It's Always America First

When did I first start to realize that America wasn't perfect?  I knew that there had been slavery from a very young age and that a great man, Abraham Lincoln had put a stop to it.  I also knew that in my lifetime black people weren't being treated well and were fighting for their civil rights.   I remember the nightly news covering the Vietnam War and all of the demonstrations against it.  I watched Watergate - reality tv for my generation.  I knew that the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) was really important but that states weren't ratifying this amendment to the Constitution.  On the one hand I lived in a country that was awesome and on the other hand we had all these things that we needed to address.

I love my country.  I always have and I always will.  I don't love my government.  These days I think a lot of folks have mistaken love of country with love of party which equates to a love for their form of government.  In addition, the reality on the ground does not match the perceptions that people have about our country.

Last November the country voted for America First without really understanding that it's always been America first, until now.  Everything we've ever done has been to promote the interests of the United States.  Whether its the amount of money we spend on foreign aid, the wars we fight or the immigrants we welcome in to our country, it's always about putting ourselves and our interests ahead of everyone else.  If we compromise, it's to further our interests.

The administration we have now though is reacting to perceptions that have long been held and don't again, match with the facts.  Getting people to actually understand these facts and to believe them is going to be a heavy lift.  We have establishment news organizations who get stories wrong regularly and who also pay pundits who have a definite agenda to come on their shows and espouse their views without telling us about these hidden agendas.  Our new reality is that we have a President who believes in the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones puts forwards and so do many of his supporters.

We believe so many things that aren't true such as Americans have the best healthcare in the world.  We don't.  We pay twice as much as other developed nations and we're not as healthy and we don't live as long.  We think immigrants are stealing our jobs and depressing our wages.  They're not.  In fact immigration is a boost to the economy that not only benefits the immigrant but those of us living here already.  We want to give up on public education and even pursuing a college degree as if those things haven't been critical to advancing America's agenda.  How can you be first if everyone is a ditch digger?  I mean no disrespect to ditch diggers, they work very hard for their money, but if that's the only job everyone qualifies for then we don't make medical, scientific and technological advances.  We'd never have put a man on the moon or stopped the spread of disease.

We've abdicated our leadership in the world and we're allowing China to step in to fill the void.  This will make negotiating in our best interests much more challenging.   We're now staring down the massive impacts from climate change that include not only land loss but famine and disease.  Do we want to let others solve these problems for us while we look on from the outside?

When I was younger I thought Americans could do anything.  We were smart, we were savvy, we were problem solvers and innovators.  Nowadays, I'm not so sure we still have that in us.  If we stay on our current path of "America First" we will wake up one day to find that we are last.

Take A Moment to Read and Hopefully React

I'll let someone else do the talking for me today.  Hopefully you'll take the time to read this post from Friday 7/7 and react:  Village Green/Town2

It's July 4th! The Holiday Without a Lecture Meme on Facebook!

It seems these days that every single holiday has a lecture meme that someone will post on Facebook or Twitter designed to tell you that you're not doing the holiday right.  Except, not so much on July 4th.  Sure, you'll see the "Keep Pets Safe" memes, and don't forget "Vets Don't Like Loud Fireworks" either memes, but nothing that lets you know that people died so you could have your tasteless barbecue!!  Look at you, out there having fun and buying stuff at sales when you're supposed to be doing what someone else thinks you should be doing!!

My Dad's birthday typically falls on Memorial Day weekend, and sometimes right on the holiday itself, and this year he turned 80.  We had a big family cookout to celebrate and I shared some pictures on Facebook for friends and out of town relatives.   Then I got a few comments that people had died so we could celebrate.  WHAT?  Enough already.

From the shop or don't shop memes at Thanksgiving and the Merry Christmas arguments it feels like someone wants to attack someone else for how they celebrate each and every holiday and so they post their righteousness passive aggressively on social media.  And, holiday or not, I feel like everyone, including me, post the passive aggressive memes.  It's easy to see something and say "Yeah!! That's exactly what I think!!" and hit the share button.   I still don't understand how people are leaving kids and pets in hot cars when there's a total meme scream going on with that one.  How can you not know?

On July 4th though, that just doesn't happen.  Having a barbecue?  Like!! Love!! Oh, you're at the beach this weekend?  Like!! Love!!  While Memorial Day is the kickoff to summer, July 4th cements it in place.  We're making plans for July 4th and asking each other about those plans and excited about each other's plans.  Today is the day we really enjoy our freedom and that's the way it should be.

Me, I've walked dogs early to beat the heat and then I'm headed to the pool with a friend and then burgers at my parents' house to end the day.  I hope you have a safe and fun July 4th and enjoy the lecture meme free holiday!

All By Myself

I'm leaving this weekend to go on vacation.  I'm heading to California wine country to bike, hike and taste.  I've signed up for a group trip where I am the only one who signed up, so it will just be me and the guide.  My sister and I usually take trips together but last fall she told me she couldn't this year and so I thought, be brave, go on vacation by yourself.  Every trip we've ever been on has always had at least one woman traveling all by herself and they always fit in with the group and they always have a good time, so I thought, why not me too?

I have flown all the way to Europe on my own to meet my sister or a cousin for traveling.  It's kind of fun to land in Florence and know your sister's plane will be landing at any minute.  This entitles you to say things like, "I'm meeting my sister in Florence in a week" and impress your friends with how worldly you are.

For the past few years my job has been challenging and so my sister has been the one to really pay attention to what our plans are.  Since she moved back to the East Coast eight years ago I drive up to her house and we fly together.  As long as my suitcase is packed and I get to her house on time, it's all good.  This year however, it's just me.  I need to know which hotels I'm staying in, and pay attention to the itinerary and get myself to the airport and back in time.

I hear you out there "Grow Up Lady!! Sheesh, people travel alone all the time!"  Right, I know that.  I'm a grown up, I can do this.  It's just that it's the first time.  I don't even have a young nephew with me to bounce my questions off "Did you see my sea pass?"  "No, but maybe it's with mine" "What?  You can't find yours either?  Shoot, let's ransack the cabin again..."

I'm excited but I'm also a little nervous.  The company I purchased the trip with always make sure their clients have a wonderful time so I think it's going to be great.  It's just that, well, I'll be all by myself.  I'm about to find out if I like traveling all by myself.  If I do, I will definitely be going on more trips like this.  I'm not even going to consider the alternative.  Glass half full, right?  Right!

Want to Save a Life?

As many of you know, I'm a dog foster.  Several years ago I reached out to Dogs XL Rescue who I had adopted Alby from, to see what it would take to volunteer as a foster.  All rescues are desperate for volunteers and so they called me back almost immediately.  Right now Dogs XL Rescue is looking for people to become fosters.  This is your chance to save a life by becoming a foster.  Without fosters, rescues can't pull dogs from shelters because they have no where to go.

The screening process for new fosters is very simple, a phone call with a foster coordinator to talk about your lifestyle, where you live, and how many pets already live in your home kicks everything off.  A call by the rescue to your vet to ensure all your resident pets are up to date on vaccinations and monthly preventatives (heartworm and flea/tick) followed by a home visit and you're up and running as a dog foster.

Dogs XL Rescue works incredibly hard to ensure that all of its dogs not only are adopted by the right family, but that they're matched up well with their foster before they get adopted.  For example, if you have a cat, your foster dog will be cat friendly.  Do you have small children?  Your foster dog will be appropriate for small children.  I live in a tiny townhouse without a fenced yard so all my fosters need to get along well not only with Alby, my only resident pet, but they also need to do well on daily walks.  My townhouse also backs to a playground that is very active and kids ranging from toddler to teen race by my deck on their way to the swings and jungle gym.  Therefore, my foster needs to be pretty kid friendly even though there are no kids in my house.

Our fosters live in all kinds of homes - apartments, townhouses, small and large single family homes, farms, on the water, in the city and in the suburbs.  Some of our fosters have fenced yards and some don't. Some of our fosters don't have their own dog, they just love fostering.  And some of our fosters have several dogs and cats and human babies.  Some of our fosters work full time and some are retired.  Some work from home and some head off to the office each day.  In other words, there are very few restrictions to becoming a foster.

