May 7th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Photo I.D.’s were required in order to vote in Indiana in the primary yesterday. A strict new law.
But what if you can’t easily get a photo I.D.?
What if you are a citizen, have lived an exemplary life, have stood up for the lives of others, have agreed not to be paid for your work lifelong, have agreed to wear funny clothes and interfere in society’s gears when justice to the soul is concerned…
and you can’t get a photo I.D. to assert your right to vote?
What if it’s because you’re 98 years old and your comrades, sister nuns who also were not allowed to vote in Indiana yesterday because they too didn’t have photo I.D.s…. don’t drive. Like many nuns. They don’t drive because they live where they work, and their work is unending. There’s no 9-5 amongst nuns. They don’t have a lot of time to find someone to drive them to wherever they might get some sort of photo I.D., they’d be leif to ask anyone to take time from their own work to do so,
and nuns, even the most elderly ones, haven’t the same courtesy of ’step to the head of the line’ that we accord dignitaries.
12 nuns from St. Mary’s convent at South Bend (Sisters of the Holy Cross) were turned away from the polls, for not having the picture that said they were who they said they were.
Ironically, they were turned away by a sister nun who knew them, but regardless, and properly so, had no choice, as said sister was acting as a volunteer at the voting precinct.
The sisters turned away were in their 80s and 90s. Some brought their passports with requisite photo, but the passports were long expired. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just went through intense rigmarole to get my own passport reissued and I could have practically graduated with a degree in engineering for as long as it took the government to issue it.
Sister On Special Assignment as Voting Precinct Volunteer said the nuns “weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law.” “You have to remember,” Sister McGuire said, “that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”
I only have this to say: These nuns and others like them who are elderly and in many ways are naive about the world yet very sharp about the ‘other world,’ and yet have dedicated a lifetime to serving day in and day out, who have sacrificed so much, deserve to be treated far more decently than this. Far more.
And as for the photo I.D. law, I see the reasons behind it. But also,
there has to be reasoned application of such a law, so that when one casts huge nets meant to catch the common fish, they do not also catch dolphins… dolphins are mammals, not fish. Dolphins are disabled when stuck in nets underwater, not allowed to surface.
It makes no sense to deny the innocent their hard-won freedoms whilst trying to entrap the others.
Indiana, for your penance, that’ll be ten Our Fathers, twenty Hail Marys, and a passel of rosaries. And an apology to the sisters from the Governor would be nice, since Mitch Daniels (R) is the one who signed the law to begin with.
But then, nuns being nuns, they’d likely say, no apology needed. They’d rather just have the prayers… And the right to vote not made labyrinthine… et– in nomine Domine, hosanna, in excelsis, and in the name of God, with high praise.
———
CODA
from AP:
“Indiana’s photo ID law is the strictest in the country. The Republican-led effort was designed to combat ballot fraud, said supporters, who also have acknowledged that no case involving someone impersonating a voter at the polls has ever been prosecuted in Indiana.
“The state’s American Civil Liberties Union sued, calling the law a poll tax that disproportionately affected minorities and elderly voters, those most likely to lack such identification. On April 28, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the law did not violate the Constitution.”
A Hoosier’s rights under the new law, include being able to cast a provisional ballot and obtain a proper ID within 10 days so that ballot would be counted later. But, in Indiana, as in many other states, the MVD takes far longer than 10 days to mail out the required key to the kingdom. So, no dice.
**Disclosure: The Sisters and Brothers of the Holy Cross, the group noted in this article, were traveler-teachers to a tiny school that gathered farmer-immigrant-merchant class kids from the boonies long ago. This order of priests, brothers and nuns taught me there, and at other proximate locations, for the better part of 12 years. Like many consecrated who live in other convents and seminaries across the world, they are some of the dearest, funniest, uncanny people you’ll ever meet.
What emerges from watching the endless YouTubing of Jeremiah Wright is not the picture of a religious or political fanatic but a world-class attention-seeker. In those operatic video clips, there is a dashiki-dressed performer playing to the crowd, a soulmate, not of Louis Farrakhan, but of Bill Maher, whose imprudent comments on 9/11 cost him his network gig.
Now Obama’s pastor is back on stage, coming out of his recent retirement, with Bill Moyers on PBS tonight and at the National Press Club in Washington next Monday, flamboyantly defending himself to the possible political detriment of his former congregant:
“I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?”
If Hillary Clinton’s campaign were paying him, the Rev. Wright couldn’t being doing more for them than to keep Obama’s embarrassment front and center in the days leading up to the final critical primaries.
But we may be underestimating him. By continuing to call attention to himself, Wright may be deviously trying to show that Obama is not under the Svengali-like influence of a dangerous man, just bedeviled by the antics of a showoff.
If so, that would be too subtle for most voters. All that may register with them is Obama’s unfortunate choice in a spiritual adviser.
