her friend replied.  “You have no choice.  None of us do.  Not anymore.”

Looking through the blinds, Julie was in a daze of fear and panic.  She thought of Romeo, the way he made her feel. She, they were in love.  How was she going to tell him his life was over, too, at least for a year?  That was the sentence for males who impregnated a female but could not afford the baby.  One year in prison.  The sniffers determine paternity.

“This was not supposed to happen,” Julie said. “Why can’t this be my private life, my decision, the way it used to be?”

“You don’t have a lot of time,” Miranda warned.

“You think I don’t know that?!”

“You have maybe a day before …”

“I know, before the sniffers come around,” Julie finished the scenario.

That would be humiliating, chased down by a whining silly round robot or several.  Then everyone would know.  And that was the point.

“This should be private.  Why should my parents know?  I’m an adult.”

“Well, they pay for your college,” Miranda reminded, then apologized as she hugged her friend.

———————————————————————————————————

They heard a knock on the door.  It was Romeo.  Miranda opened the door, cautiously scanning left and right then quickly pulled him inside the campus apartment.  “What’s going on?” he asked playfully.  Miranda looked away while walking into the other room.

Julie looked at him and took a breath.  “I’m pregnant.”

She wiped tears from her eyes.

“Oh … that’s … that’s not what I expected to hear,” he replied awkwardly.  “How …”

She chuckled behind tears, “You know.”

They stood silent before Romeo approached Julie, embracing her tenderly, enveloping her, breathing in her sorrow, entering into her shame.  “Look,” he whispered, “we can leave, go to California.  It’s legal there.  No questions asked.”

“How are we going to suddenly leave in the middle of college?  Those sniffer hounds probably already know.”

“Let’s go right now.”

“I need to think.”

“You’re not thinking of keeping it?” Romeo asked.  “You know how we’ll be treated.  We’ll be locked up until the baby is born.

“I don’t want that,” he commanded.  “We don’t deserve that.  No one does, especially young people with our whole lives ahead.  We shouldn’t have to be parents until we want.”

Sometimes, Julie thought, Romeo spoke with such passion, like he was a born leader and could take charge and protect her and everyone who felt powerless to fight the system.  Julie realized why she fell in love with him.  It wasn’t just chemistry and attraction.  She admired and respected his entire being.  In her mind and heart, they would marry.

But she didn’t want to marry yet and not for being pregnant.  Maybe in a few years.  She wanted that time for Romeo, too.  They could be parents later when they could afford it, when they wanted to bring a new life into this world.

And now pregnancy could change their lives but not before placing them in separate facilities for a year.  She knew the law.  Pregnant girls could marry or move into a mandatory facility until the baby was born.  She could keep it only if she could afford it.  The community would place her in a job.  The fathers of unplanned pregnancies got a tougher sentence if they could not afford to provide for the expectant mother and the unborn baby: one year in jail.  It was punishment because males know better.  “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”  Youth of their generation saw the signs everywhere since junior high.

———————————————————————————————————

“We’ll marry,” Romeo proposed.

“No, it won’t work.  We have no money to keep a baby.  Maybe when we graduate and are able to get jobs.  But not now,” Julie said, starting to weep.

Romeo looked through the blinds, knowing the sniffers would eventually roll around the corner, detecting.  The couple had little time to think or plan.

“How about your parents?  Can’t they help us?” he asked.

Julie shook her head in fear.  “My parents can never know this!

“They would not understand.”

“What?  A couple in love?”  Romeo said tenderly, stroking her hair.  “They know about that.”

“My parents cannot know this,” she asserted, end of subject.

“Our parents were lucky living young when your life was your business not the government’s,” Romeo said, sarcastic and envious thinking of the freedom.

President Roberts, the first woman president, ran on a platform of abolishing abortion and punishing both the mother and father of pregnancies if they could not afford it, even stiffer penalties if they tried to induce miscarriage or abortion.  Parents, family, friends, churches and social organizations could come to a couple’s aid by providing funds to pay for health care as well as the baby’s first year of life.  But anyone caught participating in an abortion, for any reason, any age female, would be punished and imprisoned.

“Look, I know someone who knows how to get you some pills,” Romeo said quietly, adding slowly and softly, “that would induce miscarriage.”

“You mean an abortion?” Julie said flatly, quoting the government’s policy.

“Miscarriage.  Whatever.  It used to be routine in the U.S. before the law changed,” Romeo said.

“Those were the days,” Julie said, cracking a smile.

Thinking about the option, to swallow some pills until she cramped and bled, she asked, “How will we get away with that?”

“There’s a solvent that comes with it.  No one would know.”

“I’d know.”

“You sound like you want to stay pregnant and …”

“Have a baby?” Julie said.  “We haven’t called it a baby yet, like we’re supposed to.”

“It would be easier to just marry,” Romeo told her.  “No one cares if you’re pregnant and have to.”

Julie sat down on the sofa, finally the weight of the world off her shoulders.  “I don’t want to have a baby now,” she decided.

“Get the pills.”

———————————————————————————————————

California broke away from the U.S. due to the Roberts’ law, seeing it as unjust and inhumane.  Julie researched online the small nation by the sea, studying the demographics, realizing the impossibility to remain a peaceful small North American nation due to overcrowding and every kind of earthly battle from floods to fire to daily earthquakes.  She didn’t want to leave Texas or America.  She thought of Canada; it was legal there, too.  But … the sniffers are everywhere across the U.S., roaming freely, more so at night, their tiny gears whizzing at a high pitch … only females could hear.

“The land of fruits and nuts,” she said to herself with a laugh, remembering something she heard about California from old TV characters a couple generations ago.

California had high unemployment due to a large migration of ex-patriots.  The cost of living was out of this world.  And money was the root of her problem as well as for Romeo.  “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she began to sing an old song by a California band.

The sniffers could not be heard.  They hadn’t picked up on Julie yet.

An hour later Romeo tapped on the back window.  Julie lifted the window as he pulled himself in.  The apartments were not closely monitored like the dorms.  College kids had more freedom … to make mistakes.

“This is all you need,” he said.

“I thought love was all you need,” Julie quipped mindlessly, reading the instructions.

She popped open the bottle and hesitated.

“The sniffers!  I hear them,” she said.

They scratched at the door like a pack of wild dogs, intent on seizing their prey.

“You!” Julie said as Miranda appeared from the bedroom.  “You told?”

“Hey, it’s the law.  I had to,” she said with a steady tone.  “Besides, the reward money will pay my final year.”

“Let’s go out the back,” Romeo said, grabbing Julie, still clasping the pill bottle.

“No,” she said, standing silent, gazing through Romeo helplessly.  “It’s over.”

———————————————————————————————————

The walls were blue with white clouds.  She thought she’d died and was sailing above the world.  She closed her eyes and gave the final push cued by the doctor.  The baby was born, a girl with loud lungs, the picture of health.  Julie smiled, happy to be a part of this miracle of life.  The baby was briskly taken to another room.  Julie was confused but understood her baby would be sold to a loving couple who could afford her.  The government would make sure of that.

“Julie, down,” the matron said, instructing the young woman to be still as she was wheeled back into her cell.

She received twenty years for attempting an abortion.  Romeo received ten years for providing the illegal pills to Julie.  They could finish college in prison and even earn other degrees.  For good behavior, their sentences could be reduced to a third of time served.

