thetexastart.org

I’ve been changed somehow.  I didn’t want to change, didn’t expect to change.  But change has been forced upon me.  I’m not numb, just sickened, politically sick to my stomach.  No, I know this feeling, at first debilitating and silent.  For months the feeling welled up from the pit of my being then almost needed to be thrown up.  It’s me experiencing anger.

It’s my apparent delayed reaction to how unreasonable Texas and now other states have gone in the Republicans’ effort to make abortion, regardless of any reason, illegal.  Texas should be ashamed of its additional ‘snoop’ clause, allowing anyone from anywhere to alert ‘authorities’ (lawyers) about the possibility of a female out here having an abortion and drag to court others guilty by association like public or private transit drivers.  What the hell is that all about?

The conservative right-wing effort abolishes the guaranteed privacy of female Americans from adolescent to adult, 12 or 50, 10 or 45, 15 or 40.  No exceptions for rape or incest.  That’s the reason for half of all abortions.

The self-proclaimed pro-lifers—the same ilk who shot and killed gynecologists, harassed and shamed pregnant females entering health centers, and bombed and burned down women’s clinics—took leave of their senses back in the 1980s.  But now … they’ve crossed into full-blown abnormal psychology likened to mass histrionics.  It is immoral that men like these are running our state governments, and nothing can be done about it.

Why play hardball with this issue?

Our Texas Legislators and Governor have placed all their eggs, pun unintended, in one basket for the almighty vote.  The one-issue voters.  This deeply divisive, emotional, religious and controversial issue brings in the ‘hallelujahs’ by loud-mouthed religious conservatives with plenty of stones to throw.  Sinless, are they?  Not in my book.  So unwilling to put their money where their mouths are, the conservative crowd is notoriously tight-fisted when it comes to tax dollars going to the births, hospitalizations, housing, feeding, healthcare, daycare and full education of babies born into poverty.   

Don’t be cruel

Ironic this was the number one song of the 1950s, the era to which the political Right has wanted to return America since Reagan.  Like the ’50s was the golden age of … what?  Whiteness?  That’s what it looked like to Baby Boomers raised on I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies.

They want us to forget about the ’60s, man!  They want us to pretend the pill and women’s liberation were never commonly touted among the middle class.  They think women ought to stay home and raise their babies, that daddies never go away …

Time has marched on, and we are a changed people: more open, rational, loving, accepting, diverse, inclusive, empathetic, understanding.  But Texas leaders don’t reflect that. No one wants to go back to the 1950s or even the 20^th century.  Yet accompanying my state’s drunken political power and mass insanity has come an ugliness and hatred I’ve never witnessed.  It’s comparable to the story in To Kill a Mockingbird.  That same furious vitriol but in the story against Black people, hated and downtrodden citizens living within the white characters’ Southern hometown.

But Texas’ hatred is bigger than race: This is hatred of women—half the U.S. population, actually more than 50 percent.

Today old white men dare think we’re just gonna go back in time with them to the simple days of the 1950s when women knew their place, were surely virgins before marriage, the double standard accepted, men wore the pants, wives smacked if out of line, abortion illegal and thousands of women dead every year because of it.

The BIG question about when life begins is a religious belief not a scientific fact.  Pregnancy in its earliest weeks is tissue, not a baby.  A third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage anyway, and even this tragedy has gained the cynical scrutiny of today’s empowered Republicans who’ve long suspected and now proclaim the cause to be not God’s but the woman’s.   

In their moral certitude, the conservative Right will tell us life begins at conception, and that’s that.  They’ll tell—I mean yell at—millions of girls and women they do not know or care about, “You’re gonna have that baby, you hear me?!,” the Southern way of ending an emotional argument.

Everybody hears them, from their lips to God’s ears.  We bear witness to the consummation of power lust producing the most chauvinist, self-important, self-righteous, arrogant, indignant, ruthless, merciless, regressive, irrational Texan-American leaders—all who history will rank alongside our state’s and nation’s list of notorious bigots, racists, sexists, liars, hypocrites, kooks, and creeps.

All I said was “Democrat”—and the voting registration computer suddenly conked out.  I didn’t know what to think, tried not to ponder a conspiracy of sorts.  I mean, I am one of the very few Democrats I know still living here in Texas.  The poll worker kept hold of my drivers license and voter card; previously I had checked out as legitimately registered.  Why did the computer go kaput seemingly when I uttered the D word?

Other poll workers were called over to check out the machine for a few minutes, then the head computer Meister determined it needed a reboot.  That took a long time, ten minutes, when all I wanted to do was cast a ballot in the Texas March primary.  Incidentally I had had a very long bad day, was dead tired, but the poll was convenient.  So before heading all the way home, I voted or tried to after 5 p.m.  The whole ordeal of waiting in line, being validated by my drivers license (with my picture) and voter registration card, took maybe 15 minutes—with me standing in dress boots enduring unbearable foot pain.  A lesser American would have left; this was, after all, just the primary.

But in all good conscience, I could not stand back this year and allow the current Texas governor to remain in office without a fighting challenger.  Not with the current state of backwoods anti-progressive hypocritical Christian measures the Texas Legislature and governor have set in motion: from banning the federal right to abortion as well as removing hundreds of school library books and textbooks to the know-nothings misperception on ‘critical race theory’ and butting into the handful of families across the state privately dealing with their child’s gender questioning—red hot issues that are none of our concern AND are intended to make us forget about the hundreds of Texans who died, billions of tax dollars spent, and permanently increased utility bills we now pay due to last year’s deep freeze debacle which was supposed to have been avoided after a similar ruinous week-long deep freeze in 2011 that made us a national laughingstock during the Super Bowl.  See, everyone else in the U.S. is connected to the national grid and report hardly any problems like no electricity, gas, lights and heat during the winter.

But the most fundamental issue our Texas government has been monkeying with is the vote.

My eyes of Texas are upon them

Republicans in Texas and many other states went out of their way to stop citizens from voting especially mail-in ballots which is one Pacific northwest state’s only way to vote and works beautifully.  But in Texas and similar overtly suspicious Republican-controlled states, it is voter suppression unseen since the decades in this country up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Texas alone nonchalantly tossed in the trash 18,000 votes, claiming every single one of those ballots did not comply with newfangled measures supposedly to ensure rare if not totally made up voter fraud.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, voter suppression laws were passed in Texas along with the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Vermont and Wyoming.

