Author: cheriebell69@hotmail.com

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This is our brains on smart phones

By now there are scads of research on how our constant use of smart phones, cell phones with internet access, are affecting our behavior, perhaps causing an addiction, and certainly transforming our family relations and society.  It may be technology overload, but many people cannot wait to read their emails or texts, delve into Facebook, or check the internet for the latest terrorist attack or national controversy.  We have been living in the Information Age for more than one generation, and there is ample research to indicate the human brain is impacted: whether it’s checking emails or news updates every few minutes while carrying on conversations over dinner or becoming engrossed in e-chat or an e-article at work … or worse while driving.

Did you see the woman who, while on her smart phone and walking a loud city street, fell right into a manhole?  What about young people listening to music from their ear buds while crossing busy streets?  God gave us several senses for a reason, if not for mere self preservation.  Maybe licenses should be issued in order to use smart phones while walking in public.  How many more people on smart phones have to injure themselves or others?

There was the news report about kids getting easily bored and restless as their parents habitually check out the latest on their smart phones, the little kids referring to them as ‘dumb phones.’  Pretty clever.  Though yet aged enough to be articulate, the kids perceived their parents’ smart phone interest as disinterest in the lives of their own children.  So when kids get to be a certain age, many parents simply give them smart phones, too.  What a big happy.

Call you back

Remember those public service announcements about fifteen years ago promoting a non-tech night or family night whereby everyone shuts off all cell phones and laptops—to spend quality time together?  What happened to those family-centered ads?  There is a generation now unaware that once there was a societal suggestion to turn off the technology especially at night.  Now kids are growing up thinking ‘the family that techs together stays together’—like our technology keeps us all connected; better connected than ever before in human history; instantaneously connected; so much preferable to the old fashioned phone call, typed or hand-written letter, or car ride to grandma.

From what I’ve seen and experienced, having the internet in the palm of my hand has had a detrimental effect on relationships.  Yet I would not want to live without it.  I can turn it off, and I do before bed.  But some people don’t turn off the internet in their hands, leaving their minds to obsess over the latest news or gossip.  Gotta know what’s going on all the time everywhere.  Kids have been known to actually sleep with a cell phone under their pillow, sometimes found to be the source of a fire in the middle of the night.

I was slow to join Facebook, not ever liking the way I look, unwilling to mug at the camera every so often to post an update.  I know I’m aging.  Why would I want everyone in the world to witness the graying, wrinkling, and additional pounds?  But the best thing for me to come from Facebook is finding old classmates and acquaintances, even reuniting with them in person.  That is indeed a fun part of our modern times.  It is particularly interesting to see that some couples who married right out of high school still celebrating anniversaries decades later.  That is quite a surprise, statistically speaking.

There are, too, the sad reports of battling cancer and other crises.  There are the ones who air dirty laundry and shouldn’t on Facebook.  There are those who simply re-post some inspirational quip or informative and cute video found online.  As a writer, that inclination to re-post what another has written or taped makes no sense.  How often have I been sucked into good writing about cancer or whatever topic only to find myself thinking after the first few sentences, “There is no way this person wrote this?”  So I scroll on in hopes of finding original posts, which is becoming rarer by the day.

Brainstorm

“60 Minutes” investigated how individual smart phone use is monitored.  Big Brother, so to speak, collects data on our news and shopping interests which we pursue on our devices—and then hooks us into similar articles to read and things to buy.  That is in the end the purpose of smart phones, loaded with information and constantly updated for which we pay virtually nothing other than a phone bill or cable/internet bundle.  We have to wade through the ads, handpicked just for us to lure us into buying stuff, in order to read what we want when we want … which is now.

Studies are showing that smart phones not only are addictive but create a short attention span, and this is exactly what students in school and college do not need.  Multi tasking is actually impossible.  The human brain handles very well only one (1) task at a time, not two, three, four or five.  The latest brain research shows that whenever we start doing more than one thing at the same time, the quality of each task is greatly reduced (talking on the phone, reading emails, typing, driving).  Instead of giving one hundred percent of our effort and attention to one task, we are divvying up the brain which itself determines the reduction: perhaps ten percent email comprehension, fifty percent conversation participation, twenty percent recipe following, and so on.  We don’t decide the quality division; the brain does.

The brain is more Buddhist than we’d like to acknowledge.  Is there really a difference between the brain and the mind?  Maybe they are the same.  In that regard, mindfulness—total concentration on one thing at a time—truly is the only way to a happy and productive life, one lived and enjoyed to full measure, every thought and especially every human emotion recalled in clarity and satisfaction.  Smart phones may be turning our nation and world into a bunch of walking zombies: people who think their brains are growing due to all the recently accumulated knowledge and stuff but are really intellectually stunted, cluttered with confusion, unable to determine truth from lies, emotionally overwhelmed, and left wondering where did all the time go.

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Mess with the Bull, you get the horns

Dear Kathy Griffin:

So, you think you went too far in the realm of macabre comedy stunts, huh?  I’ve seen funnier than Trump’s bloody decapitated head.  Yawn.  But the thing about free speech imagery is it’s best not to offend tens of millions of people, well tens of millions of Americans.  And that’s what you did, girlfriend!  As your stunt picture was taking shape, you even conceded you and your photographer would have to leave the country.  And Trump, well he has totally lost his sense of humor since becoming president.   And it’s funny, for someone who relishes free speech ad nauseam, he sure is willing to release the hounds to rip the head off anyone who would dare besmirch him.  [Pssst, “Frontline” did a recent report theorizing that Trump ran for president because of a comedic remark by President Obama who smugly declared Trump would never be called President.]

Famous comedians and entertainers like you whose purpose is to rebel rouse, and as you put it ‘push the envelope,’ should expect a one-time public scorning.  Take Joan Rivers, your dearly departed comedic mentor.  She went through an awful period in the 1980s where she could not get a job.  Her situation was not really based on her loud bawdy comedy—a little too much goading of Liz Taylor for her weight, as I recall—but more of the cut-throat entertainment industry.  The word was Johnny Carson had her banned or had put out a bad word on her, and she was history for a long time until she decided to step back into her high heels and take the bull by the horns.  She remade herself into the comic legend we fondly revere today.

