The wrong side of history.... If we live that long....

This country was once a beacon of hope to the disenfranchised. It provided a safety net to displaced people around the world. It looked past the exterior and understood that people are not the sum total of their governments, and accepted those who were at risk because they didn't fit the mold of the totalitarian places from which they came.

On this day, of all days, when we are supposed to remember the losses of The Holocaust, when we are reminded of what we must never accept again, we, the United States of America, have shut our doors to the very people most at risk on this planet. It is shameful, and I feel ashamed. It is wrong. It is horrifying. It is immoral. We have given up who were trying to be for the last 250 years in order to be something so much less than we should be.

The terrorists have won. And make no mistake about it, they are celebrating this day. Because it will light the fire of extremism in places where the flames were not even flickering, and will fan the inferno further where we were already struggling for control.

All things considered...

Just something to consider. If your news source just keeps validating everything you already thought, if it is telling you exactly what you want to hear all the time, if it isn't regularly challenging you to think in different ways or to question your own conclusions, maybe your source is flawed. Because where else in your life is everything exactly the way you think it is, all the time?

To vote or not to vote? What exactly is the question?

After this grueling election season, a lot of people are expressing surprise that so few of their fellow Americans chose to exercise their right to vote.  (According to reports I have seen, voting was at a 20 year low in a presidential election, which is bad, even for the United States, which typically has a low turnout, anyway.)  I have seen a lot of disparaging remarks about not voting, and I think they have missed the point. We also have a right not to vote, and it can be a choice of honor, a choice of exasperation, a choice of civil disobedience, a choice of protest.

Working rich...

Change is difficult for most people.  It is scary.  It is unpredictable.  It is challenging.  It is complicated.  It is emotional.  It is enervating.

But change is also exciting.  It is innovative.  It is opportunity.  It is interesting.  It is fun.

I have felt all those things in this complicated week of change, sometimes all at the same time.

To write or not to write.... It really isn't a question.

I rarely get into this genre of writing, but this morning I stumbled into a blog post by a so called "mommy blogger" who was expounding on the virtues of her recent epiphany of not blogging about her children.  Like most new converts, she was full of enthusiasm for her viewpoint, and somewhat sanctimonious about her freshly developed convictions on the subject.

What she apparently failed to appreciate in the whole piece was that she was still blogging about her children.  In fact, she went even further by reminding her readers that she had previously blogged about something so personal for her son that her own father had to tell her to knock it off.  By talking about how she was not going to make personal revelations such as these any longer, she was, in fact, talking about them, and reminding us all that she had talked about them previously.  Frankly, the whole piece fell flat, since the entire blog was, in fact, about her children's personal lives.