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apartyofone · 6 years ago

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Who is this guy?

Read in the NYT about the mayor of a medium sized town in Indiana who has announced his candidacy for Democratic Primary in 2020.

For President.

Huh?

And then I saw his uncommon name - Pete Buttigieg - and remembered this very memorable post on Medium after 2016:

Take a read. And open your mind to the crazy, longshot possibilities...

https://medium.com/@buttigieg/a-letter-from-flyover-country-5d4e9c32d2ac

A Letter From Flyover Country

Most people have trouble pronouncing my name, so they just call me “Mayor Pete.” My surname, Buttigieg (Boot-edge-edge), is very common in my father’s country of origin, the tiny island of Malta, and nowhere else. Dad came to America in the 1970s and became a citizen; he married my mother, an Army brat and umpteenth-generation Hoosier, and the two of them settled in South Bend, Indiana, shortly before I was born thirty-five years ago. At the age of 29, the city elected me mayor. Being the mayor of your hometown is the best job in America, partly because it’s relatively nonpartisan — we focus on results, not ideology. Yet, precisely because of what it means to my community, I am paying closer attention than ever to national politics and the direction of my party.

The Democratic Party matters more than ever, now that a hostile takeover of the Republican Party has brought to power a thin-skinned authoritarian who is not liberal, nor conservative, nor moderate. Yet the party today stands at its lowest point of national and statewide influence since the 1920s, just when a robust opposition is needed most. Much will depend on whether Democrats can organize and deliver a consistent alternative — principles, proposals, and candidates — in the face of what is about to come out of Washington and various state capitals under unchecked Republican control. They will keep some of their promises and break others. Things they will do, and things they will allow, stand to hurt America and Americans. We need to be ready to put forward a better way.

Among Democrats responding to the last election and organizing for the next one, the conversation, inevitably, is moving in the direction of organizing and tactics. This is vital, but it cannot come before the fundamentals. We need to begin with the values that make us Democrats in the first place. If we don’t talk about values, many Americans will tune us out. Again.

I am a Democrat because I believe in protecting freedom, fairness, families, and the future.

(Emphasis is mine)

First, freedom — not just the thin idea of freedom from overregulation but the freedom to choose our destinies, not to mention our spouses. Freedom from things like crushing medical costs and student debt, from dishonest banking practices and anything else that affects the most basic of freedoms: freedom to live a life of our choosing.

Next, fairness, in the sense Democrats have always cared about deeply, fairness in access to voting and to public accommodations, fairness in the face of discrimination and privilege, fairness in our systems of distributing financial and political power. Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he correctly asserted that there is great unfairness in our economy and our democracy.

Next, family: because we are made happy or unhappy mostly by what happens in our families, because you can’t raise a family on less than an adequate wage, because shaping our families is a personal right, and because you can’t raise a family at all if your government doesn’t have your back.

And finally, the future: because the national security of our people, and the habitability of our land, almost totally depend on those we elect, their judgment and wisdom and willingness to pay attention to facts and evidence when making decisions that will have consequences for centuries.

None of this is theoretical for me. I didn’t see Afghanistan on the news, I saw it through the armored windshields of the vehicles I drove or guarded on dozens of missions outside the wire, and as a Reservist I could be sent back to war if a reckless president leads us into peril. I don’t think about gun violence as an abstraction, not when I’ve had to attend funerals and console the mothers of victims in my city — and swear in police officers alongside family members who pray they will come home safe every day. Marriage equality isn’t a political rallying cry for me, it is a legal fact without which my future family cannot even exist. Obamacare isn’t a political football for me, it’s a matter of household finance: it’s how my partner pays for his health care and how his mother pays for the chemotherapy on which her life depends. Climate change isn’t about polar bears for me. It’s about the South Bend families whose homes I stood in last summer, their basements flooded with muck and excrement while children wandered around the porch the night before school started, because our city had just experienced one of those unprecedented rainfalls that science kept warning us about.

Commentators have focused on candidates and their antics as though that mattered most. But politics, for our city and for most Americans, isn’t about The Show. Its consequences don’t happen in the Beltway or on Twitter or on television. Politics happens in, and to, our homes, in the lives of the people we care about, like the people in my household, my family, and my community. That’s why this all matters so much. The process matters because of what it means to us voters as human beings, not the other way around.

At home, I ran and won, twice, by telling my blue-collar community that Studebaker was never going to come back and make cars in our city, and that it was all right, because there is a way forward. Now Democrats need to absorb the fact that winning the popular vote is not enough, see that the future trends of the electoral map alone will not save us, and know that it’s all right, because there is a way forward.

Our values are American values, and a values-led strategy (backed by a formidable organization) will prevail if we are true to it, and if we keep it close to the earth. I am not a candidate for a position in the national party, but I am watching closely to see if any of the declared candidates will articulate this message: it is time to organize our politics around the lived experience of real people, whose lives play out not in the political sphere but in the everyday, affected deeply and immediately by how well we honor our values with good policy.

With over 40 per cent of voters in my generation describing themselves as independent, our future as a party will depend on reminding people how their lives have been improved by good Democratic policies, and when a voter thinks that isn’t true in her life, we had better listen closely and try to understand why.

When it comes to my part of the country, we will recover our ability to reach people only when we take them seriously, connecting our plans to their actual, personal lived experience rather than focusing on The Show. We need to invite individual people to assess how their individual lives changed — how their safety, their income, their access to health care, their gun rights, their marriages — have actually been affected, if at all, by what goes on in Washington.

Taking people seriously also means treating the constituency groups that traditionally support Democrats as more than a disconnected patchwork of interests to cater to, served by a great political salad bar of something different for everyone. The various identity groups who have been part of our coalition should be there because we have spoken to their values and their everyday lives — not because we contacted them, one group at a time and just in time for the next election, to remind them of some pet issue that illustrates why we expect them to support us. Laundry lists will not inspire.

Democrats need a true turnaround, just like my city did when I ran for mayor. In the last five years, my “rust belt” city went from being described by Newsweek as one of America’s ten dying communities to seeing its fastest pace of population and investment growth in recent memory. That’s how I got re-elected with 80 percent of the vote last year, in the seat of a county that would split its vote evenly between Clinton and Trump a year later. We earned support from residents on both sides of the aisle, not by becoming ideologically conservative but by listening to people about what matters to them, facing our problems, and delivering results on the ground to earn confidence and trust. In the same way, I am convinced that, for our politics and for our nation, salvation begins with the local.

#2020 #longshot

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koffeefrkeleven · 7 years ago

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Thoughts

I’m sure just about everyone has heard some relatively affluent person (middle class job, couple kids, suburban house) grumble about feeling financially pinched. Usually these people have crappy conservative views they share with their co-workers at the office, and together they grumble about anybody getting social services “must be nice,” they’ll say, “they (people on welfare) probably live better than I do...” Not sure why I am thinking of this. Maybe they just don’t know anyone who lives in poverty, or maybe the people they know they assume are outliers and “special cases” and “not like the rest of the freeloaders“. Maybe they even have their own experience of a job loss, or financial setback and they even view themselves as the exception to the rule that justifies their socioeconomic status and that of everyone below them.

...

I’ve read that it is true in America that the middle class only make comparisons of their situation to the people above them. Their boss that has a newer car or gets more vacations or has a larger house it a classier zip-code. I don’t watch much television as an adult, but it seems TV only ever portrays people of a certain affluence. You can tell by the gleaming counter-tops and the spacious imaginary rooms. To be poor in America is to be invisible. Maybe the Bundy’s in Married With Children or the TV family of Rosanne Bar, --but neither depicted poverty even if they were more recognizable. A little scrappy, but not poor. I think I am floored by this line of thinking, I mean, middle class folks rent space to store their shit because even though they live in a massive house they still need room to store their shit. They buy houses with enough room (with an empty room) in case they need to “grow their family.” The counterpoint to this (using myself here, disabled since 2001, I have worked at least part time all but a couple years since then). I have, --what is to me-- a very pleasant, cozy 2br apt for my son and I. I would imagine people with more money would be unused to quarters this cramped, but otherwise, coming to my apartment wouldn’t be that much unlike walking into a home of an affluent friend, --if scaled down. There’s the usual TV (a CTR for my son to play video games) a game system or two (gifts, often) and other electronics I use for my living. In the kitchen, the fact that consumer goods are cheap means I have either thrifted or been gifted all the things they would likely recognize in their own kitchens. Perhaps the basics, anyway, since I largely don’t buy small appliances. Still, there’s nothing here that screams to most people “dire poverty” (--to be fair, I don’t live in dire poverty, I’m just a hair below the poverty line with my income for selling art teaching and hosting events). Even though consumer goods are cheap, most of my clothes are years old, and I wear them until they fall apart. Even if you are poor, you can’t afford to look poor --especially as a teacher or artist. I have to have some suit jackets, and I have an abundance of ties. My furniture, like my clothes, are repaired again and again, until they can’t be any more. Gifts, dumpster-diving, bought second hand. There is maybe a half-dozen pieces of furniture I bought from an actual furniture store. There are some valuable things related to my occupation, or (frequently) gifted by more affluent family or gotten second-hand from friends.