My number one rule for fostering has always been that it has to be okay with Alby.  We had one dog that kept picking at Alby until he couldn't take it anymore.  I called the rescue and we made arrangements for that guy to go somewhere else.  The rescue can't always turn on a dime, but they are incredibly responsive and work hard to place dogs where they will do well.

The optimal situation for all of our dogs is that they be in a foster home until they are adopted.  Unfortunately though because we're always short on fosters that sometimes means that we have to put dogs in to boarding.  Our boarding partners are wonderful, Tecla's K-9 Academy and Dogtopia, and our dogs can be very happy there for short periods of time.  Some dogs require a dog savvy owner though and it takes a little longer to find just the right person to adopt them and if there's no foster, they can end up in boarding for a longer time.  While it's still better than a shelter situation, it's not great.  Like I said, a foster home and eventually a permanent home are best.

We're a rescue so while we get awesome dogs, some of them do have special needs.  Some dogs just aren't appropriate for a home with small children, or they can't be with cats or in rare cases they need to be an only dog.  Remember, we don't like all people and some dogs don't like other dogs.  We work incredibly hard to match the right dog with the right home.  We're looking to make a lifetime commitment for that dog so that when they're adopted they're going to the home they'll be in for the rest of their lives.

Dogs XL Rescue pays for all food, preventatives and veterinary care while the dogs are being fostered.  They supply the foster with a crate as well.  There are also dog trainers who volunteer with the rescue to answer any questions around behavior and provide extra support to fosters who are new to rescue.  In addition, when you're heading out on vacation, the rescue will arrange for a temp foster while you're out of town if your foster dog hasn't been adopted yet.

On average Dogs XL dogs are adopted within 2 weeks of arriving at the rescue.  Some, like our puppies, are adopted almost as soon as we greet them for the first time, and some of our older dogs can be with the rescue a little longer.

Nothing is more rewarding than watching your foster dog head off with their new family.  Yes, you love them and yes, you'll miss them, but knowing that they're one of the luckiest dogs on earth is a very happy feeling.  So many dogs never make it out of the shelter.  Dogs who get picked up by a rescue have hit the jackpot.  The likelihood of them living an awesome life for the rest of their days is now very high.

If you've ever thought you'd get too attached and just couldn't give the dog up, I would say that at the end of the day the rewards of having saved a life and given so much joy not just to the dog, but to the family that adopted that dog as well, make it a lot easier to say good bye.  Do some of our dogs end up getting adopted by their fosters? Yes.  Have I considered adopting some of my fosters?  Absolutely.  Then I get an email from the adopters talking about how much they love their new dog, and how well the dog is fitting in to their family and that just makes me over the moon happy.  Then I get an email from the rescue asking me if I'm ready to take on a new foster and I start looking forward to helping save the next life.

If you are a dog lover and have ever thought you wanted to make a difference, I would encourage you to click on the links I've embedded throughout this post for Dogs XL Rescue and consider volunteering as a Dog Foster.  We'd love to have you and we and the dogs really need you in our life.

Horrific, Awful, Nightmarish....

Updated 6/8 below

It was misting last Tuesday morning when I headed out for my morning walk with Alby.  Another grey day to add to the many we've already had in May.  I checked email on my work phone when I got back to see a message indicating that a coworker had died unexpectedly.  The opening paragraph about his final days set off my radar that maybe he had died in some sort of freak accident, but there were no details.  I don't want to use his real name in order to protect his family so I'll call him Ward since I don't know anyone with that name.

Ward had been arrested for possessing child pornography, his mug shot and arrest details appeared in his local paper and a few days later he took his own life.

Never in a million years would I have had any inkling he'd do something like this.  Ward and I were not close.  His office was down the hall from mine and we spoke some times about sports like soccer, or just in general office banter if we happened to land in the same meeting.  Ward was a nice looking man, clean cut, smart and hard working.  All week everyone in the office has been in a bit of a shock. How do we reconcile the man we knew with what he did?

Yesterday I binge watched "The Keepers" on Netflix.  Once I started I couldn't turn it off.  Unlike the movie "Spotlight" which came out in 2015, "The Keepers" goes in to more detail regarding the abuse that was suffered by the young women at Archbishop Keough.  When I was finished watching I had a need to know more, see if there were any updates, and find out if Brother Bob had been identified.  I started reading Tom Nugent's articles on Inside Baltimore.  Nugent is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and he's written extensively on the Sister Cathy murder.

I may have read too much.  If the young women at Archbishop Keough were living in a nightmare, the kids at the Catholic Middle School in Locust Point were living in hell on earth.  I won't share the details, you can go ahead and read Nugent's articles on your own.  When I was done I felt like throwing up.

I'm not Catholic, I'm not even a religious person, but I'm furious with an institution where so many of my friends and relatives claim a membership.  Just like I was furious for the Penn State cover up a few years back.  What kind of a world are we living in where young, innocent victims are sacrificed so readily?  Over the years I've read the stories of the lifelong trauma victims of abuse suffer.  Some of them are able to live fairly normal lives as adults and confront what happened to them, refusing to let the abuser have anymore power.  Some though turn to alcohol, drugs and even suicide.  They feel guilty for something that was never their fault, that was done to them, that they never asked for.  They were just kids doing kid stuff when someone started them on this hellish journey.

"The Keepers" provides details that one of the abuser Priests had kept records of his victims, including photographs of half naked young girls.  I wonder if Ward realized when he was buying his online child porn the nightmare that the kids in the photograph were living in?  I'm not saying Ward looked at the Priest's pictures, but he did look at someone's.

When my Mom sent my brother off to nursery school in 1980 she told him that no one was ever allowed to touch him, ever, without his permission.  At Show & Tell on the first day the kids were asked if anyone had anything they wanted to share.  My brother stood up, "No one can touch your penis without your permission."  We get a family laugh out of it, but what my Mother did was uber important.  She also told him that if anyone tried to do that he needed to tell her immediately, no matter what.  I don't think parents prior to that had any idea they should be sending their kids off to school with that warning.

When I was coaching soccer about 12 years ago, several parents always hung around to help out.  Good.  Never leave your kid unattended with an adult for long periods of time.  If a parent was late picking a kid up after practice I never offered the kid a ride home.  Instead, we'd sit waiting by the parking lot in plain sight until the parent finally showed.  The kids all had cell phones by then too so they always called the late parent to find out where they were.   Don't be the parent who picks their kid up late from practice.  As a matter of fact, don't be the parent who picks your kid up late ever from anywhere.  Especially in the evening when places are closing up and your kid might be all alone and easy prey.

I hope one day the Catholic Church, Penn State and other institutions who have protected themselves over their victims, come to realize and openly acknowledge the harm they've done.  I hope that the survivors and their families find the peace they are seeking.

UPDATE 6/8
For anyone interested in gaining additional understanding on what's happening with the investigation in to the murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, I suggest joining the Facebook group page,  The Keepers Official Group - Justice for Catherine Cesnik and Joyce Malecki.  On the sex abuse scandals of the Catholic Church, Alex Gibney's 2012 HBO documentary, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is very well done.  Finally, Richard Sipe who is referenced in the movie Spotlight, and appears in The Keepers,  also has his own web page discussing much of his research and linking to others who have been trying to get the church to do what's right.

Somber Thoughts on Memorial Day

Since last November like many people, I've been processing through a lot of what our country is about and what we stand for and searching for truth.  What is true about what I believe and what is not?  Today is the day that we remember and honor, with broken hearts, those who died in service to our country.  From the Revolutionary War to today's War on Terror, we have sacrificed the human treasure in our country for what we aver is a higher ideal - the fight for and the preservation of freedom.