I wrote last week about the Houston Chronicle’s incomplete description of an at-large suspect. I’m still troubled by the implications there, but there have been further developments in the story itself.
February 18th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
In the primaries, petty accusations and imagined slights and slings and arrows seem rife-– and arguing about such matters ad infinitum and ad nauseum. Every day, this media or that flogs one or another candidate for doing, saying, being, acting…re some insignificant thing. And sometimes, the candidates themselves turn to seemingly ‘out-victiming’ one another by petty accusation and counter pittance accusation.
But, there’s a price to pay for allowing/putting the emphasis on irrelevant and inflated matters….
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
The boy was a shepherd in a small village of farmers. Sheep herding can be tiresome. He did not mean to, but he imagined that maybe there was a hungry wolf creeping at the edge of the forest. He looked hard into the forest; there was no wolf. But, then he looked again, and thought, Maybe there is a wolf after all. I do think there is a wolf, really there is.
So, the boy cried Wolf! wolf! and the villagers ran from the fields with their sickles and scythes. But there was no wolf. The villagers were kind to the boy; You made an error, but you are young. Be more careful to rein in your imaginings.
The days passed. Again, the boy became restless. Again the boy thought there might be a wolf walking back and forth at the edge of the forest, and finally convinced himself there really was a wolf. So, the boy again cried Wolf! Wolf! and the villagers came running again, shouting this time they would kill the damned wolf for once and for all.
But the villagers looked inside and under and over all they could, poking every hut and hollow with their planting sticks and their bladed tools, yet again, there was no wolf. This time the villagers were stern: You are older now. You are supposed to be wiser. Do not keep making up untruths, for your own people are starting to distrust your eyes and mind.
The boy was chastened and tried to stay to the facts of his work. But, one day the wolf really did come from the forest into the pasture, and the boy cried out over and over: Wolf! Wolf! Help! Help! Wolf!, but the villagers did not come. Instead, they said amongst themselves, That’s only Crazy Hans who is always seeing wolves where there aren’t any.
And thus the boy met his fate.
———————- Much of human behavior seems archetypal at root, and can thereby sometimes be predicted
I’ve been a shrink for 38 years. I mention this because as the decades go by in close-up observations of many persons’ psyches in depth, one begins to see repeating almost ritualistic patterns in human thought and behavior throughout those persons’ lifetimes,
a kind of aerial view of human beings that cannot be trained into a neophyte shrink, a non-book compendium that notes the often predictible trajectories and patterns of human behavior.
When opponents tire: predictable competitive behavior
Human behavior is often predictable when humans are engaged in a competition for something that is one of a kind, or a one time opportunity. A ‘vying match of many rounds,’ is also an intense stressor. A ‘flaying and flanging’ race causes marked physical and psychic duress. Markers that the ‘fighters’ are becoming fatigued, losing energy and power…
occurs when the boxing rounds devolve into not who is the best fighter, but who is the greater victim of the other.
In verbal competitions wherein others will decide who the ‘winner’ will be– such as arguing the law in defense or on offense– the most significant and powerful position one can take is not that of the champion… it is that of the victim.
The honest victim garners warranted empathy and shelter. People are moved suddenly to help and understand and heal the injured person. A true victim does not willfully linger nor wallow in their travail for secondary gains– even though it may take years to reconstruct trust or wholeness as before. Humankind as a record of eons of thinking that such are worthy to receive due comfort and benefit.
Especially, our hearts can be moved by those who suffer for a just cause. This instinct to shelter ‘just cause’ victims, is also a venerable ideal is us, but also a vulnerability in many. A great but not adequately insightful/experienced heart can often be manipulated by a poseur who hopes for a rich empathy that was not earned fair and square.
Oddly, there has been in our culture, for several decades now, an almost instant unexamined opprobrium toward those who are actual victims. Of anything. Of anyone. A kind of taunting that appears to rest on
–fatigue about Read the rest of this entry »
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said it is important to examine the Obama rumors in the broader context of today’s bitter, unrestrained political environment.
“I’ve said consistently that this campaign will turn out to be one of the dirtiest campaigns in American history, and the first few weeks prove it,” Sabato told The Jewish Week. “Obama has borne a disgusting burden so far — attacks on his race that are worthy of the 1950s, and complete lies about his supposed ‘Muslim religion.’”
Sabato put part of the blame on the “mainstream media [which] has not done nearly enough to root out the perpetrators.”
He said suspicions about Obama’s religion may compound a racial divide in the campaign in which many white Democrats are simply reluctant to vote for a black presidential candidate.
Here are some more-valid reasons to be concerned about Obama:
Daniel Pipes shows (HERE and HERE) that because Obama’s father and step-father were Muslim and Obama did attend mosque as a child, the Muslim world may see Obama as a Muslim apostate although he is clearly a Christian today. If the Muslim world sees Obama as an apostate, his election may antagonize some elements thereof who may wish to kill him.