Take the Dixie Chicks and that remark in front of a London audience after 9/11 when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq—two undeclared wars that would last longer than Vietnam, still ongoing in many respects, end in countless ruined lives and deaths and lifelong misery and suffering especially among our young men, and cost about a billion dollars a day at one point, all funded off the books.  But I digress.  Before singing a Texas song, Natalie Maines remarked that the Chicks were “ashamed” the President was from Texas.

Heavens to Betsy, all hell broke out!  Remember?  First, the Dixie Chicks, the hottest country-crossover girl band ever, were banned from country radio nationwide.  Fans were tossing their CDs.  Then the hate mail and death threats came a-pouring in, among the letters one that strongly advised the lady entertainers to just ‘shut up and sing.’  They posed nude on the cover of a major news magazine, their bodies painted with the hateful words and common female epithets from those irate letters.  It was a scary time, especially for proponents of free speech.  Anti-war speech was suddenly verboten.  Lenny Bruce and George Carlin would have taken the right all the way to the Supreme Court.  Nothing to fear but fear, I can hear them say from the Great Mike in the Sky.  But … they were men, not women.  Female entertainers face a more dangerous reality when it comes to personal safety.

And let’s not forget the most important comedian blackballed from late night TV: Bill Maher—again, his ordeal having to do with post 9/11 puffed-up patriotism.  During his political comedy show’s roundtable discussion, he talked about the terrorists being called ‘cowards’ by the president.  He thought aloud that anyone who would drive a plane into a building could be called many things but not a coward—not that the terrorists were brave but that as humans universally fear death, men who would knowingly commit suicide to attack America and Americans were not cowards, in Maher’s mind meaning afraid of death.

Snap.  Oh how our national outrage hit the fan!  Maher was out on his can within hours.  His show was funny, thought provoking and cutting edge.  But our nation at the time was sorely wounded and humiliated and was not about to let some so-called comic slander America or our President’s use of wordery like referring to terrorists as cowards.  The good news is Bill Maher returned in full form where he belongs … on cable TV, where he can say whatever the ef he wants.  And I believe he never apologized for trying to correct the adjective used by President Bush when describing suicidal terrorists.  Did anyone ever get the point that Maher was not taking up for the terrorists or praising them or calling them brave?  No, no one ever considered his thought on the subject of word use and meaning.  The network suits and political pressure cut off his head, so to speak.

I know what you were probably thinking when you participated in that gruesome photo stunt.  Surely you and your photographer saw the cover of Der Spiegel shortly after Trump took over as president?  The image on the German political magazine was of an animated Trump holding the bloody head cut off the Statue of Liberty.  It was a political statement, perhaps not satirical but a realistic European view of the new U.S. President, their concerns that his leadership may threaten democracy in America and abroad.  Very little uproar came from that image, one that surely went viral.

You were thinking along those lines, right?  Maybe trying to say something about Trump has gone so far in his agenda that he’s setting himself up for assassination, or that a lot of people worldwide would like to see him dead?  So you used the image of a beheading because that’s what the terrorists have been doing for years now, uploading  each one online?  That our free speech rights and guaranteed freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being jeopardized by the Trump agenda?  Am I getting anything close to the intent of your editorial photo, not unlike an editorial cartoon?

Well, most people took one look at your picture holding a fake bloody Trump head and immediately freaked out.  It was too real, especially in these dangerous times.  It’s a real possibility that many people the world over have envisioned: Trump’s assassination, his death perhaps in the hope and manner of the Middle East terrorists.  Americans can take a good joke, bawdy, brazen, truthful, politically honest and culturally insightful.  Perhaps your political imagery should have included a short comment so everyone would have understood your point in such a photo.   Instead, you just shocked the hell ought of everyone, well mostly Americans.

There is a price to pay for free speech, isn’t there?  Everyone isn’t going to like everything you say and do.  But you still have the right to make a political statement, violently bloody or not, just like Der Spiegel does every week over there in Germany, several knocking Trumpian philosophy.  For now, take a break from the comedy circuit.  Lay low, just for a little while, like many of your fellow comedians of the past.  [Oh, I forgot all about Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem all off key and crudely at a televised major league baseball game.]  When it comes to entertainers, the American public is fickle and in time always forgiving (if not forgetting).

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God to Earth, calling all mankind

Why?

Who’s that?

Did ya hear that voice from up on high?

Why?

Lord, that You?

I AM THAT I AM.  Now answer, why?

We praise You Almighty God!!  We praise Your holy name!!

We are Your most unworthy subjects …

You know who I AM.  Answer my question: Why?

Lord, we are sore afraid of Thee.

I’ll ask yet again: Why?

Lord God, what ever do You mean asking us why?

Why?

What why?

Why?

[What in the world is He referring to?  Why what?  He won’t tell us what He’s asking about.  How we s’posed to answer lest we know precisely the question?  Ignert.]

Lord the Holiest of Holy, we mere humans, Your faithful servants, do not understand Your most wise question Ye asketh.

Why?

Perchance You are inquiring into all the wars and mass killings mostly in the name of You, dear God?  Lord, You know more of these matters than we humans.

I created you, each and every one.  But only man knows why he continues to destroy My children, all of you brothers and sisters.

Yea, Lord, we are sore ashamed ….

Stop!

[Cut out the Puritan talk, Americans.  You’re offending Himmmm!]

Lord and Savior of the world and our eternal souls, please help us understand Your question so we best might come up with an answer, something You might understand.

Do you want to know why we continue to make war, kill our fellow man, rape our fellow woman, raise our children in hate—all along dishonoring Your holy name?

As such.  Now, why?

Uh, er, ahem, You really got us on a bad day here now Lord.  We’ve been so awfully busy, see, watching one atrocity after another from all over the world, some of us cleaning ’em up, many of us—no, most of us really—praying and a-praying to You dear God for all the horrific bloodshed to just stop.  You see our hearts are pure and our minds constantly strive toward peaceful solutions.

Man’s natural state is peace, not war.  Yet you reject living among My beautiful creation with peace and love in your hearts.  I only ask why.

Lord, that’s a toughie, we’re just gonna be honest with You.

[Hey, what can we tell Him?  He’s obviously not gonna leave us alone.

He already knows what we’ll say and then turn it around like we really want to destroy the planet.

Yeah, that’s just like Him, sitting up there in heaven, completely silent for millennia, looking down on us mere humans trying to survive our miserable lives in this hellhole of a planet.

