Apr 25, 2025
We live in paradox, all of us, which I define in this instance as being both human and divine. Perhaps what I mean is better put this way: we humans are seriously flawed and messed up, petty, mean, and unkind and yet, we’re also seriously beautiful, capable of so much good, decency and kindness, such love and compassion. We can and must be what we are: complex, contradictory, authentic, false, flawed, scared and stupid, full of doubt, while also hoping for, and occasionally embodying the ideal, our better selves, wiser, kinder, smarter, surer. We can be both; we are both. Complications and contradictions come with and are an integral part of our human operating systems.
In that way, being all things, containing many worlds, women can be both lovers of men and righteously raging dismantlers of the patriarchy, a system that benefits all men, of which system too many men are completely and utterly blind. We can love, as a good friend of mine does, her gay son and still be a devout Catholic, a religion whose doctrine calls homosexuality a disorder. I gotta admit, I struggle with her on this, while acknowledging her Catholicism is bone marrow deep. Mind-boggling, and not my personal paradox, for sure, given this ex-Catholic actively disdains the Catholic Church, but then I’m not a fan of any religion or institutionalized system of belief, because they’re misogynistic by design, policy, and doctrine, and very often deeply racist as well, reflecting the culture or cultures at large.
I also acknowledge the good, the comfort, many religions provide in communities large and small, for individuals and groups. Still, like racism, and racist systems, the misogyny embedded in all religions is working exactly as intended, which is to repress and subjugate women world-wide while elevating men, their aims and needs, while bringing in big untaxable bucks.
Living in a state of paradox brings discomfort, walking the line between good and bad, the daily acts and gestures of kindness versus the overall weight of days, weeks, months, and actual centuries of inhumane humanity. I saw a meme recently where a European guy in a conquistador outfit was saying to a group of indigenous people, ‘You should be grateful! We got you to stop worshipping the sun!’, to which the indigenous said, ‘Dude, the sun is real!’, which is about where I stand on religious belief, period.
We can hope for better, while preparing for the worst. We can be both realists and dreamers, in fact I would say we have to be, especially in an age of despair and global issues that could, and may, overwhelm. We can believe and say we hate racism, yet still be racist, filled with unconscious biases learned at our grandparents’ knees; that’s certainly where I learned it, as well as in the newspapers and magazines covering the race riots and upheaval of the decades in which I was born and raised.
A Republican predecessor of mine in office as Town Supervisor told me he opposed a certain individual, also a Republican, becoming the new county attorney. The attorney in question was black, and this elderly white man went on to say that his opposition was because he hated negroes, all negroes. He then said, which I will never forget as long as I live, ‘You probably think I’m a racist.’ Well, Yes, yes, I do, because you are! But, I didn’t say that. I said, ‘We all are, all white people are racist, but we can be anti-racist, too, not letting our prejudices blind us, leading us to do and say things that are simply wrong or untrue.’ I don’t think he gave a toss what I said, or thought, but I’m glad at least I managed to both respond and stay polite. I guess? I probably could’ve done better.
It was my first year in office, the first of four long years dealing with casual racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-poor people in general statements from white male colleagues on the Board of Supervisors and in meetings all over my rural county, which I challenged every time, making the speakers at least a bit less comfortable. I hope.
Paradox is defined as ‘a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition, one that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, or logically unacceptable’. We are, by nature, by design, paradoxical creatures. I know people with bi-racial or black family members who think Black Lives Matter is nonsense or worse, a hate group; others with gay brothers or sisters who say ‘the gays’ are too ‘present’ in current American life. Huh?
We Americans and people all over the developed world have income and opportunity gaps that are ever-widening, but we also have an immense empathy gap; I believe they’re closely related and interwoven. How we fix it is challenging, but I suspect we all need to step outside our personal comfort zones when confronted with our own and other people’s ignorance and meanness to cross that line, the line between our cruel, lesser selves, toward our better, kinder and – I would argue – wiser versions of who we are.
Apr 24, 2025
*From Kripalu on line – which I joined as a member at the start of January because – well, because I knew that 2025 was going to be a toughie, to say the least, and that I would need all the help I could get to get through. My grandmother started her day reading from the Common Book of Prayer, but I prefer a different – yet equally valid and necessary – daily source of wisdom. I’m also trying to meditate every morning, which is going about how I thought it would go: choppy. Sitting still, focusing my busy brain on breath and nothing else: a perennial challenge. From the wise and good folks at Kripalu, where I go several times a year to remind myself to breathe, slow down, and take three plus hours of yoga daily, all to try to remain flexible and open (or, try to!!).