UPDATE: Just noticed this Editorial, also in The Jewish Week.
There are legitimate reasons to question Obama’s candidacy on the issues — the same can be said for all his competitors, Democrats and Republicans alike — but outrageous charges about how his childhood years in Indonesia indelibly taint him as a Muslim sympathizer go far beyond the pale.
AND
Part of this reflects the corrosive victory-at-any-cost mentality that has turned “swift boating” into a verb. That is the motive behind “pollsters” who call voters, ostensibly to ask questions about issues but in reality to keep repeating Obama’s middle name — Hussein — as if that alone disqualifies him from the presidency. And in part, the fact these rumors are believed reflects a destructive, seemingly bottomless skepticism about our political leadership, fear and outright bigotry.
The insidious thing about such charges, as political scientist Gilbert Kahn noted in a recent Jewish Week blog, is that once spoken, “it is like you plant the seed in the mind of the jury even if the judge sustains the objection — it’s out there. The suspicion persists and has legs of its own.”
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to deliver one more speech during his tour of Texas. It was to have been given after he rode in the motorcade in which he ultimately died, felled by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets.
In the speech, Kennedy was going to speak of the life and death struggle between the United States and the free world, on the one hand, and Soviet totalitarianism on the other. Kennedy, like his immediate predecessors Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower, believed that the US needed to be, in Roosevelt’s phrase, “the arsenal of democracy.”
But Kennedy also suggests in his undelivered speech, as he had in other speeches previously, that the US couldn’t rely entirely on its military or economic might to confront Soviet totalitarianism. He asserts:
We in this country, in this generation, are– by destiny rather than choice– the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, Read the rest of this entry »
January 12th, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
”
I have always believed that once you accept political corruption as a universal phenomenon, you are finished. Be it Pakistan, the USA or India. I was quite disturbed to read that the US administration has allowed billions of dollars of unaccounted aid to flow into Pakistan. Now we have the World Bank chief pulling up India for the misuse of loans meant for the health projects for the poorest of the poor. What a shame!!!
Lesley Wroughton of the Reuters writes: “The World Bank said on Friday it had uncovered ’serious incidents’ of fraud and corruption in a review of five health projects in India and Bank President Robert Zoellick pledged he and the government would get to the bottom of it.
“Evidence of problems was found in a just-released Detailed Implementation Review launched by the World Bank in 2006, with the support of the Indian government. It looked at the five World Bank-supported projects, some dating back to 1997, for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
“The review’s findings are likely to further highlight concerns about corruption in World Bank-financed development projects and increase pressure on Zoellick to tackle shortcomings in the bank’s oversight of projects. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not going to bother looking up the research but will speak from personal experience. Anger is often perceived differently in men and women. The same anger seen as an asset in a male candidate may be seen as a liability in a female candidate. I know this because I have often been perceived as an angry woman (and therefore dangerous and unstable) rather than a rightfully angry person.
December 7th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
You just wonder, is Old Scratch whispering to Mukasey: “Policy isn’t fitting the facts, it seems. Critical evidence has been lost? You’re thinking over what to do for the 44th time? Great tactics! Carry on.”
But, a gaggle of muddy angels interested in the old fashioned definition of justice are asking: Hasn’t Mukasey known for many days now that ‘tapes have been lost/ destroyed’?
Why hasn’t Mukasey shot out an immediate preservation order to all concerned so that all current records are protected from further ‘loss, misplacement, and addending’?
That grinding noise we’re hearing? Could it be shredders?
That scratching noise? Redacting/ revisioning of history?
That snoring sound? A Congress controlled by Democrats?
And Mukasey says? Mukasey says nothing of import in this critical matter.
————— See here, for ‘the thunder letter’ written by Sen Patrick Leahy when the previous AG Gonzales declined to issue a preservation order about a similar critical matter. Upon Gonzales declining to take charge, Congress issued their own supoena right over the top of him. Gonzales thought he was being loyal to the president.
As did Icarus think he was being loyal to his father Daedelus’ devilish instructions that left out the most critical part about flying for the first time, that is, that flying too high can cause hypoxia and thereby fatally imperil judgment.
AG Mukasey, if involved in the same kind of long ‘loyalty-do-nothing’ spasm AG Gonzales affected, will be Icarus II.
Here are three articles I wrote at TMV about Icarus psychology, and those in politics who begin with such promise, and yet fall from the sky in a nonstop dive they cannot pull out of.
And meanwhile, regarding the current AG Mukasey and his long overdue order, and regarding the Democrats in Congress who seem to be acting as though they are at tea party… while the Red Death traipses about, supposedly outside the walls…
Well, let’s just say Old Scratch is likely saying, “Perfect.”