This sacrifice means there are babies who will never know their fathers, children who will grow up without a mother or a father, and parents who will ache with the loss of their sons and daughters for the remainder of their own lives.  This sacrifice means thousands of men and women won't be there to raise their children or care for their elderly parents.  This sacrifice means that the men and women who gave up their lives will no longer contribute to our greater society.  They won't cure cancer, they won't come up with a solution to climate change, they won't solve the next economic crisis, they won't teach in our schools or police our streets or run for elected office.  Many of them have been cut down too young to have had a chance to leave a mark  in this world other than the sacrifice of their life in a war.

In the last Harry Potter book, Dumbledore tells Harry,
      "Do not pity the dead, Harry.  Pity the living and, above all, those who live without love.  By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart.  If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say good-bye for the present."

The older I get the more I feel the loss of this treasure and the toll it takes on all of us.  Not just the sudden loss of a life, but the fact that we're honoring men and women who died because of a failure on the part of the living.  War is the worst of human nature and we are way too eager to engage in it.  We're not just asking for the sacrifice of your life, we're asking you to take lives as well.  We're asking you to take part in something that kills the human soul.  Perhaps we have no choice but to go to war, but we should never forget the totality of the cost to one and all.

The United States has been at war for nearly my entire lifetime.  I was born in 1965 and a quick query on the internet reveals that we've lost more than 66,000 US Soldiers since then.  The bulk of those deaths occurred in Vietnam, but the numbers for Iraq and Afghanistan are each already in the thousands.  We no longer see the black bags lined up on the tarmac awaiting the last ride home with the bodies of our lost treasure resting silently inside.  The American public doesn't actually like war and we don't like the consequences of war and so our government hides from us the awful truth and instead glorifies the battle and the pageantry and our weaponry.  We see the soldier standing with the weapon heading in to battle, not lying torn to shreds on the ground, limbs missing and covered in blood in the aftermath.

It's not just soldiers who give up their lives in war,  but civilians as well and yet we rarely if ever acknowledge their sacrifice as anything other than acceptable losses.  The numbers of civilian casualties may number equally or higher to the number of soldiers lost, but their number also includes children from infants to teenagers.  They will never grow up to become educated adults, have children of their own or provide solutions to finding peace in our time.  They are the world's lost treasure.  In recent years the United States has bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, slaughtered a wedding party in Yemen and killed an 8 year old girl in a drone strike.

We also ask for the sacrifice of the planet we live on.  We have allowed poisonous chemicals like Agent Orange to rain down on our soldiers, on the local populace and on the land they occupy impacting generations to come, not to mention what we do to the wildlife.  Soldiers bond with domestic animals (both dogs and cats) while they're serving their country and some try to bring them home and some leave those animals to fend for themselves once they're gone.

Nothing and no one is safe in the theater of war.  Yet we sing songs about going off to war to kick some butt as if at the end we'll all just come back to the bar for a cold one and have a laugh.  War is death.  There is nothing to celebrate about war except when it ends and we can begin to pick up the pieces of our lives.

So on this Memorial Day we should gather and quietly honor those who have been lost to war, and we should remember not just the soldier, but all of the losses embodied therein and wonder what our future might have been if only.....Then we should demand to know why some wars are still being fought these many years later and how much more earthly treasure we can stand to lose.

Weekend Rambling Thoughts

It's Saturday morning and my sister and her family will be hopping in their mini-van shortly with both their dogs and heading south to Maryland.  I should be finishing up laundry and making beds to get ready for them, but I'm not.  I'm engaging in what my sister and I refer to as 'self-sabotage'.  You may remember it from your college days when you were working on a term paper.  You can find all kinds of things to do and become thoroughly engrossed in but that.  I recall someone asking how long it takes to write a term paper and the answer was, how long have I got?

I really need to walk my dog and then get on my bike for an hour.  I have a trip coming up in June where I'll be on a bike a lot and I'm not sure my legs or my behind are up for the job.  I managed to self-sabotage my plans for daily bike riding over the past few months with excuses like it's too cold, or it's too wet when in reality I just couldn't focus on the task at hand.  Although, it was pouring buckets on Thursday morning and it was chilly so I'm going to say not going was legit.

Part of my problem is my laptop and all the social applications I just can't get enough of.  I keep saying I'm going to break myself of my Facebook and Twitter habits but I can't.   They're a total time suck.  I also bought myself an Apple TV for the living room and my bedroom and I love surfing all my options.  I love a good binge watch.

Also, much to my dismay,  my heat pump/air conditioner decided this was a good time to say goodbye to the world.  I worked from home yesterday while the new system was installed, but it meant I couldn't get to the laundry!  Very convenient excuse.  My laundry area in my basement has been on my 'to do' list for a while and so last weekend I had started to get it organized.  When I first start I actually make more of a mess before the actual clean up starts.  I need to create piles to figure out what needs to be trashed, recycled, given away, etc.,.  Anyway of course the indoor unit is right there by the laundry area.  I had to make sure the guys had room to work which meant moving some trash bags and stacking stuff on top of the washer and dryer, and then just staying out of their way.

Anyway, here I am writing a blog post when I haven't had the need to write about anything in a long time and suddenly this morning, with laundry looming and all the other things I need to get done, I'm blogging.  Of course!!  That's how self-sabotage works.

I have a lot of things I want to write about but one of them is just too taxing (Trump).  I don't know about a lot of you, but I'm exhausted trying to keep up with the shenanigans of the current administration.  I really need this long weekend of rest to think about nothing and just enjoy family.

My Dad turns 80 on Sunday and we're all gathering at my parents' house for a milestone celebration.  Both my parents are doing really well and it will be a fun celebration.  Hopefully we won't talk politics, not because we disagree but because it's just too depressing.

On Monday I'll be in a good frame of mind for the Memorial Day holiday.   One thing that might help my motivation before then though is for the sun to come out.  I don't know about you, but I've had enough of this gloomy weather to last a lifetime.

I think I just heard the buzzer on the dryer so I'll sign off and wish everyone a very nice holiday weekend.

Love Is All Around

A little more than two years ago the rescue I volunteer with gave me a foster dog that had been rescued from a homeless situation.  A woman was living in her car with two dogs and was having a very hard time of it.  Izzy, the dog that came to me, had serious mange that was very expensive to treat and I believe her car mate did as well.  I'm not sure who convinced the woman to turn the dogs over to a rescue, but she did, they were treated for their health issues, and both found wonderful new homes where they're thriving.  When the woman was back on her feet again she inquired about getting her dogs back.  Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

Izzy

At the time I thought that giving up those two dogs was a great sacrifice but that the dogs would be better for it.  Or would they?  She certainly wouldn't.  I know what the loss of a dog feels like after they've lived a long and full life with you, and I can't imagine the heartbreak of giving them up while they're alive because you can't care for them.  Also, the attachment between dogs and their humans is two ways - we love them and they love us back.  Who hasn't seen the pictures of dogs dumped at a shelter, head bowed and staring in to the corner, crying and wondering what is happening and not knowing where their beloved human has gone?  Or the story of a dog chasing after a car that's just dumped it on a highway?  My own dog follows me around the house when we're home together and wants to be in the same room as me.  He can be off leash in safe spaces because he and I are a pack and he stays with me - I jokingly say we're a bonded pair.  He loves me and I love him.

When I'm near kids who are interacting with my dogs I always make sure to share with them that dogs love.  "Did you know that dogs feel love the same way that people do?" I'll ask the kids.  They start to ask questions as they pet the dog, "Do you think your dog loves me?" and my response is "Yes, I think he does.  Look at his tail wagging."  Especially when I have a foster and the kids want to know why I'm not keeping the newest resident of our neighborhood,  "Doesn't he love you?" and I say, "Well yes, I think he does, but he knows that we're working very hard to find him a family of his very own and he'll love them too."