This is purely a Republican charge.  I’ve heard them belly ache about voter fraud since the days of Nixon and suspect it goes back further.

Our right to vote is so important that it is the number one issue that will lead to the collapse of democracy, according to the world history book How Democracies Die.  It starts with a growing number of citizens convinced of voter fraud coupled with the pessimistic self-pitying sentiment that their vote really does not count no how because they believe there are mighty powers that are up to evil who in the end put into place who they want as U.S. President whether Republican or Democrat.  There is no hope, and the little people like you and me are not in charge at all.

Vote doubters are quick to quote “We the people” in impassioned speeches about how awful life is in America.  But deep down they do not believe that in this nation the People are the ones in charge.  We elect leaders to govern in the best interest of everyone.  Our leaders work for us. We have the opportunity to fire or promote them every election.

When few Americans vote—something else I’ve noted with shame my entire life—and the masses are apathetic until their right to vote is gone, authoritarian leaders take over rather quickly.

All of this because so many Americans choose to believe a lie.

The 2020 election was not stolen.  Democrat presidential contenders won both the 2000 and 2016 elections according to the votes.  But the electoral college voted differently than the popular vote.  And the anti-Trump rallies held on a single day in major cities across the U.S. following the dubious 2016 election, attended by mostly Democrats and millions of others who did not believe he legitimately won, furious as they were they did not assault police officers, carry guns, or attempt to overthrow the government.  They did not smear human feces along the marble halls of the U.S. Capitol.

The Russian leader was asked by candidate Donald Trump to help him win the election, knowing full well that their notorious government had the power to interfere with our computerized voting.  And they did.  Maybe.  And still could, I guess.

So on the March primary, I stood firmly and waited patiently.  I put out positive vibes.  Nothing to see here.  I stood self assured that I would get to vote, unlike my friend who was hassled for hours when trying to vote in the 2000 election in Florida.  Remember that?

No, I kept calm, cool and collected at the Texas primary.  Inhaling and exhaling, keeping my wits about me, keeping quiet and maintaining a sense of humor—and at long last was handed my ballot to go vote.  I don’t have to tell you I went down the ballot pressing the computer screen of mostly Democrats and most especially one that will give our present governor a run for his money.  Yes, money influences our elections and shouldn’t, something else I’ve heard all my long life.

But when we look at all the other government options in our world (and there aren’t but a few of them), democracy with all citizens voting is better than the alternatives.  At least for now we have our freedoms like speech and press.  Election nights may not be as ‘fun’ as a government professor theorized on why we Americans go through all the trouble to begin with.  Eh, I’m fine with it and must participate.  I want our esteemed leaders to know I’m watching their every move.  Every day.

The story of Elizabeth Holmes has been played out in news investigations, televised documentaries and a current miniseries called The Dropout.  She was a Texas gal and extremely intelligent Stanford dropout apparently in a helluva hurry to become a billionaire.  To come across as altruistic in her purely monetary life goal, she convinced herself and everyone around her that her billions would come from a 21^st century medical invention.  The invention would replace traditional blood tests, using a long needle and vials, with something like the new diabetic thin needle prick.  The sales pitch, in her made-up revolutionary invention, was that only a ‘drop of blood’ would be needed to test for more than 100 health issues and conditions.

Everyone saw this big-deal invention, well the company name Theranos, at Walgreens.  Then before anyone could blink or think, the partnership dissolved and the Latin-sounding name summarily removed from the pharmaceutical chain as Ms. Holmes was under federal investigation.  Recently she’s been convicted of business fraud and now awaits sentencing that is expected to be several decades in prison.

The theme of The Dropout is discounting the old adage ‘pay your dues.’  She thought she was too smart to have to spend a couple of years in prison, er, college with all that learning and full comprehension before, say, starting a business … in a field in which she was not qualified as someone who actually earned a degree involving years of lab work, experiments, and studies.  She wouldn’t know it, but that is the purpose of higher education.

Economic analysts blame Silicon Valley for Ms. Holmes getting away with her big lie for so long.

But the real reason this young woman was able to fool everyone, especially her board of old white men, is because she was white, blonde with large blue eyes.  She looked like their daughter or granddaughter—and they treated her like family.  They simply believed every word that came out of her mouth.  They gave her a lot of breaks when she messed up, too.

Perhaps for appearance, to come across as an eccentric genius, she wore her long blonde hair in a messy pony tail and often accessorized her usual black pantsuit with a white lab coat attempting serious medical scientist.  But it was all part of the smoke and mirrors.

White Anglo Saxon Protestant

Ms. Holmes would have never been able to get away with the enormous lie involving very important leaders and millions of invested dollars if not for her looks and white race.  She played the people she knew best, her own kind, because once upon a time her family had wealth, too.

White people have been told they are privileged whether upper class or middle class and even poor.  The sociological term is white privilege.  A lot of white people, however, in this country have denied this description as they certainly do not see they’re living the easy life.  They will say they’ve had to fight for everything they have, same for their parents and grandparents and on back in time.  They bristle at the notion that minorities like Blacks and Hispanics maintain white privilege exists.  Whites deny it and don’t believe it.

Then the Elizabeth Holmes’ story comes along and reinforces the stereotype.

White privilege can be said of the media’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  This story is the main news in every news source and has been since it happened.  The Ukrainians’ plight, having to fight the Russian war machine from taking over their country and losing their freedom, has been covered in great detail.  It is full-on 24-hour news coverage and hard to watch.

Compare it to similar wars that received little and inconsistent news coverage: Darfur, Congo, Syria, Middle Eastern nations and Asian countries, too.  The world is full of bully leaders intent on war and committing atrocities against people whose countries their armies have invaded. Ukraine is a predominantly white nation.  Why weren’t other nations in the world with the same type of invasion constantly brought to our attention 24/7?  Why aren’t they now?

People of color may wonder why.

Ms. Holmes got away with a lot maybe because of her high intelligence and conniving ways.