I eat very well, but there’s a couple factors to this. There’s a the federal subsidy I financially qualify for, and I go regularly to food pantries (imagine if you will the unspeakable horror of off-brand cereals and peanut butter, --shocking to the affluent? Maybe?). Joking aside, being disabled I have more time than food budget so I stretch my dollars by buying no pre-made foods at all. A bag of potatoes in the long run is cheaper/more versatile than a bag of tater-tots. I make my own breads, pizza dough, and (often) my own crackers and tortillas.

If I am painting a rosy picture of “poverty,” --that’s intentional. I’m well aware there are many, many people clicks down the economic ladder. I’m protected from “dire poverty” by two things: federal disability and my education (which assures the work I do when I am able is paid at a much higher rate than minimum wage). My disability is also higher than most, because disability is calculated based on your last wage (ie: my last year teaching full-time). Interestingly enough, it is the people that live in “dire poverty” that the middle class maligns. Poverty cuts across racial lines and demographic concerns like the urban/rural divide that defined so much of this last election cycle. In Western Saratoga County (where I grew up) poverty was obscured by the fact it as down a driveway in a trailer park hidden by stands of trees to obscure it from the road. Trailer parks are tucked on side roads and dilapidated farmhouses with sagging porches. It’s part of American’s ugly legacy of racism that the popular imagination puts a brown face and Africanized name on poverty. But even where poverty is deeply entrenched it’s hidden because more affluent neighbors find it unsightly. They re more worried about their property values than homeless having a bed when the temperature dips during a NY winter. The max amounts for TANF (public cash assistance) for a family size of 2 or 4 people is $363 or $763 (assume single adult, kid, or 2 adults, two kids). On that, it would be hard to find an apartment I could live in in the city I live in. There’s a paltry $100 dollars more if you qualify for a “special housing need” which at the household of 4 is $711 a month, --which might get me a decent studio apartment, --might-- and with nothing left over for the month. And that is the first major problem of dire poverty, right there. Poverty means you’re pretty much always going to go from one crisis situation to another to keep living in doors. There’s a paltry $100 dollars more if you qualify for a “special housing need” which at the household of 4 is $711, --which might get me a decent studio apartment, --might.

“But why don’t they just get jobs?” Thanks for paying attention, Jimmy, --they do work. All public assistance recipients are required to work to get benefits. It’s been that way for years. Because you have a charmed life and have never needed assistance, you are lucky enough to avoid finding out that “just getting a job” doesn’t cure poverty when wages have been stagnant for so long that people are working their 40 and still can’t make ends meet or get ahead. Assuming they can get a full-time gig, because we in the US allow profitable companies to hire many PT workers have them work just enough so they don’t qualify for health care and benefits. If and when they get a bit ahead, their gain will be lost if they or a child gets sick or some other emergency expense arises.

Good try though, buck-o. This has been long. I could spill a lot more ink (or computer pixels --as it were) on this topic. There is an idea among the middle class that poverty should be made so mollifying and humiliating that people would be shocked into doing everything it takes to uplift themselves so they are never poor again. If you have spent time at DSS, look around at the tired, worried faces. It is exactly as humiliating and mollifying as Conservatives want it to be. But these are people with almost no way out. A job hasn’t gotten them out of poverty. The benefit they’re seeking won’t do it. These are people just being ground up and sent to their graves early by a broken economy with a dead safety net. If you ask a poor person how you strike it rich in America, --they will probably take you to a corner store or market and tell you to buy a scratch off. And economists that study social mobility in America will likely agree with them. Because the American dream is dead, and the dollar and a dream is what they got now. The American middle class is pinched as well, and feeling resentful. The middle class has been swallowing a meanly crafted folk-lore about poverty and supposed “generous benefits” that barely keep people in housing and alive for 30 years now. Even without any idea of what poverty is like, most middle class Americans are too scared to lose what advantage they have and are fighting like hell to keep it. Fighting for the status quo that grinds up the people below them. The middle class has almost no interaction with the poor, --generally. I wish I felt better about my country. I wish I liked people that are economic “winners” more than I do. (I do have many friends that are pretty affluent, --owning their own homes even in a city like Albany with it’s relatively high cost of living, --but most are urbanites who see the poor daily, and they get it. They are usually very aware of how good they have it and often I find they pick up the tab when we go out together --because money doesn’t matter, or at least not more than the company does, I hope). The question of whether “they have it better than I do” is pretty easily answerable, --however.

#poverty #thoughts #essay #America #disability #mental health #poor

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thisdaynews · 6 years ago

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How the anti-vaccine movement crept into the GOP mainstream

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-the-anti-vaccine-movement-crept-into-the-gop-mainstream/

How the anti-vaccine movement crept into the GOP mainstream

Protesters attend a rally at the Oregon State Capitol against a proposal to tighten school vaccine requirements on March, 7 in Salem, Oregon. | Sarah Zimmerman/AP Photo

health care

‘Appeals to freedom are like the gateway drug to pseudoscience.’

The anti-vaccine movement, which swelled with discredited theories that blamed vaccines for autism and other ills, has morphed and grown into a libertarian political rebellion that is drawing in state Republican officials who distrust government medical mandates.

Anti-vaccine sentiments are as old as vaccines themselves — and it’s been nearly 300 years since smallpox immunization began in what is now the United States. Liberal enclaves from Boulder, Colo., to Marin County, Calif., have long been pockets of vaccine skepticism. But the current measles epidemic, with more than 880 cases reported across 25 states of a disease declared eradicated in the U.S. 19 years ago, shows it gaining power within the GOP mainstream.

Story Continued Below

What’s new about the current anti-vaccine movement is the argument that government has no right to force parents to vaccinate their kids before they enter school. While Trump administration health officials and most Republicans in Congress still back mandatory vaccination, opposition is gaining steam among Republicans in state legislatures.

Among some of these officials, that libertarian demand for medical freedom has displaced the traditional GOP view that it’s a civic responsibility to immunize your kids to prevent the spread of disease. As more politicians take an anti-mandate stand, some end up adopting bogus theories about the supposed harms of vaccination — threatening to roll back one of public health’s great achievements.

In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin said vaccine mandates were un-American. In Oregon, the state party used vaccine mandates to bash Democrats as violating parental rights. And in the California Senate, all 10 Republicans last Wednesday opposed a measure aimed at stopping bogus medical exemptions from vaccination.

President Donald Trump gave measles vaccination a nine-second endorsement on the White House lawn recently. “They gotta get their shots,” he told a press scrum on April 27. In a speech at the World Health Assembly last week, HHS Secretary Alex Azar decried misinformation from “conspiracy groups” that “confuse well-meaning parents.”

Azar and other top health officials, at the CDC and elsewhere, have advocated consistently for vaccination. But Trump himself has shown a disdain for scientific and government expertise, and for years — including during his campaign — he backed a debunked claim that childhood shots cause autism.

The arguments of the skeptics — that vaccine-preventable diseases like measles are God’s will, a natural process, or even a way of strengthening a child’s immune system, that the government and a rapacious pharmaceutical industry are joined in an insidious cover-up of the dangers of vaccines — are varied, and cut across political and geographic spectra, from ultra-liberal bastions of California to the religious conservatism of the South.

The GOP tilt is more pronounced among state lawmakers than among federal ones; many prominent Republicans in Congress including most of the 16 GOP doctors have endorsed vaccines. The most visible and voluble exception is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an ophthalmologist who says his own kids were vaccinated but the decision should be left to the parents, not the government.

But in states where legislators have advanced serious efforts to tighten restrictions, such as Maine, Washington, Colorado and Oregon, nearly all of the opponents are Republicans who’ve taken a medical freedom stance.

