One and Done...Torture

I will NEVER have any more children!! Okay, there are exceptions to this new rule that I am making about the future of my childbearing years. That being said, today I had one of the saddest experiences of my life. It felt like I was abandoning my heart and leaving it in the care of complete strangers. I was forced to drop my child off at DAYCARE!! Yes, my son is 3 and 1/2 years old, but this is (for all intents and purposes) his first experience being cared for by someone other than one of his parents during work hours. Sounds so strange. Those of you reading this who are parents are probably thinking..."Lucky!!! You NEVER had to rely on daycare until now!?! Wow, aren't you spoiled!" Yes, I was. But I also never had to let go of him at 6 or 8 weeks of age and acclimate myself (and him) to this type of separation. He is cognisant of what is happening. Hopefully, after we both get used to this, he will be ready for Kindergarten. I will never leave one of my children again. I just won't have any more children if I cannot afford a nanny to stay in my home and take care of my child. Sorry people I am not that strong.

Tea Party Demonstrates Hate

Tea partiers proved that I was right


Tea partiers vow revenge over health overhaul
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
So it turns out that, contrary to what I argued in this space a few weeks back, racism is not ``a major component'' of the so-called tea party movement. I am informed of this by dozens of tea party activists indignant and insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.

In other news tea party protesters called John Lewis a ``nigger'' the other day in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.

For the record, Lewis wasn't their only target.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon.

Rep. Barney Frank, who is gay, was called ``faggot.''

But it is Lewis' involvement that gives the Saturday incident its bittersweet resonance. The 70-year-old representative from Georgia is, after all, among the last living icons of the Civil Rights Movement. Or, as Lewis himself put it, ``I've faced this before.''

Indeed. He faced it in Nashville in 1960 when he was locked inside a whites-only fast-food restaurant and gassed by a fumigation machine for ordering a hamburger.

He faced it in Birmingham in 1961 when a group of Freedom Riders was attacked and he was knocked unconscious for riding a Greyhound bus.

Most famously, he faced it on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 45 years ago this month when his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers who charged a group of demonstrators seeking their right to vote.

In the very arc of his life, Lewis provides a yardstick for measuring American progress. The fact that he rose from that bridge to become a member of Congress says something about this country. But the fact that people demonstrating against healthcare reform chose to chant at him, ``Kill the bill, nigger!'' well, that says something, too.

Which is why tea party leaders have spent much of the last few days spinning the incident, deflecting renewed suggestions that their stated fears -- socialism, communism, liberalism -- are just proxies for the one fear most of them no longer dare speak. Some even faxed the McClatchy news bureau in Washington to suggest, without offering a shred of evidence, that the episode was sparked by Democratic plants within the crowd.

Amy Kremer, coordinator of the Tea Party Express, went on Fox News to dismiss what she called an ``isolated'' incident. Your first instinct may be to cede the benefit of the doubt on that one. It seems unfair to tar nine reasonable people with the hateful behavior of one lunatic.

But ask yourself: When is the last time organizers of protests on other hot-button issues -- say, abortion rights or globalization -- had to apologize for ``isolated incidents'' like these?

Moreover, given how often tea party leaders have been forced to disavow hateful signs and slogans and even the presence of organized white supremacist groups in their midst, is it really fair to use the word ``isolated''?

Is there not a rottenness here? And is not the unwillingness to call that rottenness by name part and parcel of the reason it endures?

No, my argument is emphatically not that every American who opposes healthcare reform is a closet Klansman. Certainly, people can have earnest and honest disagreements about that.

But by the same token, as these ``isolated'' incidents mount, as the venom and the vitriol increase to the point where even proxy words no longer suffice, it insults intelligence to deny that race is in the mix.

Not that the denial surprises.

Often we tell ourselves lies to spare ourselves truths. Had you asked them, the people who locked John Lewis inside that restaurant, the ones who mauled him at that bus station and smashed him down on that bridge, would not have said they acted from a rottenness within.

No, like the ones who called him ``nigger'' half a century later, they would have told you they were good people fighting for principle, trying to save this country from the liberals, the socialists and the communists.