Which brings me back to my original question, should homeless people give up their pets? There are plenty of people living on the streets alongside their pets and in a harsh world where there's little hope and little joy in every day existence, perhaps these pets make a real and positive difference.  At least that's what Glenn Greenwald and his husband David Miranda believe.  I listened to Glenn on DemocracyNow! talk about creating an animal shelter in Rio de Janeiro that will hire homeless people who love dogs to work there and I read his article about it in the online newspaper he founded, The Intercept.  The people they hire will live and work at the shelter with their own pets while working to find homes for the many homeless dogs living in that city.   They're hoping this shelter will become a model that can be replicated in cities around the world.  I hope they're right.  This morning I went to their GoFundMe page and made a $100 donation in support of this effort.

We're living in an incredibly chaotic world right now.  Within all this insanity here is an opportunity for something real that can make a difference in many lives, both human and animal.  I believe that like the song says, the love you take is equal to the love you make.  Click on the links I've embedded throughout this post to hear and read about all of this first hand.  We're one week away from remembering those who sacrificed their lives for war, and what better way to remember them but by building up the people and animals for whom they made that sacrifice.

My Teeth

You may have noticed that I'm not a daily or even weekly blogger.  I decided when I started this blog that I wouldn't force it.  If I didn't have anything to say or ruminate about that I'd just not blog until I did.  This has worked out really well.  Except I've had a lot of things I wanted to talk about and share on my blog over the past few weeks only my teeth had other ideas!!

I don't know about you, but I hate the dentist.  I didn't use to hate the dentist.  Growing up I had great teeth.  Never a cavity, no braces, and a lot of compliments on how beautiful my teeth were.  Then around age eighteen I got a cavity.  The dentist I'd grown up with had retired and we got a new one.  He was a pretty good dentist but I said to him "I never got a cavity with the old dentist."  He didn't really know how to reply.

Around age 21 I had my wisdom teeth pulled.  This seemed like just a right of passage.  A lot of my friends were going through this and I didn't think twice about it.  One day my Mom informed me that our general dentist didn't participate in the network any longer.  I would never be able to afford the additional costs of a non-participating dentist.  So I basically stopped going to the dentist for a few years instead of trying to find someone new.

In my late thirties it suddenly dawned on me to grow up and go to the dentist.  A friend, a dental surgeon,  recommended one.  The new dentist told me that I had a few cavities and that one of my teeth needed a root canal.  Turned out the root canal tooth was cracked and needed to be extracted.  I lay in the Endodontist chair with tears streaming down the sides of my face contemplating the financial cost.

You see, that same year I had decided to go back to college and finish my bachelor's degree.  I had refinanced my house to have enough money to pay for the first year of school and I was saving money to pay for the second year.  However, my heating and air conditioning system had died and that was a $5,000 price tag.  My bathtub tried to take a trip to my kitchen and that had been a $2,500 price tag.  My car decided it needed a $600 repair, and my dog decided she needed a $600 surgery.  This might not seem like a lot to many, but at the time it was the difference between me finishing school or not.  Luckily I have parents who stepped in and wanted to help with these large bills and my Mom shared some money she had inherited from her father with my siblings and I that kept me afloat.  Teeth were not included in this financial scheme.  Even with the financial help from my Mom I barely had two pennies to pinch together when all was said and done.

I won't share the oral surgeon's name who pulled my tooth out, but it hurt when he did it and it hurt a lot.  He practically stood on my chest to wrench the tooth out of my mouth.  The nurse held my hand while I crushed her fingers.  Even a few weeks later small slivers of tooth were coming up through my gums.

The general dentist then proceeded to do a lousy job with a filling in one of my molars that caused a lot of pain and discomfort.  I still had a lot of great teeth but he seemed to want to grind them down and put crowns on them.  He also was odd with his method of billing.  I felt that he kept trying to bill me more than a participating dentist should be billing me.  I walked away and learned to work around my bad filling and again, stayed away from the dentist.

Then a few weeks ago I ended up with a tooth ache that brought me to my knees.  I've never been in so much pain.  Good friends recommended a general dentist and I took what I figured was the tooth with the bad filling thinking that time had run out on the work around.  I was wrong.  The tooth causing all the pain was right next to it.  A referral to the Endodontist ended the same way it had previously, a cracked tooth that needed to be extracted.  

Now, let me tell you that this experience was a complete 180 from the previous one.  My general dentist was awesome.  The Endodontist was so nice.  She worked really hard to get me a same day appointment with the oral surgeon knowing how much pain I was in.  The oral surgeon was also really great.  I never felt a thing and he pulled the tooth out in one piece.  I've never been so grateful.

Since then my new dentist has worked on one filling and I've had a root canal performed on another tooth that while cracked, has a chance at being saved.  It's a short tooth though so I scored a Periodontist who is going to perform a 'crown lengthening'.  This means that some gum and some bone need to be removed in order for the crown to fit properly.  I had a consultation with the Periodontist and he seems like he's pretty nice too.  So far on this go around, all of the dentists I've seen are super nice, and really go out of their way to make sure you're comfortable and that they do a good job on your teeth.  Most important, they listen when I'm talking.

I've got a lot to look forward to this year with regards to my teeth - for the two teeth that were extracted I need to talk to someone about implants and I have the original bad filling still to be taken care of.  Remember I went back to college?  Well thanks to that activity I was able to advance in my job and can actually afford my dental work.  My company offers Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) too so I've put money in there to pay for the out of pocket expenses that aren't covered by my dental plan.

I shouldn't have stopped going to the dentist.  Maybe I could have avoided the second extraction and the problem filling might have been taken care of.  I should have searched for a new dentist when the guy I didn't like turned out to be so crappy.  In fact, I should have searched for a new dentist when my old dentist stopped participating.  Well, I can't change any of that. I can make sure that I have great doctors all around going forward.

How does this tie in to my theme about choice?  Well, choose to do the smart things in life, they're not that hard if you put a little effort in to them and maybe it will make things easier down the road.  Choose to shop around for doctors you want to see, don't just stop going to the doctor due to a bad experience.  There are other doctors to choose from.   At least I never gave up on brushing and flossing!!

Shark in the Diving Well!!

A post from a friend on Facebook prompted me to write and warn everyone that there's a shark in the diving well at the pool in Burn Brae.  When I was a kid on the Columbia swim team back in the 70s we practiced a few days a week at the 50 meter pool in Burn Brae during the summer months.  There was a huge, deep, dark diving well we had to swim past and every single one of us scooted by as fast as we could due to the shark.  We never saw the shark of course, we just knew it was there.  Well, turns out the Turf Valley pool also has a shark in it's diving well according to my friend.  Smaller diving wells like the ones on most pools in Columbia do not have sharks, thankfully.  At least, I never received any reports on them if they do.  Swimming quickly past the diving well remains the safest option for not being chomped by the shark.

Also, at night if you're asked to take out the trash or walk the dog you should note that there are poisonous snakes in your driveway just waiting to get you.  So, hop around a bit to avoid them and get yourself back inside the house as quickly as you can.  My sister confirmed for me that yes, she was also avoiding snakes in the driveway.

When you're a kid there are all kinds of things lurking in the shadows waiting to get you.  I don't know how to warn toddlers, but I do recall when I was very little a tiger lived in my closet.  Luckily my Mom was prepared and all you had to do was say "Go Away Tiger!" and you were safe.  Dodged a bullet there with an educated Mom.

Even as you get older things with large arms are waiting under your bed to grab you by the ankles should you need to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  In this instance use the same defense that you used for avoiding the snakes in your driveway.   A lot of hopping around and finally leaping in to your bed seems to do the trick.

Our house also had a ghost or two in the basement.  Light is the best way to scatter the ghosts.  Of course, leaving the basement is tricky depending on where the light switch is.  As soon as the light goes out, get yourself out quickly to avoid all ghost encounters.

I don't know how many of you know this, but driving in the car you can carry a very long (at least 50 yards), very sharp knife or sword and use it to cut down all trees along the road as you ride along and the trees will remain standing.  It's a huge mystery about how this one works, but a lot of kids have reported this to be true.

Having grown safely in to adulthood after avoiding all these hazards I'm sure there are things I've totally forgotten about but definitely deserve a mention.  Feel free to include those in comments.

