All of these people are sick and dying because they went on with their lives because their government told them they had it under control. All of us unemployed Americans are unemployed through no fault of our own. We could lose our homes, be unable to buy food, lose every penny we didn’t have before because if the inequities of life in a “great” economy. Nurses and doctors have to beg for supplies. Governors have to bid against other states for life saving equipment and have to build hospitals out of convention centers. And yet you can wake up every morning bemoaning liberals and food stamps and Medicare for all every morning in your support of a man pretending to be a president. We expect so much of our doctors and our nurses and our mailmen and our grocery clerks but we expect so little from our president. And then we have a full display of his grasp on mental illness every single day during his rambling incoherent press conferences where he says stupid things like people want to work next to doctors who say the whole country should be on lockdown. If you the people who don’t read newspapers because they are “fake” media and you don’t watch his press conferences because you are busy playing games on Facebook you are doing yourselves a disservice, for you you have no idea just how unsuitable this psychopath is and you will vote for him again in November,
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As I was in Target today I was behind this lovely woman with two lovely four year old girls. They were just adorable. Until they started crying that is. I still thought they were adorable as I’m waiting for grandchildren but everybody around me looked at her in that disapproving way we always look at mothers whose children misbehave in public. Gasp.
While I was driving home I thought about the people in charge of watching these poor immigrant children the Trump Administration is separating from their parents and putting in cages or barracks or concentration camps whatever you want to call them. Now let me add that I believe these people are just doing their jobs, the ones they are paid to do by our government, but I wondered how do they sleep at night? I’m reckoning very poorly unfortunately. That last sentence probably makes their job so much harder.
I’m not an expert on human nature or humanity for that matter but how hard must it be to go to work everyday and hear crying children. I know how two beautiful little girls warranted nasty looks in Target. Children crying for their parents, maybe not sleeping well themselves in the conditions they are kept in, maybe sick with the flu since the Trump Administration would not accept the free flu vaccines from doctors. How awful must it be to go to work and then come home and be thankful for your own children. It must break their hearts. It’s all done in secret too because we don’t want photographs or audiotapes showing how devastating this is for children. Easier to label them illegal than it is to call them children. Easier to keep anybody who wants to help them away too. It’s a deterrent I suppose.
But really what is it doing to the people paid to watch them? They are not making $770 a head for watching them, they are civil servants probably making a decent salary but is it enough to have to endure what they must endure? How many times have you been in a room full of children, one cries they all cry? It must be like that all day long, it must be as traumatizing for them and their families as it is for the children missing their childhood.
I usually share my opinions on my Facebook page much to the chagrin of my Trump supporting friends but I wanted to write something longer than my usual rant. It’s really important to put this out there in a way that doesn’t target people doing their jobs and takes into consideration the feelings and depression that must come from being a child or being a worker under these conditions. I am tired of the bullying and vitriol that comes with being on either side of this president. I really just want you to think about it. How do they sleep at night and what are we doing to humanity?
My wish for all of them is that someday soon we return to some kind of normal and all these people, children and adults, can get back to their lives and get some sleep. I hope God watches over all of them in the meantime.
This is for my young friends for it is you who will be affected most by what is happening today. It is you who may fall in love with someone and not have your marriage validated. It is you who may find yourself with a child you are not capable of raising. It is you who may get some innocuous pre-existing condition that you cannot be insured because of. It is your future we are fighting for as mothers, sisters, daughters. Life can be very difficult with many unforeseen consequences. It appears that at this moment there is nothing we can do to stop this horrible Supreme Court nomination but there is something you must do in November, vote. Vote like your life depends on it because it does. I thought these kind of hardships were over that pitted men against women, the young against the old, the sick against the healthy. But they are not as a mother that scares the crap out of me. I will vote in November and I will hope that all of these old white men who put party and their base above their country will be voted out so a new beginning will start. I feel this way about Republicans and Democrats. The old has to be taken away so we can have growth. So we can start over, so we can stop going backward. So we can work together for equality and a better tomorrow.
What does it mean? Really, does it mean spending our dollars making bombs and listening to American’s phone conversations or does it mean feeding our children, educating them, giving them a future? Have we even read our bibles? Have we even looked ourselves in the eye and ever asked the questions what would Jesus do? What would he do? We know what he would have done. He would have taken the hungry to a river sat them by the riverside and fed them. He would have said blessed are those who are poor in spirit instead of institutionalizing them. He could raise the dead not drop bombs on them. Who the hell do we think we are?