Like we like spending centuries feudin’ and fightin’ and killin’.

Like we really like watchin’ it on TV and in movies again and again and again.

Yeah!  I bet He’s not even the real God.

Yeah!!!!]

The Lord Your God is not satisfied with your answers … or thinking.  I’ll ask you only one last time: Why?

[You tell Him.

No, you tell Him.

No, you.

No, you!]

God, please forgive us our sins and trespasses as we forgive those who sin against us.  Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil …

Man is responsible for all evil in the world.

Yeah, but YOU gave us free will!  What did You expect us to do?

Be happy.

Happy?!  Are You crrrazy?  On this planet?  With all the strange people we have to deal with?!!

First, You gave each of us different skin and hair and lips and noses.  We don’t even look alike unless we’re from the same family and race.

Then You allow the masses to grow all over the world, knowing full well that some of Your very own creations would desire to play God themselves and create rules and regulations and religions to control everyone else living in their territory.

Yeah, this whole mess on earth is ALL YOUR FAULT, God!!!!

You shouldn’t have ever given us free will.  You should have made each of us the same.  You should have put something in our brains to make us love one another.

You should have made us JUST LIKE YOU.

But You didn’t, did You, Gawd?

I bet He’s not even real.

Yeah!!!!

Prove You’re really God.

What is the deepest desire of all mankind, my beloved creation?

Peace on earth … right NOW!

You got it.

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Schools should educate mind, body & spirit

On the issue of separation of church and state, I’ve gone back and forth.  As a kid I was for it then got religious as a teen and was vehemently against it.  Later as a liberal young adult fresh out of college, I was again fervently for the complete separation, never foreseeing a day I’d change my mind yet again.  I wholeheartedly believed in the constitutional Framers’ wisdom and intelligence to keep religious beliefs and practices out of the business of government.  But now as I’ve grown much older and perhaps wee bit wiser, I see the error of what has always been an implied constitutional right.  The philosophical epiphany came to me while spending years teaching in the public schools.

Long before I even started first grade, Madalyn Murray O’Hair had gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure American children in tax-supported schools would never be imposed upon to hear, speak or see anything remotely religious and in particular Christian.  In 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in her favor.  Murray v. Curlett officially ended mandatory school prayer in public schools across the nation.

The new law seemed cut and dry.  But when I was in school in the 1970s, prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance were spoken before pep rallies and student assemblies.  Our Congress prays before sessions.  So something about the ‘separation of church and state’ seemed hypocritical in my mind.  Across the land there were always individual kids and parents who spoke up against prayer in school and were equally pushed back by die-hard supporters of school prayer, citing community standards.  In those days most communities across America were Christian.

Mixed up

Back in my reporting days, I sought to find how small communities dealt with racial integration—because that was a bygone era I knew nothing about.  Integration began with the public schools.  What I discovered was the black schools had something called ‘chapel,’ a morning ritual that involved all students and faculty congregating in an auditorium and listening to the principal sort of preach before each school day.  What the principals told their students was change was coming.  They foresaw the day of complete racial integration, this before a lot of whites would come to terms with the new social reality.  The adults I interviewed who went to black-only schools spoke of total pride in their separate education, from shining floors and buildings maintained by meticulous custodians to educated teachers with degrees from some of the best universities in the country, not necessarily in Texas or the South.  And their teachers encouraged them to reach for the stars, to feel God’s love and support, and always to stay close to Him in prayer and deed.

But when the public schools integrated during the 1960s and ’70s, black kids were not only frightened to start attending what used to be the ‘white schools’ (because white families were never going to allow their kids to attend former black-only school buildings) but they spoke of a disorientation—of the soul.   They believe the restriction of school prayer, or chapel, was the beginning of community breakdown.  See, the white schools pretty much removed any type of ritual prayer service along with Bibles and crosses from the classrooms, even references of annual December shows as Christmas concerts.  So a whole culture and generation were left to fend for themselves spiritually, perhaps at a time when they needed it most, while attending a new public school system.

Roll Over Tom Jefferson

It’s been decades since all American public schools were integrated and at the same time prayer—even a biblical quote or spoken positive spiritual affirmation—removed.  Today most of the country would agree our public schools are broken.  But a nation’s schools are a reflection of its society, what we are willing to put up with.  As a daily mandatory ‘prayer and preachin’’ were removed from the schoolhouse, so were sincere religious practices from many homes and the family unit.  And that family decision had nothing to do with what was not taught in the schools.  Americans changed.  Churchgoing and practicing a specific denomination or doctrine are not important to many if not most people nowadays.

And nowadays we are accustomed to school shootings and student violence, even student suicide.  We know this was incomprehensible during the days of ‘Leave-it-to-Beaver’ public education.  Parents of all races are not guaranteed their children will come home from school every single day unharmed one way or another.  But they are guaranteed religious and spiritual teachings, prayer, and readings will not be permitted at school.

This is NOT what the men who wrote our nation’s Constitution had in mind.  They were Christian, but they were secular Christians, highly-educated products of the Enlightenment.  They probably never thought this nation would be anything but Christian.  They simply did not want religious ideals to dominate a democracy, they of the 18th century knowing full well of England’s bloody past when it came to ruling Catholics and Protestants.  They did not want any American citizens to literally ‘lose their heads’ because they were of one faith or the other—forget world religions, multiculturalism, and perceptions of African Americans as not fully human.

The intent of separation of church and state could not have meant loss of faith altogether.  And that is what has happened in our public schools, society, communities, and even families.

Any philosophy I have about teaching is centered on first recognizing human beings are not just and only body and mind … but also spirit.  If a portion of Americans do not believe this—and I acknowledge the growing number of atheists and accept their belief in nothing to believe—they are within their rights.  But I have come to see most children do have a need for nurturing of the heart and soul.  They need constant reassurance that comes from feeling loved, wanted and accepted and that their school is a community united in the well being of everyone.  This is what ‘chapel’ provided long ago in the black-only schools.