**Plus, homicide is tricky.
“Letting ourselves be angry is the first step to healing the hurt that is beneath the anger. If we don’t wrestle with anger, we will never get to the heartbreak. And if we don’t get to the heartbreak, we don’t get to the healing. Our anger arises over our pain and is only pointing back to our pain. To hold space for our pain is a way that we begin to take care of our pain. Taking care of our pain softens our hurt as we do the work of empathizing with ourselves. Empathizing with ourselves makes it easier to empathize with others around us. This empathy is at the root of the love and compassion that will begin to disrupt the systems that create harm.”- Lama Rod Owens, Kripalu
Love doesn’t always come packaged in the neat and predictable ways you might expect. Sometimes it comes in the form of anger or rage; wild like fire, feral, and burning everything up. We must allow anger into our experience. What if we could meet, face, and welcome anger in a way that acknowledges and honors its power as a force for personal, social, and spiritual change and transformation? Anger then becomes a tool, vehicle, and pathway of liberation for oneself, each other, and the world. A healthy fire that lights the way forward in radical change. When we allow ourselves to feel what we feel, including anger and pain, we gain the potential to connect to a fierce and compassionate kind of Love that wakes us up and cracks through systems of oppression and violence.
Apr 23, 2025
*Pope Francis has died, after a period of ill-health, at the age of 88. May he rest in peace. I am not a fan of the wealthy, misogynistic institution he led, nor of Catholicism as a whole. And, we cannot close the door on or our minds to imperfect allies in the fight for justice, peace, decency, and kindness. And climate. He made incremental progress for …progress. Was it enough? Hell no. Did it matter? Yes, to those who – unlike me – give a shit about the RCC. And, let’s be real here, it’s the 2nd largest religion on the planet – therefore, it matters by virtue of sheer numbers.
a poem by Adrienne Maree Brown on his teachings:
the teachings of pope francis
humble man he
donned the whole vatican
to remind us
this world is destined for the meek
he showed us a way
to speak the truth every day
such that the last words are justice
go look what he said
go look who he called
he showed us that
even when the christians forget
to not kill, especially in holy delusion
to protect the children
to show mercy
to speak truth, even as apology
to love the earth
to reject the pharaohs, the inner greed
even this old white man
steeped in sacred protocol
let his heart lead him to love
understand it was worship
the way he used each breath
the prayer is in the practice
understand it was a blessing
when he grasped the hem of a miracle through the veil thinned by ritual
and flew on home
His humility and decency were undeniable, and undeniably admirable. He advocacy for the poor, and refugees, was also admirable – as were his calls for peace in Ukraine and Gaza. And, he was an avid reader. I love me my fellow readers. Here’s Pope Francis on the importance of reading books below. May he Rest In Peace, may the church choose an even more progressive successor (a girl can dream), and may his memory be a blessing:
“Often during periods of boredom on holiday, in the heat and quiet of some deserted neighbourhood, finding a good book to read can provide an oasis that keeps us from other choices that are less wholesome. Likewise, in moments of weariness, anger, disappointment or failure, when prayer itself does not help us find inner serenity, a good book can help us weather the storm until we find peace of mind. Time spent reading may well open up new interior spaces that help us to avoid becoming trapped by a few obsessive thoughts that can stand in the way of our personal growth. Indeed, before our present unremitting exposure to social media, mobile phones and other devices, reading was a common experience, and those who went through it know what I mean. It is not something completely outdated.
Unlike audio-visual media, where the product is more self-contained and the time allowed for “enriching” the narrative or exploring its significance is usually quite restricted, a book demands greater personal engagement on the part of its reader. Readers in some sense rewrite a text, enlarging its scope through their imagination, creating a whole world by bringing into play their skills, their memory, their dreams and their personal history, with all its drama and symbolism. In this way, what emerges is a text quite different from the one the author intended to write. A literary work is thus a living and ever-fruitful text, always capable of speaking in different ways and producing an original synthesis on the part of each of its readers. In our reading, we are enriched by what we receive from the author and this allows us in turn to grow inwardly, so that each new work we read will renew and expand our worldview.”