But who are we kidding?  She got away with a bald-faced lie because she was white and somewhat pretty.  The mass media cheered her on with virtually no questions asked because she was female.  White power begats white power.  Ms. Holmes went a step further in her self-deception: She felt entitled to great wealth.  Trying to cozy up to a renowned Stanford business professor, a fellow woman, Ms. Holmes was instead scolded by someone who could see right through her.  She was warned that because she was female, she could not skip all the steps to business success.

Nah.  Not when you’ve got white privilege on your side.

Another aspect of the Holmes’ con may be generational.  Every young person is in a hurry to be successful and financially secure.  Ms. Holmes’ goal in life was ‘billionaire’ not medical scientist or inventor of something to benefit all mankind.  Somehow her wiring was twisted.  The prize was not medical advancement but big money.  Being a young American in the 21^st century, her financial goal was not millionaire but billionaire.  What kind of goal is that?  It is the goal of a shallow empty person.

The lesson from Holmes—or for Ms. Holmes—is: yes, ma’am, you most certainly do have to pay your dues in life, and even then, success is elusive to most.  But, hey, life is not about money anyway.  Our lives are far more valuable than money.  It shouldn’t take an old wise woman to know that.  Ms. Holmes will spend a lot of time thinking about life and what it’s all about.  Meanwhile, talk of her redemption is already in the works, according to one documentary, because America loves a good redemption story.  Beautiful.

Finally … after practically two years of mandated masks at work and elsewhere, we’re being told that wearing them is now our choice.  It’s up to us!  Basically 70 percent of us, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has no need to wear masks all the time especially at large gatherings like work and school.

It’s hallelujah time, paralleled to the COVID-19 vaccine!

Why so glum?  You’re not gonna join me in stripping off the mask, tossing it in the trash, and filing the bag(s) of unused sanitary masks under M or H or P?  We learned all sorts of medical terms during this pandemic.  There were a lot of reasons why I didn’t choose the medical profession: 1) blood and gore, and 2) wearing masks.  Even medical professionals never wore masks all the time, just during surgery.  Remember when dentists never wore masks until AIDS came along?

So in some semblance of restored normalcy, I can commence to wearing lipstick again and relying on facial expressions like smiling to let everyone know I’m not being sarcastic or in a bad mood.  And now everyone will see I’ve been straightening my teeth during the masked years.  Yeah, a few more weeks to go yet.  But I’d rather everyone know than continue wearing masks at work … 8 – 10 hours Mondays through Fridays … changing to a fresh one after lunch … spraying medicated mist and chewing medicated mint discs to clean my breath … and after washing my face with a cleansing cloth because wearing a mask all day created skin problems.  I predict that two years of wearing masks at work and other places—which meant breathing in all the carbon dioxide we’re naturally supposed to be exhaling … into the air—will someday be found to cause assorted lung problems including cancer.  Go ahead, call me Debby Downer.

Through foggy lenses

I wear glasses, just like our national health leader Dr. Fauci.  I remember him saying on 60 Minutes early in the pandemic that things would not get so bad as to mandate everyone wear masks.  What a laugh seeing how things turned out.  Besides getting used to shallow breathing and itchy runny nose, my glasses fogged when wearing a mask, no matter how tightly I clamped the nose wire.  So I had to decide which is more important: seeing clearly when among a crowd like grocery shopping and working and walking or going along with the mandate so that others do not get sick (this thought after the vaccines … and booster).  As for my own fears, I felt a sitting duck in the months before the vaccine, and it did take a few more months before I was permitted to get them (yes, two).

But I was never afraid I’d die from COVID-19.  I don’t know why I was so confident.

President Trump was right when he said: We told everyone to go home, lock the doors and hide under the bed.  I was never that afraid of this virus.  We were not in biological warfare.  We could go outdoors and not choke to death on chemicals or fall ill from radiation sickness.  I knew all along that the great majority of humanity would not die from this little ol’ virus.  Why didn’t everyone feel the same way? 

We’ve lived through lots of pandemics and epidemics.  Remember Ebola?  That was gruesome and scary and totally deadly.  HIV and AIDS?  I was a young adult in college when that came down on the planet.  Back then I learned two things: that new viruses evolve and some stay and some can be eradicated by vaccines; and that there is a Big Reason From Way Up On High that pandemics come along every so often.  We are to learn from them.  They have something very important to teach us.

The reason with HIV/AIDS was so obvious.  Remember how mean and cruel all the prejudiced people, many self-proclaimed Christians, became when having to deal with others who had AIDS?  Our society devolved into mass hysteria.  The whole ordeal was played out on and in the news, this before the 24-hour cycle.  Unlike the belly aching over hearing too much about COVID-19, back in the 1980s I don’t think anyone said, “I’m so sick and tired of hearing about AIDS.”  In fact, we wanted to know everything about it; every day there was something newly discovered about the disease.  In comparison to AIDS, COVID-19 is a blip on the screen of human history.

But both AIDS and COVID-19 divided us as Americans.  With AIDS, people either supported gays and those who developed AIDS, or you abhorred them, blamed and condemned them—at the time sick and dying people, young and old, even children.  See, AIDS was in the blood supply, and a lot of people who had had surgeries before AIDS was known ended up with the disease.  You can see why everyone was so frightened, more than we’ve been with COVID-19.  It took a few years and a lot of educating Americans, but eventually our nation changed.  Our society’s view on homosexuality changed.  AIDS made everyone think about … throwing stones.

Our society opened its collective heart to the many victims of AIDS.  We became a better people for understanding that when it comes to sexuality and drug addiction, there is nothing we need to understand.  We’re all just human beings down here.  Live and let live, that was the lesson from AIDS.

What is the Big Reason for COVID-19, which is really a strain of previous viruses that infect the lungs?  We’re just as divided as we were over AIDS long ago.  Could this pandemic be teaching us that like it or not we’re all connected to one another and indeed our brother’s keeper?  So we have to do things like wear masks to help each other stay healthy and avoid a spreading deadly virus.  Some have chosen to ‘follow the science’ and tried to prevent the virus from spreading by wearing masks and getting vaccinated.  Others chose to pass on yet another vaccine, even if mandated at work, even if doctors say it’s for the common good.  They avoided crowds and working in a large office but saw the benefit in wearing masks interestingly enough.  Each side has demonstrated remarkable bravery and the price of freedom as a few of the ardent anti-vax have died from the disease.