We have thrown so much money to the rich banks controlling our countries finances but we bemoan feeding hungry children. We spend so much money on the damn warmongering military industrial complex and defense industry while we bemoan buying books or saving football programs in high schools. We gutted arts education in our school, can’t things be beautiful anymore? Can’t we appreciate a hard day of work whether it comes from a banker or a cabinet maker or a hand embroidery artist?
We in a collective way don’t value people anymore. We value rich people who have learned to make their money by stepping on the backs of the people below them. We value sneakers made in China with a celebrities name on it. We value gun makers who make guns capable of shooting down an entire classroom in 5 minutes. What about the visionaries investing in our kids and their futures? Our kids don’t need freaking guns and ammo they need vegetables and books. They need the American dream.
Times have changed, we have changed. But we haven’t changed that much. Men still need a good paying job and an advocate to make sure they keep that job. Kids still need food in their bellies to think while in school, they still need a hug. They still need a trip to a museum every once in a while to remember what it was like when life was simpler. They need to remember when a man woke up in the morning and went out to a field and brought things back to feed his family or when an artist could sit for days and make a masterpiece. We have come so far in this country that unless it is our kid we don’t even care how people feed their families and how to bring back a modicum of dignity to the world.
Now don’t get me wrong the world has shifted and people, ordinary people are starting to remember the way this country was built but we are not led by the visionaries in the small towns, by the charities that feed the poor left behind, nor by the churches that struggle to make people believe. We are being led by the politicians who secretly work for the powerful, for the war mongering military industrial complex. Ten years ago we actually voted for a man who was the CEO of one of the most influential defense contractors in the world. How did that happen? When did we sell our country to nonstop war in foreign lands while our children are starving here? What has happened to our country and where is our moral compass? How did we the people of the United States allow them to steal our country right out from under our feet? We were too busy watching television and being divided down to the lowest common denominator instead of raised up in the all for one mentality. It’s time to get back to the way things used to be with the acknowledgement that people are different, they believe in different ideologies, different beliefs, and different lifestyles. But in the end we really haven’t changed all that much, we still need food, a roof over our head, a good book and someone to love. In other words we still need the American dream and in God we Trust we might just find it.
Floating
She was floating in the middle of a lake, the most beautiful color of blue she had ever seen. The water was so still and serene. The lake was surrounded by tiny white crystals of sand, the beautiful smooth feeling sand of the tropics not the coarse sand of the Northeast. As she was floating she could see all way down to the bottom, seeing the reflection of the small pebbles on the bottom in the sun.
She was out there alone, immobile in peace. She had nowhere to go, nobody to see, no responsibilities at the moment. She was in complete peacefulness. A beautiful serenity enveloped her. She had such a beautiful time floating around aimlessly drinking in all the beauty. She was floating far enough out there where nothing could reach her except a cool, gentle breeze. She felt so safe and secure out there floating around. It was as if nothing could reach her and she could just find a moment’s peace. Floating, floating, floating. She wanted to bottle that feeling so that she could feel it all the time.
And then she opened her eyes in her living room. Namaste.
I Need You
I need you to be here to pick me up when I fall,
I need you to be here when I hear the children cry,
I need you to be here when I see the waters overflow the shoreline,
I need you to tell me it will not start raining and never stop,
I need you to kiss the back of my neck and remind me that I am loved,
Unconditionally, totally.
I need you here in body not just in spirit.
I need you when I see the connections everywhere and do not understand what they mean,
I need you to find me when I am lost.
I need you to bring me to heaven on earth.
I need you to remind me that everything will be all right while the world collapses around us.
While children go hungry, while woman are victimized, when our brothers are angry and need comfort themselves.
Show me you are real when I need to believe in something.
We all need to believe in something.
We are all one and when one of us is in chaos we are all in chaos.
I need you when I look into the eyes of my brother and feel pain.
I need you where are you? Show me you are real.
I’ve worked so hard to find you, where are you?
I need you when I hear the voices crying out in pain.
When I get the feeling that someone that I love is alone and despondent.
If you’ve given me the ability to feel pain please come and give me the ability to feel joy.