Santas in Australia’s largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas’s traditional “ho ho ho” greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.
Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say “ha ha ha” instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.
One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.
“Gimme a break,” said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.
It’s bad enough that there have been increasing rumblings among some in The Food Police that Santa is too fat and therefore a bad influence on young people. But now apparently the Don Imus controversy has imposed yet another layer of super-sensitive — and super silly — political PC.
Will the use of the term “manhole” for street covers be banned next?
If someone uses the term “male” and “female” electrical plugs at an electronics store will people soon gasp in fear — and cover their kiddies’ ears?
And what about Santa’s red cheeks? Shouldn’t cartoon and photo depictions get rid of the red? Doesn’t that suggest he’s an alcoholic? Will looking at Santa turn kids into winos?
And what about the reindeer? When they fly overhead, aren’t they setting a poor example for high sanitation standards (they must be worse than pigeons)?
There is more:
“We are talking about little kids who do not understand that “ho, ho, ho” has any other connotation and nor should they,” she told the Telegraph.
“Leave Santa alone.”
A local spokesman for the US-based Westaff recruitment firm said it was “misleading” to say the company had banned Santa’s traditional greeting and it was being left up to the discretion of the individual Santa himself.
But why raise the issue at all?
One upon a time in America (and the world) people were willing to live and let live, rather than go on campaigns to parse each word, each phrase and go after someone either with a publicity campaign suggesting they are using “inappropriate” language or, even worse, send out lawyers.
But the PC police are out in force. And with each victory, they continue their scolding advance.
By the way, what about Santa’s RED COSTUME? Does this suggest a political bias?
Why would many Americans let a fat man who sets a poor physical example and who has red cheeks that some might consider to be signs of too much Jack Daniels into their homes or be perceived by little kids as someone who is somehow a friendly figure? Shouldn’t he take that friendly figure to Bally’s Fitness Center and lose some of that flab?
THIS JUST IN: Those who have urged Santas not to say “ho ho ho” have now been inducted into TMV’s highly-prestigious GET A LIFE CLUB.
The Get A Life Club Award is given to an individual, group or institution that reveals itself to need to get a deeper sense of perspective due to their obsession with P.C. or other small things blown way out of proportion. Other criteria may apply. But this is a slam-dunk induction.
Oops! “Slam-dunk” encourages children to do drugs and endanger other children by pushing them under water.
So we’ll say “shoo-in.”
But that may be offensive to the shoe industry so we’ll just say “natural.”
SOME OTHER MEDIA REACTION TO THE PC PATROL STRIKES BACK:
Most rappers (and Don Imus) would not be good Santa Clauses. Their “hos” — even in the jolly triplicate — just wouldn’t convey the proper spirit.
But ban working Santas from using “Ho, ho, ho”? That’s a realm beyond race, gender and political correctness — a new frontier in coddling kookiness.
And yet, that was the story out of Australia Thursday, where a firm that trains Santa Clauses reportedly told recruits to avoid “ho, ho, ho,” in part because it conjures American slang for a prostitute, according to The Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney.
…At least two red-suited rookies Down Under reportedly quit over the restriction on St. Nick’s traditional belly-shaking expression. The Telegraph reported that a representative of Westaff, which provides Santas to retail centers around the world, wrote to Australian stores explaining the company’s position.
–The San Diego Union’s story written by Greg Gross (a former colleague and editor of mine when I worked there and a superb writer) has the headline: “This year, there’s an Insanity Claus for Christmas”:
SAN DIEGO – Ho ho. . . no?
It’s about as quintessentially Christmas as you can get, that jolly “ho ho ho!,†as universal a symbol of Santa Claus as his red suit and reindeer.
Until now.
A U.S.-based employment firm that provides department-store Santas throughout Australia has asked that they refrain from using “ho ho ho!†because it might offend women.
Santa trainees are being instructed to say “Ha ha ha!†instead.
Seriously.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney, which first broke the story, reported that at least some trainees were quitting in disgust.
A spokeswoman for Westaff, the Walnut Creek, Calif.-based employment firm whose Australian branch made the request of the Santa trainees at the request of an Australian store chain, said it only applies there.
November 14th, 2007 by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
You can see the headline at Fox News, can’t you? Martial theme music, elaborate graphic, perhaps a mushroom cloud emerging from an about-to-be-carved turkey, an all-American family looking on in horror, white to the core, manifest destiny come undone, exposed at last, the pioneers of American imperialism obliterated by the revisionist blamers.
Wait… what?
Yes, there is war here, there, and everywhere on the American cultural landscape — and it ain’t just Iraq and Afghanistan. No, it’s Christmas and Easter and, yes, Thanksgiving.
Mademoiselle Malkin claims to be “all for truthful, historically accurate lessons about Thanksgiving” — and that’s really something, because she isn’t for “truthful, historically accurate lessons” about anything else.