Perhaps this pandemic has taught us to avoid thinking we’ve got life figured out.  Maybe we had become too smug and needed a lesson in humility.  Maybe we needed a lesson in accepting one another whatever individual decision about how best to deal with this pandemic.  Maybe the lesson is not so much “Live and let live” anymore but “Live and let die.”

Anyone who’s a fan of the songs by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young think the same thing: They must be intense.  They all happen to be at the top of my ‘playlist’ along with the Beatles, of course, and Pink Floyd.  I like a lot of music, but when it comes to the art of songwriting, the three at the start of this blog are certainly the most influential.  And though we’ve aged since their heyday in the early 1970s, I still respect them not only for their song style, wordcraft, instrumentation, voices and melodies but also for their social views.  Maybe they’re not the most politically renowned, but I know where they stand.  How?  Because I’ve listened to their songs … for years.

When Neil Young called on Spotify to stop ‘airing’ his songs alongside one major podcaster whose views Young believed to be dangerous for society as a whole—even possibly contributing to deaths—I knew where he was coming from.  Then Mitchell joined Young along with his pals CSN and even a folkie singer/songwriter from modern times India.Arie.

Their collective ire was not over the free speech of big-time podcaster Joe Rogan but his continued insistence against the Covid-19 vaccine.  That was the focus of these songwriters and others, with India.Arie calling attention to Rogan’s use of racial epithets.  Rather quickly Spotify developed some sort of compromise allowing Rogan to continue his extremely popular and big-budget podcast but with a content warning.

I say a lot about how none of us really knows the famous people, those who move about in circles to which most of us have no link or entrance.  But it’s different with singer-songwriters.  They bare their souls poetically and capture our attention.  If they are truly talented, musically innovative and lucky, their songs and the message of each one air nationwide and nowadays are easily heard around the world.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear Neil Young and colleagues gave Spotify an ultimatum. 

Yeah, a lot of people didn’t know who they are or were, not even one song by Joni Mitchell.  The Baby Boomer generation, the largest loudest strongest of American seniors, knows these singers and their music, a lot of it played routinely on classic rock stations.  The words & melodies are seared into the hearts & minds of a generation like snapshots in black-and-white and fading color.  Don’t knock music fans.  The bond is stronger than politics.  Singer/songwriters say—and beautifully so—what millions of people think and feel and know to be true.

And the most important thing to remember about Neil Young, Joni Mitchell & CSNY is they are paid nothing every time their songs are played on Spotify.

Again we see how the great Baby Boomer generation, with the first batch now in their mid to late 70s, keep rockin’.  They called out Spotify.  They got fans to wake up to what’s going down.  And it’s not about money.

Free speech is a beautiful thing.  No one knows that more than these singer-songwriters. But all of us Boomers know free speech does not mean someone can yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire, you know as a joke.  Why?  Because people will get hurt running over each other to leave the fire that does not exist.  Only sociopaths would laugh at the outcome.  It’s irresponsible.  It’s mean.  It endangers society, other people.

Like it or not, we can’t say whatever we want whether true or not.  Boomers have learned that the hard way … as we’ve rebuilt relationships with loved ones when politics got too divisive, as we’ve raised children and grandchildren, as we’ve pursued our life’s work and hobbies, as we live beside neighbors of various ethnicities and cultures and spiritual practices, as we deal each day with other people one on one.  

Somewhere along the line in this internet world, our right of free speech has been … abused.  Today it’s hard for people to know what is true and false, real and fake, even good and bad.  With every click, anything we read or see or hear has to be vetted, checked and checked again to substantiate: Is this the truth?

When it came to just sitting back and allowing misinformation to spread unchecked and unchallenged, old Neil Young, who is the father of two children with cerebral palsy, had to take a stand.  Nothing new.  Songwriters do it all the time, whether or not anyone is listening.

They’re calling it the Great Resignation.  Millions of Americans simply have been quitting their jobs, whether professions/degree-required or blue-collar labor.  Just in November 2021, four million workers flat out quit.  Anyone else humming that ol’ country song Take This Job & Shove It?  Come on, might as well be honest.  Aren’t we just a little bit proud of those folks?  Quitting a job is one of the most uplifting, life-affirming, positive steps we can take … sometimes.

Why the mass exodus?  Where’s the fire?  Reasons include: the unexpected pandemic when our government agreed to financially compensate practically everybody for mandatory business shut downs; mothers who have no choice but to stay home with their youngest children not yet vaccinated or in school or their elementary schools and daycare facilities closed; personal or family illness (cancer and other devastating long-term health crises); work too high stress with little income (minimum wage); moving in with parents or family to go to college and change careers; and, it is believed for the vast majority, an overwhelming realization that ‘Life is short’ and ‘Quality of life matters.’  I mean, what exactly are we working for anyway?  The Man?  A comfortable retirement that likely will never happen for most of us?  Not anymore, say America’s purposefully unemployed.

Scranton’s everywhere

Although there are many reasons for the Great Resignation, one type of 20^th century employment has taken a beating: The Office.  Ironic since many binged on that very show while quarantined for months at home.  But for all of us who have worked in office buildings, we understand the feeling.  Working in an office is not unlike a prison sentence.  We bide our time, do our work, and if unhappy seek a way out, another job.

Until then, office workers arrive faithfully Monday through Friday, most driving in traffic that extends the journey an hour or so longer than it should be both morning and night.  We owe, we owe, so off to work we go.  We arise in the dark morning, yawn repeatedly as we prepare for work.  Many office workers must dress well, too.  We answer to a boss or to several in upper management for they hold our livelihoods in their hands.