“The more they dig into it being about freedom, the more susceptible they become to the theories,” said Dave Gorski, a Michigan physician who has tracked the anti-vaccine movement for two decades. “Appeals to freedom are like the gateway drug to pseudoscience.”

At the extremes are legislators like Jonathan Stickland, a pro-National Rifle Association, Christian conservative in the Texas Assembly, who has described vaccines as “sorcery” while personally attacking Baylor University scientist Peter Hotez, who has a daughter with autism and works on vaccines for neglected tropical diseases. “Parental rights mean more to us than your self-enriching ‘science,'” Stickland tweeted at Hotez earlier this month.

That same day, the Oregon Republican Party’s official Twitter account posted that Oregon Democrats were “ramming forced injections down every Oregon parent’s throat.”

Other Republican state officials have blamed Central American immigrants for disease outbreaks, echoing a talking point of Fox commentator Lou Dobbs. In fact, experts say, children in many of those countries are more thoroughly vaccinated than their U.S. counterparts against diseases like whooping cough and measles.

In Washington state, the House sponsor of a bill to end exemptions from measles vaccination was state Rep. Paul Harris, a moderate Republican whose district was the epicenter of a measles outbreak. But in the state Senate, the entire 20-member GOP delegation — as well as two Democrats — opposed the bill, although they failed to defeat it. In his signing statement, Gov. Jay Inslee, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said pointedly, “We believe in science. … And that is why in Washington state, we are against measles.”

In Oregon, where, again, most but not all opposition came from Republicans, Democratic Gov. Kate Brown killed an effort to tighten exemptions as part of a compromise with Republican leaders over a tax bill.

Vaccination was not a partisan issue in the past and even today, in states where vaccination hasn’t become politicized, GOP governments are sometimes as likely as Democratic ones to tighten vaccine requirements. Wyoming, for instance, is deeply conservative, but its state health department in a little-noticed decision last year created an immunization registry, added two vaccines to a list of school-entry requirements, and required home-schooled children to be vaccinated if they want to participate in sports or theater.

In neighboring Colorado, though, opposition to vaccine requirements became an attractive issue for conservatives, a minority in the state Legislature. Colorado has one of the country’s lowest rates of vaccinated kindergartners, but when Democrats tried to pass a modest bill requiring parents to take their vaccination exemption forms to the health department, hundreds came out to testify against it. The witnesses ranged from conservative Christians to parents with children they think were hurt by vaccines, to “natural living” types who don’t want vaccines to muck around with the immune system. But with a few exceptions, it was Republicans who helped stall and kill the bill.

“The antivax messaging has shifted from a focus on questions of safety to things like parental rights and data privacy, and those messages resonate more with conservative lawmakers and play to the GOP political base,” said Stephanie Wasserman, executive director of the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition.

People who prefer whooping cough

Not all that long ago, the anti-vax movement was dominated by the granola-eating, pharma-distrusting left. Conservative opposition was centered among people who also tended to see water fluoridation as a communist plot. In addition to the political fringes, a few religious sects opposed vaccination for doctrinal reasons — some small churches see them as arrogant interference with God’s plans; adherents of Rudolf Steiner, who propounded what he called anthroposophic medicine, think high fevers are key to a child’s spiritual growth.

The anti-vaccine club includes people like the former dentist Len Horowitz, who suggested that Ebola and HIV were created in CIA-funded laboratories, and the late Harris Coulter of Washington, D.C., whose books linked the pertussis vaccine to everything from blindness to serial murder and attraction to loud rock music.

A good share of the opposition arises in parents who claim to have seen harm from vaccines in their kids. Autism is often diagnosed around the time of the first measles shot, and while research has thoroughly refuted a causal link, it’s hard to shake the convictions — or convincing power — of a parent with a disabled child.

And like any pharmaceutical product, vaccines can, rarely, cause serious adverse events. Scientists at the CDC, FDA and elsewhere get paid to research side effects. Over the years, they have investigated evidence of harm from pertussis and measles shots, and traces of mercury and aluminum in vaccines. They’ve examined theoretical links to autism, allergies and sudden infant death syndrome — all negative. But the anti-vaccine movement waxes and wanes on political currents that have little to do with the evidence. Since Trump began his ascent in 2015, the movement has been growing.

Paranoia, mysticism and cultural pessimism still contribute to anti-vaccine thinking, but freedom from persecution is increasingly the banner raised in social media and public appearances. At a 13-hour committee vaccine bill hearing in the Colorado House last month, there were a lot of parents like Thomas Olmstead, who called the bill “a step toward the complete erosion of our medical freedom.”

Mistrust of government also seems to have underlain the epidemic that struck parts of New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, a crisis that took scientists by surprise. “I can’t recall in my time at CDC or since where the Orthodox community was involved in anti-vaccine beliefs,” said Walter Orenstein, who led immunization efforts at CDC from 1988 to 2004 — and happens to come from a family of rabbis.

Vaccine resistance has swept into conservative areas of Texas, where parental refusal rates doubled over just a few years. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, rates of refusal increased somewhat in liberal Austin, but the biggest upticks occurred in places like suburban Dallas and Trump-loving West Texas. In Gaines County, midway between Odessa and Lubbock, the percentage of vaccine refuseniks went from 3 percent to 9 percent from 2012 to 2018.

The late feminism opponent Phyllis Schlafly opposed vaccine mandates for years, but she was considered a right-wing gadfly for much of her career. The party has moved toward her. Her son Andrew Schlafly became lead counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a group that’s skeptical of vaccination and for a time counted former Trump HHS Secretary Tom Price as a member.

Kentucky’s Bevin, a conservative, said in March that he had taken his nine kids to a “chickenpox party” to catch the disease. In the pre-vaccine days, doctors recommended this practice because highly contagious chickenpox has fewer complications in the young, so it was actually safer to get it in childhood than later in life. But the chickenpox vaccine, licensed in 1995, changed that. Science had moved on, but not Bevin. “This is America, and the federal government should not be forcing that on people,” he said.

“There’s a populist shift, this ‘The government is telling me I have to do this,’ and then they buy into the conspiracy theories to find motives,” said Angie Anderson, a registered Republican with two small children who testified at one of the Colorado hearings — in favor of the bill tightening vaccine requirements. “It plants seeds of doubt and it’s gaining traction, and it scares me.”

The current measles outbreak can in part be traced back to a 1998 Lancet article by the British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, which linked measles vaccination to autism, setting off a wave of fear. The paper, since disproved and retracted, has become a classic of sorts — frequently employed in college statistics courses to demonstrate bad scientific practice.

Notwithstanding the ridicule, and the fact that Britain stripped him of his medical license in 2010, Wakefield met with Trump during the 2016 campaign, and he’s been interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who clings to the long-disproven theory that trace mounts of mercury in certain vaccines caused an autism epidemic, says Trump aides after the election promised to appoint him to a committee to investigate HHS’ vaccine programs.

Del Bigtree, a former TV journalist, teamed with Kennedy and Wakefield to make a tendentious anti-vaccine film. The three men often speak at rallies in state capitols where bills are under consideration, usually in the company of a few Republican state legislators.

The growing clout of the anti-vaccine movement is visible even at the CDC, where hundreds of vaccine opponents show up to speak during public comment periods at thrice-annual meetings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC’s key immunization overseer.

“I don’t tune them out, but the concerns they have — safety, appropriateness of vaccine trials — don’t raise a red flag with me,” said committee Chairman José Romero, a University of Arkansas pediatrician. “I wish the public would understand that the safety of these vaccines is looked at many times along the way to their children.”

#crept #Foreign #mainstream #Politics

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timclymer · 6 years ago

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Halloween – Samhain Teach Us To Overcome Fear

At its core, Samhain is about the night when the old God dies and the crone Goddess mourns him deeply for the next six weeks. The popular image of her as the old Halloween hag stirring her cauldron comes from the Celtic belief that all dead souls return to her cauldron of life, death and rebirth to await reincarnation.

After the Christian church to recast the sabbat, or seasonal season, by turning it into a day of fasting and prayer for saints (All Hallow Eve, preceding all Saints Day, is still one of the holiest days in Catholicism), Samhain lore and practice remained popular and the church was forced to diabolize it as a night “boiling with evil spirits.”

Masters of cultural blending, the church declared that the evil spirits were dispelled only the ringing of church bells on All Saints Day. Although terrorism has nothing to do with this pagan holiday, the idea of Samhain being a night of unleashed evil took hold in the collective mind.