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From Obamacare to don’t care

What must the world think of Americans now since reneging on expanded public healthcare—and once again going alone from what works in every modern nation on earth?  They can think what I’ve come to know: Americans do not like taking care of other people—and by that I mean they only want to take care of themselves and their own families.  In fairness, I may be too hard on my countrymen.  After all, the rest of the world really can’t think of Americans as the unkindest people on earth.  Americans are usually first to donate to world catastrophes like typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes and famines.  We probably raise more money and send more tax dollars than any other country in that regard.  Didn’t we practically rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II?  What about all the global goodwill from our Peace Corps volunteers?  Isn’t that the kind of altruism for which the world knows us, holding Americans in the highest esteem, the very best of humanity?

Chaps and spurs

Where did Americans get the idea that everyone should just take care of his own?  Well, from wearing blinders for one thing and never seeing how nonwhite people are treated in our own country and have been mistreated here for centuries: Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Italians, the Irish, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Muslims, Mexicans, etc.  But mostly, I have a hutch, this ideal of proud American self sufficiency evolved during the late 20th century … from watching TV shows like “The Rifleman,” “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “Big Valley” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

America is the only country with a cowboy heritage.  And we’ve romanticized our pioneering Western spirit to the point that fiction has become reality in our minds.  None of us, our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents really know how life was lived way back when, how men treated women, how parents treated children, how communities of mostly one race and religion treated others who did not fit in physically or socially.  We don’t know why Wyatt Earp hung up his guns in public places.

One thing we can assume is within the hundreds of small rural communities that cropped up across the American Western frontier post Civil War, people cared for one another.  If one family lost their home to a fire, the community probably helped rebuild and donated clothing, food and furniture.  Seems like our kin would have done that.  Seems like that’s what the Good Book tells us to do, to help our fellow man especially in time of need.

Modern times

There are a few reasons why Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost.  One was Obamacare.  Democrats liked it; Republicans hated it.  Universal healthcare, like any policy President Obama tried to create, was blocked by Republicans.  President Obama had to take his healthcare policy all the way to the Supreme Court.  The Court found that health insurance was a right of every American citizen, not just for the gainfully employed.  So, expanded Medicaid was crammed down the throats of every American.  Americans don’t like being told what to do now.

From small business owners to young single adults, millions of Americans did not like Obamacare and its punitive clause to collect money from anyone not insured one way or another.  It did not matter that every single doctor, hospital, pharmaceutical and insurance company, and the entire medical profession supported the new law because it meant healthier people through immediate diagnoses and treatment—and maybe assured salary and career future.

Typical of Americans, the good ol’ days was romanticized as the better situation: when anyone who could afford insurance had it and the rest could just rely on Medicaid—which we all have to pay into anyway.  Self reliance and rugged individualism, that’s what built this country!

T’ain’t true!  What built our country was Americans working together, multicultural Americans working together, being allowed to work together.  Having strong charismatic leaders, more father than friend, and one goal at a time built this nation, made America the greatest place on earth.

The world probably still thinks America is great, probably believes in America more than Americans do themselves these days.  Our history is unique, yes built on self sufficiency and reliability and determination and total liberty.  But our nation was not built on mass disdain toward the down-trodden and underprivileged—the poorest, weakest and sickest among us.  Whatever their demographic number—10 percent, 25 percent, half the nation and more if we include the over-50 crowd—a nation is known for how it treats its own people.  That’s certainly how America judges all the other countries—often why we get involved overseas, to make things right, make a difference, improve the lives of our fellow man.  It’s the American way.

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Of Holocaust and street riots: What’s wrong with people?

The last week of April brought together two horrible memories in modern human history.  One was Holocaust remembrance week, the other the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots.  Both events have one thing in common: mob mentality.

The Holocaust didn’t just happen overnight.  It can’t be blamed singularly on Hitler either.  For centuries, before and after Christianity, Jews were a persecuted people.  Migrating to Europe and regions that would form Germany met with even more persecution.  For generations Jews could only hold certain jobs.  Non Jews would not associate, trade, or do business with Jews.  Sound familiar in our own American history?

Given where I grew up in Texas, I have known very few people who were Jewish.  One was through college, a piano teacher from Queens New York.  I have been privileged to have met a couple of Holocaust survivors.  One was a Jewish Christian; another was speaking on a lecture tour, his premise about how hate turns into evil.  He was 15 when his family was sent to concentration camps.  He still bore a tattoo of numbers on his forearm.  He said the Force put it there.  When he was 19, his camp was liberated.  He ran to a nearby house, was fed soup and allowed to shower.  He weighed 80 pounds and did not recognize the old man staring back at him in the mirror.  He ended up coming to Dallas and became prosperous in the scrap metal business, a trade his Nazi captors taught him as he had to take apart Allied planes downed by the Germans.

Words of hate

There was a phrase, a racial epithet, spoken throughout Europe that as a Texan I had never heard: dirty Jew.  I cannot recall any member of my family or friends ever saying it … or for that matter even the word ‘Jew’ other than quoting the Bible or speaking of Jesus.  We did not live in or near a known Jewish community.  Our only reference was from TV shows like “All in the Family,” Jewish comedians, movies or news from major cities like New York.

I grew up in a part of Texas where Jews were never spoken against but were never known, too.  They were a cultural mystery.  Only after high school did I realize there were a couple of classmates who were Jewish and kept it to themselves as the rest of us openly celebrated Christmas with presents and music and loving sentiments.

In recent years I learned of the centuries-old offensive phrase ‘dirty Jew.’  I could not imagine why anyone would say it or think it.  From my background, Jewish people were never ‘dirty.’  What could that have meant?  What’s the reference?  Why the word ‘dirty,’ meaning filthy?  Why that judgment against those people, a religious people, a righteous biblical people?  Why was it such a common thought throughout Europe and in some large multi-ethnic American cities with a notable Jewish population?

The only people who made Jews filthy were Nazi captors in the concentration camps where the only shower Jews may have been provided was a gas chamber to kill them.  Now who were the real dirty people—with ugly thoughts, filthy mouths, stained heart and soul?

There is a phrase, a racial epithet, spoken throughout the United States, maybe more so in the South.  I’ve heard it all my life.  I have family and friends who still use the word, the description of a people.  It is offensive to a lot of us in the middle-aged generation.  Yet the word is a source of pride somehow among some black youth and had become a notable lyric in rap songs, however still bleeped from public air waves on radio.