She just can’t stand the “‘diversity’-peddlers” — you know, all that “guilt-mongering and institutional racism indoctrination,” all that “Blame America” BS.
Tom Tancredo’s campaign ad is designed to be “shocking,”and it has legs, though the candidate might not….
We in his home state, Colorado, are not supposed to see Representative Tom Tancredo’s ad. Neither are you. Unless you live in Iowa.
But Representative Tancredo is hoping his ‘shock’ ad will generate free publicity, so you might see it anyway. He’s hoping that media will carry it for free as ‘news.’ They likely will, actually have already, but perhaps not the way Rep. Tancredo imagined.
Terry Jessup from KCNC CBS4 affiliate in Denver reported on his conversation with Tancredo today.
Congressman Tancredo, “… told me he has to do well in Iowa or money will dry up and he’ll have to drop out of presidential race. He says the controversial new ad will definitely get him noticed.”
The ad comes at a time when Representative Tancredo’s numbers are flagging and his donations are way down. The ad is meant to provoke and inspire lots of media coverage so that the ad will infiltrate people’s living rooms over and over again… and then hopefully money will roll in again. The ad was designed to make big ad buys.
He may get bloggers, but some think he might also, without meaning to, get YouTube. From distant thunder I hear, there are parodies of his ad already in the works.
Think of the AppleHillary ad. Think of the original ad from which Tancredo’s ad appears to draw its oeuvre…1964 Lyndon Johnson anti-Goldwater ad (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg) showing a child counting daisy petals, then stop-motion zooming into her eye… where a mushroom cloud forms. Lyndon’s voice-over implying, Elmer Gantry style, that all of God’s children are going to die if Goldwater, ‘nuclear war monger,’ is elected.
Add ‘Eau de SNL’ to all this, and there may be a YouTube Festival revolving around scary ads… although have you seen the content in horror and disaster films teenagers not only sit through in cinema without blanching once, but also laugh over?
Tancredo goes on to say the ad is meant to make people uncomfortable… the ad shows the imaginary blowing up of a family shopping center by a terrorist. Tancredo says: “There is nothing, absolutely nothing that says this can’t happen in the United States.”
Tancredo commented about his ad depicting a seeming young person in a hoodie with backpack blowing families to Kingdom Come: “I thought it (the final ad) was a little tame. When I explained what I wanted, um and they came back with this after two or three different iterations of it, um I finally accepted it, but ( Tancredo laughs here) what I had in mind, was um a little more dramatic than this.”
Tancredo’s ad opens with him standing in a light-toned, patterned-fabric suit, next to large American flag on left screen. There’s a wall of Reader’s Digest looking “Great Books Club” hardbacks in red. green and dark yellow in the bookcase behind him. Representative Tancredo says: “Hi, I’m Tom Tancredo, and I approve this message… because someone needs to say it.”
Then an announcer comes on: a fellow sounding a lot like the man who used to do all the spooky movie preview ads, one who could just be saying, “I think I’ll go do the dishes”– and make it sound like Rodan, clawing for blood of the firstborn, has just landed again. The opening carries the sound of a heart beating hard in the background. This under-sound sort of goes into an arrhythmia in the middle of the ad, and then quits halfway through the word ‘politicians,’ near the end, an odd symbolic place to stop.
The announcer says (verbatim transcript I took down from TV ad):
“There are consequences to open borders beyond the 20 million aliens who’ve come to take our jobs. Islamic terrorists are now free to roam US soil. Jihadists who are fraught with hate, free to do here as they’ve done in London, in Spain, and Russia
“… the price we pay for spineless politicians who refuse to defend our borders against those who come to kill.”
Aside from 2 serious errors in the root logic of the ad, one of which infers that if our Southern and Northern Borders were closed tight like a vacuum-sealed coffee jar, it would prevent terrorism… it wouldn’t. The 9-11 terrorists were all here legally, had come right through government daylight channels.
The second wobbly inference in the ad, that others come illegally to take ‘our jobs’… it’s hard to imagine that the souls who scale the fence are also carrying a DayTimer and know how to run Vista (We can hardly run Vista ourselves, come on)….
but, setting aside those underlying assumptions in the ad…
The visual is a seeming young male, ‘Hoodie man,’ with backpack. Pan shopping center. Pan leg of child running in shopping center. And etc. Finally, legs of Hoodie man shown as he leaves his back pack on the floor. Bloodied child being carried. (Picture of actual child from Russia) Then, Read the rest of this entry »
November 5th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
I had a night dream long ago about how hard it was to get to earth. For those of us who get pregnant when just passing through a room where a man is reading a newspaper and no more, it has sometimes seemed as though women becoming pregnant, carrying to term, and laboring to bring a living baby into this world is easy, common, like falling out of a ground floor window.