The effect of this unfortunate misinterpretation is that a great opportunity to reflect on life and death, on the endless cycle of seasons, and extremely, on confronting and overcoming that which frigtens us, has become lost. Halloween has become an extremely commercial holiday, second only to Christmas in decorating and candy sales, or a celebration of the macabre, leading to fearful rejection by religiously conservative groups, or wanton abandon by those happy to unleash their versions of the hounds of hell.

Very few people however, seem to take the opportunity Halloween presents to face our fears, which is interesting – or maybe understandable — America appears to be one of the most frightened places on earth. According to a NY Times poll in 2006, nearly half of Americans feel “something uneasy or in danger.” Compared with five years previous, 39% of Americans said they feel less safe now, while only 14% said they feel safer.

While there does not seem to be any exact figures, turn on the television at almost any given time, and it’s clear that there’s been an increase, in recent years, in the number of crime dramas and crime related news coverage. We’ve got show like the venerable America’s Most Wanted reminding us that violent predators are loose in every city; CSI solving dramatic counters in at least three states; 20/20, PrimeTime and 48 Hours, with their companionable reporters warning us, with great concern for our well-being, about scams, crooks and thugs of every variety; and horrific slasher films, available on cable, right in our own homes and enhanced with the best blood-letting computer graphics to bring it all home.

In the early 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in the public perception of crime as the most important problem facing the country – 52% of Americans, in 1994, felt that crime was of utmost concern. Based upon data from 1978 through 1998, results suggest that this “big scare” was more a network TV news scare than a scare based on the real world of crime. The television news alone accounted for almost four times more variance in public perceptions of crime as our most important problem, than did actual crime rates, which – believe it or not – have actually gone down in the last fifteen years.

Yes – down: For the 10-year trend, from 1996 to 2005, the FBI reports that violent crime declined nearly 18%. Murder decreased 15% in 2005 compared to 1996. In this same time period, robbery offenses decreased 22%. Even motor vehicle theft decreased, down more than 11% in 2005 compared with 1996.

So just what are we so afraid of? If you’ve managed to avoid the crime scare, modern media has some other concerns for you: How about dying in an airplane accident? Getting cancer from … well, anything at all? Virulent breeds of superbugs resistant to every known antibiotic? Food safety? Organ trafficking? Killer bees? Having your child kidnapped? Hooked on drugs? Or finding a razor blade in their Halloween candy? Lead in toys?

For what it’s worth, the Halloween razor blade thing never happened, and most of those other concerns are overblown as well. Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear (Basic Books, 2000), calls these “pseudodangers”, and says the media, advertisers, politicians and various companies and organizations thrive on them and the money (or votes, which extremely translates to money ) that your fears bring them. Pseudodangers, suggests Glassner, represent an opportunity for us to avoid facing problems head-on. Rather than address – or sometimes, better said, because of our inability to address – poverty, we fear the criminals that poverty can create. Our inability to address foreign policy issues renders us terrified of terrorism.

“In just about every contemporary American scare,” says Glassner, “rather than confront disturbing shortcomings in society, the public discussion centers on disturbed individuals.”

Our fears, however, are often far worse than our realities.

According to John Meuller, the Woody Hayes Chair of national security policy and professor of political science at Ohio State University, we’re suffering from a national false sense of insecurity.

“Until 2001,” he writes, “far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counts) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer , or some severe allergic reaction to peanuts. ”

Further, Meuller noted that transportation researchers at the University of Michigan calculated than “an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the Sept. 11 crashes into account). risk when driving on America’s safest roads – rural interstate highways – one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles. ”

Driving is, in fact, one of the most dangerous things we do, and yet most of us are quite willing to accept that risk. Author Bruce Schneier, in Beyond Fear (Springer, 2nd edition 2006), observes that, “In America, automobiles cause 40,000 deaths every year; that’s the equivalent of a full 727 crashing every day and a half – 225 total in a year. As a society, we effectively say that the risk of dying in a car crash is worth the benefits of driving around town. But if those same 40,000 people died each year in fiery 727 crashes instead of automobile accidents, you could be sure there would be Similarly, studies have shown that both drivers and passengers in SUVs are more likely to die in accidents than those in compact cars, yet one of the major selling points of SUVs is that the owner feels safer in one . ”

Many of our fears, of late, involve children – everything from being afraid for them to being afraid * of * them. Surveys have found that kidnapping tops parents’ list of concerns for their children. Yet the largest safety issue for kids is basic simple safety measures in homes and public places. The risk of kidnapping by strangers remains incredibly small – under 1% of the nation’s more than 64 million children are located by non-family members and actually returned. A far smaller number die.

And those killer Columbine type kids? They’re statistically almost non-existent. 80% of our nation’s counties never experience a juvenile homicide.

But are things getting worse? “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know,” said Harry Truman.

“A new army of 6 million men are being mobilized against us, an army of delinquents.” Juvenile delinquency has increased at an alarming rate and is eating at the heart of America, “declared a Juvenile Court Judge – in 1946.

There are "predatory beasts” on the streets, hordes of teens and preteens running wild in city streets, “gnawing away at the foundations of society,” said a commentator – in the 19th century. In 1850 in New York alone, there were more than 200 gang wars mostly by teenage boys.

The youngest American ever executed for murder was 12 years old. She killed the baby in her care – in 1786.

So how did we get so scared? Our fears, suggests Glassner, are carefully and repeatedly fed by anyone who desires to create fear, often by manipulating words, facts, news, sources or data, in order to indict certain personal behaviors, justify governmental actions or policies (at home or abroad ), keep people consuming, elect certain politicians, or distract the public’s attention from allegedly more urgent social issues like poverty, social security, unemployment, crime or pollution. The most common techniques for social haunting include:

Careful selection and omission of news (some relevant facts are shown and some are not); (reporting that the number one problem teachers faced in 1940 was talking and gum chewing, and in 1990, pregnancy, suicide and drug abuse; , teachers today site problems parent apathy and lack of text books as their biggest problems)

Distortion of statistics or numbers (declaring 800,000 children missing each year, but failing to break those statistics down meaningfully)

Transformation of single events into social epidemics ; (going “postal” is not a postal service epidemic – that remains one of the safest occupations)

Corruption and distortion of words or terminology according to specific goals ;

Stigmatization of minorities , especially when associated with criminal acts or degeneration behavior;

Generalization of complex and multifaceted situations ;

Causal inversion (turning a cause into an effect or vice-versa).

None of this is to suggest we should not be cautious or aware or concerned, that we should not be proactive in caring for ourselves or our children, and taking normal precautions for health and safety. But simple things like wearing seatbelts and washing hands will do more to protect you than refusing to talk to strangers or carrying a gun.

“To fear is one thing,” says author Katherine Paterson, who wrote Jacob Have I Loved (HarperTrophy, 1990). “To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.”

Nobel Prize Laureate Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic, suggested, in 1950 when we were dealing with all sorts of still familiar concerns, there are two ways of coping with fear:

“… one is to diminish the external danger, and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance. The latter can be reinforced, except where immediate action is necessary, by turning our thoughts away from the cause of fear. of very great importance. Fear is in itself degrading; it easily becomes an obsession; it produces hate of that which is feared, and it leads headlong to excesses of cruelty. ”

In “ We are Not Afraid, ” Homer Hickam, author Rocket Boys (Delta, 2000) (which was made into the film, October Sky ), drew on his experiences growing up in the brave and resilient community of Coalwood, West Virginia, a town were the threat of death was constant, but fear was not. He said Coalwood residents take a four pronged approach to fearlessness that he sums up in something like a set of mantras:

We are proud of who are

We stand up for what we believe

We keep our families together

We trust in God but rely on ourselves

Hickam also says something substantially Buddhist early in his book. He says that despite the ills of our society, we large live among compassionate, kind and optimistic people who are striving to do good. “As an American,” he says, in a line that would make the Dali Lama proud, “you have a duty to be happy. pursuit of happiness. So do your duty. Learn how to be happy and keep this in mind: You can not be happy unless you stop being afraid. ”

Senator. John McCain (R-Ariz.) Puts it less poetically: “Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud. You’re almost certainly going to be OK. a life worth living, is it? ”

Fear, Hickam says, is mostly a habit.