Finally, remember, here in the USA everyone has remained safe, but those daring kids down under have taken the Shark in the diving well to a new level.  Probably don't share this story with anyone under the age of 18 or you'll never get them into a pool again:  Shark in the Pool.

Choose to Quit the Rat Race

The Rat Race is real, we're all in it, we're paying a high price to participate and some of us are barely keeping up.  We have willingly given up control of our lives and I think the time has come for us to take a hard look at our choices and start taking back control.  Around 2000 I started noticing an increasing trend in the United States and it was our insatiable need to consume goods at a high rate.  At that time the housing market was just starting to take off and home prices were on the rise.  The economy was good, unemployment was low and I remember thinking "Is shopping all we have left?".  Then 9/11 happened and my focus changed and I didn't think about our need to consume quite as much.

In 2008 as the "Great Recession" was hitting us and just after Lehman Brothers collapsed I took in a movie at the Arundel Mills Mall.  The Mall was packed with folks and nearly every single one of them had a shopping bag in hand from a recent purchase.  Probably a lagging indicator of the economy and just anecdotal of course, but this was the craziest recession ever if people could still get out and shop.  That changed as the recession really took hold though and people lost jobs and homes.

In my neighborhood of around 100+ townhouses, I think I could count around 20 off the top of my head that went in to foreclosure after 2008 and stayed empty for a long time - years in some cases. There are still houses in Columbia popping up on real estate sites for auction, but the numbers are significantly down over the past eight years.  The townhouse three doors down is finally on the market after some rehab and it looks like there might be a buyer and then we'll be fully occupied again.

This need to buy, buy, buy though has not changed as we've recovered from the recession.  From clothes to cars to houses, we buy, we buy a lot and we buy big.  We also eat big.  We love delicious, tasty food and in large portions, although at least this part is starting to slowly change.  We are officially trapped in the Rat Race and  it's not just Wall Street and the banks that have us by the short hairs.  Many of us are trapped in jobs that we absolutely can't afford to lose or all we've amassed will come crashing down around us.  How has this happened and how did so many of us not learn our lesson after 2008?  How do we escape from this madness and take ownership of our lives again?

As I stated previously, we have willingly chosen to give control of our lives over to others.  Our need to eat so much and not exercise puts us under the power of the medical community and the drug companies to fix our problems and people in my generation may not live as long as our parents or even our grandparents for that matter.   We complain about the cost of our health insurance, but we are the ones choosing to live unhealthy lives. We're owned by the bank that holds our mortgage and the note on our cars.  We're owned by the credit card companies for all the things we bring in to our homes.  Our employer owns us because we are so beholden to all of these other entities that I mentioned before and we can't afford to lose our jobs.  Jobs that many of us find deeply unsatisfying.

In exchange for all our stuff we have given up the most precious thing we own and that is our time.  Time with loved ones, time outside in fresh air, time pursuing activities that bring us pleasure, all have been sacrificed to feed our addiction to stuff.   Stuff that doesn't really bring enjoyment or even value to our lives.  When was the last time you took a vacation?

Your job owns you in that most people can't afford to lose their jobs - even if only for a week - or they'll lose everything.  We're told to be grateful for the jobs we have, taking for granted the fact that we bring a valuable resource to the job every day - ourselves.  Sure, most of us are replaceable so we toe the line and keep our mouths shut and our head's down.  Are we fully engaged though in the office with so many other things on our minds - kids, parents, bills.....?  Some of us have achieved a level at work that helps us maintain a lifestyle to which we've grown accustomed and the fear of losing all that can keep us up all night stressed out.

How do we get out of this hole we've dug for ourselves?  I have recently become a fan of the minimalist movement.  I think it can mean something different to everyone depending on their own needs and desires, but at its heart it's something that I think we can all embrace to some degree.  Want to get some control of your life back?  Downsize anything and everything that you can.  Buy less stuff.  Eat less stuff.  Live in a smaller house.  Drive a smaller car.  Spend more time outside walking.

Junk everything you've worked for all at once?  Don't panic, I don't think that is the answer.  The first thing we can all do is take stock and prioritize what it is that brings us joy.  What are those things that we love and don't mind spending our limited time working hard for but at the same time making sure we have the time to enjoy? I know for me it's leisure time - whether that means making time to walk my dog each day, or finding time to sit on my deck to read a book, or go on vacation, spending time with friends.  I have a good friend who likes her 5 bedroom colonial though because she entertains family and friends a lot.  That's what brings her joy.  She and her husband are getting real value out of their home.  On the other hand, I don't care about living in a big house.  I want a small, great house that doesn't suck up all of my money because I want to spend it on vacations as I said before.

Every time we make a purchase - from food to houses we need to ask ourselves why we're buying it.  Why are you buying that car?  To impress someone?  Show someone you've made it?  Why are you living in that big house?  Why are you eating that big steak?  Who said you had to do all that?  At the end of the day, what do you want?

We should ask the same questions about why we choose to spend our time a certain way.  As I said before, we only have so much time.  Instead of sitting inside, what would happen if you took a half hour and walked around your neighborhood every day?  On Friday afternoon I shut down my laptop and grabbed my dog and headed out for a warm winter walk.  While outside I made two new friends.  I met a man walking his puppy and turns out he grew up in Columbia, same age as me and he and his wife are ultra-marathoners.  Inside the undeveloped side of Blandair I met a woman who was just exploring the park and lives in my old neighborhood.  I chatted with each of these people and it made my day.  I like making friends.  Yesterday in Blandair again ran into a woman who was running with her two dogs.  That for me was a great way to spend time - outside, moving, meeting people and icing on the cake, with my dog.  If I didn't have time for that kind of thing I think my life would be a misery

If you asked these questions, are there some things you could let go of?  Could you start buying yourself some freedom by making different choices?  What would happen to your blood pressure if you made different choices?  Would you lose a few pounds?  Would you get rid of some stress?  Could you change jobs if that's what you wanted?  Could you retire early?

Years ago a friend of mine was heading off to work each day and leaving her newborn son in daycare.  She hated it.  So she and her husband sat down and went through their finances.  With both of them working and putting their son in day care they were only ahead by $75 each month.  My friend said "I'm miserable for $75 a month!! It's not worth it!"  She quit her job and became a stay at home Mom which she loved.  Her husband got a part time job delivering pizzas on the weekends.  They didn't have as much money as they did before, but they were a whole lot happier.  It turned out if one of them lost their job they were still fine.

I have accumulated way too much stuff in my 20 years of home ownership.  Stuff I just don't need and would love to have the money back that I spent on all of it.  Today I'm going through my house and putting donation bags together for Big Brothers and Big Sisters to pick up tomorrow.  Less stuff means less to clean up around my house!!  I am not neat - I am a terrible housekeeper.  So, the less I have the better!  I'm hoping that by this time next year my house will only have those things that I want to have and don't care about picking up and cleaning.

We can take back control of our lives.  We can escape the Rat Race.  We just have to make better choices for ourselves.

The Intolerance of Liberals

For years now I've been hearing, mostly from people on the right, how liberals are intolerant and I find this accusation incredibly confusing because I thought that's what we were working against.  So yesterday I'm getting ready for work and a guy on NPR is talking about how he used to be a liberal, but he couldn't take all the hate, so he became a conservative.  Some days you just think to yourself everything is upside down and inside out.

From the little bit I listened to, the host asked for an example of the hate this guy was talking about and he said he couldn't understand why people were so upset when a business refused to sell a gay couple a wedding cake based on their religious view point.  My head started to spin.  I don't understand how a small business sets itself up in a community, taking advantage of tax breaks and other community offered incentives, and then determines it won't serve the entire community.  Again, I'm really confused about how asking that business to serve the entire community is intolerance.  If the business said it didn't want to serve white people based on a religious preference, would people be okay with that?

I am not religious, I have not studied the bible, but I have heard that some people believe that white people are devils based on the bible.  Full disclosure for new readers, I am white.  So, if we say that someone can deny service based on religious beliefs, are we okay with someone denying white people service using that rationale?