But, it isn’t. It is hard to get to earth, more than a one in a million odds, I think with certainty. Those souls who make it to earth have made a long trek with many perils along the way.
In my dream, I saw that getting to earth was like running an obstacle course of timing: making love timing, who what where when timing, physical timing, time of life timing, money timing, right lover timing, right this that and the other timing.
If little souls sit on clouds gambling on a body being made for each one, they’d lose their bets more often than win.
That’s why I think being born, no matter how a person came to be conceived, is like winning the lottery. Most of us were not planned. Some of us were not ‘wanted.’ Some of us arrived through a loveless act or a perfunctory one. Some of us came by accident. Some of us are called ‘the ooopsie baby.’ Some of us came from unsanctioned moments and are called ‘love child.’ Some of us were sick in utero, even sick unto death, but somehow recovered. And some of us, well…
Listen…
When doctors found that Gabriel was weaker than his brother, with an enlarged heart,and believed he was going to die in the womb, his mother Rebecca Jones had to make a heartbreaking decision.
Doctors told her his death could cause his twin brother to die too before they were born, and that it would be better to end Gabriel’s suffering sooner rather than later.
Mrs Jones decided to let doctors operate to terminate Gabriel’s life.
Firstly they tried to sever his umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply, but the cord was too strong.
They then cut Mrs Jones’s placenta in half so that when Gabriel died, it would not affect his twin brother.
But after the operation which was meant to end his life, tiny Gabriel had other ideas.
Although he weighed less than a pound, he put up such a fight for survival that doctors called him Rocky.
Astonishingly, he managed to carry on living in his mother’s womb for another five weeks - until the babies were delivered by caesarean section.
The children are home now. The doctor’s thinking was that one child seemed half the size of the other, not getting enough nutrients. The doctors said his heart was 3x normal size and it was likely the tiny baby in distress would die from a heart attack or stroke in utero.
Mrs Jones said: “They told us that if he died, it could be life threatening for his brother.
“We had to decide whether to end his life and let his brother live, or risk them both.”
At Birmingham Women’s Hospital, when Mrs Jones was 25 weeks pregnant, doctors tried to sever Gabriel’s umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply and allow him to die.
But the cord was too thick, and they could not cut through it.
As a last resort they divided Mrs Jones’s placenta so that when Gabriel died, it would allow Ieuan to survive. Mrs Jones said: “I put my hands on my stomach thinking of Gabriel. It was devastating. I had said my goodbyes.”
But the next morning Mrs Jones felt Gabriel kicking. A scan showed his heart was still beating. She said: “No one could quite believe it.”
Gabriel hung on, and his enlarged heart started to reduce in size. He also gained weight.
Mrs Jones said: “They thought it may be because the placenta had been divided. Inadvertently, it had evened out the distribution of nutrition between them, allowing Gabriel to survive.’
Like I said, it’s really something to make it to earth. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the very few lucky ones. I know with an earth burgeoning with over 6 billion people that sounds like an overstatement. It isn’t. Given all other matters, that you and I are here, is amazing.
I hope I can say this right without it being misunderstood; I hope I can adequately express the way this all sits in my heart, in my bones: I’m not pro-abortion. I’m not anti-abortion except for myself, my daughters and grandchildren: we consider a pregnancy, no matter how unexpected, no matter how it comes about, a gift of a soul trying to come to earth.
November 3rd, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Duane ” Dog ” Chapman has issued an apology in attempt to bail himself out from a controversy involving a phone call he made using racist language that led to his popular show “The Bounty Hunter” being pulled from the A&E Network.
At issue: use of the “n-word” which also derailed comedian/actor Michael Richards’ career. The link to the phone call (we won’t embed it on this site) is HERE.
The A&E network said Dog the Bounty Hunter, starring Duane “Dog” Chapman, would be off-air “for the foreseeable future”, but had not been scrapped.
The National Enquirer released a recording of a conversation involving the star, repeatedly making derogatory remarks about his son’s girlfriend.
He issued an apology but several civil rights leaders want his show ditched.
They have written to A&E, branding his comments “a vicious attack on… interracial relations, as well as an incitement to violence”.
Tucker’s programme sees him and colleagues trying to find people who have absconded in Hawaii and other US states.
The question is whether sponsors will want to sponsor a show featuring someone who has been publicized as using that notably-unwelcome language. It may be difficult for the show to come back if there is a strong campaign against Chapman — even with an apology.
And unlike radio talk show host Don Imus, whose joke about young black women got him dumped from his regular gig, Chapman’s show, while lucrative, may be more dispensable than Imus’ long running show. Imus has risen from the professional grave and will debut on a new radio network (and probably do better than ever in the ratings after all the publicity) on Dec. 1st.