“The habit of fear and dread,” he writes, “can be compared to having a chronic disease. that we walk around with slumped shoulders and drag one heavy foot after another. We dread getting out of bed in the morning, certain that only awful things are going to happen when we do. We include ourselves. We do not like the way we look. We feel victimized. We’re envious of others and assume the world is filled with meanness. We always lose our views and we do not even know why. Worse, the disease we have is infectious. Innocent people we encounter are susceptible to catching fear and dread from us, including our children. wrong, but we do not know how to be cured. ’

One way to rid yourself of this infection, says Hickam, is to "stand up straight and …. be proud of who you are.” To do that, he says, it’s necessary to know who you are, and how you’re connected to your family and your community. That involves talking to family members, to community members – and passing their stories on to your children and other family members. To be unafraid, you have to be connected to something larger than yourself, says Hickam.

The habit of fear and dread also causes timidity, says Hickam, a tendency to avoid confrontation, especially in defending our opinion. That one’s probably not quite as big an issue here for us – we have lots of opinions and fling them around easily here. But how about “out there”? “If you act as if what you think is not important, it’s the same as believing * you * are not important,” wrists Hickam. “An attitude like that can squeeze the life right out of anyone.”

One of the best ways to overcome that aspect of fear and dread, he says, is “to take up for those who can not take up for themselves.”

“There’s always someone who needs you help. How can you be afraid if you’re the protector of someone else in a dangerous world?

But there’s more to it than just faking it till you make it. Hickam says you should also teach that person to stand up for himself, too, so that he can keep his dignity. Hickam cautions that standing up for what you believe "does not mean that every time you feel you’re slighted, you should erupt with loud, hateful behavior. of some perceived oppression. This attitude ahs to do with a quiet determination to have your opinion explained and heard. To be effective, it also has to be respectful and fair. The most effective way of standing up is always going to be the nonviolent way, quiet but determined. ”

Keeping our families together can actually be one of the harder tools for fearlessness, observes Hickam, but it’s a vital one. “An intact, functioning family works to not only provide a loving refugee, but also fills in the cracks of our own personalities. Smart he is, or how many muscles he ahs or anything else. The family can be a shield against the world, and also the springboard to a better life. ”

And finally, Hickam says trusting God but relying on yourself is a sure way to rise above fear. “The people of Coalwood were against calling on God any time they needed help,” he recalled. “For one thing, it was considered impolite. God had a lot of things to worry about after all, without including everything that got in the way of one particular human being. with most of what they needed to get past a scrape, including their own good common sense. ” Mostly, he said, they reserved their prayers for thanks.

While others often ponder why bad things happen to good people, Hickam ponders something he says as more amazing: “Why, in a universe and a world where everything must work hard to simply survive, did that which we think of as decent and fine get we are crave goodness, seek out honesty and strive to be honorable, even when evil is so much easier? our species and our world and our universe? Some great goodness is out there, and it’s here, too. It is everywhere. ”

We’re two parts, says Hickam, “one spiritual and the other physical. Both are important. us. But we also must use our hands and minds to keep our families safe and build a better world. ”

A world in which we are not afraid.

“We are not afraid.”

Say it slowly, and savor it, says Hickam, like we should savor the world and each moment. This sacred time of year honors the timeless changes of our lives, and offers us a rare opportunity to look death in the eye and give it a wink and a nod.

“There is no reason to fear life or dread what might be coming your way,” wrists Hickam. “Every hour of every day, recall all the people who came before you, all those who make up who you are, and stand tall and be proud. No matter how perilous the times, they will always be with you …”

Bertrand Russell would agree. “We want to stand up our own feet and look fair and square at the world,” he said. “- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it … We bought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We bought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create. ”

As Samhain reminds us, death is not an end, but a transition, a time to look forward to new beginnings, when we will be born anew as the wheel of the year turns on and on.

And there is nothing to be afraid of.

Source by Theresa Willingham

from Home Solutions Forev https://homesolutionsforev.com/halloween-samhain-teach-us-to-overcome-fear/ via Home Solutions on WordPress from Home Solutions FOREV https://homesolutionsforev.tumblr.com/post/184650014775 via Tim Clymer on Wordpress

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homesolutionsforev · 6 years ago

Text

Halloween – Samhain Teach Us To Overcome Fear

Very few people however, seem to take the opportunity Halloween presents to face our fears, which is interesting – or maybe understandable — America appears to be one of the most frightened places on earth. According to a NY Times poll in 2006, nearly half of Americans feel "something uneasy or in danger." Compared with five years previous, 39% of Americans said they feel less safe now, while only 14% said they feel safer.

While there does not seem to be any exact figures, turn on the television at almost any given time, and it's clear that there's been an increase, in recent years, in the number of crime dramas and crime related news coverage. We've got show like the venerable America's Most Wanted reminding us that violent predators are loose in every city; CSI solving dramatic counters in at least three states; 20/20, PrimeTime and 48 Hours, with their companionable reporters warning us, with great concern for our well-being, about scams, crooks and thugs of every variety; and horrific slasher films, available on cable, right in our own homes and enhanced with the best blood-letting computer graphics to bring it all home.

In the early 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in the public perception of crime as the most important problem facing the country – 52% of Americans, in 1994, felt that crime was of utmost concern. Based upon data from 1978 through 1998, results suggest that this "big scare" was more a network TV news scare than a scare based on the real world of crime. The television news alone accounted for almost four times more variance in public perceptions of crime as our most important problem, than did actual crime rates, which – believe it or not – have actually gone down in the last fifteen years.

So just what are we so afraid of? If you've managed to avoid the crime scare, modern media has some other concerns for you: How about dying in an airplane accident? Getting cancer from … well, anything at all? Virulent breeds of superbugs resistant to every known antibiotic? Food safety? Organ trafficking? Killer bees? Having your child kidnapped? Hooked on drugs? Or finding a razor blade in their Halloween candy? Lead in toys?

For what it's worth, the Halloween razor blade thing never happened, and most of those other concerns are overblown as well. Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear (Basic Books, 2000), calls these "pseudodangers", and says the media, advertisers, politicians and various companies and organizations thrive on them and the money (or votes, which extremely translates to money ) that your fears bring them. Pseudodangers, suggests Glassner, represent an opportunity for us to avoid facing problems head-on. Rather than address – or sometimes, better said, because of our inability to address – poverty, we fear the criminals that poverty can create. Our inability to address foreign policy issues renders us terrified of terrorism.

"In just about every contemporary American scare," says Glassner, "rather than confront disturbing shortcomings in society, the public discussion centers on disturbed individuals."

Our fears, however, are often far worse than our realities.

According to John Meuller, the Woody Hayes Chair of national security policy and professor of political science at Ohio State University, we're suffering from a national false sense of insecurity.

"Until 2001," he writes, "far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counts) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer , or some severe allergic reaction to peanuts. "

Further, Meuller noted that transportation researchers at the University of Michigan calculated than "an American's chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the Sept. 11 crashes into account). risk when driving on America's safest roads – rural interstate highways – one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles. "

Driving is, in fact, one of the most dangerous things we do, and yet most of us are quite willing to accept that risk. Author Bruce Schneier, in Beyond Fear (Springer, 2nd edition 2006), observes that, "In America, automobiles cause 40,000 deaths every year; that's the equivalent of a full 727 crashing every day and a half – 225 total in a year. As a society, we effectively say that the risk of dying in a car crash is worth the benefits of driving around town. But if those same 40,000 people died each year in fiery 727 crashes instead of automobile accidents, you could be sure there would be Similarly, studies have shown that both drivers and passengers in SUVs are more likely to die in accidents than those in compact cars, yet one of the major selling points of SUVs is that the owner feels safer in one . "

Many of our fears, of late, involve children – everything from being afraid for them to being afraid * of * them. Surveys have found that kidnapping tops parents' list of concerns for their children. Yet the largest safety issue for kids is basic simple safety measures in homes and public places. The risk of kidnapping by strangers remains incredibly small – under 1% of the nation's more than 64 million children are located by non-family members and actually returned. A far smaller number die.

And those killer Columbine type kids? They're statistically almost non-existent. 80% of our nation's counties never experience a juvenile homicide.

But are things getting worse? "There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know," said Harry Truman.

"A new army of 6 million men are being mobilized against us, an army of delinquents." Juvenile delinquency has increased at an alarming rate and is eating at the heart of America, "declared a Juvenile Court Judge – in 1946.