———————————————————————————————————

“Dear Julie, I love you and want to marry you.  Let’s marry behind bars.  There is no one else for me, just you!  Please say you will.  I know the baby was born.  What was it?  Did you see it?  How are you coping?  In my dreams we are together and I feel your embrace and I am so happy.  Please hold me in your dreams!  Write me soon.  Your Romeo”

Julie read over the letter with no expression.  Prison left her little time to sleep let alone dream.  She was exhausted but had many chores to do, her punishment for years to come.  The walls and floor of her cell were gray cement.  The matrons were hefty and strong.  Their voices were all she heard.  Inmates were not allowed to talk.  Julie hadn’t heard her own voice for months.  She had been nesting alone in a baby room for nine months.  Her sole focus was on the new life growing inside her.  That was her commandment and duty.

After the birth she would begin paying her debt to society.  She scrubbed toilets, mopped floors, painted the warden’s office, sewed pillows in the factory, attended college classes and studied.  The female inmates, from girls to teens to women of child-bearing years, all serving time for attempted miscarriage or abortion, received their meals alone in their cells.  They were not to congregate or communicate with each other.  Their punishment had to be severe. The ladies must feel the scorn of society.  And the younger generation needed to know how stiff the punishment for abortion would be.  “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”  The slogan was on a government poster with a couple kissing in a heated embrace.  The picture seen across the nation was captivating, a romantic moment.  How did the government think that picture would instill abstinence, Julie wondered.

In the imposed silence, Julie sometimes could think to herself.  She didn’t think of Romeo anymore.  She grew to despise him.  She had to kill their love.  Everyone she knew would know her crime.  She never spoke to her parents though they often came to see her in prison.  She thought of the millions of strangers who did not care about her and whether or not she got pregnant and wanted an abortion.  Then again, just as many felt her life was their business only when she was pregnant and sought to terminate.  To them, science proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that human life—physical and spiritual—begins at conception.

Whatever Julie believed did not matter.  In the back of her mind, she heard a woman’s self-assured commentary from another era: “You don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want.  Your body is your business.”  The tears stung now.  She cried for her mistake, for unintended pregnancy, for the new law changing abortion to a crime of murder, for the loss of privacy, for never knowing the baby she had to have.

She envied women of the old days when they took to the streets to make abortion legal once upon a time.  They held their signs high: Abortion on demand!  Mothers, daughters, grandmothers all marching together.  Abortion was illegal then, too. They were so brave, she thought.  They marched for a reason.  What was it, Julie wondered.

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Don’t you hate it when slim people call fat people fat?

The one challenge I may not win in this lifetime is the battle of the bulge.  I am one of the 40 percent of Americans deemed overweight or obese.  Like my fellow fatties, I’ve had a lifelong love affair with food—I, like they, don’t eat to live but live to eat.  The only time I remember being lithe, thin without a care in the world, oblivious to how I looked but very much aware of the joie de vivre, was … second grade.  But the following summer, nature played a cruel trick on me as I morphed into a totally different body.  Teachers did not recognize me.  I had been short the previous year but grew to second tallest girl in class [I ended up a short woman], gained at least 20 pounds more than my Brady Bunch peers, and had to wear a bra.  Everybody started calling me fat: family, friends, strangers, teachers, doctors.  What must that have done to my 8-year-old psyche?

I kept a brave front like I didn’t care, but that emotional wound never healed.  I became self deprecating, first to make fun of myself before anyone else had a chance.  I suffer from fat mentality.  It’s a real thing.  Like every fat person, I eat when depressed, angry, happy, sad, lonely, socializing, mourning, and celebrating.  Doesn’t everybody?

When our peers manage to grow older while keeping weight off, we who are fat adults aren’t fooling anyone.  We gotta problem, and everybody who sees us knows it.  Obviously we eat more, a lot more, and exercise less, a lot less if at all, than the nonfat people.  Doctors have been telling us the key to weight loss is eat less and exercise more.  Oscar-winning Texas actor Matthew McConaughey gave a great bit of advice to his remarkable weight loss playing an AIDS victim: Don’t eat.  He actually stopped eating, and the weight just melted off.  Who am I kidding?  I can’t not eat.  I’ll pass out.  Besides, food tastes so good.  Remember that slogan to help us girls lose weight in the ’70s: Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels?  I’ll never know the comparison.

Fat people know all about dieting; it works sort of, takes a very long time, and then our old habits and natural inclination are welcomed back into our lives like a dear loving friend with whom we had unkindly kicked to the curb.  Oh how we personify our relationship with food.  Obesity is at the root an emotional problem first and a physical or metabolic challenge second.

So when comedian Bill Maher recently sermonized, as he tends to do at the end of his weekly HBO show “Real Time,” about America’s fat problem, he was preaching to me, reaching my guilty soul.  I’m a fellow Democrat, and Bill and I see eye to eye on practically everything—he more cynical, I more optimistic, yet the same politics.  When he presented the sobering statistic that every year 40,000 Americans die of gunshot wounds while 300,000 of us die from obesity, he got me.  Must get back to seriously dieting again and exercising.  Must make myself think before any morsel of food enters my mouth.  I get this way every once in awhile: join a gym and am faithful to exercise and diet.  Then I go through slumps, mostly due to loss of income.  The gym membership has been the first to go in 30 years of experienced job loss or salary reductions.  But to get Maher off my back, I once again joined a health club.  It’s new and ten minutes away, so I have no excuse.  I mulled it over for a year, dreading it but wanting and needing it simultaneously.  That’s how we fat folks roll.

Carry that weight

I never liked exercising when I was a kid.  I didn’t like breathing in cold air and pushing my heart rate and body which easily tired.  I preferred lounging indoors all summer and after school watching TV or listening to radio or records.  I was a plump child of the ’70s.  My peers were active and enjoyed playing outdoors.  The 99 percent of them were slim and appeared to be having the time of their lives.  I was envious watching on the sidelines, self conscious of fat legs; everyone told me I had fat legs.  And the bra thing meant I’d never be a runner.  That’s what I always dreamed of being: an elegant runner.  But it wasn’t meant to be.  Walking by boys at school, I’d hear “Boom, boom” or “Flop, flop.”  I’d rather no one see me try to exercise.

The first time I got serious about joining a gym, a women’s gym, and giving it everything I had, I was 21.  I ate hardly anything: a half sandwich for lunch with an apple, a spoon of vegetables and a quarter serving of the main dish with a salad, no sweets just fruit except on Friday nights I allowed myself one diet fudge Popsicle.  Even I was surprised at my will power.  It took three months, exercising three days a week including sitting in the sauna afterwards.  But some weight came off.  I was so proud of myself.  I was a size smaller, weight lost mostly in the chest, heh heh.  I weighed 120 pounds.  When I told everyone I’d lost 13 pounds, they looked at me like they couldn’t see a difference, like I still had a long way to go.  No congratulations for my effort either.  I felt good and healthy and the right size but continued to try to break 120, exercising more, eating less.  Then job loss, no more health club exercising, and succumbing to all the temptations of chips and sweets.  I gained what I lost and then some.

Back then the physician charts allowed a short woman to weigh no more than 100 pounds, maybe as much as 107. I weighed 102 in 4th grade. Through the decades, I noticed in the exam rooms the weight charts have changed and now permit a higher range, even allowing for body sizes based on a specific measurement between the two bones of the elbow.  I am right between small and average.  Sometimes I weighed within the guidelines, sometimes not, OK mostly not.