Chapman, 54, has been under fire and accused of being a racist ever since the private conversation with his son, Tucker Chapman, was posted online Wednesday by The National Enquirer. Chapman used the N-word repeatedly about his son’s black girlfriend.
At least two advertisers have pulled out from the show and civil rights groups have called for its cancellation.
Soon after the clip was posted, Chapman issued an apology and A&E suspended production of the series.
In the conversation, Chapman urges Tucker to break up with his girlfriend. He also expresses concern about the girlfriend trying to tape and go public about the TV star’s use of the N-word. He used the slur six times in the first 45 seconds of the five-minute clip.
Chapman has said he was “disappointed in his choice of a friend, not due to her race, but her character. However, I should have never used that term.” He also said he was ashamed of himself and pledged to make amends.
His attorney, Brook Hart said his client is not a racist and vowed never to use the word again. Hart said Tucker Chapman taped the call and sold it to the Enquirer for “a lot of money.”
David Perel, the Enquirer’s editor in chief, would not comment on how it obtained the tape.
E! News’ story, headlined A&E Houses Dog, suggests his show isn’t dead yet…but then it’s early in the outrage stage:
An A&E spokesperson insisted the network’s flagship series—one of the top-rated shows on cable with around 2 million viewers per first-run episode—has not been canceled.
The network had already suspended production on the show on Wednesday, shortly after Chapman’s N-bomb-laced conversation was posted online by the National Enquirer.
“When the inquiry is concluded, we will take appropriate action,” A&E said in an earlier statement.
On CBS’s Public Eye blog, Matthew Felling notes that this is yet another indication that we are in a new era:
In 1970, love meant ‘never having to say you’re sorry.’
In 2007, celebrity means ‘never being off-the-record.’
As with Alec Baldwin’s less-than-fatherly feedback to his daughter earlier this year – where he called his 11-year old a ‘rude, thoughtless little pig’—we’ve got ourselves another family dispute dragged out into the public, courtesy of a voicemail for a family member.
A&E’s Duane Chapman…..is in big trouble because of a horribly intolerant voicemail he left on his son’s phone.
Felling offers a long list of celebrities, celebrity wannabes and politicos who have gotten into hot water due to things that might not have come to the public attention years ago, and he also notes how the infosystem is now set up so they immediately go to the forefront.
And, this is the era of YouTubes, the 24 hour news cycle, weblogs (where controversies rage about everything, including the use of private emails), and newspapers trying to find new angles to compete in a world turned upside down by the impact of the new Internet news media.
Add to that the competition between the tabloids and the mainstream media which started full scale in the 1980s when the supermarket tabloids began to move away from just celebrity news into covering political scandals…and beating some of the mainstream papers.
Since that time, the tabloids have lost circulation due to on-line news sources and the mainstream media stealing some of the tabloids’ techniques (and absorbing their news values). More than ever, the “bloids” are willing to pay big bucks for stories that jolt.
Add to that an increased demand that certain kind of language be banished — and if you had to place money it would be on Chapman’s show not returning…or him having to offer a much bigger apology or take some other action.
November 1st, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Perhaps you grew up in a small town like I did. I keep up with the local newspaper even though I no longer live in that little still semi-rural backwoods burg, population 600, with a struggling city nearby that is still going through the tailings of its own version of ‘the rust belt.’
You might remember my article about the good old guy who made tin can scarecrows and drove around with them in the front and back seats, delivering them to various small truck farmers. He got stopped on the toll road for carrying too many passengers at one time (all the scarecrows had hats on their 5 pound bucket heads.)
You probably remember the recipe from my hometown newspaper for fresh-ground black pepper oatmeal to strengthen your health, and the advice on how to pick the blueberries before the birds do, and how soybeans are down, but corn is up.
You might remember too about the sad parents this summer who lost their children when the kids dove from the jetties into Lake Michigan and hit sand bars instead open water, breaking their necks and dying. The legislature is thinking of banning diving from jetties. Since I was a child, every summer there have been deaths from jetty diving by people who don’t know the ways of big water and rush into it all too soon.
Also this time of year, for decades beginning in the 1930s, townspeople who had made the 200 mile round trip to Chicago often brought back this one issue of the Chicago Trib for these two pictures (see the masthead of this article) of Indian Summer that ran every October without fail… up until a couple years ago.
The artist of “Indian Summer” was an Irishman born in the late 1800s, name: John McClutcheon. My dad couldn’t read, but he always thought he could ‘read’ pictures out loud. It took me years …until I learned to read in grade school… to realize that Dad was making up the dialogue to the Sunday ‘funny papers’ when he ‘read’ them to me.
He did the same for these two pictures of “Indian Summer” that ran in the Trib every year. For years I thought he was reading the words under the picture. But, he wasnt. He was making it up out of whole cloth.