Office workers see themselves as cogs in a wheel.  Their work has some sort of purpose, and they are given deadlines and know the importance of what they do for a living.  The most industrious often eat lunch at their desks or in their cubicles, maybe take a brief walk in sunny weather.  There are office parties for birthdays and Christmas and occasionally a co-worker’s new baby.  There is the funeral sympathy bouquet from the office.  Sometimes co-workers go out for lunch.  If they’re really lucky, some people who meet at work build good friendships, see a movie together or catch a concert, occasionally or even weekly go for a drink, once or twice a year get the families together for a swim or dinner at each other’s homes.  As if mystically pre-ordained, there are couples who meet at work, date and marry and start a family.

That’s the dream, the way office workers hope time under the long flat fluorescent ceiling will turn out.  Maybe the work is bearable and rewarding and some well-liked folks stay to retirement.  Retirement parties are fun, leaving a sprinkle of optimism about the future.  But the Great Resignation, caused by colliding yet related situations, boils down to unhappiness.

Time alone, with children and the extra government money, may have driven some workers to think about whether or not their job’s really been worth it: the hassle, the traffic, the gas, the vehicle, the hours away from family, sitters, parental guilt, uncomfortable clothes and shoes.  Millions upon millions of Americans who were inadvertently left alone for a good year say NO.

Then there’s the other aspect of work whether in an office or elsewhere: the assorted personalities.  That’s the fun part when watching a TV show, seeing all the characters and what they’re up to when no one else is around.  But when people of various ages and backgrounds are thrown together, especially for jobs and income that everyone must have to survive, it’s not so interesting.  In fact, it rarely works out.

Been there, done that

I’ve worked many office jobs, at least four at newspapers.  I’ve worked other office secretarial gigs, too.  Maybe work contentment amounts to the job, the salary and the boss, but co-workers go a long way in determining happiness.  That quality is not so elusive.  Looking back at all the jobs I’ve had, I only had three great bosses.  Let’s start there.  What made those bosses so great was: TRUST.  They were competent, mature, and made good hires.  They hired me, didn’t they?  They sat back and managed.  Nothing to it really if you hire good people.

I guess we’ve all had crazy bosses.  One boss was so critical of me on a weekly basis … that I just quit.  I would never advise anyone to quit a job without having another one.  For months I felt so foolish.  Why didn’t I just put up with the situation until I was fired and at least have some income instead of zero?  Life sometimes gives you an answer.  I ran into a former co-worker who told me he’d quit after I did and several others followed my lead!  To them, prisoners their work, my resignation was heroic.  My instincts were right, but I remained unemployed, depressed, and miserable for a long time.

Back to my earlier premise about work sometimes being like a prison sentence, quitting a really bad job and impossible situation with an awful boss is like setting yourself free.  Believe me, the giddy exhilaration of sticking up for yourself, ‘letting go and letting God,’ completely trusting in a Higher Good, a just force in the universe that will take care of you and support your decision to quit a job is … short lived.  Turns out, I was the only one who believed in myself.  Self-assurance doesn’t pay the bills.  Lesson learned: Best to grin and bear an awful job till a better one comes along.  I wonder if any of the tens of millions who’ve quit their jobs reached epiphany yet.

How are teachers supposed to even teach now in Texas? The state Legislature and Governor have gone off the deep end trying to close the mouths of public school teachers. What’s got them riled this time is a concept about which they know nothing: critical race theory.  The problem with the theory is that white people think they know all about it, and what they think they know greatly offends them down to their lily-white foundation. So the white-dominated Texas Legislature and Governor are telling teachers to ‘Watch it!’ when dealing with our country’s and state’s history as well as current events involving racial conflict (and oppression). Seriously, they want teachers to self-censor their attitudes, word choice, sentence structure and personal emotions as to not leave any Texas school student thinking less of his or her or another’s race (especially the great white race) when delving into our collective history and government. LOL!!

This is as asinine as it is offensive to any intelligent person living today.

What’s been a-happening in the past couple of years, perhaps more so during the time students spent studying at home and more and more relying on the internet for research, is kids have been asking a lot of questions about America’s history and race relations.  A 21^st century student is different from one learning in the 20^th century. A kid today doesn’t just read history books and gloss over common phrases we all learned, like: “slave-holding states,” “three-fifths of a free person,” “set all his slaves free upon his death,” “Trail of Tears,” “The Civil Rights Amendment of 1964,” “The Voting Rights Act of 1965,” “women’s suffrage,” “Japanese internment camps,” “National Guard shot college students protesting the Vietnam War,” “French Fries changed to Freedom Fries,” “America’s longest war.”

A kid in school today, from elementary to high school, will immediately research online any new term or time period. They do it on their classroom laptops.  And alongside all the misinformation that is online is also all the truth: authentic pictures of an African American hanging from a tree, and another picture, and another one, and another one … thousands from the 19th to the 20th centuries (the names now preserved on hanging headstones in a museum); the Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the young teen crying over a slain college student at an anti-Vietnam War protest; all the Civil War photos; all the WWI and WWII photos; all the Nazi concentration camp photos; and all the validated and substantiated research confirming our history–all the same stuff we learned way back when, well, suitable for printing in a school textbook.

But kids today ask questions in the classroom while studying American history and other subjects, questions that we never asked before the internet: “OK, um, exactly why were Africans brought here as slaves? Why not people from other parts of the world?” “What I don’t understand is why didn’t the slaves just proclaim their freedom, say ‘I’m not a slave’ and just leave the plantations.”

Ah, the rub, my fellow white Americans, Southerners and Texans. We don’t want to acknowledge the ugly truth, the reason ‘why’ which young students want and deserve to know. We’d have to tell the kids, er students: “Slavery was a brutal system. ”

What do you mean? What would happen if they ran away and just started working for themselves, start their own communities?

“If a slave were caught, he or she would be punished. Some were hobbled so they’d never run or walk normally or quickly again.”

But why? Why were the people who owned slaves so cruel? Why couldn’t they just let the slaves work like all the European indentured servants who came here, like seven years or so, and then let them be free?

“White European people of the time in the U.S., the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries, maintained a deep conviction that their way of life was the only proper way to live. For many centuries Western European man believed his religion, race, culture, art, music, literature and even the English language were superior to all other people around the world.”

This kind of objective classroom conversation, one whereby the educator takes great care to explain to young minds so that they understand the past, is now hereby banned from taking place in Texas schools.