When the Los Angeles street riots happened in 1992, following a not guilty verdict of white police officers who beat a black man under arrest, Americans were shocked.  And that would have included me back then.  Turned out, only white America was surprised.  The black American experience is so different, so Bizarro World from white America, that it is and remains unbelievable.  Why would blacks riot, shatter glass on cars and business strips and then loot and set them on fire?

For three days white America could not understand, called it a shame, a pity, very sad.  Blacks understood.  They may not have a Holocaust tattoo on their forearms.  But they are born with a racial designation that has kept them down throughout American history—and many still insist keeps them down to this day.

Why can’t we all just get along?

Racial and ethnic segregation is created by the people in power.  It is innate and cannot be helped.  It comes from the brain, the primitive part of the human brain, the fight-or-flight part of the brain, the part that is fully developed in early childhood and never really changes despite higher education and continuous addressing of and focus on the issue especially at work and by law.

To most Americans, Los Angeles meant Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the movie and TV industry, posh, wealth, glamour.  For decades it’s been portrayed as the best America has to offer: sun and fun, money and privilege, youth and promise, clean and beautiful.  The other side of L.A. was never featured in the movies or TV shows because America did not want to see it.  Maybe I’m talking 1950s America.  But the same could be said of 1980s America.  What we put before our eyes on TV or the movie screen was what the people in power wanted to see.

Twenty-five years ago I saw the L.A. riots through live TV coverage.  I’ll never forget ‘rioters’ attempting to kill people, in particular that long-haired man dragged out of his delivery truck and smashed repeatedly with cinder blocks.  He could have been killed.  And we would have witnessed a real murder on live TV: blacks killing a white man.

Then a year or so later, we saw the trial of those caught on tape during the riots trying to stomp that man to death.  And we had to listen to the defense use ‘mob mentality’ to explain how the human brain reacts in such conditions: that people caught up in a raging riot just go along with whatever the majority is doing–and in that regard are not responsible for their actions.  Sound familiar in German history of the 1930s?

Anybody believe this?  The L.A. jury did.  The rioters were found not guilty of attempted murder.  Even more incredible is that the man they tried to kill—seen on tape just like the Rodney King police beating—forgave his assailants in the courtroom.  He held no grudge.  He remembers absolutely nothing of his brutal beating and near death.  Unrecalled memory is his blessing from God.

For the rest of us who saw it and remember, there is but one solution.  The solution is: Think before acting.  Don’t we teach children this lesson:  If your buddy is throwing a brick on another guy’s head, would you pick up a brick and do the same thing?

From Nazi Germany to modern-day American street riots, people have the power of personal responsibility.  We can blame people and circumstances for perceived miserable lives: from parents to teachers, schools, bosses, society, guns, gangs, drugs, police, racism, bigotry, poverty and prison. Yet there is no escaping the fact that each of us holds the power to control our tongues and thoughts, attitudes and behavior … before a hateful majority rules.

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Marijuana: all together now

Quietly—with little notice or even controversy—Dallas passed a new marijuana law.  Called ‘cite and release,’ the ordinance allows citizens to possess up to four ounces of weed without having to go to jail.  Like, wow.  This blows my mind.  Finally the Man gives a wink/wink to all the people, young and old, who smoke pot … who are never ever going to stop smoking pot … for the past fifty years or so … whether it’s legal or not.

We are seeing nationwide a huge shift in the marijuana debate.  There is no debate anymore.  NORML is normal.  Just breathe, breathe in the air …

It was bound to happen, though I figured it would be rather late in my lifetime.  I remember when Ann Richards was given a hard time by the mass media for not answering the drug question as she ran for Texas governor.  George W. Bush never had to answer the drug question either.  Barack Obama answered and still was elected president twice.  So our nation has changed.  The majority of Americans do not care about this particular drug being illegal anymore.

The ’70s show

You will not believe this but … back at my old suburban high school, there were two outdoor smoking lounges for the students.  Before my arrival, the campus had conducted a big debate and vote to allow a student smoking lounge so kids would stop smoking in the restrooms.  And it worked really well.  Yeah, in my day, the kids who smoked—and they were the cool kids even with subtle coughs and throat clearing and that awful smell on their clothes—would come to class, lay their pack of smokes on top of their desks, and pay attention to whatever subject was being taught.  I’m not kidding.

Of course, along with the leniency toward smoking cigarettes, which were somehow legal for kids to get in those days, (I forget this point; seems like only age 18 and older could buy them, so how were we allowing kids to smoke cigarettes anyway?) came a pushing of the envelope.  On occasion the sweet aroma of marijuana wafted from the teen smoke lounge and intermingled with the Camels and Virginia Slims.  Society forgot that kids push boundaries.  That’s what they do.  That’s what childhood is for.  Society also had forgotten that teen-agers are kids, albeit really big and immature kids.

I guess adults in those days were not going to see past the smoke and mirrors.  Cocaine and heroin were the big drugs that worried parents.  As the kids themselves would say, marijuana is like an aspirin compared to hard drugs.  Then some kids did get hooked, searching for that elusive high and rush from harder drugs.  But overall few who tried marijuana became drug addicts for any lengthy period.

The dance continued until the mid 1980s when the student smoking lounges—did I mention there were two, one for the new freshmen campus—were closed down.  The times had changed dramatically with a full-fledged, alleged war on drugs in America.  Youth were being programmed to just say no to drugs.  But teen life and modern childhood come with a lot of baggage, more so if the kids come from parents who themselves do drugs.  And that scenario was played out in a major anti-drug TV commercial: the one where the father walks into his adolescent boy’s bedroom and confronts him about a shoe box of pot, demanding to know where he learned to do this sort of thing.  “You!” the kid retorts, “I learned it from watching you!”  The father hangs his head and turns sadly in defeat.

Half baked idea

From Woodstock when Jerry Garcia held up a joint and proclaimed “Exhibit A,” police departments cutting out marijuana questions on recruit applications, to all the free-wheeling, pot-smoking, drug-toking movies and rock lyrics and concerts of the past half century, finally the figurative smoke has cleared.  The debate is OVER.  Pot won.  My generation of former high school cigarette and pot smokers must be dancing in the streets.  That is, if we can get off our hind ends without a walking cane.

Medical marijuana is becoming legalized throughout the nation and is recreational in Colorado.  For the past few years, the Texas Legislature has some young elected official who tries to open the marijuana laws only to be shut down by the Old Gray Guard.  But it’s just a matter of time before Texas sees the light, like Dallas.  The majority of the voting public—democrat and republican—do not care about marijuana remaining illegal and especially with a prison sentence.  And our prisons are mostly full of people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes.