I need you please find me. Please find us all.
Hold my hand and together we can change the world if only for a moment.
I need you to help me find peace and love and understanding.
I just need you.
So the geniuses in Washington are going to allow millions of federal workers to lose their jobs so they can prove to all of us just how little they care about the people they serve. Obamacare is the law. It was passed into law years ago. It is now finally available to all the people who need it and they want to rewrite the law and send our country into turmoil. Does it even matter that these congressmen and their families get free health care for life just for screwing up our government for a few years?
Of course the law is complicated, it was written that way because god forbid we just have single payer health care like all the other civilized countries in the world. We couldn’t just make it easy for everybody to just go to the doctor when they are sick could we? No we have to make them jump through hoops and finally when they see the light at the end of the tunnel, pull the rug out from underneath them.
We can spend money on countless wars, to spy on our own people, to take our education system and standardize it so much that we can’t even use the brains we were given but we can’t let Obamacare go into effect and help the millions of people who need it.
I think while they dither around with our lives, making people who are desperate even more desperate by cutting off food stamps, and delaying health care every single one of them should have their government paid(by we the people I might add) health care cut off so perhaps they would know what it is like to be sick and not able to pay for your treatment. I don’t think they should get paychecks either(but of course the health care lobby and the gun lobby will make damn sure that they are taken care of anyway). We are a government bought and sold by the lobbyists in this country.
They don’t want health care, presto change no health care. They don’t want gun control, even after the slaughter of innocents. We don’t want people to be able to buy milk and cheese for their children no food stamps. And then we wonder about the mental health system in our country. We live in the greatest country in the world and yet we don’t know how to take care of our own people. Sad really. No wonder so many people in this country with health care live on anti depressants and Viagra.
The world is sleeping. God gave us brains for a reason. If he wanted us not to use them he would have just made us sheep. All of us, we could have spent all day grazing and procreating and living peacefully in the meadows. But he made human beings and he gave us brains.
Why did he give us brains, so we could play Candy Crush all day or watch meaningless sitcoms and dramas that poison our brains, or did he give us brains so that we could look at our leaders and hear their words and look at their actions and see the difference between what they say and what they do.
I saw President Obama go to the latest memorial for gun violence and give yet another speech about gun violence. He clearly has a brain, but what has he been able to do about gun violence? NOTHING because people in the United States are more interested in playing Candy Crush and watching the Kardashians than they are in how many people are getting mowed down in minutes because of useless, senseless gun violence. Or maybe they are not more interested in these mindless matters they just think their thoughts and their wishes for peace are ignored and there is no reason to pay attention.
I see the government listened when they were interested in dropping yet more bombs on another Middle Eastern country and they couldn’t vote for it because people in the US are sick of the senseless, horrible wars. We want peace, we want peace right here in the United States. We want an end to the senseless gun violence that shatters the peace and quiet in our neighborhoods too. How can we even begin to lecture other countries on how they treat their people when we treat our own like sheep who have no thoughts and no rights to what they think are important. Just throw a couple of words about terrorists in other countries and hope nobody pays attention to the terrorists that are shooting up our schools and our businesses and bringing metal detectors to a school near you.
We don’t need metal detectors we need better gun control laws. I’m not saying we should outlaw all guns but there should not be easy access to a WMD right here in our own country. When you can kill dozens of people in minutes that is a WMD. The only other way you can kill that many people that quickly is to build a bomb and if someone named Mohammed did that we’d be in yet another war, but we let terrorists terrorize us every day with names like Klebold and Alexis. It’s time to put an end to that kind of terror too. It’s time for Washington to act. Now before yet more people die this way.
Charity begins at home. It begins with each and every one of us. Why do we have so many charities for so many worthwhile causes when our government spends so much money on war? Wouldn’t it be simpler if we paid for food stamps and education and job creation for our own people and had a charity for war? We could use the money to educate children instead of incarcerating them. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to spend money finding ways to feed our children? What about supplementing our family farms to feed our starving people or supplementing restaurants for their surplus food? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to fund research into curing some clearly curable diseases instead of paying for expensive health care? There are many holistic ways to deal with diseases that are not fatal and are quality of life diseases rather than medicating everything. Perhaps we could get our college students to help out in early morning classes and afterschool programs. It would give them valuable work experience and children would be more likely to understand someone who is closer to their age group. There are so many people ready and willing to work , they volunteer every day. Pay them and it’s a win, win.