This is what he ‘read’ to me: He said that long ago, new people came to this land, the wood and lakelands, but there were already people here, an old old people. The original people were called Indians. Just like in Hungary which had been run over by Huns, Hapsburgs, Turks and others over the centuries, Dad said the Indians were run over too. Run over and run over til there were hardly any left.
But, he said, like the Hungarians, the Indians knew corn and wheat. The Indians knew about seeds and trees and important things like about singing and dancing and drinking and smoking. They knew about the best of life, hunting and gambling and music and love of horses… that Indians were just exactly like Hungarians, good people.
Dad would point to these two colored pictures in the Chicago Trib (a full-color picture in a newspaper back then was a wondrous thing) and say that we just had to see that no one can wipe out a people like that. They come back. People who love and live like that… You cannot kill them. They come back.
See, he’d say, there are the corn stalks all tied together, but really, the spirit of the corn is the true home for people all across the world. The simple seed keeps even poor people alive. The seed is the thing that makes ten of itself for every one of it you plant. All you need is one seed, to keep coming back and back.
That’s how Dad ‘read’ the pictures to me.
Tonight as I was writing this for you, I wondered why the Chi Trib wasn’t running “Indian Summer” any more. In my research I found that some thought the story that had traditionally accompanied the two pictures, was racist.
October 29th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Though some try to hijack the issue of capital punishment into a left vs right tailspin, it’s not a pol issue at base; it’s a thinking issue about, “How shall we who are of, they say, greater minds than other creatures, how shall we live together in the forest?
… a forest that is filled with great peril, more so for some than for others… and also filled with many avenues for self-defense, as well as ways of co-existence, and even symbiosis, as each situation might merit?
Pre-Sister Prejean, the nun who so deeply speaks out against executions, groups of Catholics, since forever, have stood outside in cold or heat of night protesting each execution of a human being in the United States. So have other religious groups, like the Quakers, who hold each God-created human life as sacred. So have many others protested the death penalty, both spiritual and secular groups
Perhaps that is the operative phrase, “human” ….for surely some such as Ted Bundy, implicated in the murder of dozens of long dark-haired young women who back in the 60s and 70s ‘took a ride with a stranger,’ and whose bodies Bundy left in deserts, down mine shafts and at river bottoms… would he be ‘human’?
Or is there another word that describes a person who has no fear nor mercy for innocent young women, bloody and torn, begging for their mothers, begging to be let go, promising they would never tell? Some would say, “animal,” some would say, ‘mental defective.” Perhaps there are other names.
Could we ask the non-PC question, What do we do with persons who are no longer persons? Once as babies, or as young children appreciably peaceful, but somehow, somewhere along the line, the brain unraveled and deteriorated into a malicious ganglia of kill synapses that looks like, talks like an actual person. But isn’t. And more so, is not in any way fit to live amongst human beings without doing them harm.
We kill animals who have rabies because we don’t know how to heal them. And we execute people who have murdered once, or serially.
And the subject of ‘taking another person’s life who has already taken another person’s life,’ is a huge one. My own side, I have struggled through these issues time and again, and I still stand for life. No killing. Even though I, like most people, can see how some should never have been allowed to walk the face of the earth, even though in my work as a post-trauma specialist working with families of murder victims; I witness and see the sheer glass mountain of pain the family endures for the rest of their lives.
I also see that for most survivors and survivor families, their pain of loss is not diminished at soul, spirit level by the murderer being executed or even dying of natural causes. There is a feeling of ego satisfaction perhaps in those moments after an execution, especially when it is a criminal like Timothy McVeigh, who kept giving interview after interview to media (another issue in itself), until finally, Judge Matsch, the westerner with real cowboy gear bona fides and a fine judicial mind, said, the buck stops here. McVeigh was executed.
The survivor families from the Murrah Building were spared from years and years more of media outlets making their chops on ‘interviewing the mass murderer of infants’ who thought extinguishing the tiny and precious lives of children was a necessary ‘collateral damage.’
Yet, there are arguments on all sides, most certainly also including the barbarous, and for many decades almost unquestioned means of literally burning a person to death with electricity, poisoning them, and other means used to put criminals to death. Though survivors of loved ones murdered might say any number of things about that, the surviving relatives do not put criminals to death. We do.
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But, things are changing. It used to be we most often heard about ‘dead man walking’ to his or her own execution. Now, it may be ‘dead man talking’… for a powerful group has taken up the plight, not of those who are guilty of murder on death row, but of those who are on death row and innocent.
This Sunday, the American Bar Association released a report saying that the death penalty systems are deeply compromised, applied unfairly in many cases, and inaccurately in many others. The ABA for three years studied eight states, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee
The ABA said every state with the death penalty should review its execution procedures before putting anyone else to death.
This link to the story at CNN also carries the link to download a PDF of the 31 page ABA report, with vital charts on something seldom spoken about regarding prison and death penalties: severity of mental illness.
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