There are "predatory beasts" on the streets, hordes of teens and preteens running wild in city streets, "gnawing away at the foundations of society," said a commentator – in the 19th century. In 1850 in New York alone, there were more than 200 gang wars mostly by teenage boys.

The youngest American ever executed for murder was 12 years old. She killed the baby in her care – in 1786.

So how did we get so scared? Our fears, suggests Glassner, are carefully and repeatedly fed by anyone who desires to create fear, often by manipulating words, facts, news, sources or data, in order to indict certain personal behaviors, justify governmental actions or policies (at home or abroad ), keep people consuming, elect certain politicians, or distract the public's attention from allegedly more urgent social issues like poverty, social security, unemployment, crime or pollution. The most common techniques for social haunting include:

Distortion of statistics or numbers (declaring 800,000 children missing each year, but failing to break those statistics down meaningfully)

Transformation of single events into social epidemics ; (going "postal" is not a postal service epidemic – that remains one of the safest occupations)

Corruption and distortion of words or terminology according to specific goals ;

Stigmatization of minorities , especially when associated with criminal acts or degeneration behavior;

Generalization of complex and multifaceted situations ;

Causal inversion (turning a cause into an effect or vice-versa).

"To fear is one thing," says author Katherine Paterson, who wrote Jacob Have I Loved (HarperTrophy, 1990). "To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another."

"… one is to diminish the external danger, and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance. The latter can be reinforced, except where immediate action is necessary, by turning our thoughts away from the cause of fear. of very great importance. Fear is in itself degrading; it easily becomes an obsession; it produces hate of that which is feared, and it leads headlong to excesses of cruelty. "

In " We are Not Afraid, " Homer Hickam, author Rocket Boys (Delta, 2000) (which was made into the film, October Sky ), drew on his experiences growing up in the brave and resilient community of Coalwood, West Virginia, a town were the threat of death was constant, but fear was not. He said Coalwood residents take a four pronged approach to fearlessness that he sums up in something like a set of mantras:

We are proud of who are

We stand up for what we believe

We keep our families together

We trust in God but rely on ourselves

Hickam also says something substantially Buddhist early in his book. He says that despite the ills of our society, we large live among compassionate, kind and optimistic people who are striving to do good. "As an American," he says, in a line that would make the Dali Lama proud, "you have a duty to be happy. pursuit of happiness. So do your duty. Learn how to be happy and keep this in mind: You can not be happy unless you stop being afraid. "

Senator. John McCain (R-Ariz.) Puts it less poetically: "Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud. You're almost certainly going to be OK. a life worth living, is it? "

Fear, Hickam says, is mostly a habit.

"The habit of fear and dread," he writes, "can be compared to having a chronic disease. that we walk around with slumped shoulders and drag one heavy foot after another. We dread getting out of bed in the morning, certain that only awful things are going to happen when we do. We include ourselves. We do not like the way we look. We feel victimized. We're envious of others and assume the world is filled with meanness. We always lose our views and we do not even know why. Worse, the disease we have is infectious. Innocent people we encounter are susceptible to catching fear and dread from us, including our children. wrong, but we do not know how to be cured. '

One way to rid yourself of this infection, says Hickam, is to "stand up straight and …. be proud of who you are." To do that, he says, it's necessary to know who you are, and how you're connected to your family and your community. That involves talking to family members, to community members – and passing their stories on to your children and other family members. To be unafraid, you have to be connected to something larger than yourself, says Hickam.

The habit of fear and dread also causes timidity, says Hickam, a tendency to avoid confrontation, especially in defending our opinion. That one's probably not quite as big an issue here for us – we have lots of opinions and fling them around easily here. But how about "out there"? "If you act as if what you think is not important, it's the same as believing * you * are not important," wrists Hickam. "An attitude like that can squeeze the life right out of anyone."

One of the best ways to overcome that aspect of fear and dread, he says, is "to take up for those who can not take up for themselves."

"There's always someone who needs you help. How can you be afraid if you're the protector of someone else in a dangerous world?

But there's more to it than just faking it till you make it. Hickam says you should also teach that person to stand up for himself, too, so that he can keep his dignity. Hickam cautions that standing up for what you believe "does not mean that every time you feel you're slighted, you should erupt with loud, hateful behavior. of some perceived oppression. This attitude ahs to do with a quiet determination to have your opinion explained and heard. To be effective, it also has to be respectful and fair. The most effective way of standing up is always going to be the nonviolent way, quiet but determined. "

Keeping our families together can actually be one of the harder tools for fearlessness, observes Hickam, but it's a vital one. "An intact, functioning family works to not only provide a loving refugee, but also fills in the cracks of our own personalities. Smart he is, or how many muscles he ahs or anything else. The family can be a shield against the world, and also the springboard to a better life. "

And finally, Hickam says trusting God but relying on yourself is a sure way to rise above fear. "The people of Coalwood were against calling on God any time they needed help," he recalled. "For one thing, it was considered impolite. God had a lot of things to worry about after all, without including everything that got in the way of one particular human being. with most of what they needed to get past a scrape, including their own good common sense. " Mostly, he said, they reserved their prayers for thanks.

While others often ponder why bad things happen to good people, Hickam ponders something he says as more amazing: "Why, in a universe and a world where everything must work hard to simply survive, did that which we think of as decent and fine get we are crave goodness, seek out honesty and strive to be honorable, even when evil is so much easier? our species and our world and our universe? Some great goodness is out there, and it's here, too. It is everywhere. "

We're two parts, says Hickam, "one spiritual and the other physical. Both are important. us. But we also must use our hands and minds to keep our families safe and build a better world. "

A world in which we are not afraid.

"We are not afraid."

"There is no reason to fear life or dread what might be coming your way," wrists Hickam. "Every hour of every day, recall all the people who came before you, all those who make up who you are, and stand tall and be proud. No matter how perilous the times, they will always be with you …"

Bertrand Russell would agree. "We want to stand up our own feet and look fair and square at the world," he said. "- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it … We bought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We bought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create. "

As Samhain reminds us, death is not an end, but a transition, a time to look forward to new beginnings, when we will be born anew as the wheel of the year turns on and on.

And there is nothing to be afraid of.

Source by Theresa Willingham

from Home Solutions Forev https://homesolutionsforev.com/halloween-samhain-teach-us-to-overcome-fear/ via Home Solutions on WordPress

#Home Solutions Forev

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nickyschneiderus · 6 years ago

Text

Liuba Grechen Shirley has been looking to flip New York’s 2nd district for a long time

Liuba Grechen Shirley may not have the name recognition of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Randy Bryce, but she finds herself in their company as they try to flip Congress.

A fifth-generation Long Islander and first-time candidate, Grechen Shirley has been endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and organizations like EMILY’s List and Our Revolution.

Two weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Grechen Shirley founded the grassroots group New York’s 2nd District Democrats (NY02 Dems)—a group dedicated to flipping the district and creating a “unified social justice movement.” A few months, protests, and letter-writing campaigns later, she decided to run for office.

Who is Liuba Grechen Shirley?

Liuba Grechen Shirley for Congress/Facebook

Grechen Shirley, a 37-year-old mother of two, was raised by a single mother. She currently lives in the home her immigrant grandparents bought almost 80 years ago. According to the New York Times, she previously worked in “global economic development and human rights for nonprofit groups, as well as the United Nations Foundation and New York University.”

In August, Grechen Shirley released her campaign video called “Personal,” which features sweeping music, a voiceover focused on working-class issues, and video of her on the campaign trail and at home.

youtube

In an election cycle where women are advertising motherhood as a political strength, Grechen Shirley has been honest about the difficulty of simultaneously running for office and raising a family.

In the video, she says, “More than half of our representatives are millionaires and they don’t understand how the policies they enact affect our lives.”

“That’s why we need more working people in office, and that’s why I decided to run. But running for office is a full-time job. I was told with two kids, a husband that worked full time, and no childcare that it was impossible. Well, it wasn’t impossible. It’s just really hard.”

Liuba Grechen Shirley news

Grechen Shirley made national headlines this May by becoming the first woman to receive federal approval to use campaign funds for childcare. The decision, which gained support from Hillary Clinton and 24 members of Congress, was unanimously approved by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

“With the FEC’s landmark decision, more working parents who can’t afford to pay out of pocket for full-time childcare will be able to run for office,” Grechen Shirley told the Daily Dot in an email. “This will make Congress more socioeconomically diverse and add the critical voice of working parents with small children to Congress.”