Wouldn’t the United States be more of a beacon to the rest of the world if it spent more time figuring out the answers to it’s domestic agenda than it would bombing another country? It could be an experiment in how to get things done and help our neighbors. We do it anyway when we donate to a charity or our local church so why don’t we change our priorities. Yes I know we are a country built on innovation and the American way of finding a good paying job, going to work every day, getting our health plans, starting a business and picking ourselves up by the bootstraps but that isn’t really the way it works anymore. There are people out of work who cannot find a job, who cannot feed their families, who cannot pay for health care all the while we are wasting our governments time and resources war mongering. Put them to work helping others less fortunate. Use their educations in non profits and innovation. Help us to help ourselves, after all charity does begin at home and a functioning US is much more attractive to the world than an overbearing bully trying to shove ideals onto other countries that we don’t even practice anymore. It’s just my opinion for what it is worth.
I’ve been working on peace ornaments and peace pillows trying to bring myself some peace the last few days. It has not been easy but try I must. I believe the world is in a whole heap of trouble and we need to end the chaos within ourselves to fix it. I don’t watch the news anymore. I monitor very carefully what I let in, but you really can’t avoid what is going on unless you live in a cave in the middle of nowhere or a Tibetan mountaintop.
The latest is yet another mass shooting. Why do these things happen? I will never know, we can blame it on guns, we can blame it on mental illness or we can blame it on ourselves. We are a society that likes our toys and our beliefs and when the two mesh together bedlam occurs. But we are the masters of our own ship, the captains of our destiny. At least that is what we wish for, but how many people live the life they’ve imagined?
We grow up with dreams and ideals and then we let them slide while we look for a real job so we can be productive. Where has that lead us? To rampant unemployment and the biggest gap between the rich and the poor in history. What does that do to our countrymen? It makes them lose hope, lose faith, lose their self esteem and move into a never ending cycle of not having enough, not being enough.
Our kids learned this from us too. I think youthful optimism is still available and I know I am youthfully optimistic even though I’m a realist along with being an idealist. But so many people who have played by the rules, gotten a job, gotten married, had the children, the white picket fence are watching it disappear and they just can’t handle it. Who can they blame? I guess it’s easy to blame the non documented workers that took their laboring jobs or the companies that outsource their jobs to countries which don’t play the same rules the United States does, but it’s actually bigger than that it’s self responsibility. We shop in Walmart, we eat animals manufactured specifically to be killed(could you eat the family dog), we allow poisons to be rained down on us to kill the mosquitos, we hang onto our guns for hope that if the government or a rampant gang of terrorists might come knocking at our door we will be ready. But are we ready? No not even close, all we are doing is killing ourselves, killing the environment, and creating an anxiety ridden society who is one crisis away from shooting up another building and unfortunately we have the guns to do it.
I want to be optimistic, I want to be at peace but I’m an empath so even if I don’t watch the news, or don’t read the newspaper I feel the chaos of the world inside myself. I hear the voices of my friends and countrymen who wonder what will happen to them if they lose their job? What will happen to their kids if the economy doesn’t improve? What will happen if a flood takes away their home or if we end up in yet another endless war. Since 9/11/2001 everything seems like an endless war and we’ve made everyone else the enemy, but the truth is we are the enemy. We allow it to happen. We look at others who haven’t coped and we pass judgment. But sooner or later that other will be us, we are all in this together. There are not enough toys or drugs to save us from ourselves. We have to do it ourselves.
When the constitution was written it didn’t take into account all the changes in technology and weaponry that make this world dangerous at times. Nobody writing the constitution imagined a gun that could kill 20 schoolchildren in a matter of minutes. Nobody imagined technology that could make it rain or forecast the rain. Nobody imagined all the toxins available to kill all the bugs or make chickens big enough to feed millions. We let ourselves get carried away and now we are paying the price for it. It’s time to be simple again. To look in the mirror and say let’s just be peaceful today and do something that makes us happy and peaceful, no matter what that is.
I’m off the soapbox, nobody reads this stuff anyway. But now I’m going to hand embroider and bring a little more peace into my own life so I can practice what I preach. Find love, find peace, be happy
DebraAnn Left Of Center 