The reason for Dallas City Council’s change of heart to permit a small amount of marijuana without a trip to jail came from listening to minority communities.  A black ministerial alliance had asked for a cite-and-release solution for up to four ounces of weed, explaining how rare it is for black youth—but really many, many people of all ethnicities and ages—to get a break if caught by police for low-level offenses related to, say, driving, no license, no insurance, no registration, and then a bag of weed, too.  If someone’s in jail, that person often loses a job, and many other financial problems follow.  It’s a hole the individual can never escape financially.

The flip side, the law-and-order side, is Don’t Do Drugs.  It’s that simple.  But a society is not at all simple.  There has never been in the course of human history a simple place, a simple time, a simple era.  And societies evolve and change slowly yet radically … especially in the span of fifty to sixty years.

Marijuana may be nothing to go to jail over.  It obviously does not create a violent streak.  The effects of marijuana are not the same as legal alcohol consumption or manufactured illegal narcotics, even prescription drugs.  Some pot smokers may feel the need to try harder drugs and will even spiral into addiction and criminal activity.  But like the old hippies have been trying to tell us since the ’60s: Marijuana grows on God’s green earth for some reason.  What could it be?

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The O’Reilly factor. Figures.

When I was a newspaper reporter, I used to watch Bill O’Reilly every night.  I figured I needed to stay in the know, and his show did present several sides of an issue, at least two sides.  My liberal friends cringed at the thought and asked how I could stand him.  “I don’t like watching him,” I replied. “I like to watch the sparring.”

In the late 1990s, O’Reilly did seem to cover important topics, inviting many liberals to come on his show to debate.  He also had many show biz types like Suzanne Somers who was writing books about nontraditional and holistic cancer treatment.  Being a man, he fawned over her, smiling while discussing her monumental stardom after just one year on “Three’s Company.”  Keeping her hair white blonde didn’t hurt.  Besides, her eyes sparkled, too.

O’Reilly kept his show cool bringing in Republicans from heavy metal bands to Hollywood actors and actresses.  The question always came up about people of their stature turning conservative, usually a quality their fans did not realize or assume.  The answer was the same:  They had traveled the world and seen dire poverty and social injustice.  Their minds were opened to the benefits of capitalism especially in nondemocratic and socialist nations.  O’Reilly smiled, his eyes sparkled in agreement.

Then something happened that turned me off “The O’Reilly Factor.”  George W. Bush was running for president, and O’Reilly appeared to be his number one fan.  Bush would come on the show and unpretentiously say things like, “Why do I need to go talk to Al Sharpton?”  O’Reilly gushed: finally a political candidate unconcerned about political correctness.  O’Reilly had lost his objectivity.

I stopped watching “O’Reilly” every night, catching it occasionally while flipping the channels to see a topic of interest.  What I started noticing especially on Thursday nights was the ‘babes’ he had on to ‘spar’ with him.  These professional women usually were educated attorneys well respected in their fields with specific details on topical and controversial court cases or arrests and could provide insight and maybe a counter to O’Reilly’s societal cynicism.

But I couldn’t get past the visual: the lips, the makeup, the hair, the tight dress, the full bosom, the cleavage.  What’s up with that?  The FOX network came along with shows like “Married with Children” and “The Simpsons” to cater to America’s love of the bawdy and OK maybe the body, the female body.  Somehow this in-your-face sex appeal crossed over into the FOX News division, too.  No other female network newscasters and reporters look or dress like the FOX girls.  There’s a reason.

Oh and somehow FOX News becomes the leader in conservative news.  How can this be?  Just put two and two together.  Or just two.  For all the sizzling hot female correspondents sparring on “the no spin zone,” O’Reilly remained aged and aging, turkey neck in check.  Never a face lift or jowl tightening.  Good thing for him there’s a double standard.

So what I’m saying is a professional woman cannot be taken seriously by men, white or blue collar, when she’s showing her cleavage.  It just isn’t possible.  My God, men are only human!  As much as I would like to blame O’Reilly for sexist jerk comments and boorish behavior—to the tune of millions of dollars in she-said-he-said pay offs—the women have to accept some part.  Sexy is a game we can never win in the real work world.  To my younger sisters who think they can portray themselves as overtly sexy and still be respected for brains and beauty … you can’t fool Mother Nature.

 

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Thirty years in the workforce: well deserved ‘tiredment’

Updating the ol’ resume recently, I just realized something.  I spent practically 16 years in one career and 14 in another.  That’s 30 years combined of full-time, real-deal working—and boy, am I tired!  No wonder.  I haven’t been a workaholic really, even was laid off a few times.  And those 30 years do not include part-time jobs in high school and throughout college.  I think my worker’s fatigue comes not only with advanced years of life but also from spending so much time and energy trying to scratch out a living, what has turned out to be two careers.

After college once I returned to the big city, I eagerly anticipated quick employment.  I’d fill out a bunch of applications and just sit by the phone and wait for the offers to roll in.  I was a college graduate.  At the time 30 years ago, not only were we in a recession of sorts, I had no real work experience.  All those part-time jobs—from slicing meat at a sandwich shop to waitressing at an Italian restaurant, writing freelance articles and tutoring college kids—didn’t matter much.  What mattered was real on-the-job work experience, 8 to 5 weekdays, for at least two to five years.  It didn’t matter the education in my pretty little head.  The lack of ink on my resume revealed an inexperienced applicant, a kid just starting out in life.

No Work Blues

Back in the late ’80s, I was one of those college grads living with the parents while searching for employment, any job to get on my feet.  I applied for teaching and newspaper jobs as those were areas for which I was qualified.  I even applied for a job I kept seeing in the Want Ads, something called an Underwriter.  Man, that insurance company must have thought, “This is what colleges are putting out these days?” because I had no idea what the job title meant.  I just saw ‘writer’ and went for it.  I had spunk.  And so dumb.  In those days, we didn’t have the internet to quickly search job titles.  So I humiliated myself, in the insurance world anyway.