While the FEC’s decision was not gender-specific, women still take on a larger share of childcare and household duties. It’s a real, rather than symbolic, win for prospective female candidates.

“In this year alone, record-breaking numbers of women are running for federal office,” she said. “And I think this game-changing decision will help inspire even more.”

What is socialism, really?

Who’s going to challenge Trump in 2020? Here are the early contenders

Could Bernie Sanders run—and win—in 2020?

Where does Beto O’Rourke stand on policy?

What is Grechen Shirley’s platform?

Healthcare

Healthcare was the catalyst that inspired Grechen Shirley to run for Congress. In fact, she decided to run the day Rep. King voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Grechen Shirley supports Medicare-for-All and believes “healthcare is a human right.”

Similar to Ocasio Cortez and Bryce, she frames healthcare as a deeply personal issue. On her website, she writes about the medical bills she faced after giving birth. She recounts arguing with doctors who wouldn’t take her mother’s insurance for six spinal surgeries.

Regarding women’s healthcare, the right to choose prevails in every facet of Grechen Shirley’s positions. Whether it’s maternity care, affordable contraception or safe, legal abortions, she has said women—of all income levels—should have sexual and reproductive autonomy.

Gun safety

As for other liberal issues like gun safety, she supports universal background checks, a new assault weapons ban—including a government buyback program—and closing loopholes for domestic abusers.

Economics and campaign finance

On economic issues, Grechen Shirley supports the $15 federal minimum wage, unions, universal pre-K, debt-free college, paid family leave, closing corporate tax loopholes, and cutting taxes for the middle class. Her website also addresses the specific ways economic policies leave women behind. She hopes to push for women’s “fully equal participation in our economy.”

In terms of campaign finance reform, Grechen Shirley has pledged not to accept corporate PAC money. She wants to roll back Citizens United and work toward publicly financing elections.

Immigration

Liuba’s website does not call for the abolishment of ICE, nor does it mention ICE directly, which puts her at odds with some other progressive candidates. However, her immigration policy includes supporting DACA (specifically the DREAM Act of 2017), a pathway to citizenship, and extending Temporary Protected Status, which allows people from specific countries to live and work in America due to unsafe conditions in their home countries.

Who is Grechen Shirley’s opponent?

Liuba for Congress Rep Pete King/Flickr (Fair Use) Remix by Jason Reed

Grechen Shirley’s opponent, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), has been in the U.S. House of Representatives for 25 years. King was once found to be one of Congress’s most bipartisan members by the Lugar Center. An old-school Republican, King now aligns himself closely with the president.

King is particularly hard-right on immigration. He supported Trump’s Muslim ban, telling Politico the executive order was “long overdue.” He also supported detaining migrants at the border. King told Talking Points Memo that “the president is absolutely right that we should be detaining more of these people,” and that “Americans care more about Americans.”

However, King has deviated from and even criticized Trump at times.

After the president’s highly-controversial Charlottesville comments, King tweeted: “The white supremacists & Neo-Nazis who organized Charlottesville event have no place in politics culture or debate & must b condemned by all.” King also voted against the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 because the legislation eliminated the full deduction for state and local taxes—which will greatly affect his district.

Grechen Shirley told the Daily Dot that King “has been in basic agreement with President Trump on most issues—and is clearly an extremist, not a moderate.”

King’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Liuba Grechen Shirley polls

The race has begun to look closer than it did earlier this year. According to the Grechen Shirley campaign, they’ve raised $1 million in donations in September free of corporate PAC money. They have also received more small-dollarr donations than any King challenger in the last 12 years.

As of late September, the Cook Political Report changed the race from Solid Republican to Likely Republican.

In a congressional district that was a Pivot County—a county that went for Trump in 2016 after voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012—it’s hard to predict if the district will flip. Despite this, Grechen Shirley says that voters in New York’s second district are ready for change.

“People who are registered Republicans have told me that they have been inspired by my race, and are going to vote for me in November,” she told the Daily Dot. “The people of this district are just sick and tired of the same and want a real champion for working families to represent them in Congress.”

Will Kamala Harris run in 2020?

Can the CEO of Starbucks really be our next president?

Who is George Soros, conservatives’ biggest boogeyman?

There’s no such thing as the ‘alt-left’—and here’s why

Editor’s note: This article is regularly updated for relevance.

from Ricky Schneiderus Curation https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/liuba-grechen-shirley/

#Ricky Schneiderus Curation

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investmart007 · 7 years ago

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HUNTINGTON, W.Va. | Ex-con candidate compounding GOP woes in West Virginia

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/D5rGmr

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. | Ex-con candidate compounding GOP woes in West Virginia

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Republican Don Blankenship doesn’t care if his party and his president don’t think he can beat Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin this fall.

This former coal mining executive, an ex-convict released from prison less than a year ago, is willing to risk his personal fortune and the Republican Party’s golden opportunity in West Virginia for the chance to prove them all wrong.

“I’ll get elected on my own merits,” Blankenship said this week.

There aren’t a lot of things that can sink Republicans’ hopes in ruby red West Virginia, where President Donald Trump won by 42 percentage points, but Blankenship could well be one. His candidacy is sending shudders down the spines of Republicans — an already rattled group this election season — who are furiously working to ensure he is not their choice to take on Manchin in November’s midterm election.

Blankenship’s primary bid is still an outside shot, but the spectacle is testing whether a Republican Party led by an anti-establishment outsider can rein in the party’s anti-establishment impulses.

“The establishment, no matter who you define it as, has not been creating jobs in West Virginia,” Blankenship said at a primary debate this week.

Even before Blankenship emerged as a legitimate Republican candidate, West Virginia was a worry for some Republicans.

Manchin, a former governor, has held elected office of some sort in West Virginia for the better part of the last three decades. And he’s worked hard to cozy up to Trump and nurture a bipartisan brand.

He has voted with the Republican president more than he has opposed him, his office says, noting that the pair have personally collaborated on trade, weakening environmental regulations, gun violence and court nominations.

The alignment with Trump was so effective former White House adviser Steve Bannon worried privately to colleagues that Trump might actually endorse the Democrat. While an outright endorsement now is unlikely, a Blankenship primary victory on May 8 could push Trump to help Manchin — indirectly at least — by ignoring West Virginia this fall.

The state has long been considered a prime pickup opportunity for Republicans, who hold a two-seat Senate majority that suddenly feels less secure given signs of Democratic momentum in states like Nevada, Arizona and Tennessee. If Democrats can win in the state that gave Trump his largest margin of victory in the nation, they may have a slim chance at seizing the Senate majority.

Some of Trump’s most prominent conservative supporters, particularly those in Bannon’s network, have rallied behind state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a fiery, conservative former Capitol Hill aide, who was raised in New Jersey but has served as West Virginia’s top lawyer since 2013. Rep. Evan Jenkins, who switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 2013, has highlighted his West Virginia roots and deep allegiance to Trump.

Jenkins noted that Manchin missed a big opportunity to align himself with Trump on key issues such as taxes and health care.

“The president gave Joe Manchin every opportunity in the early weeks and months of his administration to vote the right way,” Jenkins said in an interview. “He voted wrong.”

But in interviews this week, both Morrisey and Jenkins declined to attack Blankenship for his role in the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster, the deadliest U.S. mine disaster in four decades. Blankenship led the company that owned the mine and was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiring to break safety laws, a misdemeanor.

Raising that dark history has been left to the national GOP forces believed to be behind the Mountain Families PAC, an organization created late last month that has invested more than $700,000 attacking Blankenship on television. A spokesman for the Senate GOP’s most powerful super PAC declined to confirm or deny a connection to the group.

Trump has done his part to hurt Blankenship’s chances as well.

The president excluded the former mining executive from a recent West Virginia stop, where he appeared with Jenkins on one side and Morrisey on the other. And Cory Gardner, who leads the Senate GOP’s national campaign efforts, had this to say to reporters when asked about Blankenship last week: “Do they let ankle bracelets get out of the house?”

For voters, Blankenship remains a deeply polarizing figure.

Blankenship calls himself a West Virginian but had his supervised release transferred last August to federal officials in Nevada, where he has a six-bedroom home with his fiancee 20 miles from Las Vegas, in Henderson.

“It’s a friendly place and I like it,” said Blankenship, whose supervised release ends May 9, the day after the primary.

