Hey, just because Im young does not mean I do not understand and unfortunately see the world of today in all its corrupted and selfish shame.
Many people are and have been ignorant and greedy, and our world, our planet is suffering for it. I have seen a lot of cowardly and unfair shit in my 17 years already. Its all about the money, isnt it? Well guess what? Theres more to life than money. I hear that many people of America are complaining against the New Health Insurance Proposal and im a little shocked as to why? I may be British, but Im not stupid and I take pride in NOT being ignorant.
Im aware of the political and global 'goings-on' in the world; and I think more people should be. There are many people who do not know who their own President/Priminister is, which is quite shocking, mostly because they CHOOSE not to care. This health insurance issue IS IMPORTANT.
Just because other less fortunate people cannot afford insurance DOES NOT mean they should suffer. How can anyone, regardless or their beliefs or backgrounds stand up and admit that they believe this. My mother is quite ill at the moment and will be having an operation in October. If we had no health insurance, we would not be able to afford it, and her illness may turn terminal.
They are far worse cases out there but i have offered you a personal example. People need to realise that money and looks or whatever only get you so far, but whats in lack of supply at the moment is common sense, honesty, compassion and generosity.
All I can say to those that are lacking is this:
Sort your life out you disgraceful excuse for a human being. >:( !!!!!
BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE
How to Protect Yourself When You Suspect Racial Profiling
Well, racial profiling is in the news again.
Prominent Black scholar and Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was recently arrested after a forced entry into his own home. Dr. Gates alleges that he was arrested for spite after he'd presented his identification, then repeatedly insisted that the officer provide his name and badge number.
Racial profiling cannot be defended. It is a horrible affront to the constitution, the rule of law, and to every law-abiding citizen, but I'm not addressing that issue here. The one issue that is at least as important as racial profiling itself, is how to best protect yourself if you suspect you're the victim of racial profiling. After all, that could become a matter of life and death.
BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREEA Simple Question: Would God Condone Torture?
Maybe I'm missing something but I find it uniquely ironic that some the same people who clamor for prayer in school, claim that same-sex marriage is an abomination under God,who insist that America is a Christian nation, and fight for the Biblical version of creationism over science, are also the very same people who demand the right to be armed to the teeth with some of the most destructive private weapons on Earth, the right to slaughter and bring the most excruciating kinds of death upon God's other creatures for nothing more than their own entertainment, and now, condone the torture of other human beings as a legitimate tool of government. Is it just me, or does anyone else see this as the very height of hypocrisy?
I’ve also posted this blog entry on my blog: http://www.theparadigmshiftshere.com
...we all need to dig much deeper - in unity, compassion, tolerance, forbearance, understanding, generosity, and respect - to first understand one another and then to realize and accept that we are essentially from the same 'mold' - if we are divided today, it isn't because of anything other than our own ignorance and choosing...
...it's very easy to point fingers and lay blame, but extremely difficult to take ownership...
...I am very tempted to rant on this in my trademark 'tongue-in-cheek' style, but in re-reading Barack Obama's 'Audacity of Hope', I'm beginning to resonate with his wise choice of speaking the language of inclusion, of conversation rather than confrontation...so, here's my humble attempt...
...as The Aga Khan eloquently pointed out in an interview: "...Rather than shouting at each other, we should be learning to listen to each other..."
For me, Joe the Plumber has a negative connotation. In the Nixon years the White House Plumbers went to prison for their dirty deeds! Just use Wikipedia to search for "Nixon Plumbers" and you'll see the story of deceit as they tried to get Nixon elected. They became known as the White House Plumbers or "the plumbers".
Why does the current "Joe the plumber" want to have this kind of association? Is he ignorant of political American history?
Senator Obama wants education to flourish in our country again. Without education, ignorance will bring our country into a black hole. Joe the plumber appears to be a prime example why we need to make education a priority.
Unity or Seperatation?
Last night at a church gathering we go to every Wednesday night, a woman who just found out I was voting for Barack started spewing anger, lies and hatred. I was dumbfounded. She said she saw this all on Newsweek and that it was a fact. Of course, there was nothing I could say. It took everything in my power to stay seated and not leave and never look back. I was shocked, saddened and horrified at the anger in her voice.
The Klu Klux Klan had reared it's ugly head this month in my town. They wrapped their propoganda around the only newspaper here in Ada and distributed that around some neighborhoods here.
There is only one reason why such hate comes out. There is only one man who created this. Ignorance is such a sad thing.
The core of my belief system is that we are all equals. My faith is based on Love where Hatred is seen as that being without alignment with God.
As I try to deal with this, I have someone to look up towards. Someone who creates unity rather than preying on ignorance and propogating hate.