What I didn’t know through all those decades of adult dieting and gymning with alternate nights to Jane Fonda videos was as we grow older, say 40 and 50, the weight is really hard to lose—I’d say impossible.  My doctor says extremely hard.  So now I find myself in a losing battle.  We’re supposed to eat a third less than we did in our 20s and 30s.  Oh now they tell us.  I never heard that before in my life.  And we’re supposed to exercise even more, like every single day for an hour.  Where do we find the time?  So a couple of years ago in yet another attempt at physical fitness, I turned to exercising in the morning, first thing, arising at 4 a.m.  Did I lose weight?  No.  But I didn’t gain any either.  And I felt better, like I had accomplished something.  Losing weight—and God knows I need to—is not the goal as much as keeping active and maintaining muscle.  The Silver Sneaker Club could be in my future except they exercise at 10 a.m. on weekdays when I’m working.

The day of the expanding man

Bill Maher blames America’s fat epidemic on junk food.  We who are fat eat too much of it when we shouldn’t eat any.  So we can be hard on ourselves about what we eat, how much, and why we’re eating it.  Maher proposed bringing back fat shaming, theorizing that’s how he got a grip on alcoholism or drinking too much.  Yeah well.  Overeating is not alcoholism or drug addiction in only one way: We’re not out of our minds and blacking out while overindulging in ice cream or chips or candy or pizza.  Or … are we?  Oh my God, overeating is exactly the same as being an alcoholic or drug addict!  We’re food junkies!!  We got an addiction we just can’t lick, a monkey on the back, a crutch we try to hide.  Damnit, the world knows our addiction with just one look: We’re fat.  We can’t hide our secret through mint breath and cologne, long sleeves and black clothes.

Maybe … being fat is some kind of gift from God.  Everyone knows our problem, our big fat problem with food and stuff.  Most adults know what it’s like to be overweight and to diet.  Half of Americans manage to stay at a healthy weight, so why not we who are heavy?  Maybe Maher is right about being fat shamed.  But all those years ago in childhood, being called fat, fatty or fats didn’t stop me one bit from eating too much of the wrong things.  I consumed even more candy, chips and soft drinks—tastes so good.  I just wanted to be left alone and didn’t want anybody scolding me about what to eat and not eat or say how pretty I’d be if I’d just lose weight.  Today when I look at pictures of myself back then, I don’t see a fat girl at all.  I see a kid who was perfectly healthy, even well adjusted considering.  That’s because I’m used to seeing kids today, many of whom are morbidly obese, and seeing the same as adults and even actors doing well in this day and age.  Americans are just ‘letting themselves go,’ to paraphrase my mother when she talked about people who gained too much weight and didn’t care anymore.

The way Americans are going to get a grip on our deadly obesity epidemic is going to take every single one of us helping each other.  First, our restaurants can serve half orders of everything.  Short people like me don’t need a full size of anything.  Our junk food industry—and it is a multi-multi-billion-dollar business—could change the way they overly mass produce.  I never bought their ‘it’s about choice’ theory so they keep stocking fresh snack cakes and cookies 24/7 in grocery and convenience stores nationwide.  Sure we who are fat need to practice self control and less overindulgence when it comes to the food we eat.  But shouldn’t something we all know is junk food be illegal?  Like cigarettes, junk food will decline, and Americans will be healthier.

Our freedoms come with consequences.  We’ve learned it with free speech when hate speech is allowed, religion with every weird group allowed to worship as they choose, and now all the foodstuffs we’re allowed to eat.  Narcotics are illegal or regulated, but alcohol is legal.  We all know people who consume either or both and do or don’t have a problem.  Some are addicts, but most are not.  Being free to eat whatever we want when we want is killing us as obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.  All of us who are fat need help from others and not just ourselves.  A revealing book I read was Eat This, Not That, where I learned a big salad meal at a restaurant has 1,200 calories while a sandwich has half or less.  All the things I have been eating to try not to gain weight turn out to be the most fattening: salads, flatbread, wraps.  How can this be?!  It makes no sense, but one reason some of us are fat is we know nothing about food—the thing we love most in the world.

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What’s black and white and red all over?

What were they thinking—our white American ancestors who bought and traded African slaves starting 400 years ago?  That has always been the silent question throughout the 20th century, louder with each passing decade, crossing into the 21st century to the historically significant anniversary year of 2019.  And the same ‘what were they thinking?’ question will surely be asked by future Americans 200 years from now about our indulgences, attitudes, prejudices, tolerance, action and apathy—perhaps on the subject of caring for our planet and all living creatures.  Future Americans will not understand our proud dusty cowboy mentality of yesteryear when good men took care of their own, even to the detriment of all others.

The reason our white American ancestors got involved in the slave trade is because Western European man believed his culture, religion, art, music, food, dance, architecture, agriculture, fashions, customs and traditions were the highest achievements ever produced in the world, the epitome of sophistication, most certainly ordained by God Himself.  Those who ventured from Europe to explore other nations returned convinced the Western way of life was the best.  No other culture in the world ever produced the refined music of Bach or Mozart, the perfect art of Rembrandt, the magnificent sculpture of Michelangelo, or the genius of da Vinci.  Most of all, the Bible itself through the words of Jesus Christ charged Christians to go out into the world and save the human masses, baptizing each one into Christianity, saving their souls from eternal damnation.       

Self assured God was on their side, our white ancestors seized land across the Atlantic, far away from where they belonged way up north, land they knew in their own terms ‘belonged’ to other people, another race.  Through purchase, trade and deals and eventually broken promises, lies and battles to the bloody death, this is the story of America.  There is no denying our brutal and unjust history.  While these cultural battles were ongoing, early Americans brought over thousands of Africans, crushing their primitive culture like they did the natives of this land renamed America.

The descendants of Western Europe who peopled American colonies were thinking this: people with dark skin were sub human and were created to perform labor like building roads, neo Roman buildings and ornate plantation homes; growing crops; butchering; cooking; cleaning; sewing; wet nursing—you name it.  The Bible clearly states some are slaves and some are masters.  This was the rationale of 18th century white Americans especially if they had money.

The races lived close together, however, interacting daily for decades, lifelong, each knowing their place.  Surely they saw humanity in each other regardless of skin color.  They both bled red blood, would bruise if hit or slapped.  They had the same human needs of food, water, shelter, clothing, companionship, sex.  They both reproduced.

Whites were dominant, blacks submissive.  There are documented cases of slave owners at the time of their death setting their slaves free and of slaves going to court to legally challenge their enslavement and insist upon their freedom.  Sometimes slaves were granted freedom by a judge.  It didn’t take long for northern American cities to consider slavery an abomination.  The South took to the issue with great complexity.  The United States was divided by progressive and antiquated cultures.  The only solution became the Civil War, when all our war dead were Americans.  Even President Lincoln considered sending African Americans back to Africa, anything to save the Union.  But African Americans were not Africans, more white culturally and in every other way than tribal Africans.  The ways of their ancestors were lost and forgotten as their new way of life was accepted even if enslaved.