Blankenship recently drew attention for comments on a radio show about the father of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Blankenship said he believed McConnell has a conflict of interest in foreign relations matters, in particular those dealing with China. Chao’s father was born in China and started an international shipping company in New York.

According to media reports, Blankenship’s fiancee also was born in China.

“I don’t have any problem with Chinese people, Chinese girlfriend, Chinese anything,” Blankenship told the radio station. “But I have an issue when the father-in-law is a wealthy Chinaperson and has a lot of connections with some of the brass, if you will, in China.”

“He’s ruthless, cold-blooded, cold-hearted, self-centered,” said Stanley Stewart, a retired miner who was inside the Upper Big Branch mine when it blew up in 2010. “I feel that if anybody voted for Don Blankenship, they may as well stick a knife in their back and twist it, because that’s exactly what he’ll do,” Stewart said in an interview this week.

But there is also skepticism that he was treated fairly by the courts. Blankenship has cast himself as a victim of an overbearing Obama administration, an argument that resonates with many white working-class voters on the ground here.

“What they’ve said he’s actually done (in the criminal case), I don’t believe none of that,” 21-year-old coal mechanic Zack Ball said while grabbing a bite to eat in the Boone County coal community of Danville this week. “Don Blankenship all the way.”

Inside a Whitesville pizza shop a few miles north of the shuttered Upper Big Branch mine, retiree Debbie Pauley said Blankenship “was railroaded” at his trial.

“I think that Blankenship does have integrity,” she said. “I don’t think he’d put up with any crap.”

By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

___

#Ex-con candidate #GOP woes in West Virginia #HUNTINGTON #TodayNews

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deniscollins · 8 years ago

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A Campus Argument Goes Viral. Now the College Is Under Siege.

Evergreen State College has a Day of Absence tradition in which black people leave the campus to show what the place would be like without them. This year, organizers suggested the reverse: that white people who wanted to participate would leave while nonwhites stayed, and both groups would attend workshops to, as the email announcement put it, “explore issues of race, equity, allyship, inclusion and privilege.” Does the revised plan of whites leaving campus: (1) make sense as “a forceful call to consciousness,” or (2) “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

It started with a suggestion that white students and professors leave campus for a day, a twist on a tradition of black students voluntarily doing the same.

A professor objected, and his argument with a loud and profane group of protesters outside his classroom soon rocketed across the internet.

On Friday, more than three weeks later, Evergreen State College had to hold its commencement 30 miles from campus, at a rented baseball stadium where everyone had to pass through metal detectors.

In between, Evergreen, a small public college in Olympia along the Puget Sound, found itself on the front line of the national discontent over race, speech and political disagreement, becoming a magnet for extremes on the left and the right.

After the dispute gained national exposure — amplified by the professor’s appearance on Fox News, his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and right-leaning websites’ heaping derision on their newest college target — the professor, Bret Weinstein, said he had to stay away from campus for his own safety and move his family into hiding.

Student protesters briefly occupied the president’s office to press their complaints of racism on campus. In one encounter, the president, George Bridges, was recorded meekly complying with a demand not to use hand gestures when he spoke because they were threatening.

The campus has received threats of violence via social media and calls to the county sheriff and 911 that forced administrators to lock down the campus for three weekdays in a row. The college had another lockdown on Thursday, as dozens of professed free-speech defenders tangled with anarchists who were waiting for them at Red Square, the campus plaza named for its red-brick walkways.

“I thought I’d be speaking from Red Square where graduation is traditionally held, and then as the alt-right backlash hit us, I wondered if we’d have graduation at all,” Anne Fischel, a documentary filmmaker and Evergreen professor, said in her commencement speech on Friday. “No one should see this graduation as a return to normalcy, to the way things were before. For one thing, the lives of some of our community members have been threatened, and they can’t be here today.”

Since the presidential election in November, colleges from Middlebury to Auburn to the University of California, Berkeley have become swept up in a running battle over free speech and politics.

But the conflict at Evergreen has been deeply distressing to many students and faculty members who see their college as a little utopia that has produced such creative alumni as Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons,” and Macklemore, the hip-hop artist.

Students at Evergreen, founded in the progressive fervor of the 1960s, have no majors or grades and study in small groups, taking interdisciplinary classes where a marine biologist, for instance, might team up with a philosophy professor and a music professor.

“There is a tradition of trying to work things out,” said Ruth Hayes, a professor of animation. Referring to Professor Weinstein, she echoed the feelings of a number of her colleagues: “That he took this public I just feel like is a breach of trust.”

What also sets the Evergreen turmoil apart is that it began not with a controversy-courting guest speaker like Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos, but a Bernie Sanders-backing biology professor who has been a fixture at the college for 15 years.

The conflict stems from the college’s Day of Absence, a tradition in which black people leave the campus to show what the place would be like without them. This year, organizers suggested the reverse: that white people who wanted to participate would leave while nonwhites stayed, and both groups would attend workshops to, as the email announcement put it, “explore issues of race, equity, allyship, inclusion and privilege.”

In an email to his colleagues, Professor Weinstein, who is white, said that when black people decided to leave, it made sense as “a forceful call to consciousness.” But to ask white people to leave, he wrote, “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”

“I would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation,” he wrote.

What followed can be viewed by anyone with a smartphone: a protest outside his classroom in which students derided his “racist” opinions and called him “useless,” preceded by an expletive; his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show; and scenes of students and professors arguing with other professors and their college president.

“Yes, they were rude,” the president, Mr. Bridges, said in an interview about the meeting in which he put down his hands. “What mattered was de-escalating the anger.”

And though students occupied his office for a couple of hours one afternoon, he said he never felt threatened.

“I was hired to be a change agent,” he said. His mission, he said, was to ask, “How do we address the equity gaps here?”

Professor Weinstein, who declined to be interviewed, has been lying low. But he is quite visible online, with a growing Twitter audience and a new blog offering his subscribers insights into “evolution, civilization and intolerance” for a nominal monthly fee.

On the other side, Naima Lowe, a media professor who has opposed him, and Rashida Love, the director of Evergreen’s First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, who sent the email announcing the format of the Day of Absence, have also made themselves scarce, after being mercilessly ridiculed online.

There is a bigger context to the dispute, faculty members say. Overall enrollment at Evergreen has been declining since 2009, while minority enrollment, which now stands around 29 percent, is rising.

Some faculty members have said the college has not been adequately serving minority students, and an “equity council” developed a plan to address those issues. Professor Weinstein was among those who objected to parts of the plan. He saw its call for an “equity justification/explanation” for each potential hire as code for racial preference.

Ms. Lowe, who is black, said that he was misinterpreting the proposal and that its goal was to hire people with the right skills and experience to relate to “marginalized communities,” regardless of their race. As for the Day of Absence, held in April, organizers have said that it was voluntary and that no one implied that all white people should leave.

But the time for academic word-parsing has passed; the final days of the term were marked by riot police officers, barricades and metal detectors.

Strange alliances have formed. On Thursday, a group calling itself Patriot Prayer, a right-leaning band of 60 or 70 people from off campus waving American flags and one showing Pepe the Frog, a symbol of the alt-right movement, was joined for a while by two students.

One of them, Tamara Lindner, said she had been a student of Mr. Weinstein’s wife, also a biology professor at Evergreen, and wanted to support his right to free speech.

The other, Colin Trobough, said he was distressed at the way Evergreen had been portrayed. “I love Evergreen,” he told the Patriots gathered in the traffic circle.

The group marched onto campus, where about 200 people awaited them: anarchists and “anti-fascists” looking like graphic-novel ninjas, with black scarves hiding their faces and hoods covering their hair, flanked by aging professors in rumpled rain slickers.

The Patriots’ leader, Joey Gibson, strolled into the crowd of ninjas, where he was sprayed with Silly String, hit in the head with a can of it and then attacked with what may have been pepper spray before state police officers in riot gear restored order.

The college spent $100,000 to rent the minor-league stadium in Tacoma for the commencement on Friday. “I’m very glad we’re all here together,” Mr. Bridges said in his address, acknowledging the “fierce and disturbing” events of recent weeks.

Ellis Paguirigan, a 1991 Evergreen graduate whose daughter, Melia, was graduating and planned to go into ocean conservation, said they were both disappointed in Professor Weinstein’s stance.

Melia had Professor Weinstein in her freshman year and liked his class, Mr. Paguirigan said. But, he added, “my daughter is a person of color — she kind of takes it personal.”

#Freedom of Speech #Evergreen College

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