I went on several teaching interviews.  No job offer.  “What is wrong with me?” I wondered way back then.  I still ponder why I never started teaching right out of college.  I think I may have come across as insecure, not too bright (well …), uncertain of my abilities and knowledge in my field, and intimidated by a confident older prospective employer who was a school principal.  I know I went into the interviews subconsciously thinking, “Why would you want to hire me?  Anyone else would be better than me.”  I had low self esteem because college had not been easy.  I may have sabotaged myself from getting hired quickly.

Then I was interviewed to be a clerk at The Dallas Times Herald.  My new boss and I had a lot in common as far as love of the arts and news.  I was in awe of her.  She was high-profile, looked like Mary Tyler Moore, and had tons of success in the mass media.  I know because part of my job was to send out her bio prior to her speaking engagements.  I learned a lot at that big-city newspaper—to this day the friendliest place I’ve ever worked.  It was in downtown, and sometimes on pay day a group of us clerks-slash-wannabe reporters would walk over to eat lunch at the West End.  I figured my future was in the newspaper biz as a reporter someday.  I even got a couple of freelance pieces published.  I had spunk.

A clerk job paid only $6 an hour.  At the encouragement of some older colleagues, I asked for a raise.  I did what they said to do: set up a meeting with a supervisor, list my job duties and additional work I’ve taken on, discuss the current salary and explain what I need to live on my own.  I asked for $9 an hour.  The company gave me $8.  So that’s how the game’s played?  Next time, I’ll know to ask for $10 an hour.  A colleague pointed out my great success in getting such a significant raise, that probably someone else lost a job or some budget was reshuffled.  I moved out on my own, living in an apartment.  Life as an older 20-something was looking good.

A year later I was suddenly unemployed along with all 900 workers of that century-old Dallas institution.  We got two months’ severance with insurance plus any pay for sick days and vacation time we didn’t take.  Next I found myself standing in line at the state ‘employment office’ as a laid-off worker.  That was humiliating, but I met a lot of interesting people in that long line.  I pieced together any kind of work, including working at a homeless shelter where I used to volunteer.  Plus I did a lot of substitute teaching, willing to rise predawn whenever the phone rang and a computer listed a job to work that day.  After several months, I finally got a steady job at a major used book store, earning about what I used to make plus health insurance.

What color is my career?

At this time in my life, I could have gone in any direction.  I applied at all the schools as well as colleges and universities and any media outlet, even drove to Austin and other parts of the state doing the same, sometimes getting an interview.  During this time of possibility combined with depression, confusion and insecurity, I was advised to read career books.  I took lots of personality tests to figure out a career direction.  The psychological tests would guide me into an area that would make me happy and fulfilled while also being a productive citizen in society as a whole.  Whatever.  I was bored senseless and certainly had the time to take a bunch of pop psychology tests.

What I found out about myself at the time was I really wanted to be of service to mankind, to help humanity.  That was enlightening.  I used to want to join the Peace Corps.  After the career tests, I considered going into social work.  But that did not appeal to my creative side. Maybe I answered some of the questions wrong.  A few years later when I took all those career personality tests again, I found the one thing I must have as a worker is respect.  That was my top priority, a job or position whereby people would respect me or what I do for a living.  So why would I want to be a teacher?  Or a newspaper reporter?

By the end of 1992, I got a big career break.  I was hired as city editor at a small-town newspaper.  I moved away with my dog and got to work building a career, one week shy of turning 30.  In many ways, I knew what to do as a reporter.  If I needed advice, I asked for it and was willing to listen, and usually would do as suggested.  I’d say that ability or characteristic has been my saving grace.  I would befriend seasoned reporters and learn how to go about covering a story or issue.

However, I’m not sure how I came across as a co-worker in general, because I was all work and no play.  In the workplace I imagine anyone who ever worked with me or near me may have thought I shoot off my mouth, talk too much, try too hard to be funny.  Really, I think long and hard before speaking, precisely phrasing opinions or comments sometimes within a clever turn of phrase, and still I can come up with some very funny quips.  I know I kept myself in stitches all the time.  So another aspect about surviving the work world, to me anyway, has been levity: a much needed release from the seriousness of our workday lives.

I moved on to another small-town paper, taking on another title of entertainment editor along with government reporting, and flourished with a very supportive editor.  A few awards later I moved back to the big city and tried my hand at cub reporter.  It wasn’t for me, not anymore.  I had so much experience and had been virtually free to cover issues and subjects that were important to me (granted, I did grunt work, too), I was unfulfilled.  Maybe I was reaching a mid-life crisis, but at age 40, I wanted to be a teacher.  All along that had been my initial career goal.  When a teaching job was offered, I changed careers like that.  Snap.

So, as the song goes: That’s life.  That’s what they say.  Mine has been that of a career woman with all the connotations that go with it.  The past decade and a half, I’ve worked in the public schools and taught thousands of kids from pre-kindergarten to 8th grade.  And I’ve been laid off as a teacher, too.  I even got additional certification to teach journalism.  I figured my newspaper experience could teach any kid to be a reporter, and I do mean honest reporting.  No fake news.

After three decades in the work world, spanning two careers, I’ve learned: Diplomacy is a must along with self assurance, think before speaking, do a job well, and aspire to be a consummate professional.  Every now and then I see on social media old high school classmates retiring as they reach the 30-year milestone, gladly saying goodbye to their dutiful yet required time spent in the workforce and set careers.  I have never thought of myself as retiring or even retired—though I am indeed tired.  I’ve always seen myself in the future still working, here or there, in this field or that … till the very end.

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“Roseanne” bar none

I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but I’ve seen every episode of “Roseanne” so often that I could teach a college course.  I mean a brief Continuing Education fun course.  So here goes.  “Roseanne” was a situation comedy created by the star and namesake, comedienne Roseanne Barr.  The premise revolved around her working-class family life with a husband, three kids, and a close sister.  The show ran from 1988 to 1997 on ABC.

When this show first aired, it was a phenomenal success along with the comedy musings of Roseanne Barr herself who sardonically titled her comedy club act “The Domestic Goddess.”  She made fun of her daily life as a wife and mother with lines like ‘We’re starting a natural food kick at our house, so we switched to brown sugar.’  Her comedy was down-home, family-centered though not always G-rated, with lots of die-hard feminism and blue-collar pride.  Her show followed suit.