African American slaves were clever.  See, they always knew they really weren’t slaves.  No one is.  They were free like God made all humans.  There were the Underground Railroad, abolitionists, clever field hollers and work songs like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Get on Board” that were code on how to escape, and patchwork quilts carefully crafted with scenes and symbols showing the way to freedom.  They also were a people who kept their family history in great detail, teaching it orally to their children.  They adopted the Bible and Christianity, attending their separate churches, and through the Gospel foresaw change culminating in their freedom not in the afterlife but here on earth.

Slavery in America was long ago, another time and another era that we just don’t and can’t understand.  But the civil rights movement was not long ago.  In many ways after the Civil War, blacks were treated worse than they were as slaves.  Many families had to leave the South, only to be met with prejudices and bigotry by northern whites, too.  World wars and military action in Korea and Vietnam had a lot to do with ushering in civil rights as the military began to integrate white and black troops.  It’s been a long struggle for African Americans toward personal and collective freedom and then acknowledged human rights by American society still dominated by the culture of white privilege.

More than likely America is now in the age of the last white hope as one more man plays president for awhile, mostly to overturn laws and policies enacted by his predecessor who was the first African-American president.  In coming to terms with American history, the painful truth is the intentional and pervasive cruelty of white people toward other people, all the other people on the planet.  The excuse is the absolute certitude of Western man who once roamed the earth and sea and believed all to be in his domain—like God surveying His creation.  So why Americans of certain European heritage would enslave Africans a few centuries ago is perfectly clear today to us, their descendents. They believed they were gods.

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This is what we know:

American society has become more violent, and more tolerant of violence, after every war starting with the Civil War;

Mass shootings in America have become a daily occurrence;

Most mass shooters have been young white men or teen-agers, very few of other races or mentally ill;

The majority of people with mental illness are not violent;

Every year in America, 40,000 people are killed by firearms: 60 percent are suicides, the rest are accidents, murder, crime and police shootings;

America had few mass shootings after the federal assault weapons ban in 1994 until Congress lifted the ban in 2004;

America has as many guns as people;

A third of Americans own all the guns;

Most Americans don’t want a gun;

By now most Americans agree some kind of gun control is warranted;

The National Rifle Association is in financial ruin and faces lawsuits by parents whose children were killed in mass shootings created by high-power assault rifles;

Since Columbine, high school shootings have become commonplace in America;

Studies of mass shooters report they were not thinking of their next step after the shooting or even the day after: They acted on impulse though their mission was somewhat planned; they have low self esteem, are extremely angry, and are determined to go out in a blaze of glory; surviving shooters expected police to kill them in action; they knew they were doing wrong;

The adolescent brain produces a phase of audacity, a time of senseless death-defying deeds without fully realizing consequence; the brain’s frontal lobe, that controls impulse and memory, is not fully developed until the mid 20s and for some the mid 30s;

America’s number one criminal gang is the Aryan Brotherhood and other white supremacists groups whose numbers have grown worldwide due to internet camaraderie;

Parents, family and friends of young men who commit mass murder by a high-power assault rifle knew something was wrong long before the killing spree.  They knew he was angry through shooting off his mouth.  They knew he liked guns and knew how to shoot them.  They knew he was more often alone than with buddies or girlfriends.  They knew he wasn’t particularly religious or spiritually inclined.  They knew he hated large groups of people: gays, blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans—and women but kept that mostly to himself.  They knew the unthinkable could happen … but didn’t take the thought seriously.  And when these mass shootings occur by the same type of young male, they have nothing to say to the American people.

That is the reason this keeps happening.

By now lots of studies have been done on the shooters who’ve lived to tell about their mass carnage.  They are not mentally ill psychopaths, though maybe sociopaths or antisocial.  They also did not expect to live after their shooting rampage.  Some first killed their parents and family before heading off to a public place with the intention to shoot as many people as possible.  Mass shooters have not been necessarily influenced by playing violent video games or watching violent movies.  Seems the only things they had in common were being white, male, young with access to high-powered firearms—and no empathy.

How do we teach empathy nowadays?  How could one or two generations grow up without knowing to be human is to live and let live?  Are young people confused by perpetual wars?  Perhaps.  Is our government to blame or our elected officials, our nation’s politicians of suits, wealth and bluster?  Definitely.  What about our hypocritical society and mass media that makes money off of violent art imitating violence in life?  Yes, they are partly to blame for desensitizing all of us and young minds in particular.  But from where does the absolute certainty come among some young males that nothing matters, life is meaningless, the future is hopeless, death is preferable, mass murder is the only answer because everyone else is to blame for their angst and misery that in reality is only in their minds?

Where does family fit into all of this?  Kids are raised with years of influence, their worldviews cemented by age 3.  Are parents unaware of their growing boys, the daily changes, the emotional needs they pass off as babyish during adolescence when they start to recoil from a father’s embrace or a mother’s caress?

This is the heart of the matter, indeed the reason for mass shootings by young white males.  We never hear from the parents of males who took to firearms to create a few seconds of hell on earth, witnessing humans scream, run, fall, bleed, struggle and die.  In a decade or so, these boys-turned-men will tell us in rational articulate terms what motivated their carnage.  They may weep while sharing their individual back stories: home lives without unconditional love, teachers too impatient, boredom with the confines and routine of school, family and friends too busy to sense and uncover their perpetual sorrow seemingly hidden during the difficulties of adolescence.  They’ll blame their families for not stopping them; elusive and uncaring parents who worked too many hours and did not indulge them as children and teens to ensure they were kept on the right track intellectually, emotionally and spiritually through church, school, sports and activities spent together; for leaving them alone and letting them develop and explore dark thoughts and deeds; for not loving them enough.

The future men, former young mass shooters, will be right.  They are in a way not responsible for their actions.  Have adults forgotten how impressionable teen-agers are, how everything in their minds is seen as black or white, wrong or right, good or bad, and no amount of arguing can change them?

They will be right about their family’s influence or lack thereof: the laughter at racist jokes; the casual use of the n word or c word, b word or w word without serious scolding by other adults; downplaying the importance of education while blaming teachers for low grades; the allure of violence in our society with no discussion about art, fiction and entertainment; the seething anger over the cost of living, unemployment and perpetual struggle to make ends meet; and then blaming women and every other minority for the inability to find a way to co-exist and make peace with changing times—culminating in an ignorant, enraged and joyless existence.  It takes a family to create a miserable little snot.

For further reading:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

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Insurance: Love it or hate it, we all gotta have it

All the Democrat contenders for the 2020 U.S. presidency are making a big deal about insurance: one side demanding universal coverage for every American and even people living here illegally, the other side still critical of Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act. Well I’ve been involved in this debate for a few decades now and have concluded that our federal government and most states are not about to allow every and any body to be covered by public healthcare.  It’s not like we’re talking guns here.  Nope, this is a totally different, yet somehow related, debate.  The America I know has always said “No way, Jose” when it comes to universal healthcare.

The Dems are barking up the wrong tree on the already dead, no pun intended, issue of expanding Medicare/Medicaid coverage so all Americans can opt in if they want or need.  Americans have a long proud history of pulling up their bootstraps and making their own way, providing for their own and no one else—except for some charitable contributions, tithes and offerings, and big-hearted giving come Christmas time. That’s the America I know.  But along life’s journey, I learned people who don’t look like me don’t have an American history of fending for themselves let alone taking care of their own.  Whether it is bad luck at finding a good job with benefits or … well, that’s pretty much been their misfortune all along.  There are tens of millions of Americans who have never had and never will have luck at landing a good job with paid healthcare, white or darker but let’s face it mostly people with brown and black skin.  A good education and Affirmative Action evened the odds for millions but not all, white and people of color.  And it’s bothered me my entire adult life: Why is America the only modern nation that does not consider healthcare a right and not a privilege, unlike our thinking about a driver’s license, which somehow is related?