No one is exempt from their faults. No one is exempt from having a gift either. Some of us are fortunate enough to share our gifts with those around us.
Mr. Obama, Thank you for sharing your gift with us. :-)
In no way will I ever be able to explain to you how crap these past few weeks have been for me. But, suddenly, like a rodent poking its snout out of the crack between the stove and the wall, good things have started to creep into the room. I seem to almost be about to be employed in some fashion. And now, this little ray of sunshine has arrived. I sincerely hope someone nominates Ms. Westfall for something. I am posting the article in its entirety:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20235099,00.html
People Exclusive
By Sandra Sobieraj Westfall
Now that Gov. Sarah Palin's daughter has celebrated her 18th birthday, the GOP vice-presidential candidate says she's hoping Bristol and fiancé Levi Johnston – who are expecting a baby in December – will tie the knot well before the date next summer the young couple had been eyeing.
You're not one of those I-broke-a-fingernail outdoorswomen?SP: No time for that, no. You have to be tough out there. You don't come back on the boat if you're going to whine and complain about being cold or tired. You do what you have to do to get the job done. Tina Fey's got you locked up. Who would play Todd?SP: Tim McGraw. That's what they say back home, anyway. Some of the kids tell our kids, "Your dad, when he wears his hat, he looks like Tim McGraw." It's good. What types of things do you argue or bicker about back home?SP: We don't have a whole lot of time to argue and bicker. It's a team effort how we get from point A to point B every day with everything that needs to get done. TP: The normal challenges, it's the kids' schedules, where they go and who's coming over. And that's mostly fallen to you now –TP: Well we've always shared that responsibility, especially with my [oil-drilling] slope job. So, when I'm gone with work, she's got both hats on. When I come home, I try to carry both hats, as long as I don't disrupt their schedule. In normal times, who does what around the house? SP: Todd grew up helping to raise a lot of sisters and it was expected that he would be a helpmate to his parents and siblings. It's just par for the course now that he does as much as I do around the house. In fact you probably do more [laughs], with my busy schedule. Todd has an unconventional work schedule: gone summers commercial fishing and then week-on, week-off in his [oil] job. When he is home, he takes over. TP: I have to. If I don't then there's no Iron Dog [snowmobile racing], there's not all the good stuff.
Mm-hmm. The payoffs.SP: No. It's truly a partnership where we share the workload because … We've never really looked at it as a workload. It's a pleasure to be home, it's a pleasure to be working with the kids. We enjoy cooking, we enjoy cleaning up together. It's just what we do. Who's the better cook?SP: It depends on what we're cooking. I'm a better –TP: She's a good cook.SP: I'm a better cooker. You're a better, like he can smoke salmon better than anybody else that I know. And can salmon. We eat a lot of wild Alaska seafood and we're trying different recipes all the time with that. You do a couple of those dishes better than I do.TP: Barbecue, yeah.SP: Barbecued salmon. Tina Fey plays you sort of bubble-headed. You obviously –SP: That's funny, I play her bubble-headed, too, when I imitate her. – but you don't get to be governor without being smart, so how would you describe your smarts?SP: How would I describe my smarts?
There are four crucial weeks left to the American elections, a very long time to test political fortunes. To the Democrats it must feel like the end is so tantalisingly near yet so achingly far away, in view of what is possible for both sides of the race up to then. Already, the Republicans are baring their nasty fangs. Bereft of innovative ideas, deprived of any real leadership and with no obvious solutions to any of the country's pressing problems (goodness knows there are many!), the intreprid Republicans, headed by John MCcain and Sarah Palin, have decided to take leave of their collective senses and get stuck into the mud instead.
The problem with accusing your opponent of anything at all that smacks of smear, slander or simple nastiness, is that two can play the same game. Having been in the line of 'terrorist for friend' fire all weekend, Barack Obama's team is now hitting back with a short documentary about McCain and Keating, an association that would have been better left unearthed in view of what is happening in the current economic meltdown.
Coming soon in a theater near you ...
"Sarah Palin and the attack of the flat-worlders."
See it and weep for the Republic (but not for the Republicans, who filmed this horror movie.)
From The New York Times, September 21, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama, By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.
In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.
A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.
More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.
When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?
From the moment Obama wrenched the primary from Bill and Hillary’s cold dead hands, our Obama has been lusting after votes he’s never going to get. Let’s call it the mean and ignorant vote. Isn’t that what it is, the flat earth society? Mostly this part of the great American electorate wonders how a black guy can run for president.
No amount of sticking up for the death penalty, guns, and huging the anti-abortion, anti-peace, greed-is-good-lunatics will put lipstick on him. Look, he’s black, did you notice? Case closed.