Because she was a wife and mother and also obese, probably in the 20+ size range, the network suits did not know what to think.  These were the years of other hit comedian shows like “Seinfeld,” “Drew Carey” and Tim Allen’s “Home Improvement.”  Roseanne did not fit the mold.  Not only was she a woman, a loud-mouthed, wise-crackin’ mother, she was not thin and attractive.  And Roseanne cast as her TV husband Dan Conner an actor equally large, John Goodman.  She can laugh about it now, but in those early years, the tabloids, media and late-night comics were unfairly rough on her because of her weight.  The truth was the higher-ups in show biz could not believe a loud funny woman who was as large as her opinions—spewing left-of-center politics and controversial views—would draw tens of millions of viewers and fans.  They lost a bet.

Americans are big and fat

People saw in Dan and Roseanne Conner couples who look like them, like everyone else, or like most people if we’re being honest.  A precious few Americans can keep the weight off for a lifetime, not without some kind of little helper or great self control and maybe metabolism.  So the fans cheered on Roseanne for years.  She even tells of a time when the network execs bought fancy sport cars for two of the male comedians whose shows were in the top ratings, along with Roseanne’s show which was probably number one at the time and beat “The Cosby Show.”  And what did they get fat Roseanne?  A chocolate rose.  Probably a big chocolate rose.  The sexism and body shaming speaks volumes.  No doubt Roseanne would have enjoyed a new sports car, too, as sincere appreciation from the TV execs whose pockets her talent helped line.

What the suits didn’t understand is “Roseanne” episodes dealt with real-life everyday situations with poignancy and heavy doses of humor.  It was blue-collar comedy.  There was nothing like it coming out of L.A.  Throughout the years, the Conners worked fairly hard: Dan, a dry waller who later chased his dream of revamping classic motorcycles until the shop went belly up; Roseanne faithfully working a variety of menial jobs until starting her own diner which stabilized the family income.  Still in the lean times, the Conners played some games about paying bills (like not signing the check) or misusing coupons (erasing the expiration date).  There was the time during an extreme financial low, their electricity was shut off.  Critics didn’t like watching a sit-com about a low middle-class family laughing their way through a mountain of problems.  I guess they figured it was unbelievable.  Let me tell you, it wasn’t—as many of us who’ve had to rough it can attest.

Watching the episodes in reruns, we see Roseanne’s weight shifts but a little.  She is a TV character, from the health-conscious ’90s, who will remain forever overweight, morbidly obese at times as was her husband.  But have you seen Roseanne today?   She did it!  She lost the weight and at no small price.  A rags-to-riches story does not mean instant weight loss and body perfection.  She has been candid about cosmetic surgeries and a weight-loss procedure that seemed to not take effect until years after her famous show ended.  Still, she lost the weight.  ‘Quite a load off, huh,’ the Roseanne character might say enviously.

Shut up!

Critics also objected to the yelling, what seemed to be constant loud and heated arguing back and forth between parents and kids and husband and wife.  Roseanne held her ground and refused to cut the yelling from her TV family, maintaining this was realistic family life whether people acknowledge it or not.  She was perceptive as most comedians are.  In the family unit, members do not perceive how loud or angry they come across to neighbors, friends and onlookers.  Roseanne believed most families yell on occasion if not often.  Prudish folks wouldn’t understand and felt as parents they were in charge and their power never challenged by their children even during adolescence.  Get real, Roseanne would reply.

What made the show tick was the family unit, the three kids growing up with obese parents.  The wealthy and upper-middle class do not relate to a show like “Roseanne.”  That’s because when it comes to families, the poor and low class care about their children because they have nothing else while the middle class and the wealthy care about their children’s education.  Roseanne’s oldest daughter found this out the hard way, again during the Conner family’s lowest economic crisis.  Becky Conner assumed her parents had a college fund for her, but they didn’t.  Through the years, they needed money for housing, utilities, food, clothes, bills, other priorities and emergencies.  So Becky, without graduating high school, simply ran off to marry her boyfriend who had taken a job out of state.  It was a shocking moment in TV history.

Writer’s block

As a fellow writer, I noticed through studying the series how Roseanne’s character occasionally lamented how she had not done anything special with her life or had become someone special, specifically a writer.  She spoke of her high school dream of moving to New York City and writing for Mother Jones, of being a children’s book author someday.  Possessing a creative imagination, she could spin an original bed-time story for her son every night.  As a birthday gift one year, her family turned the basement into an office just for her to write, a quiet place away from the chores of wife and mother.  The next scene, Roseanne is dusting and vacuuming her new office.  She does not have a writer’s drive, the ability to collect and organize thoughts then sit down and punch it out on a typewriter or computer—both devices she never learned to use.

This is where I cannot relate with Roseanne the character.  My middle-class background led me to take every advantage of writing, from tall tales in elementary school to junior high poetry and newspaper staff, continuing on in high school.  A couple of weeks before starting my senior year, I walked into the hometown newspaper office and talked to the editor about a part-time job.  I could type and was on the newspaper staff, I told him.  I would have swept the floor and laid out the paper old school with glue and light boards.  But he needed a high school correspondent and so hired me on the spot, paying me $10 a story.  That experience helped me in college when of my own volition I wrote freelance features for the town newspaper, which led to becoming a news correspondent for the university news service, and later a writing tutor at the college.

But Roseanne Conner never pursued real writing, any writing, writing just to write, like this blog here.  [The real Roseanne of course has a blog.]  All those years, especially when her children were in school, she never thought to drop by the local newspaper (the town had one) and start writing a column or go to a community college (there was one nearby) and take a writing course.  Other TV characters do just that.  But those other TV shows were written and created by middle- and upper-class folks, people with built-in drive and a lot of self confidence.  That is what Roseanne—very overweight, economically and emotionally depressed at some level yet always quick-witted with razor-sharp hilarious perceptions of men and, well, every kind of person—never had: self confidence.  That counters the real Roseanne.  Her TV character never figured out that through pursuing a passion, doors open that lead to opportunities like a fulfilling job, career and success.  The comedian clearly brought success on herself but did not instill her own drive and ambition into her TV show character.  Wonder why?

Now Roseanne Barr has become a Trump supporter, strange given the American TV audience still believing her to be a big ol’ feminist.  But she’s proven once again, like her working-class sit-com—entertaining through deep characterization and blunt bawdy humor for loads of laughs—she has her finger on the pulse of real America.