They would not have said they were racists. Racists never do.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/24/1544302/tea-partiers-proved-that-i-was.html#ixzz0j7cWHk89

And Now, Once Again, for Your Reading Pleasure, I Present the Man who Reads my Mind

The fierce urgency of now: justice
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
`B lessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.'' -- Matthew 5:6

Ultimately, I suppose, what we're talking about is a clash between the sweet by and by and the fierce urgency of now.

The former is the refrain from a venerable gospel song that meditates on the bliss of life after life. The latter is a phrase from Martin Luther King's ``I Have A Dream,'' a passionate demand for justice, equality, and freedom, now.

Into the tension between these two disparate views of Christian mission stumbles one Glenn Beck. The Fox News showman recently ignited an uproar in the world of Christian ministry by attacking churches that preach a gospel of social and economic justice, i.e., a gospel that doesn't just promise relief in the sweet by and by, but seeks to effect change in the hard here and now. If your church preaches that, Beck told his radio audience, ``run as fast as you can.'' Social and economic justice, he said, are ``code words'' for communism and Nazism.

In response, the Rev. Jim Wallis, a preacher of the social gospel and president and CEO of the liberal religious activist group Sojourners, suggested on his blog that what Christians should run from is Beck himself. Beck, he wrote, attacks the very heart of their faith.

``When I was in seminary,'' he says, ``we made a study of the Bible and we found 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor, about God's concern for the left out, left behind, the vulnerable and God's call for justice. If I were ever to talk to Glenn Beck, I would hand him that old Bible from seminary where we cut out of the Bible every single reference to the poor, to social justice, to economic justice, and when we were done, the Bible was just in shreds. And I would hand it to him and put a sticker on front and say, `This is the Glenn Beck Bible.'''

I ran Beck's comments by two other preachers of my acquaintance, and they seconded Wallis. But Beck, says the Rev. R. Joaquin Willis of Miami's Church of the Open Door, is not alone. Many others, he said, ``would like to see many of us as pastors just come to church and deal with the spiritual needs of the people and not address those difficult day-to-day issues that make life so hard.''

Beck, adds Willis, ``speaks from the perspective of the entitled and the relatively well off and they don't see a need for social improvement. Anybody that's trying to improve the society is a communist to him.''

``It's hard,'' says Rev. Tony Lee of Community of Hope in Temple Hills, Md., ``for a church to sit and talk to somebody about how to change their lives and how to turn things around when the institutions around that person are broken. It's hard for me to talk to young people about how God can make a way and how they can move forward and be all they can be through God -- but their educational system is in pieces. What Glenn Beck is saying is, `Don't have a role in the shaping of the educational system.'''

For the record, Martin Luther King preached a social gospel. Even the preachers in the anti-abortion movement preach a social gospel.

And the idea that such people are enemies of the state is as visceral a reminder as you're likely to get of the paranoia and intellectual discontinuity that afflicts extremist conservatism. Fifty years ago, they saw communists behind every movie marquee and schoolhouse door. Now, Beck sees them in pulpits, too.

And I suppose the way not to be a communist in his eyes is to embrace a gospel that promises uplift in the sweet by and by -- and only then. But that's a lazy, complacent gospel, a gospel of self-satisfaction and I got mine, of egocentricity and look out for number one -- and it doesn't square with the gospel of feed my sheep and love your neighbor as yourself.

He thinks we should flee the church that preaches social and economic justice? I think you should flee the one that does not.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/21/1539820/the-fierce-urgency-of-now-justice.html#ixzz0j6UMCrJI

Duh!

“Why do we have an abortion rate 20% higher than France’s (and more than twice as high as Germany’s), especially considering most doctors here won’t perform them? The answer is any country that has universal health care, where contraception is free, where child care is free or inexpensive, where there is less poverty because people don’t become bankrupt over medical bills — those societies are simply going to have fewer unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. And there the mask gets pulled off the Bart Stupaks and the “Christians.” If the statistics show that countries with government-provided universal health care and nearly-free abortions are, in fact, the countries with the fewest abortions, then why on earth wouldn’t the Right be the first in line to support universal health care?” --Michael Moore (reposted from http://hiplove.tumblr.com)

Is This Really Too Much to Ask For??

FDR'S Second Bill of Rights (Taken from his State of the Union Address in 1944)

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are:

Opportunity
 The right to a useful and remunerative job…
 The right to a good education.
 The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies…

Security
 The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.
 The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
 The right of every family to a decent home.
 The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

Maybe the reason I keep getting pulled over is because I let THIS guy drive my car!!