Blessed insurance

I voted for Bill Clinton for one reason: universal healthcare.  He was gonna make it happen.  He was so naïve, and so was I.  Shortly after taking office, he assigned his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to study and propose a universal healthcare system for America.  She held round table discussions with doctors, hospital administrators, insurance and pharmaceutical reps, and also American consumers.  The bottom line: none of the money makers (healthcare, insurance and pharms) would take a financial reduction so that affordable healthcare could work for everyone.  Being American means we support anyone for making as much money as possible.  But it is interesting to know that healthcare providers around the world, including Canada, do not earn anywhere near their colleagues in the USA.  So the Clintons dropped the subject.  They had other fish to fry, but they gave universal healthcare a good solid try.  Besides, the Republicans always were fond of saying America has the best healthcare money can buy.

That makes no sense.

Universal healthcare was placed on the back burner for awhile until Congress took it up once more. The Democrats came up with a plan to cover all Americans. The Republicans came up with a counter proposal with strict mandates like no coverage for pre-existing conditions and other restrictions seemingly at the time rather mean spirited if not spiteful. But then as President, Barack Obama simply took the Republican plan to debate and maybe pass in Congress. It was a brilliant political strategy. The Republicans had already proclaimed they would never work or pass any legislation proposed by President Obama, even their own counter universal healthcare proposal. President Obama took the issue up to the U.S. Supreme Court which passed on the question of mandatory insurance whereby every American of a certain age and income would have to be insured. It was the only way the Republican healthcare counter could work. And Obamacare became the law of the land.

I still do not know anyone who has ‘Obamacare,’ but it is tens of millions of Americans. A few friends who work for small businesses, however, told me the cost was even higher than their regular insurance. Many Americans disagreed with the mandate to get health insurance or be fined, and that issue alone had a lot to do with Donald J. Trump winning the White House. President Trump did get that part overturned, so we’re back to Americans not having to have health insurance if they don’t want or can’t afford it.

Not very reassuring

Each American has a story about insurance coverage or lack thereof.  When I was in my 20s, my first job provided solid insurance.  It took a lot out of my paycheck, but another one of our American sayings about health insurance is you need it ‘just in case,’ meaning the big auto crash or cancer.  So I paid.  I made $6 an hour, and health insurance took a hunk of my paycheck.  Did I mention I hardly ever used it or didn’t need to at the time, thank God?

Then something new in healthcare crept into my large 900-employee workplace: HMO.  The deal was take it or stay with the triple-increased regular insurance.  I took the HMO because I was young and needed insurance ‘just in case.’  I also chose the HMO because it was very affordable: $5 co-pays in those days, $5 prescriptions, too, and no deductibles.  But operating like Wal-mart, the HMO soon became the only option as co-pays and prescriptions increased: $7, $10, $15, $20.  I remember the 30-somethings with kids did not like the plan at all: having to choose doctors from a list instead of keeping their usual family physicians, no coverage for pre-existing conditions, cheaper quality like equipment for insulin and generic prescriptions.  But I likened the HMO to college when we saw whoever’s at the quack shack.  They’re medical professionals after all.  The HMO worked for me, single career gal.  Yet each year, the rates increased and the plan became more restrictive in coverage.  Everyone was suspicious.

Then our employer went belly up, and none of us had any insurance to complain about anymore.  In between jobs, my parents were kind to help pay for prescriptions.  This is a very American face of life.  My next job paid $900 a month, of which $200 went for insurance.  Some months later, I finally got a professional job but at a small company in a small town.  The annual deductible for health insurance was, wait for it: $2,500.  It was 1992, and Bill Clinton soon was elected President.  When I told my father my deductible was $2,500, he said, “You’re lying.”  See, he always worked in the big city and for major corporations.  His insurance, though always increasing in rates, was quite manageable.  Small towns and small businesses are screwed when it comes to health insurance premiums.

Nevertheless, I continued paying for insurance that I hardly used, thank God, and of course never reaching that deductible.  I was indeed paying for others, not unlike universal healthcare.  A few years later, I worked for a slightly larger company but in a corporation so insurance was a bit better.  My deductible was $1,500.  I’d never reach that figure each year either.  I guess in America we should be openly thanking God for the blessing of never having to use our insurance.  Has it come to that?

Eventually I returned to the big city with a big employer.  I was a public school teacher, and the insurance was sweet.  I opted for paying a bit more per paycheck for a $500 deductible.  I could even use it for chiropractic care.  I easily paid the deductible in the first few months each year after enrollment.  It was a great ride for a few years until the option was gone.  I’d pay not only more per paycheck, but the deductible would increase annually: $750; $1,000; $1,200; $1,500; $1,750.  Then the school district switched to another major insurance company, and I lost all my doctors, some I’d seen for years.  I thought of the 30-somethings I had worked with in 1990.  Suddenly I felt their loss.  It was a loss of control.  I had bonded with doctors who knew me and my health.  So I had to set my mind back to ‘college’ mode when I saw whatever doctor.

This is my personal insurance story so far as an American. I can add that in recent years I was without insurance, and thank God nothing too serious happened.  Besides, I could always pay by credit card.  Has being American come to this: healthcare on credit?  Yes, it has for 99 percent of us.  Some of my teacher colleagues, whose employee insurance was paid by the school district, could not afford the family option to cover their children, a monthly cost in the low thousands of dollars.  They had to choose between a roof over their heads or health insurance for their kids.  Has living and working in America come to this?  Yes, it has, and it’s been this a-way for decades.     

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A social media platform where millions can say whatever they want! What could go wrong?

It’s more like: Let everyone in America copy anything off the internet and post it on their Facebook page.  What could go wrong?  How about everything?  Facebook coupled with the still Wild West internet to the consummation of the ‘free to say whatever pops into our minds good or bad’ era.  Because everyone says online whatever they want, as a nation and a people we are more divided, angry, anxious, suspicious, distrusting, extreme, and more gullible to any and all conspiracies floating around in cyberspace.

Facebook’s all-out effort to censor hate speech from the vast recesses of its social media pages is lost on me.  They are not doing a good job, if they are doing anything at all other than having meetings about all the derogatory phrases and verbal intentions out there, weighing equally criticisms against men and women and cultural slights.

Every day I spot more than one racist, sexist, bigoted, angry comment against: Latin Americans seeking asylum and their children, blacks with or without deep American ancestral roots, Muslims, ‘libtards,’ and more recently elected congresswomen of any race or non Christian faith.  Now, granted eight years of nonstop racial slurs were abundantly posted on Facebook throughout President Barack Obama’s terms in office.  But I thought it would decrease exponentially with the election of yet another rich white man to the U.S. presidency.  Nope.  It’s as if Americans who relish free speech as hate speech were just warming up on social media prior to 2016.