The flow of teaching and learning

Texas lawmakers don’t understand the flow of a lesson, the classroom and teaching. A teacher organizes lessons by specific concepts and units to eventually cover a school year’s course like history or literature, music or science, for example. (FYI: Every school subject’s concepts were set in stone by the Texas Legislature in the 1980s.) Throughout the lesson, however, questions and conversations from students can (and should) pop up. A modern teacher would allow conversation and not stifle it. Teachers today do not expect, and school administrators do not want to see, students sitting in their desks erect and quiet. The 21^st century classroom is supposed to be lively and engaging and allows for conversation and curiosity—because students who ask questions are learning.

By the way, all those blunt questions being asked about America’s documented past and current conflicts centered on race are not from African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans or Hispanics. The questions are coming from the white kids. Unlike most of us at their age—we who accepted as fact what we learned in school, like ‘Africans were brought here to be sold as slaves,’ ‘the Civil War was fought over many issues of which only one was slavery,’ the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ‘public schools had to be integrated because they were segregated for a hundred years’—students today don’t just accept what they’re taught, no questions asked. People who are not white know their history. We don’t.

And the Texas Legislature wants to keep it that way.

The most recent mass school shooting—in the gun-toting state of Michigan—ended with four students shot to death, several other young people injured and hospitalized, the 15-year-old male alleged assailant charged with murder and terrorism, but also charged the alleged shooter’s parents who supplied their son the gun as a Christmas gift.

Finally, parents of minors accused of mass school shootings may be drawn into the criminal justice system and face prison and fines. For several reasons, this school shooting places blame squarely on the alleged shooter’s parents. The gun was not out of the minor’s reach and clearly belonged to the youth legal or not. The day of the shooting, the parents were called in by the high school administrator to discuss their son’s emotional distress and bizarre behavior reported by concerned teachers. The parents did not remove their son from school. Texts between mother and son were disconcerting and related to reckless use of the new firearm. Moments later the deadly shooting rampage occurred.

School shootings are a loop of horror. It’s been this way for decades especially now that military-style firearms are available for easy purchase. School shootings have become so common in the U.S., we refer to it as ‘Tuesday’ while the world looks on at all of us with disgust because this just does not happen on a weekly and daily basis in other countries. The world looks on at our country for continuing to allow guns all around. We are the nation with more guns than people, hundreds of millions more guns than our 360 million population.

Since the 1990s’ Columbine High School massacre, which ended in the two student assailants turning their weapons on themselves, our nation has studied the myriad reasons why a student would bring a high-powered gun to school and commence to shooting. By now we know all the reasons: mental illness, bullying, easy access to guns, Hollywood movies, the mass media, shooter video games, now the internet and smart phones, raging rock music and violent videos like Jeremy—the theory is all of it has desensitized us and more so young developing minds. But the rest of the world does all this, too, without frequent mass shootings, hardly any.

It seems in America, adults have forgotten … who calls the shots, to use an unfortunate yet accurate phrase. We’re the ones in control, not adolescent boys. We’re not acting like authority figures, however. Few laws have been passed to address and stop kids from shooting kids at schools, and instead we as legislators and voters have sat back and allowed more high-powered guns everywhere to be owned and operated by anyone.

With news of yet another school shooting, all that kids see us do … is shed a tear if even that, then every few years in big cities march for gun control. Boys with guns think they’re in control. They think a gun and shooting it at peers is the only way to take charge … the only way to deal with what’s really bothering them (which is not feeling in control of their lives). Adults can at least agree that something along this line is what’s wrong with someone young or old who would get a gun and shoot everybody.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The reason for all the school shootings has always been parenting or lack of it. Sometimes the young shooter kills his parents and family at home before heading off to school to shoot classmates and teachers. After Columbine, Oprah Winfrey remarked that the parents owe this nation an explanation; they’re obligated to tell us ‘why.’ But they weren’t about to share their dirty laundry on Oprah, except in recent years, maybe 20 years after Columbine, one of the assailant’s mothers wrote a book about dealing with her personal grief. Too little, too late.

The ever-growing list of American parents whose sons are convicted of deadly school shootings rarely tell their side of the story. They would have to face a nation who would call them failures as parents. Oh, the sting of it, as if that’s the worst thing in the world. No, much worse is a deadly school shooting.

‘Indulged’ is the word that came to mind as we learned the lives of the two teen-age boys accused of the Columbine tragedy. Their parents never walked into their sons’ bedrooms, had no idea of all the weaponry and bombs in the closets, their hand-written cryptic notes, the time they spent outdoors shooting their military firearms. There are so many incarcerated school shooters now, men who now can articulate what drove them to mass murder, surely they can be studied, scrutinized, analyzed. Perhaps some were raised by an exhausted single parent, usually the mother, or their old grandma. But this is not the back story of the latest accused youth. What would all these men, now serving time for mass shootings they committed as teen-agers, tell us about why they did it?

Do we really want to know? Do we have the guts to learn their truth, we the nation who weeps a moment after each school shooting then does nothing? What school shooters say won’t be easy for us to hear or understand, but their parents will play a prominent role in their childish actions that today leave them with remorse and all the other emotions they could not express as adolescents. And here’s the kicker: They won’t blame their parents. As society wants to hear, they’ll blame themselves for choosing to take a high-powered gun to school and intentionally shooting people to death, as many as their super-duper gun and ammunition would allow.

Parenting is a very hard job, more so during the offspring’s adolescence. Add undiagnosed and untreated mental illness then special conditions like Asperger’s syndrome, the job of parent is a million times more difficult—but not impossible. When the fights come—and there’s going to be fighting between an adolescent male and a parental authority—how many parents would do anything to stop their child’s loud, obnoxious, angry, violent, profanity-laced rants peppered with the one-two punch ‘I hate you!!!?’ Takes a mighty tough parent to put up with all that and resist the urge to return to the bygone days of a slap across the mouth or a belt across the butt. In studying young males who turned into school shooters, the most common clue is their homes had guns. That’s the place to start, the rest of the world would tell us.

So it’s come to this.  A new name for the old Facebook company.  F Book will still exist, but with all the proven irresponsible social consequences, it will remain only for the aged including me and my generation.  How kind of the kids at FB.