Apr 22, 2025
Never heard of him. Thomas Szasz, but other than Sazz, rhymes with jazz, don’t ask me to pronounce it correctly, please, and worth quoting because we like to acknowledge wisdom in men, as it does exist, but especially highlighting those who question the accepted wisdom, as Szasz does, or did, given he died in 2012. And, TBH, he was a psychiatrist but with a Jungian twist (although he would probably deny this!!) and Jung is my guy, if it’s a contest between Jung and Freud (it ain’t, but you get my drift): “The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.”
“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.” (Amen to that, Tom)
“The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.”
“If you talk to God you are praying; if God talks to you you have schizophrenia.If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”
“Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by “cure.” What we do have are problems in living — whether these be biologic, economic, political, or sociopsychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.”
“In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” (I think this is my personal favorite)
“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”
“Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession. It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.” (No, maybe this one is my fave…)
“The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.” (or this one…LOL)
“Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61789-9/fulltext
Apr 21, 2025
I confess I never watched the Jerry Springer show, although I certainly knew what it was, from clips and headlines, and the general unavoidable knowingness of the flashiest flashpoints, highs and lows in the cultural zeitgeist. Springer, even having never watched it, was clearly a low. Netflix has a 2-part documentary about the show (oh great, only 2 parts, I can do that) which – having viewed it – made me more glad than ever that I didn’t tune in. And, it haunts me, a handful of the details, and how a few white men – male producers, a ‘respectable’ male star, male network executives, and a few women too – did this, made this trash, hurt people, especially vulnerable women.
The description of a triangle of geography from which 75% or more of their guests were pulled, a triangle including deeply poor, rural parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and southern Illinois, was tragically illuminating. This triangle was good for mining outrageous stories, but also ripe for a grotesque form of exploitation. Enter The Jerry Springer Show. What individual living in poverty in a rural community wouldn’t love to be made much of by city slickers from Chi-town, not recognizing the bone-deep cruelty at play, the patronizing, dehumanizing horror? Basically, guests were being used to provide shock value – “She’s sleeping with her husband’s brother!!” (or much, much worse; see below) – for which their guests received no counseling, no follow-up, and a major dose of public shaming and humiliation. But, the ratings were great, so who cares?
Conscienceless capitalism is a cancer on and in the body politic, on our civic lives, and in every sector of public life. Springer is dead, yet throughout the documentary he is portrayed as a good, smart, decent guy – which he most certainly might’ve been during his career as the Mayor of Cincinnati, and as a news reporter. But. By the time the Springer Show became a mainstream phenomenon – including beating Oprah in the ratings for an extended period – is it really plausible to cloak this very wealthy man, wealthy by way of exploiting and trashing others, as a hero, free of culpability? No, no it’s not.
Springer was a smart guy, he knew what was going on, he was the name on the show, and is as guilty as anyone else who worked there. If Ellen DeGeneres can be (and was) held responsible and accountable for an abusive work atmosphere at her named show, an atmosphere created by members of her crew and producers, a much lesser infraction of human decency by far than what went on at the Jerry Springer show, so must and should Jerry. Just because he had a developmentally disabled daughter who loved his sorry ass, and who he loved, does not excuse the abuses there, or make him a fucking hero. Ditto simply getting and staying rich.
One of the male producers quit the show because of a story line they were pursuing, a tale that involved a young woman, 18 or 19 years old, who was working as a prostitute in her home state, and whose father kept hiring her through the escort service being used. Yes, you read that right. Her dad was paying a service to fuck his own daughter. This male producer – whose dad worked on SNL, by the way – brought her to Chicago where she was ‘safe’ from her abusive dad in a hotel room paid for by the show, except, her father found her through the service again anyway, ‘hiring’ her for sex once more. The painful ugliness of that story made him quit the show, but guess what? He went back. Money talks, cowardly bullshit walks and then returns for more of same.
As I was watching that part, I felt sick to my stomach. I still do. Call the fucking police, I screamed at the TV, call a shelter for abused and exploited women and children, call a domestic abuse hotline, call your mother or someone who thinks you’re still a decent human being and check yourself, you dumb, cruel brother-fucker.
Similar to the WWE (another form of entertainment I’ve never indulged in) the conflicts on the show were staged and ginned up – literally in many cases with booze – pre-rehearsed with producers determined to get the most literal bang for their buck.
Conscienceless capitalism is a cancer on and in the body politic, on our civic lives, and in every sector of public life.