Facebook, recently fined billions of dollars for lax efforts to protect users’ privacy—interestingly, tied to the 2016 election—can’t possibly censor its website.  It is a massive politically charged machine, reaching billions of people the world over—practically every human being on the planet living right now.  And Americans have the right to free speech and thought, so there.

Something about allowing people to freely and openly speak hate against everyone on the planet who is not white and Christian and recognizes the white male of the human species as God on earth is … frightening.

Paved with good intentions

Facebook was such a beautiful concept … so very long ago.  It’s as if it’s been part of America for decades, yet it’s still a relatively new phenomenon in the span of modern times.  Through Facebook and the internet, America has changed because Americans have changed.  Facebook’s downfall was allowing users to post anything off the internet—any insulting image, rough language, comedic political or culturally bigoted statement, and outlandish unfounded claim.  In playing loose with American constitutional rights of free speech and press, a Beast has been created not unlike Frankenstein’s monster.  A giant dead body was jolted to life by electricity, and our society now lives in its shadow, proceeding with dismay and caution.

Tech experts recommend breaking up Facebook like the ‘Baby Bells,’ following the 1982 court mandate against the phone company’s monopoly.  Facebook is gargantuan because of its billions of users who rely on it for social contacts and business.  On the other hand, more people tore their lives off Facebook after federal investigations concluded the Russian government meddled in our U.S. elections specifically through the internet, social media and Facebook prominently. We put our lives on Facebook and for some also our opinions.  We sparred politely and crudely for years.  And now we know, thanks to Facebook, we can agree that no one can say or write or post a thing to change another’s worldview.  The issues are so controversial and our opinions so deeply ingrained we can feel them.

Thanks Facebook.  Thanks internet.  Thanks U.S. Constitution.  How we gonna live with all this freedom?

Facebook, the genie, cannot squeeze itself back into the bottle, to the days of unexpressed views perceived by the ruling society as nasty, mean and evil and by just as many as logical, the truth and just plain right under God’s heaven.

Any future change on Facebook is up to us.  If Americans have learned anything from Facebook, it’s the fact that uncensored thoughts and feelings against massive groups of humanity—races, sexes, religions, creeds, colors and sexuality—spread like wildfire.  And they destroy like fire, too, and cannot be easily contained.  Prejudices that once were thought best kept to oneself, which were left pent up only because of social standards and a subtle code of ethics and common decency, have boiled and seethed for decades.  They’ve always been part of America, the nation that guarantees its people at birth and when naturalized total freedom especially to think whatever we want.

Facebook is a mirror, a reflection of each and every one of us on it and reading it, revealing to millions of others what collectively Americans think and how we act, what we really are inside.  Even if the social media giant disbands or ends its business reign, nothing will change … not for the millions who remain the objects of bigotry, ridicule, racism and sexism from the human venom contained in a single hateful thought, spoken and heard, written and read by many like-minded, allowed to infect another and another.  The seeds of hate have always been abundant, blowing in the wind until landing on soil and taking firm root all over God’s green earth.    

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All right already, time for the #MeToo movement to practice forgive & forget

What?  Peter Yarrow, the short bald one in Peter, Paul & Mary, is now tossed into show biz refuse courtesy of the #MeToo movement?  Unknown to me and anyone born in the 1960s and the many decades hence, Yarrow served time for indecency with a teen-ager back in 1969.  He was jailed three months, and ever since has repeatedly apologized and publicly owned up to his transgression and related psychotherapy for decades now, and was even pardoned by President Jimmy Carter.  Still, in the 21st century Yarrow hasn’t paid the ultimate price of obliteration from the annals of American pop music history as well as a life of public good works and international philanthropy.  He wasn’t yet judged and executed by the #MeToo movement.  Yarrow, whose lifetime achievement honor from his New York high school was tarnished in light of the old scandal, was canceled from an upcoming festival when once again his long-forgotten crime came to light in the modern age of ‘a-ha!’

Ironically, this year “Seinfeld” is celebrating thirty years of TV relevancy, the show that in the 1990s dared to ponder if Americans have become a little too sensitive about race and, without saying it, a white person’s unintentional remarks that could be taken as culturally biased and innately racist.  The episode involved Seinfeld questioning an Asian-American mail carrier for the nearest Chinese restaurant and Seinfeld’s silent struggle to avoid the words ‘reservations’ and ‘scalper’ and the disparaging phrase ‘Indian giver’ to a gal who was Native American, a young woman he wanted to impress for a date.

Well, Americans have not come a long way since the age of “Seinfeld,” which may explain our cultural retardation as well as the show’s enduring popularity.  In fact, we as a modern society have regressed … perhaps all the way back to 17th century puritanical America and the days of witch hunts.  How the hell did that happen?

Ya-da ya-da ya-da

The problem that always has been with the #MeToo movement—a movement that also ironically co-exists during the presidency of Donald J. Trump—is the ‘she said, he said’ factor.  There are a few condemned men with more than one female witness to their inappropriate sexual behavior, such as disgraced comedian Louis C.K., chopped down at the top of his game if I recall correctly.  And then the other comedian Aziz Ansari who was downed via internet by a woman’s claim of sexual assault on a date with him years ago.  A lot of disgraced male comedians due to #MeToo; what’s up with that?

America has spent a couple hundred years suppressing women and women issues like cries of rape and injustice that now the tide has turned into a floodgate, and it’s because of the internet and social media like Twitter.  #MeToo started out bravely enough, gained traction after a couple years, to the point that millions of women have claimed on the internet of experiencing with men inappropriate behavior, sexual forcefulness, date rape and stranger rape.  The difference this time is they name names, and everybody believes them.  Considering the way things used to be against women, that’s progress in this country.

No one remembers the ’60s

So the story on Yarrow is in 1969, he was at the height of fame with Peter, Paul & Mary, playing folk music gigs throughout the land, even across the sea.  He was a staple at all the anti-war protests, happenings, and peace-ins.  If he had the hair, he would’ve supported hair peace with John and Yoko.  And all those artists, actors, musicians, beatniks and clingers-on who surrounded him indulged in recreational drugs, one of which is now legal in a few states.  Like any famous guy, he had groupies.  They all do.

A couple of teen-age sisters, the younger age 14, pursued him for an autograph. When they knocked on his hotel door, Yarrow answered in the buff.  The gals didn’t run away.  Leave it to the imagination what happened inside the room.  Not that there’s any excuse, but the feminine look back then was ‘young girl’: long hair, no makeup, short dress, thin like Twiggy.  In fact, “Young Girl” was a hit song.  But a minor cannot consent to a grown man’s desires.  A sex crime occurred, and Yarrow was summarily prosecuted and sentenced.

Men who take advantage of a girl or woman already have committed a crime.  The police and the courts handle each and every one.  But now that #MeToo is running full steam over anyone, no questions asked, it’s become un-American.  It’s old fashioned, gossip, rumor, scandal, salacious, Peyton Place.  We don’t and can’t ever know what the truth is. Worse yet, #MeToo allows for the old adage that the female accuser may bring down a man because he became rich and famous, leaving her the scorned woman.  That can’t possibly be the intention of #MeToo, was it?  Is it?

And for the men who’ve actually paid the price for sexual misconduct, misdemeanor or felony, who were judged guilty in court, have spent their lives not hiding their past but becoming better people—what of them in the age of #MeToo?  Yarrow perhaps is the best of what can come out of public shame.  #MeToo doesn’t give any credence to forgive and forget.  But they’ll come around.  They have to.  Dwelling in the past has its own dire consequences personal and individual but not societal.  We learned long ago it’s best everyone move on.  Like they sang in the ’60s: Take a sad song, and make it better.