A corporation, on the New York Stock Exchange and valued in the billions and billions of dollars, that has to change its name and rebrand itself is in B.I.G. trouble.  Yet I, a tech novice but observer of people, could see a problem with social media way back in the early 21^st century.  I came late to Facebook, my first social media venture, maybe around 2010.  My husband got on the band wagon and told me all these old buddies and classmates and long lost relatives he found or who found him through Facebook—of all places, cyberspace.  It was neato!  We saw many siblings, split up as children, who found each other on Facebook. I don’t know anyone whose heart wasn’t softened by this miracle for all lucky enough to be living in the tech age, the high tech age.  Still … I was hesitant. Seemed like we first had to give millions of strangers too much information about ourselves, this before stolen identities became a reality.

Behold, the internet

My first realization of something called an internet and email was watching a gritty cop show called Homicide: Life on the Street.  On an episode airing in the mid-1990s, the police detectives had to use the internet to lure a criminal suspect, a very clever person.  The one guy in the squad room who was the computer nerd got on the World Wide Web (oooooo!) and started typing whatever his tech-challenged colleagues told him.  One detective started using profanity to communicate to the perp.  The computer nerd said the internet only uses polite language.  Wha?!

Through the turn of the century as everyone got online, commencing to email faster than the speed of thought, internet language and imagery reflected the coarse and crass more than the refined or well mannered.  Americans at that point in time had long been more DeNiro than Jimmy Stewart.  Then social media came along, and anything goes!  People like to chat and gossip, and they like sharing anything off the internet they find funny or suspicious with like-minded friends.  Plus, a lot of people like to type whatever idea pops into their little heads, like kids. 

Today the internet has saturated the collective consciousness with lies, half-truths, nontruths, misinformation and disinformation.  IDK.  When did the internet become evil?

The internet is only as evil as the people who post on it.  For years, perhaps from its inception, Facebook maintained the sanctity of ‘free speech.’  They guaranteed all users the right to their free speech, even hate speech, and therefore refused to censor anything or anyone on its platform.  The bottom line was money.  Facebook somehow makes money.  It’s never sincerely been a free space for the masses to debate and challenge ideas in a moderate low-key style. It was supposed to be about getting together like on the phone or at a party.

People who study the human psyche know lots more people respond to negative information than positive.  More shares for the rumor the Obamas are divorcing than the pix of a cute baby tasting sugar for the first time, at least on Facebook.

A cyber mile away

I wasn’t surprised that Facebook would fade away like everything else.  It is simply evolution, and tech is about evolving every few months.  The smart money is on that principle.

Sure, it was warm and fuzzy finding old friends and relatives from long ago, old teachers still around and kicking, old acquaintances and former neighbors we haven’t thought about in years.  So we got in touch and can visit anytime we want.  We don’t need to physically see these people.  We can visit virtually in the 21^st century!

But … then we all did something we knew we weren’t supposed to do: talk politics and religion.  Those two subjects are not to be discussed at parties and social gatherings.  We forgot we were on social media.  Perhaps the feeling was it was unreal.  Social conversation is supposed to be polite not intense, ending in freestyle cussing fights and rifts.

God help us, we Americans take our politics seriously, as seriously as we do religion.  Many like-minded people, through Facebook and other social media platforms, formed tight associations.  Many ‘unfriended’ people when they discovered extreme differences in political and societal ideologies, one way or the other. Through Facebooking, we found out a whole lot more about each other than we ever wanted to know.  We were better off not knowing everything about each other, weren’t we?

We were once so happy just to know one another.  Totally oblivious to our neighbor’s true beliefs and ideals whether alt left or alt right or old-fashioned Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.

We’re ready to draw guns now, are we?

Words, typed or spoken, can destroy.  How many people wish they could take back some things they’ve said?  That was human nature before email.  And nothing posted is truly deleted.

We live in such an advanced age that many of us can’t keep pace.

But a slow down is a-coming.  Since we could not control ourselves, our big mouths and quick keystrokes over our deeply-held political opinions and social media businesses continued to permit irresponsible free speech that culminated in deadly attacks—SINCE TOO MANY AMERICANS CONVINCED THEMSELVES THEY NO LONGER KNOW WHAT ‘TRUTH’ IS—our government will control the internet and social media for us.

We don’t have the right to believe whatever we want.   That is the epitome of ignorance.  We have the right to know the truth, and it’s EZ to find, easier in this day and age than any time in human history.  Truth takes time to prove.  In researching truth, we have to be objective.  The internet itself is objective: granted, polluted with lies and rumors but also facts and substantiated verifiable truth, information at our fingertips.

Facebook, social media and the internet are what ‘we the people’ have made it.  We should be ashamed.  But a lot of people have no shame.  Another revelation brought to us on social media with millions of likes.

I … just … can’t be one of those people—the scornful masses who if given the chance would spew at millions of girls and women each year who find themselves ruefully, unexpectedly, unjoyously and secretly pregnant:

“You gonna have that baby!!  You hear me?!”

The noisy & ever nosy anti-abortion crowd has always been about one thing: judging females in their child-bearing years—essentially judging girls and women most of their lives.  Their cause is about butting into millions and millions of lives in which they have no business telling how to react and what to do in the matter of unintentional pregnancy.  Female lives matter.  Those who pursue an abortion are people who for many reasons (all no one’s business) know they cannot have a baby at this time in their lives. 

The Texas all-boys club who swiftly banned abortions at six weeks of pregnancy, AND for some bizarre reason encourage any nut in the country to sue people ‘involved’ in assisting an abortion in the state, is just showing their hind ends to the rest of a weary world.  Why not brand the female with a scarlet letter A?

Ever since Roe v Wade became law in the early 1970s, safe abortion was a private option.  I don’t remember when abortion was illegal.  I mentioned that to a sister as we marched in the national women’s rights protest against the Texas abortion ban.  Her response to me was “I do!”  Our country’s elderly women have not forgotten the hangers, back alleys, unlicensed assistants and other gruesome methods and humiliations endured by many a teen or young woman prior to 1973.  Deaths by self-induced and unsanitary abortions were so numerous and known to most women, feminist Gloria Steinem referred to it as “our Vietnam.” 

