A long, long road for the rationalists in INDIA

Okay, all you Western skeptics.

You think YOU'VE got it tough?

Try being an atheist in India.

Some folks are trying and they can probably use all the help & support they can get.

~~

Now, today at church we had a guest who lives half the year in an ashram in southern India, following a lady popularly known as The Hugging Saint. We saw DVD's of "Amma's" work -- she's attained multiple honors from the UN and the Indian government, and there is no doubt whatsoever that she has done phenomenal work for humanitarian causes.

It's certainly not difficult to become inspired by Amma's accomplishments. Our guest today talked about how she "was called -- sold everything and went to join the ashram." I pondered this -- over the last year or so I've met more than a couple of people who have chucked nearly everything in the material world to devote themselves full-time to one spiritual cause or another.

Sometimes it's tempting to contemplate. A great many of us, I think, often look around and ask themselves, Is this all there is? Is this what life's about - schlepping back and forth to the office every day, trying to keep ourselves from going under, losing this house, with its carpeting, Cuisinarts and computers? Would it be such a radical leap to give it all up and just go where the need is greatest? To save just one life? To bring hope?

Unlike some uber-materialists like Rush Limbaugh, I find no reason to denigrate people who adopt such an ascetic lifestyle. In fact, the older I get, the more sense it makes.

And that's the place where you start hearing the spiritual talk. The "higher purpose" talk.

Is it a spiritual undertaking to care more about other people's lives and well-being than your own interests? It's troubling to me, because it's nearly impossible to hear anyone talk about wanting to adopt a self-denying existence without bringing invisible beings into it. Seems to me, it's enough just to say, "Hey, look at this teeming mass of humanity we're all part of. We need a way to ensure that we don't lower ourselves to a primitive, animalistic state just to survive. We need a way to achieve our greatest potential, make the most of the few decades we have here and secure the future for the generations that follow."

I find it interesting how people who have come back from the brink of extinction (victims of flood, earthquake, famine, etc.) almost immediately turn inward and start wasting their time and energy setting up shrines and praising an imaginary being, rather than rolling up their sleeves and saying "Those people who rebuilt our village and got the power on are the ones we should be inspired by. I'm going to learn how to build houses and roads and make a difference." Or "None of this can be achieved without education -- I'm going to get some people together and start a school." Certainly some people do just that -- judging by the videos we saw today, that's the mindset in some places But the same catastrophes are going to just keep happening until people start looking at life in a pragmatic way, rather than just relying on superstition and magic.

Plenty of rambling thoughts here -- sorry! Click Here to Read More..

Food and Money

Carl's hours have been cut -- now it's something like 3-4 days a week, 4 hours a day. A couple of days ago we went food shopping and I ended up having to bail him out with a dollar - he underestimated the $26 total.

We've been together 11 years now; our food philosophies are so very different, but it really only becomes apparent when the money gets tight like this.

-He's extremely underweight; has virtually no body fat. Since getting dentures last year and discovering that they don't fit properly, he's eating even less. He also smokes about a pack a day, maybe more. And yet, he's as strong as an ox. When we moved to NYC for a year, he moved most of our furniture up 3 flights of stairs to our ancient apartment, most of the time with a Marlboro clenched in his teeth.

And, he eats Little Debbies like they're going out of style.

-I, on the other hand, continue to pack on the pounds, mainly due to lack of exercise, since I'm not a big eater. I think I have a condition called myoadenylate deaminase deficiency, but have never taken the time to have it diagnosed or to invest in a supplement. That's for another day. Honest!

-Carl was raised in a household with six siblings and one working mom. They often went to school with their shoes duct-taped together. I don't think any of the kids finished high school. So we're not talking about a worldly bunch. Very salt-of-the-earth, very meat and potatoes. The type of mentality that says "Well, we're not officially poor because we can still afford to put meat on the table."

Carl is completely entrenched in that mindset. Any time I sit down to a meal that does not include meat (such as a spinach omelet or a cheese sandwich, or baked squash...) he'll look at my plate and say "No meat?" In our 11 years together, the one and ONLY area in which I've had the tiniest influence on him is in the area of flavorings. I can't count the number of times I will reach for the sage, or rosemary, or vinegar, only to have him say "Momma never put that stuff on anything...she worked 10 hours a day and raised six kids; she didn't have the time or the money for anything more than salt and pepper." But he doesn't complain about it anymore, even when I reach for the garlic. He still finds it odd that I use more than one pan and one spoon when making anything; he complains that I "mess up" his kitchen when I experiment, so most of the time I stay out of the kitchen (and on the computer) and he takes care of meals.