They can't say what we can't accept By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Three little words.

That's what keeps bringing us back to this intersection of low comedy and pathos. Three words, none longer than three letters -- and yet, some of us still find them nearly impossible to say.

Three words: I am gay.

If he'd been able to say those words, who knows what Roy Ashburn might be today? But we already know what his inability has made him: an object of ridicule.

Ashburn is a Republican state senator in California. He has always been rather reliably anti-gay in his law making, voting against virtually every gay-friendly piece of legislation from marriage equality to a simple motion to set aside a day in honor of Harvey Milk, a gay political icon who was assassinated in 1978.

So naturally, we're all shocked -- shocked, I tell you, shocked! -- to learn that Ashburn himself is gay. This revelation came after he was arrested for drunk driving early this month. Turns out he'd done his drinking at a gay bar.

``I am gay,'' he told a conservative radio host. As for his anti-gay record? He said he was just following the wishes of the people he served.

Because who wants a leader who thinks for himself?

Then there's Eric Massa, a now-former Democratic representative from New York. He stands accused of sexual harassment by a number of his male staffers who claim he groped them. It has since come to light that he faced similar accusations two decades ago when he was in the Navy.

Massa who, according to The Washington Post, shares a townhouse with several unmarried male staffers, still declines to speak the three little words, but he confirmed the latest charges in a bizarre interview with Glenn Beck on Fox News. He also tried to portray it as non-sexual. ``Not only did I grope [a male staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe, and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday.''

Oh. Well, that explains it, right? When we turn 50, all us manly men like nothing better than to jump atop one another and tickle ourselves silly. Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Alan Greenspan . . . all the manly men do it.

Sorry. As I said, low comedy. And pathos.

Because for all the laughter these men evoke with their lies to self and tortured rationalizations to us, I find I have also, hidden in the breath between ha and ha, a certain bittersweet pity. There's just something ineffably pathetic in the inability of these middle-aged men, in the Year Of Our Lord 2010, post-Will & Grace, post Ellen DeGeneres, post-Barney Frank, Elton John, Meredith Baxter and Neil Patrick Harris, to simply stand up and say those three simple words.

Perhaps that sounds judgmental. Perhaps it is.

But if so, it is a judgment fueled by the cowardice and mendacity of those who lack the courage to be what they are, by anger at the hypocrisy of a Roy Ashburn willing to sell out his own for 40 shekels of political approval from those who would hate him if they only knew, and, ultimately, by the realization that we have been at this intersection too many times before.

So you have to wonder: how many Massas and Ashburns, how many James Wests, Ted Haggards, Mark Foleys and Larry Craigs do we have to see, how many shocked spouses and embarrassed children do we have to endure, how many lies, alibis and justifications do we need to hear, before we accept the obvious: Gay is not a choice, gay is not a sin, gay is not a shame.

Gay simply is.

And their inability to say ``I am gay,'' doesn't just speak poorly of gays and lesbians.

Because if what we see here at the intersection of low comedy and pathos indicts certain of them for cowardice and mendacity, you could argue that it indicts the rest of us for much the same thing.

After all, their inability to say what they are only reflects our inability to accept it.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/17/1532939/they-cant-say-what-we-cant-accept.html#ixzz0idooyzpX

Together, Not Torn: St. Patrick's Day Mass for Immigration Reform

Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland. However, he was born in Britain. As a teen he was captured and sold into slavery in Ireland. His enslavement awakened his faith. After 6 years he escaped back to Britain, studied in Gaul (France), and later returned to Ireland as a missionary and succeeded in converting many of the island's tribes to Christianity.

Legend also credits Patrick with teaching the Irish about the concept of the Trinity by showing people the shamrock, a three-leaved clover, using it to highlight the Christian dogma of "three divine persons in the one God."

Saint Patrick's Day reminds us of the contribution of the Irish to American Society. It is a story of struggles as an immigrant group that faced blatant discrimination in America. With their faith, family, and hard work they were integral to the growth and development of our country overcoming negative stereotypes to become one of the most successful ethnic groups in 20th century America. Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day!

Does this remind you of any particular immigrant group facing the same undeserved scrutiny today??