All through the last nearly forty years I've listened to liberals and their sometimes political counterparts, Democrats, be demonized by the right.
  "It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant.  It's just that they know so many things that aren't so."          - Ronald Reagan

Newt Gingrich had a list of words specifically meant for this purpose.  At one of the RNC national conventions before 2000 I remember hearing that I was not a real American because I wasn't a Republican/Conservative.  Sarah Palin told me I wasn't a real American because I live on the coast and not in the heartland.  She later apologized but this has been a running theme on the Republican side to state outright or to insinuate that Liberals, Progressives and Democrats are unpatriotic and not really American.

Liberals have been mocked for how we raise our children, the fact that some of us buy coffee at Starbucks and for being 'snowflakes' who need safe spaces.  Tomi Lahren, the young darling of conservatives loves to insult liberals and call us names while at the same time complaining of that behavior on the left.

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here.  I'm not giving the left a free pass.  We do call people on the right names.  What I really want to break down is what is actually liberal intolerance.  Take for instance the recent saga surrounding Milo Yiannopoulos.  He was scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley until protests were joined by anarchists and the university swiftly cancelled the event.  There's been a trend on college campuses to shut out people like Yiannopolous because they represent hate speech.  Their claim is that they just have a different point of view and all voices need to be heard.  They claim that liberals and the left are shutting out free speech.  I can't think of any liberal who isn't a champion of free speech.  What I can name though are liberals who don't want someone coming on to a campus only to recruit people to their cause which is hate.  Especially someone who makes false claims about marginalized groups of people.  College campuses should welcome the free exchange of ideas, but would conservatives be happy if someone from ISIS came to make their pitch?  What would the question and answer session look like on that one?  Peaceful?  Reasoned?

Here's a link to Yiannopoulos' own writing, and here's a link to a profile piece and another profile piece so you can make up your own mind about him.

So what exactly is liberal intolerance and it's partner in crime "Political Correctness"? I feel like wanting equality for groups of marginalized people and then pointing out the ways in which they're marginalized is why we're labeled intolerant.  Here's the thing though, as a Liberal Progressive, I'm not just concerned about some folks and not others, I think if we can bring about true equality, it works well for everyone.

I want women to have autonomy over their bodies and I want them to be able to work for a living, or be a stay at home Mom, or whatever their heart desires.

I want our fellow black citizens to be able to truly realize the American Dream and not worry that they'll be dead because they forgot to use their turn signal when switching lanes.

I want the LGBTQ community to not fear for their lives and get to be who they know they are and live their lives accordingly.

I want religious people to be able to freely practice their religion - just not try to make me practice it with them if I don't wish too.

I want our public spaces to be available to all, but not designated for one group over another.

I don't see how wanting equality for the race of people known as humans is intolerance or even politically correct.  If people on the right have a problem with this then they need to take a good hard look at what American values really means to them.  The pledge of allegiance that they think all of us should be required to say ends "with Liberty and Justice for All".    If you're saying those words then step up and make it happen and stop complaining about intolerance.

Note to readers:  I embed links in my posts to the information I'm referencing.  Links will open in a new window so you can read for yourself and reach your own conclusions.

To Engage or Not to Engage, That is the Question.....

I'm working on a few posts but am having trouble collecting my thoughts so I was a little relieved this morning that this popped up.  First, let me thank Shakespeare for inspiring my title and then let me dive right in.  Should we express our opinions on social media?  YES!!  One of the worst things about American social circles is our unwillingness to engage in conversation and to express differing opinions.  It's not political correctness, it's a total discomfort with confrontation and wanting to tell someone you disagree with them.  For goodness sake, disagree!!

Until last November I had somewhat given up on posting my political viewpoint or sharing articles that I had read.  I did share a lot of rescue dogs and cute animal videos from the Dodo - you should visit this site every day, watch the videos and share because you will feel better, you will be smiling a lot!!  Where was I?  Oh, right, Trump.  So, I had read all these articles about how you can't change someone's mind and that the more you argued your case the stronger the other person held on to their original view point.  I figured, what's the point of trying to talk to people about anything?  I'll just keep rescuing dogs and posting videos of someone jumping in to icy water to save a puppy.  You're welcome.  

This week I'm seeing and hearing (gawd, I sound just like Trump!!) people say that it's cowardly to unfriend someone who disagrees with you.  I was unfriended during the election and too bad for them because I am a really good friend, the best....you know the bit.  I had pointed out that what they were in the act of doing was the exact same thing they were complaining about and they got mad, accused me of questioning their morals and ta dah!! I was unfriended.  

I'm a liberal progressive (should that be hyphenated? I don't know) and I'm happy to say that despite my upset, anger, confusion, frustration and constant posting about it, my conservative friends have hung in there.  Only a few of them ever speak up though.  If they post an article I do read it.  I don't always comment and maybe that's what they do too when they see my stuff.  The important thing here though is that we have a connection.  

I think though, we're at a defining moment in American history.  I do believe our democracy is at stake.  This election was anything but a rubber stamp on the status quo.  We're finding things out about ourselves that can make us very uncomfortable and I think we should just wade in and see where that goes.  If we want to be a free people, then we have to talk about our friends and neighbors who aren't free.  I should go down and talk to my Muslim neighbor to make sure she's okay.  I should make sure my black friends are okay.  I should make sure my immigrant friends are okay.  I should find out why my white friends think they're not okay.  I should look out for all the women in my life.  I should engage with my fellow humans anywhere and anyway that I can.  So should you.  Take a deep breath, think about what you think, "Self, why do I believe this?"  and dive in and start talking.  Otherwise no one knows and no one will know to care.  

Now Is the Time to Choose Your Purpose

One of the many commercials promoting the US Marine Corps says "Many are called, few are chosen."  At this time in our history of the United States the majority of us are hearing the call to act, to stop this mad descent into white nationalism, isolationism, and overt discrimination and oppression against members of the human race.  Now is the time to choose our purpose going forward and stand up for what we believe and I hope that more than a few choose to do this.  Let's stand up and be counted!  We're off to a good start after last week's Women's March on Washington reports that more than 1,000,000 people attended the march there and in extraordinarily large numbers across the country and around the world. We have a fight song, Quiet, and more and more ways to make a difference popping up.  Today I pick up my postcards to send off to my representatives, all of them, describing the issues that are important to me.  I have a long list.  This is the first of ten actions in 100 days being promoted by the march.

It's certainly not been a boring first week of the Trump administration.  We've seen our President stress the country out over how large his inaugural crowds were, continue to blame his popular election loss on illegal voting for which he has shown absolutely no evidence, remove the Joint Chiefs from the National Security Council and add-in Steve Bannon his chief strategist who is  described by Matt Taibbi on twitter as "tactically a Leninist and ideologically a racialist/white nationalist..".  Some at the CIA, like former Director Brennan, expressed anger at Trump's speech in front of the wall of stars while at least 400 agents accepted open invitations to hear him speak.  

The week was topped off with an Executive Order banning entry to Muslims from many countries in the Middle East including Iran, Iraq and no surprise Syria.  Not included on this list are the countries that quietly fund terrorism and from where the 9/11 hijackers all hailed from like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE.  Unless you were out in the woods yesterday with no access to a mobile device you know that Green Card holders, people legally residing in the United States, were detained at airports across the country, placed in handcuffs, their social media was searched and they were asked their views on Donald Trump.   The lack of due process in all of this is glaring which prompts me to see if I can find a good class on the US Constitution on iTunes U that we might all want to take.

In other news, George Orwell's book "1984" is topping the best seller list and I began to think of other books that speak to American values that we might want to read as well like Walter Van Tilburg Clark's "The Ox Bow Incident" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird".  Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments, which I'm sorry to say I have to moderate now.  I embrace dissenting view points but not abuse and after my last post on the Women's March on Washington a particularly mean-spirited and abusive comment was made which I deleted.  I think some found the march threatening to them personally and felt the need to strike out.  If the commenter is reading this know that if you can't engage in civil discourse, then you're cut off.  