The decades since abortion was legalized in the U.S., the anti-abortion crowd seemingly swelled and grew self-assured and politically empowered.  Not only did they intimidate and scorn anyone trying to enter a women’s public health clinic, they also commenced to blowing up the facilities one by one, shooting physicians whose practice included abortions, and publishing names and addresses along with other personal and family information of anyone associated with medical centers where abortions are performed.  In short, the fanatical anti-abortion crowd was notorious for death threats.  Many physicians were murdered by the same people, practically all men, who claim to be pro-life.

Why is everybody getting to decide except the pregnant?

Perhaps if men had a better track record about unintentional pregnancy, abortion would be rare.  But male hormones, AKA male teen-agers, and grown men who find their lover pregnant have had a long history of fleeing the scene.  If truth be told, they may be the first to suggest abortion.  These are private conversations after all.  Abortion is quite likely many a man’s first reaction.  It takes a very special teen-ager or man to accept his consequences of ‘creating a new life,’ of suddenly becoming a father, of acknowledging his offspring, and finding a way to support his new baby.  But alas, this touching scenario is more fiction than the rule.  And every woman knows it, and girls will learn it.

Who was the ’70s feminist who chided: If men got pregnant, abortion would be a legal holiday?  I heard Cher say it.  She’s in that senior women’s group who remember when abortion was illegal, a dirty word, a dirty secret—a shame.  I don’t.  In college I heard rumors of girls who traveled out of state to have abortions … fearing in Texas they might run into their parents.  That’s how ashamed they were.   Many of my generation as young girls felt unable to talk to their parents about being pregnant.  Then the anti-abortion crowd forced the conversation by making abortion a parent’s decision.  No minor could obtain an abortion without her parent’s consent.  How awful.

The poor girl has to tell her parents she’s pregnant when they don’t know she’s sexually active.  In my day, a lot of parents would have flown off the handle if hearing the news.  I never bought the ‘pro-life’ side that parents are supportive and loving.  The reality I saw was parents pressing for the new life, their grandchild after all, and giving little if any consideration to their pregnant daughter, what she wanted to do.

Life’s a mess.  No doubt about it.  Trouble is, women deal with life’s messes all the time … and men just don’t have to.  Take the Texas abortion ban that assumes pregnancy at six weeks after a missed period.  Doctors don’t even want to see a patient who thinks she’s pregnant, even if a home pregnancy test confirms it, until she misses two periods.  This is the messy reality of which the Texas Legislature and Governor are unaware—and every 21st century woman in America knows it and are both laughing and fuming.  See, men, women aren’t like finely tuned cars, having periods every month like clockwork.  Sometimes the female body just doesn’t want to have a period for one or more months.  May be due to stress.  May be weight gain or weight loss.  May be over exercising.  May be hormonal changes.  Texas Legislators don’t know any of that either.  Did I mention there are tens of millions of women out here, each with her own cycle of which is in reality out of her or any man’s control?  Meanwhile, contraceptives have been known to fail.  I noticed Plan B’s off the shelf at pharmacies, well maybe just in Texas.

To be a woman is to be out of control.  We who are female accept our fate.  Yes, those of us with more testosterone would like to live like men: free a whole lifetime unencumbered without bras and monthly hygiene products.  Must be nice.  Especially between the years of 10 to, oh, 55.  It’s as if God has blessed men and cursed women.

Wait a minute.  That’s exactly what men want us to think.  They’ve written it into laws and cultures for centuries, only in my lifetime to have been overturned.  And it’s been a great lifetime for women since the 1970s, since 1973.

Heart & Soul

Like everyone in America, for years I wrestled with the issue of abortion. Scientists disagree on the moment life begins; they don’t all agree it’s at conception.  That is a belief not a biological fact.  When younger, I would have judged a girl or woman if she had an abortion.  You shouldn’t have sex if you don’t want to get pregnant, I would have thought, as indoctrinated.  But along my solitary spiritual path, I experienced moments of profound enlightenment—on this issue of abortion, which as long as I can remember has never ceased to tear this country apart.

First enlightenment: In the 1980s the Reagan/Bush administrations mandated a survey of women who’d had abortions.  The purpose was to find how abortion impacted the mental health and physical well being of these women.  The survey took years to complete.  The findings were supposed to conclude, as society believed way back when, that women who’ve had an abortion are emotionally unstable and their lives a wreck.  But that was an old wives’ tale.  The modern survey found that a good 98 percent of women who had undergone a safe and legal abortion not only completed their education whether high school or college but suffered no lingering emotional distress, went on to marry and have healthy children, and even work satisfying and rewarding careers.

That two percent or so who maintained abortion was the worst decision of their lives and they could never forgive themselves for what they considered murdering their unborn offspring, well among the general population 10-14 percent suffer anxiety and neurosis caused by assorted past traumas.  Abortion itself did not create mental illness in a woman, the report concluded.  This was according to the former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Second enlightenment: I support abortion but wondered about the ‘soul.’  Was abortion killing a human soul?  There are cultures in the other half of the world that believe a soul does not enter a body until a few months after birth.  A large number of pregnancies end in miscarriage, 30 to 50 percent, most in the first trimester, sometimes before a woman knows she’s pregnant, and more sadly in the second and third trimesters.  Collectively we mourn the life that was … as if fully formed and created, vibrant and healthy … in our minds.  Miscarriage is heartbreaking.  We even name the unborn before fully formed, before entering our shared world and breathing on their own.

The divide of our society on abortion is stitched into the fabric of American history and our puritanical past.  Today we believe our Puritan ancestors were uptight miserable people so sure of themselves, certain they were the Elect bound for heaven and everyone else doomed to hellfire.  It is ironic that a couple hundred years later ‘the scarlet letter,’ a story from America’s past based on Puritanical prejudices, remains an A, with all the same judgement, scorn, and sexual imagery forced deep down into the human subconscious.  Hypocrisy drives people insane.  As a modern country, leader of the Free World, we’ve been better off leaving judgement to God while privately following our individual spiritual convictions.