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When world leaders are the fattest men in the room, no good can come of it

Beware a leader fatter than his people.

The more I see President Donald Trump with Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, the more I think about Mahatma Gandhi.  That’s right, Gandhi: sweet little man, docile, educated, wise, pleasant, swaddled—whose people called him Mahatma, meaning Great Soul—the man from India whose political tactics calling for nonviolent resistance to British authority and rule would impress Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ve been so used to seeing U.S. presidents who at least appear physically fit: Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon and Johnson.  Some had their health battles of sorts, mostly age related, but they all enjoyed active lifestyles … and it showed.  Each was a man to behold, carried a presence and power in the room even among other world leaders.  This is because they had their act together.  Because they were world leaders, they could have eaten whatever they wanted.  Obviously, they exercised self control, including President Bill Clinton eventually.

Now our American president is as bloated, obese and sluggish as millions of us Americans.  And though we are enjoying a prosperity that keeps us eating high on the hog, the North Korean masses are not so lucky.  My understanding is many are starving to death.  And I understand U.S. sanctions against North Korea to halt nuclear pursuits have something to do with it.  Some high authority wants us to believe that line of bull.  But all you have to do is look at their leader.  Short people can’t carry extra weight like the tall, and they cannot hide their obesity.

For more than a generation, America has had an obesity epidemic and all the related health consequences that go with it such as diabetes, heart disease, chronic foot and skeletal pain, and doctors say several types of cancer.  Our leader indeed reflects the absolute fattest period in American history.  What President Trump, Kim and all the tens of millions of obese Americans have in common is: GLUTTONY.  It is an ancient sin, a spiritual affliction, an emotional illness, and if nothing else the epitome of selfishness.  Gandhi, by the way, was known for the spiritual practice of fasting, something out of the Bible when one wants to grow closer to God.

Namaste Gandhi

Gandhi walked among his people, not unlike Christ.  Despite his British education and good fortune, he decided to resemble his people in dress and culture because he truly cared about the masses oppressed by British rule.  Sometimes he spoke of his childhood.  The Brits were called Beefeaters, and Indian children assumed their impressive muscle and strength was linked to the consumption of meat.  So when Gandhi was about 12 years old, he decided to spend one year eating meat, not informing his parents who taught him vegetarianism is a more spiritually sound practice.  Vegetarians believe eating meat clouds the mind and body and makes one aggressive.  Each day he checked his puny muscles, but there was no change.  After the year of beef eating, he was struck by guilt of not being honest with his parents.  He confessed, and they saw fit to not punish him.  He learned a lesson, he said: to be yourself not someone else.

Hmm.    

Another lesson young Gandhi learned was dealing with his extreme fear of the dark.  He just wanted to see something in the dark, a ray of candlelight or moon or stars, some reassurance that all is well.  But sometimes the night sky was moonless and clouded especially during the rainy season.  Gandhi was so afraid of sleeping in total darkness, though that is what he saw when he closed his eyes, what everyone sees when we close our eyes.  Anything could happen.  In his mind there was much to fear: cobras, spiders, beasts.  Then one night a servant asked him, “Why do you fear the dark?  Don’t you know God is with you?”  It was a revelation that changed his life.  God would always be with him, looking out for him, caring for him, loving him eternally.  You see, Gandhi was first a spiritual being, and he knew everyone else to be the same.

OM.

That brings us to another truth in discovering the compulsion of Americans and fat leaders who overeat: FEAR.  What do people who live in the most prosperous nation on earth have to fear?  Instead of a leader who reassures us we have nothing to fear but fear itself, that maintaining constant fright leaves us paralyzed and unable to move forward, we voted in a leader who does nothing but stir fear every minute of every day of every month of every year he’s in charge of the Free World.  President Trump’s leadership has not made us free, just more frightened, fatter, self-loathing, cynical, lonely, and for some unable to believe long-held religious teachings and spiritual enlightenment centering on brotherly love. 

What must President Trump fear?  Or Kim?  One could fear he’ll be found out.  And isn’t it funny?  So could the other.  Phony undeserved leadership based on a mountain of lies, manipulation, smoke and mirrors, deceit, and in one nation brutality, enslavement and murder.  North Koreans are taught from birth to idolize their dear leader like he’s God.  With the internet, however, we can see the day when North Koreans will learn their leader is not God but a man who suppressed them while he lived a life of opulence, comfort and glorious food—the latter any human realizes already.

At least Americans can pursue the truth.  We know better than to idolize our president who will be gone in four to eight years regardless.  Our fear is actually self-induced.  As a nation we are holding onto fear for some deep psychological reason, some unspoken infantile need, stuffing our feelings instead of speaking our mind. It is no way to live in the land of the free and home of the brave.

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High school newspapers and journalism class: More relevant now than ever

Of the many bills presented in state legislatures—from strict abortion bans to a teacher pay raise and mandated pre-school—the one that caught my attention came from neighboring Arkansas.  Earlier this year a legislator, who also happens to have been a former TV broadcast journalist and with her husband publishes a community newspaper, presented a bill to reinstate journalism as a mandatory elective in all the state’s public high schools.  After hearing staunch support from a prominent university journalism professor and articulate journalism students who maintained the scholarly and societal benefits of the course, the Arkansas Legislature summarily killed House Bill 1015, sponsored by Julie Mayberry, R-Hensley.  What a brave notion, though, given our politically divisive mass media convoluted by the internet.

To think that in 21st century America an entire state blocked high school students from studying journalism seems … so 1984.  When we have a president who calls real news fake and fake news real, it is necessary for high school students to study journalism.  Not that any of them would actually become journalists.  Only a few will have what it takes: concern for mankind, inquisitiveness, above-average intelligence, determination, audacity, innate organization and solid communication skills verbal and written.  Oh yeah, they’ll need to be good creative writers yet with integrity to stick to the facts and present all sides.  So the final mark of a good journalist is to recognize what’s fair and just and to spot what’s unfair and unjust.

‘Reporting’ for duty

My appreciation for journalism came from doing the job on school newspaper staffs.  In junior high an anonymous teacher placed me on the staff.  Looking back I can see why a teacher thought I’d be good at that after-school activity.  I did well in English class, won a couple of writing awards, and was sociable and unafraid to chat with teachers and principals.  I was an independent worker and respected deadlines.  But what really made me stand out as a potential student newspaper reporter, I believe a bit ruefully, was my childhood notoriety as insatiably nosy with a big mouth.  Adolescence did a lot to suppress that phase.  In time through learning journalism, I became cautious with my words especially in print and tried not to exaggerate or use flowery adjectives or flat out lie.  It would take one tough high school newspaper sponsor, but I learned to rein myself in to become a better reporter.  Teen-age girl that I was, I still enjoyed creative writing, poetry and songs.  But there was no place for that in the school newspaper.  However, I managed to put all my writing talents together for features, columns and music reviews.

High school newspaper staffs are an eclectic bunch: the highly intellectual, self-assured photographers, the bookish, a couple of popular kids, the wannabe advertising execs, and of course the brooding nonconformist rebels.  The latter fit in perfectly with the newspaper staff.  I was somewhere in between, one of the very few who paid attention to cub reporter training: Every story must have the 6Ws and the 1H, and news articles cannot be made up.