I watched a video this morning of an interview with Jane Elliott on the Rock Newman show.  It's under an hour long and well worth taking the time to watch.  I think it solidifies what we need to do today.  We can't sit back and wait for someone else to act.  She specifically says she has a purpose.  She calls on white women to be the leaders in ending racism.  We have so many issues today that are rooted in racism, white supremacy.  Today is the day to make the choice to make the difference as Jane says and stop living in ignorance.  Choose your purpose. 

The Women's March in DC Was Huge!!

UPDATED BELOW (1/25)
In keeping with my theme this year, yesterday I and about 500,000 other people chose to participate in the Women's March in Washington, D.C. and it was awesome!!  My sister Diane traveled from New Jersey so we could go together along with her sister-in-law and some close friends.  We were a group of seven traveling to DC via car and metro.  Another good friend offered parking at her house near the Takoma Metro station where we hopped on the Red line to Union Station and were part of something HUGE!!

Our Group of Marchers

Our new President likes to say many things are going to be, or will be HUGE, but this truly was.  Far exceeding organizers expectations, women traveled from all over the country to be in DC yesterday and those who couldn't make it here, marched in their local cities and suburbs in HUGE numbers as well.  On the way down from New Jersey my sister called near the Delaware Memorial Bridge to tell me she was in a "Women's March Traffic Jam"!  Everywhere she looked were cars of women, by themselves, in pairs and in groups heading to DC.

I've heard reports that at least 1200 buses applied for parking permits and I saw many pictures of planes filled with women flying to DC.  Some of my friends turned their homes in to Airbnb for the weekend to give many people a place to stay when local hotel prices were out of reach.

Why did I, and all these women decide to go to this march?  Is it the birth of a new women's movement or something even bigger?  I don't know.  I hope the momentum from yesterday turns in to something spectacular.  Before I go further describing the march experience though, I will tell you why I marched.

I marched for a lot of the same reasons that I consider myself a liberal and a progressive.  I want women to have complete and total control of their own bodies.  I want full reproductive freedom whether its access to birth control or safe abortion or my doctor telling me the truth about my medical decisions.  I want us to protect the environment.  I want us to invest in renewable energy and I want us to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.  I want to keep the clean air and clean water act.  I want to protect Social Security and Medicare and I don't want the Affordable Care Act  to be repealed.  I want us to ensure public education is available to everyone.  I believe in raising the minimum wage and making college affordable.  I want women to earn equal pay for equal work.  I marched for Women of Color because I believe Black Lives Matter.  Finally, I believe that a lot of the progress we've made during my lifetime is now under threat with the new Administration unlike anything we've seen before and I want my voice to be heard.  I want to join with others who have similar inclinations and work towards changing not only our representatives at the national level, but at the local level as well.

Our group departed my house at 7am to drive to Takoma and catch the Metro.  When we got to Union Station around 9 a.m. it was already packed.  The line to Dunkin' Donuts as soon as you come off the Metro was long and we headed up the next elevator to grab a quick bite at Au Bon Pain.  We walked out towards the Capital where free signs were available and of course the non-official merchandise that is found at every single event ever.

My friend Tracey and I with our signs

Of course as we made our way towards the Capital we stopped for pictures and to buy a tshirt or two.  We even managed to run into a friend from school before we headed towards the larger crowds. Their were rows upon rows of port-a-potties up to and around the Capital building and the bunting and chairs were still out from the inauguration the day before.  As we approached the main area, which we still couldn't see, the crowds were getting thicker and thicker.  We saw a lifesize Hilary marching with a pussy hat on.  There were a lot of homemade signs too.  One said "Super Callous Fragile Ego Trump You Are Atrocious" (hopefully I remembered that right).  We managed to get ourselves in with a large group of people making their way up and around the National Museum of the American Indian.  A woman near me said she thought if we went that direction we could go up a block or two and see and hear the folks speaking on the podium.  Native Americans at the museum were engaged in a small gathering focused on stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Everywhere we looked were women in pink pussy hats and the crowd was friendly and extremely happy.

Now, I didn't do all my homework about the march.  I had it in my head that the march started at 10 am, but apparently the speaking was starting earlier and the march itself wasn't starting until 1:15pm.  Okay, that's fine.  Of course, as we worked our way around the patios and steps of the museum, we were in a giant crush of people.  When I say crush, I mean that each person occupied a space as big as their person and not much more.  People pressed in on each other from all sides.  We were intimately close with one another.  You really couldn't inch any farther forward and going backwards was a bigger challenge than what a Salmon faces swimming upstream to spawn.

My sister and I attended Oakland Mills High School ('86 and '83 respectively) and the halls were packed with students and moving fast in between classes.  We know how to move through a crowd.  Not on this day.  There was no where to go, and some people were getting very antsy.  At about 10 am we were standing on the patio around the museum, off to our left we could glimpse the jumbotron, but we couldn't see it clearly and we couldn't hear anything the speakers were saying.  The crush of people was only getting greater.  No one had any phone service to speak of.  Diane and her sister in law were probably 15 ft away from me, but at least 30 people stood in between us.   Looking at my watch I was thinking I can't see the speakers, I can't hear the speakers and I'm feeling mashed and so I thought we should get out of the crush.  I tried to signal Diane but at times the crowd was loud and it was hard to get through.  I couldn't text or call because I didn't have phone service.

Looking across the sea of people towards
the Air and Space Museum

I looked across the street towards the Air and Space museum and I could tell that people next to the building had freedom of movement, but not a lot.  I also didn't think we could make it there when I looked at the sea of people.  I turned around and could see the National Gallery of Art and thought we might have a chance if we went in that direction.  I didn't see any way we could go back the way we had come.  I finally got Diane's attention and we turned our group around and made our slow way out of the crowd.

I said earlier that the crowd was friendly and polite, and that's mostly true, but put even the most polite people together in a crush and nerves are sure to be on edge.  Groups attempting to escape the crowd had linked arms and would push through a crack in the people and you'd be trapped, unable to move while they forced their way out.  Or you'd be faced with people who surprisingly were attempting to move deeper in to the crowd.  Folks next to me at the National Museum of the American Indian said Jamie Raskin was their representative and they were supposed to be meeting up near the podium.  I learned last night they had stopped people from coming into the area close to the podium because there were already too many people at that point.

Scary moments are when you feel a force pushing at your back and know that you are powerless to stop it.  Calls to cease pushing could be heard.  An ambulance appeared seemingly out of nowhere on Jefferson Drive and 4th Street.  The crowd could not part to let the ambulance get through.  As we weaved our way slowly through the crowds I could hear people calling to let the ambulance through and knew we could make it across Jefferson Drive and the ambulance wouldn't have made it to where we were the crowds were that thick.  In desperation to get through the crowd people started claiming, truthfully or not that they had a great need to move ahead of others.  A woman near me said that people she was with were having anxiety attacks.  I was concerned and asked where they were.  "Well, they're ahead of us now, I can't see them."  Another woman was softly calling "Lilly!" and peering behind me.  I asked if she needed help locating someone and my efforts garnered me a dirty look.  I'm not innocent of the snark.  At one point four tall men pushed their way in front of my friends and I, and I felt that I had been shoved aside.  I said "Don't worry, women are used to being pushed aside to let men through, don't worry about us."  The young man turned to me and said "We're marching with our Mom and trying to keep up with her."  Well, okay, good for you, but you still didn't need to push me aside.

A woman on a scooter yelled out "Scooter!! Coming through!!" and literally ran over the feet of a man near me.  He said "You're running over my feet!!"  The woman on the scooter didn't seem to care.  I heard that an elderly, sick woman needed to get through, that a child in a wheel chair needed to get through, that a woman in a wheel chair needed to get through, and when I or someone else in the crowd would ask where they were, they were not near enough to be seen.  I also saw people smile and help people catch up with their groups.  At one point my sister and I were separated and the crowd chanted my name as they parted enough to let me slide through and catch up with her.  That was the majority of the time.