However, the tremendous cost of media, polling and campaigning for this effort has made a lot of the Obama team rich. The question is: are you guys now rich enough that you can go back to getting Obama elected? The world hopes so.
Our guy as is - this is the product. And the best salesman for this super product is Obama himself. Once he starts selling again – not pandering - then the rest of us will wake up. And we’ll sell too. And our enthusiasm, our conviction will win over the fence sitters. The fence sitters who haven’t even yet registered, and or might not even vote. Especially if the pandering and parsing continues.
The fence sitters, that’s the part of the electorate that will cancel out the flat earth folks. Let our Obama go!
Evil Within
When we perceive
Evil in others
The evil resides
In the darkness
Of their ignorance
And our own
We must speak
With those
We perceive
To be evil
With honesty
With integrity
And with transparency
To illuminate the darkness
And rob evil
Of a refuge
In their hearts
And minds
And in our own
Matthew T. Groff
If evil is a warriorAnger is its swordAnd ignorance its shield
Educate the ignorant with enough compassion and respect for them to hear. Anger cannot conquer evil.
People are asking, "Where's Hillary?" as a counterpoint to Palin's aggressive, bitchy, naive, ignorant presence.
How about Chelsea does an ad where she is superimposed in front of Palin's more ignorant, strident remarks, saying something to the effect: "My parents raised me to be a free thinker. Yes, to think for myself...to research and thoroughly understand the issues that matter to me...Sara Palin's selection as candidate for VP is pandering of the highest order, insulting to assume that intelligent, caring, informed voters, would vote according to gender? Really?"
And thereby give up and disregard all that my mother, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Michelle Obama stand for? Or the insights of all the outstanding women from history or who live and work among us today? Or for that matter for any man in history whose values you admire and hope to emulate? If Sara Palin was a man who was this uninformed and this inexperienced and this astoundingly ignorant, yet this (show strident, overconfident comment by Palin as Chelsea watches) egomaniacal...the man would be a laughingstock...!...I'm not buying it...What do you care about?"
Note: This presentation would appeal to the younger generation and all thinking women...and men. Why not give it a shot?
Two weeks into my student teaching experience, 9/11 brought the country to its knees.
I spent weeks trying to process with my Freshman English students. We chatted, discussed, journaled, debated, debriefed, and then started all over again. During that time, when I wasn't with my students, I barely slept; instead, I watched cable news all night as I waited for the other shoe to drop. 9/11 shaped my life as a teacher in ways that I am just now starting to realize.
Since September 11, 2001 I have been teaching English to secondary school students. I have watched students pledge allegiance to the flag then actually take the required moment of silence seriously on this day for seven years now. Although the fear that lives in my students' eyes is not as close to the surface as those long ago ninth graders on that not-really-so-long-ago day, it is still present. The world has changed for these kids; it will never sparkle with innocence for them.
Absence of the feeling of safety, of immunity from danger that I remember vividly from my own childhood makes me deeply and irretrievably sad for the children I teach. Even worse, though, are the lessons someone else taught these children, lessons I cannot undo because they came from home, a higher authority than any New Hampshire schoolteacher.
"All Muslims hate Americans," they say. "I'd hate to live in a big city where there are those Arabs everywhere you look." "They flew planes into the World Trade Center." "My dad says we should just throw every Muslim into jail, then we'll be safe."
These kids take to heart what their families tell them about the situation in Iraq, too. "We can't leave Iraq until we catch bin Laden," I once overheard a student say in a hallway debate. I've received more essays than I count about the need to stay in Iraq because "We're freeing the Iraqi people. Life is so much better for them now that we've gone to help them." Perhaps most disturbingly, several of my former students, honors-level juniors and seniors, truly believed that Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction (or WMD, a phrase they preferred perhaps because of it's likeness to their own vernacular--OMG!) and, worst of all, that Saddam Hussein was part of the 9/11 Terror Attacks.
There is a line of moral judgment that I cannot cross as a teacher. Much as I want to tell these students that their facts are wrong, their opinions have been thoroughly debunked by the media and credible sources in the government, I know it is not my place to do so. That the current administration plays on these inaccurate statements and beliefs only makes the matter more tragic.
September 11, 2001 was a horrible, tragic day. We were attacked on our homeland by radical Islamists who had been told untrue, misrepresented ideas about America by people they honored and respected. The attackers knew only what they had been brainwashed into believing.
I'd like to think that a lesson our country could learn from 9/11 is the importance of rising above senseless hate, of trying to solve problems with words, patience, and tolerance instead of violence.
But this is a lesson that I can teach only to my own two daughters. My students all have their own "teachers" when it comes to September 11.