I was raised differently. My parents weren't rich or worldly by any stretch, and Dad was also a high school dropout, but they had lived together in NYC for a number of years before I came along, and made it their business to learn about various types of cuisine. Back in the 1960s, I stood out among my classmates because I knew the difference between Moo Goo Gai Pan and Baked Clams Oreganato. We went out to eat fairly often. Once my parents got into a loud argument with an obnoxious waitress in a diner we liked, who insisted that a seven-year-old (meaning me) would not eat brook trout and should order from the kids' menu. I not only got my fish, I ate it right down to the bone. She grudgingly gave me a lollipop (a green, broken one) and grumbled something about me being "spoiled." In my teens I subscribed to Gourmet magazine and liked to peruse cookbooks. I didn't cook much; just found food to be an interesting subject.

I like a steak as much as anyone, but could be a vegetarian if I needed to. I am not the least bit fussy about any food. Store brands, for the most part, are just as good as national -- another area where Carl and I differ. He thinks most vegetables are alien invaders from another planet, mushrooms in particular, and the ones he likes, he prefers southern style: boiled to oblivion with some sort of pork flavoring. One of the few instances where I will say "yuk." In fact, I've learned that when Carl mentions "vegetables," he exclusively means the kind you need a can opener to get to. If I'm talking about fresh veggies (the healthier type), I always have to say "produce."

Carl believes in a full, sit-down meal, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I will randomly graze -- heat up a can of green beans, throw a pat of butter on it, and call it a meal...then an hour or so later decide I'd like an egg. To me, food is food. I eat because I have to; try to make semi-healthy decisions, and then get back to the computer. That's why, when he says "There's nothing to eat in the house," I'm silently thinking, Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis? There's pasta [which he hates, more on that later], rice, canned soup, plenty of canned veggies, frozen stuff that's open [another taboo with Carl: once it's been opened, he won't touch it a second time. It falls to me to make all-gone with it].

So, when we got to the grocery store the other night, his first stop was the frozen food aisle. Stouffer's, Marie Callenders, Swanson Hungry Man. And here we are with $25 to spare. I made a snap decision: I told him to get whatever he wanted and not to worry about me, then picked out one large potato, a few cans of store-brand soup, and my one indulgence: a can of Underwood turkey spread, which is apparently a new product. Carl ended up having a bowl of cereal for dinner and the turkey spread the night after that.

It irks me that veggies are now so damn expensive. My mom used to give me a bowl of green peppers, carrots & celery to eat while I read in bed at night. She cut and peeled the carrots herself, by the way -- they didn't have the pre-packaged stuff back then.

In the two years between divorcing Doug and meeting Carl, I fell into the classic single-mom eating pattern: Pasta, ramen noodles and processed stuff. I didn't even think about what I was feeding Wally. As long as he had something to eat, I figured everything was fine. We both liked pasta. So a couple of weeks after Carl and I started keeping steady company he came over for dinner and asked what we were having. As soon as I said "pasta," his eyes rolled, and I suddenly realized that yes, I was serving pasta in some form or another nearly every night. I didn't mind him pointing this out to me. But now, it seems the shoe is on the other foot, because if we're not having meat loaf, it's hamburger helper, or quarter pounders from Mickey-D's, or his favorite rice & hamburger concoction...he says he doesn't like chicken very much; he no longer cares much for pork. It all seems to have narrowed down to hamburger at least 3x a week. Seafood occasionally -- not fish, God forbid, unless it's beer-battered, and shrimp almost anytime.

Side note: To Carl, "pasta" does not include spaghetti. Spaghetti is fine; he just doesn't like ziti, rigatoni, spirals, bowties or other shapes. Go figure. If I ever suggested "couscous," he'd probably either burst out laughing or call 911.

So I guess the point of this rambling monologue is, I'm trying to figure out a workable strategy to eat healthy and save money. With the huge differences between Carl's eating habits and mine, it isn't going to be easy.

~I've edited this thing at least a dozen times since starting it Friday morning. New thoughts keep popping in. Click Here to Read More..

Social Grumbling

What'm I up to now, six posts in one weekend? Feels like...