We had to wait till tenth grade to take journalism and then by the end of the year may be invited to join the newspaper staff.  The course taught the history of American journalism—from the colonies starring Ben Franklin to New York columnist Horace Greeley who summoned city reporters to “Go West,” from Ida Tarbell’s tenacity to stick it to rich oilman John Rockefeller to yellow journalism and sensationalism, from the Associated Press’ journalism standards and ethics to the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.  We learned about the contributions from the mass media including radio, TV, film, journals, magazines and tabloids.  No cable news or internet yet.

The next year the newspaper sponsor placed me on the news section of the newspaper staff.  All the seasoned reporters wanted to write features, columns and critiques.  I wanted features, too, but figured I had another year to apply.  Delegating me to news writing was the best thing that could have happened to me in many ways.  I had to get out of my own experience to report the facts. I could not slant stories.  News had to be honest, as best a high school kid could know, find or determine.

My first sponsor let us run the school paper.  Next year’s sponsor was completely hands on and did not tolerate errors.  Staff photographers were creative and good at their craft.  Our editors were shoo-ins for top ten universities.  In fact several on the newspaper staff were all-around exceptional students, delivered sardonic wit that kept me in giggling stitches, too smart for their own good, and ended up in the Top Ten graduates at a very large competitive school.  That is a notable fact that continues among high school journalists.  Journalism produces serious lifelong learners who know about and explore a variety of subjects.

In college I chose not to major in journalism but ended up writing freelance for the town paper and then as a part-time job for the university news service.  After graduation I ended up working in the news business, covering mostly government news; writing a lot of enterprise pieces, weekly columns, features, news-features and feature series, performing arts critiques, CD and concert reviews; and shot many photos that accompanied my stories.  I survived the demise of a big-city paper and along the way was honored every few years as an outstanding reporter.  I took the job of journalist seriously, wanted to do meaningful work and write engaging stories sometimes from the heart but mostly from the head as my old journalism teacher would have liked it. 

Journalism seeks truth

Reporters have taken a beating for generations, way before our current president who blasts The New York Times and CNN, both as good as journalism gets.  Yes, there have been a couple of sorry jerks masquerading as ‘reporters’ but writing pure fiction.  The New York Times in the early 2000s and The Washington Post in the late 1970s have black marks for those hires.  But the vast majority of writers who call themselves journalists maintain an integrity few other professionals match.  That is the truth.

With the internet, instant news, bloggers pretending to be real-deal reporters and self-styled journalists who play fast and loose with the facts, a young mind needs to learn how to substantiate what’s real news from the heaping mounds of internet pop culture trash, propaganda and misinformation along with dangerous disinformation intended to destroy democracy, free speech and free press.  The far right made fun of the mainstream media, calling it the ‘lamestream’ media years before Trump was elected—one of the loudest and most popular among them who used the sarcastic characterization in daily speeches earned her degree in journalism.  How ironic.

You gotta pity the high school kids in Arkansas and any other state public education system where journalism is removed from the curriculum, the extracurricular curriculum.  Maybe there is still hope for the highly curious, intelligent and easily bored high school youth, the ones who question everything they hear and read, the ones who just want to know the truth historical and in the here and now.  Independent intelligent young people need no one to guide them into doing their own research, verifying facts and sources, then coming to their own conclusions—not their own truth but the facts.  Even without a high school newspaper and the opportunity to write news and commentary, they could become good reporters.  A great journalist once told me, “Everyone should be an investigative reporter.”  Ain’t it the truth, now more than ever?

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No Show: White House concerts & the legacy of great performing artists

The White House most evenings is dark, full of shadows and dim light, eerily silent.  The White House gig, once the highest honor for many American and world performers alike, is no more, the grand ballroom no longer the quintessential American venue celebrating performing arts and artists … and that certain something that makes them great, immortal and beloved.  During Presidents’ past, White House concerts were major celebrity events, sparkling with performances spanning every genre of musical taste.  President Carter and Presidents Bushes were keen on progressive country artists while President Obama was first to include an evening of rap featuring then-controversial Common.  But Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton opened the White House every few weeks to a variety of performers in fondly remembered concerts.  For decades the tradition of special musical evenings was magical in that they brought together politicians and performers, Republicans and Democrats, for a night of delight.  That’s the way it used to be in America.  Everyone tried to get along.  All agreed music charmed and soothed.

What happened?  Who killed the White House concerts?  PBS used to air
“In Performance at the White House” since 1978, the last show in 2016.  The only one to blame is the current President, a longtime associate of show business but lacking that certain something that springs forth from great entertainers into the living rooms of Americans watching television.

Musicians and show biz folk are for the most part liberal.  They are free-spirited, freedom-loving idealists who are not afraid to speak their minds while artistically musing on the good and bad in life.  Their songs, music, art, novels, movies and shows reflect real life.  And the one thing talented American artists cannot stand is not so much controversy but blatant lies and lying.  Artists are about truth.  Great art, from writers to performers to painters, is about what’s really going on in the world in which we live today.  Truth and lies don’t mix. Lies can’t enter the artistic realm. Honesty is the key. 

Music of the spheres

Artists … musicians … actors … writers … whether great or unknown reside in another dimension.  Talented artistic people are more often than not great at their craft for one reason: empathy.  They are not simply sympathetic toward others in crisis.  Anyone can be sympathetic.  Those with an artistic soul have the ability to place themselves, their wonderful imaginative minds and loving hearts, into the lives and circumstances of other people.  Artistic souls should be revered by society.  But society, not fully comprehending (though usually envying) the cool artistic types, only laud a few, the very few, who capture collective attention through sheer luck and happenstance.  In other words, fame, which is not the ultimate goal of an artist, is usually gained by ‘who one knows’ and ‘being at the right place at the right time.’

A commercially and therefore financially successful artist is not necessarily a great one or even enduring.  There are far more flashes in the pan, born with great talent and drive enough to get famous but maybe get bored and return to private life.  We all know that only a tiny percent of the great ones will endure and even fewer of those achieve immortality to be called an icon.  Yet they all used to perform at the White House: from Willie Nelson to Ray Charles, Barbra Streisand to Aretha Franklin, Pablo Casals to Count Basie.

And isn’t a great leader like a great artist?  They understand each other.  They both empathize with their fellow man and were born with an innate love for humanity.  They know humility, failure, heart ache and depression.  Yet they both are not averse to evolving, growing emotionally and intellectually, changing their views and moving forward.  They’re comfortable with the unknown in life.  They don’t and can’t see life in black and white but only the many shades of gray.  A great leader and a great artist are in sync.  They lead by the power of their words and the integrity of their intentions.         

Perhaps it is best the White House remains quiet as our nation contemplates how and why we’ve become tone deaf—unwilling to stand, let alone consider, another point of view; unable to listen to the same music, enjoy one hour of pleasantness seated among political opponents, allowing our hearts to soften and our humanity to be inspired by awesome God-given talent, to be temporarily swept away by the sound of music.  The White House may be silent for now. But the music of past concerts for the Presidents of the United States—the highest honor of a performer’s life—can be heard by those unafraid to travel to another realm and listen from the heart.

http://museummusic.com/musicofthekennedywhitehouse.aspx