Questions on Relationships answered by Yahoo

When typing in questions on Yahoo Answers, my friend pointed out to me that if he simply keyed in the words, "Why do Lat...," All of these questions popped up that read, "Why do Latinas not date White guys?" The following was the top rated answer by the person asking the question: "i never see young white male latina girl couple. i do see them alot in texas but never saw them growing up in new jersey and the couple is always midddle age i think latina girls think they will lose cool points if they date a white guy in high school or college. me personally love latinas!!!"

The second question was "Why aren't White men interested in dating Latinas?" The following answer was the top rated by the person who wrote the question: "To be honest, I think alot of white men are under the impression that Latinas are not interested in dating them. Which is funny when I read yahoo answers and hear from Latinas saying that you guys are interested, lol. I think being friendly helps alot. Most white guys I know open up alot easier if they think the girl is open minded, and being friendly is the best way to show that without asking him straight out. You could also mention in passing how you think certain white guys are attractive as well, (like if you happen to find a certain white celebrity attractive, for example). That would send the message that you are open to the idea of dating a white man. Just like you guys are not sure if we like you, we're not sure if you like us. I'm white myself, and I wouldn't mind knowing what we white guys can do to let you Latinas know that we are interested.

Thank you for for what you said about white guys, btw. That was very sweet. I feel the same way about Latinas. Most white guys would love to date a latina, because you guys are warm hearted, interesting to talk to, have beautiful skin, and amazing curves. And unlike white girls, latinas don't suffer from flat butt syndrome. :)"

The Illogical Nature of Hope

There is a reason my blog is called Amor y Dolor. I believe that these two things are the main components of life. It is amazing how at different stages in one's life the overpowering emotion can be love, but in an instant that changes to pain. When stress levels and sadness take over it is hard to keep them at bay.

People always use these colloquialisms to talk about the bad things that happen in our lives as if they only happen to show us how great our lives really are. When, in truth, maybe our circumstances were not that great to begin with. "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade;" "What doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger;" "The darkest night is always just before the dawn;" "God never gives you more than you can handle." All of these phrases attempt to inspire hope. However, sometimes life doesn't give you lemons with which to make lemonade; it gives you poo, with which one could arguably make a compost pile, that is if you have a yard to put it in; but if not, you are just stuck with a large build up of poo in the corner of your bedroom. What doesn't kill you, can cause you stress and pain and suffering. Sometimes when waiting on that false hope we liken to "the dawn, " we are just stuck waiting for something better to happen, to take the pain out of our lives. I also believe that God is never the one to put stress, pain, and sadness in our lives.

So, instead of pining your emotional state on false hope given by some trite statements, the only way hope even makes sense is to make your own "hope," by creating actual things to look forward to...in your own life.

Musings on the 2010 Winter Olympics

For some reason, I get very excited for the Olympics (and the World Cup, but that is another story for another time...THIS SUMMER :). I watched the entire Opening Ceremonies with my family and my partner. I get patriotic when I watch the Olympics...I do not feel particularly patriotic when watching the United States of America bomb bunkers where "terrorists" may or may not be "hiding," but something about the peaceable assembly of all of these countries coming together to compete in the sports that they love makes me feel like peace is possible...within our grasp. Yes, I know that idea is idealistic to the point of being unREAListic, but I don't care. I find new "heroes" to root for from all over the globe. My son was into the spectacle as well. We cheered for the Korean and Canadian women figure skaters because they inspired us. For the most part we cheered on Team USA, but there were many exceptions. On our list of favorite US Athletes; Apolo Anton Ohno, Shaun White, Shani Davis, Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso, Jennifer Rodriguez, the chubby bobsled dude, Bode Miller, and many more...

The best part was watching the highlights before the Closing Ceremonies. After watching all the great feats of athletic prowess my son looked at me and said, "Mommy, when I am a 'dude' (to him, this means grown man), I am going to be in the 'lympics!" To which I replied, "Really? That's awesome! What sport do you want to compete in?" His response, "NINJA!" Another highlight was a quote from my 65 year old, Stanley, KY born and raised mother who said as she watched the Closing Ceremonies, "You know Canada did a great job of hosting the Olympics this year. They make me proud to be an American!" Yes, my MOM gets it...America is a CONTINENT, not a COUNTRY!