I think it took us a good hour to move through all those people as we worked our way up 4th street to the National Gallery of Art where we finally had room to move about.  We also managed to run in to another friend who had grown up across the street from us.  We took advantage of the time to head in to the museum, use the bathroom, look at some art and regroup.  We decided to grab lunch a few blocks from the march and then join the march in progress afterwards.  When we made our way back to the march though, everyone was pooped out.  At least one in our party just wasn't feeling right and we decided to call it a day.  We hopped on the red line at Metro Center and headed out.

We listened to the coverage on the way home and got to my house and kicked back to take in all the televised coverage.  It was amazing watching all the people who had gone to the marches around the country and seeing how many people had shown up in DC.  I'm so glad that we went even if we didn't actually join in a moving march.  I felt and still do feel energized like something great is about to happen and this is just the beginning.  I hope the momentum sticks with us and that people get involved at all levels of government.  Think about all the people who have a say over your life that you vote for.  From the group of people deciding about reserved parking and what color I can paint my door in my townhouse community, to the Board of Education, the County Council, the State Legislature and all the way up to the President of the United States.  It's a lot of folks who are making decisions that impact the way we live, whether or not we thrive, and determining how much freedom we get to lead our lives in the way we see fit.

The importance of the march yesterday to me at least is, as I said earlier, I want my voice to be heard.  I want to be taken in to account when decisions are made.  I'm going to be writing and calling and attending meetings and if there's another march, I'm going to be there.  Today the women's march sent out a plan for 10 actions in 100 days.  The first one is a postcard that goes to your elected representatives.  They said have a party and fill yours out and mail them off.  Well, okay, I will do that.  I commit to do the ten things they're going to ask.  It's a choice I'm making that I'm involved and I'm committed because this is important.  We're deciding what we want our world to look like and I'm not sitting on the sidelines for that.

UPDATE 1/25 - When I originally published this on Sunday, crowd estimates were at around 500,000.  I'm now hearing that more than 1,000,000 people were at the march in DC.

The Choices You Make

Happy New Year to All!  It's just the second day of 2017 and I am going to work on a theme for my posts this year - Choices.  I think it's a good and important theme because as we are all aware, choices have consequences.  Sometimes we have immediate feedback on our choices and sometimes we feel no impact at all.   I want to touch on some simple choices like exercise and dinner, but I also want to talk about broader and bigger choices like who we choose to represent us in government and some stuff in between.  At the end of 2017 it would be nice if we could say to ourselves that we had made some really good choices in the past year.

Every single day we make hundreds of choices.  I will try not to run down a bunch of rabbit holes that make your head swirl as I write, but instead, I want people to think about what every choice means and whether or not you can live with the consequences of those choices.  What does a choice mean to you?  Why are you choosing what you're choosing?  Does the choice you're making bring value to your life? What would happen if you made a different choice?  What would happen if you couldn't get your first choice?

Years ago I read the following:  Make your decision and then live your life like you had no other choice.  It's about not having regrets, or looking back.  However, sometimes we make a choice that turns out badly and it's good to look back to try and figure out where we went wrong.  Maybe we'll conclude that given the same set of circumstances we'd make exactly the same choice again.  It never hurts to have a 'debrief'.  What you want to make sure to do is learn and grow and keep moving forward.

When I was little my parents would take us over to the Columbia Swim Center in the evenings.  Unlike today's Splashdown, we had a high dive to climb up and jump off.  I was eight and my sister was five and we loved going off the high dive.  On my way up the ladder I'd stop and let go to show off my bravery.  My sister wanted to show how brave she was too - and she slipped and fell hard on to the concrete below, cracking her skull.  I was a little kid of course, but I knew my sister liked to copy me.  Younger siblings are doing everything they can to keep up with older siblings.  I knew she'd try to do everything I did.  I didn't know she'd slip and fall.  She and my Mom went off to the hospital in the ambulance and my Dad followed in the car.  No, they didn't leave me alone at the pool, a neighbor watched out for me while they looked after my sister.  In case you're wondering, she's fine.  She grew up and is having a very good life.

Okay, so while today's parents are freaking out over this story, I'll fill in some more details.  Where were my Mom and Dad?  Why weren't they hovering over us like today's parents making sure we didn't fall off the high dive?  This was 1973 and kids were given a lot more space then.  All of the parents were swimming laps or chatting at the other end of the pool.  All of the kids were swimming in the deep end of the pool and jumping off the diving boards.  There was a lifeguard sitting in the stand.

In 1973 Columbia was a small town.  Nearly everyone we knew was on swim team, including our parents.  My sister was a "Mini-Might!" - the name of the group of kids in the 5-6 yr age group.  All of us went to swim practice multiple times per week and all of us were excellent swimmers.  Jumping off the high dive was part of regular practice for the younger kids.  We did it all the time with no incidents.  My sister is athletic - she was jumping in to the pool and swimming by age two.  My Mom tells a story of her standing on the edge of the pool saying "'mere Daddy" and signaling to my Dad to come over because she was jumping in.   Sometimes she would say it and leap before my Dad was ready and he'd have to quickly move to her.  As a Mini-Might she swam quite a distance without taking a breath.  She hadn't gotten the breathing part down yet.  That happens with a lot of kids.

My Dad heard my sister fall off the high dive.  She didn't scream, but he heard the thunk as her head hit the pavement and he knew it was his little girl.  He said he felt it in his heart.  He was in the pool at the time, at the other end in a lap lane.  He leaped up and ran.  So did the lifeguard, my Mom and a lot of adults.  It happened really quickly.  As I said before, my sister had cracked her skull and had a minor concussion.  She missed a day or two of school.  After all of this, she still went off the high dive again.  We went back to our normal routine and my Mom said "Don't let go when you climb the ladder."  She didn't.  At least not for a while.  Neither did the rest of us for a while, because we had seen what happened.  Of course as a kid there comes a time when you do it again to see if the same thing will happen.  I never ever did it in front of my sister though.

My Mom and Dad made the decision that the pool, both before and after the high dive fall, was a safe place for their kids.  Like all environments, and I mean all environments, it comes with hazards that you need to be aware of.  Should they have stood over my sister as she climbed the ladder to the high dive?  Should they have forbidden her to use the high dive even while all the other kids were using it? They made the choice that this was a one off incident.  Also, they know that my sister has a bit of a daredevil gene and that they wouldn't be able to protect her from everything.  On our recent trip to Hawaii she was racing down steep mountain roads at top speeds on her bike.  She's jumped out of an airplane.  She likes to ski fast.

All through our childhood my parents encouraged us to try stuff, physically and mentally.  They didn't want us to get hurt, but they also knew that some of the stuff we did had an element of risk. They let us do it anyway.  I personally think they made good choices.  From swimming in the ocean, to skiing in the mountains we learned how to handle ourselves and to know when we were taking on too much risk.  That's a choice our parents made for us.  I'm glad they did.  Different people might have made different choices and everything would have turned out just as well for them.

I think the first time my sister started up the ladder to the high dive after her fall my Mom was close by, but not right next to her.  My Dad was watching from a distance.  After she made it up without falling our lives went back to normal.  Would it have been better if she hadn't fallen?  Maybe, but maybe not.  No one wants their child to get hurt ever, but they do.  So, we make choices about what kids can and can't do and how much hovering we'll do as they go about their business.  We put helmets on their little heads when they ski and bike.  We make them wear shinguards when they play soccer and helmets and padding when they play hockey.  We try to teach them funny comebacks if they get teased or bullied at school.  We help them with their homework so they have a better chance at succeeding.  We don't drive the car until everyone has their seatbelt on.

We make considered choices all the time about the activities kids get to pursue and there are real consequences.  As we make these choices, the kids are watching and learning because they're making choices too.  My sister did not stop doing stuff after she fell off the high dive.  Two days after Christmas this year she climbed into a wind tunnel to do indoor sky diving and had a big grin on her face the entire time.