Anyway. Time to get socially relevant. Being the second Saturday of the month, it was the day that our neighborhood association meets. I'm the recording secretary. This tiny little historic neighborhood is about 99% black. I'm in the 1% minority. I agreed to be secretary because the non-profit that's backing us sent us on a nice weekend retreat last fall, put us up at a posh hotel and lavished us with t-shirts, tote bags, hats, pens, and other goodies and it seemed to me that if they ask me to help out this way, it wouldn't kill my ass to say yes and commit myself for a year. I've certainly been doing it since I moved here -- attend nearly every meeting, become a block captain, walk up and down knocking on doors getting people sign a petition to get speed bumps, make 5000 fish sandwiches on a cold November afternoon, sweep and pick up trash for several hours, watch kids on the Astro Jump so they wouldn't kill themselves, and escort a couple of college kids through the community getting people to fill out surveys and win a Wal-mart gift card.

I grew up in an all-white community. My church has recently been running a series on "sundown towns," which are designed to exclude minorities, either by making them feel unwelcome via town charter, redlining or other bureaucratic methods, or by outright threats of violence toward those who lingered. My hometown was such a place. But I grew up in the Civil Rights era and we were taught, on a consistent basis, that black people were the victims of evil whites. It was a very idealistic time. Some people I grew up with were prejudiced (especially the parents of my classmates) but I really had the idea that it was just a matter of people being nice to each other.

I still had very little interaction with black people until I was in my mid-30s. Every place I lived and worked was overwhelmingly white. This changed when my ex and I started our own retail-type business in an urban area and found ourselves hiring the people who lived there. We began to experience first-hand the complexities of social relationships. The good-guy/bad-guy lines weren't as clearly drawn as they were on the ABC Movie of the Week. Later, I went back into office life and the demographics this time around were different. I worked with and for African-Americans. This continued after the divorce when my resources were not as abundant as they had been, and I lived in lower-income areas. I had a sense of standing outside myself and wondering if it was okay to be annoyed at neighbors who wandered around at all hours of the night talking loudly and waking me up, and whose kids always seemed to be coming to the door asking for food and money. I started having thoughts like, we're all the same under the skin ... aren't we??

I worked in an office that was about 65% black, and there was an enormous amount of distrust between the races. Each group seemed to keep to itself. The rules in the place were very restrictive. Very little wiggle-room and it was ridiculously easy to get written up for stupid things. One manager said (in a whisper, of course) "If there weren't so many blacks here, we wouldn't have so many rules, but they take advantage every time." There were also whispers of "If a black person breaks a rule, we have to give them a pass the first time, otherwise we'll get sued for discrimination." There were people of both races who firmly believed that every person of the other persuasion was "out to get them."

So, here in this new town where I live now, I'm back to working in a nearly lily-white office. I know there are minorities in the company, but most of them seem to be in the warehouses in far-flung locations. My home, however, is in "the hood."

I really like where I live and have very few regrets. I remember the day the real estate agent drove us through this section. He knew better than to say anything negative. He probably thought it was strange that this midde-class looking white couple was specifically looking for a house here, but he didn't see our finances. We're not in the best shape. It's just a fact of life. I've never made any kind of big bucks and my husband's income fluctuates wildly. Neither of us is hugely interested in opulent living because neither of us ever lived that way. He was very poor. Shoes patched together with duct tape -- that kind of poor. Bad teeth, bad bones, bad nutrition -- that kind of poor. I did better because I was an only child and my parents sacrificed a lot for me, but neither of us was ever spoiled. The 13 years I was married to Doug are probably the closest I ever came to being "upscale," but he was incredibly stingy with me because I didn't earn as much as he and he didn't believe that the higher earner should pull most of the weight. So he stashed his money away and had plenty when we split. And I was too dumb to try going after it when we divorced. So I've basically struggled ever since. I like to think that I "could" have a lot more money if I were inclined to go after it, but truthfully, I'm content to be able to pay the bills on time and have a few modest goodies (panty hose without runs, Stouffers instead of Michelina's, high-speed internet) when I want them. I had no interest in a McMansion. The last house we had was 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom. This one is newer, and it has 2 bathrooms. There are many, many things that need improving here, but I am truly happy. I don't care what the neighbors look like. Actions are the only thing that matters, and the overwhelming majority of the people around here are good and decent. I accept that perspective and viewpoint are going to be different; I can't change history. But people are people; that's all there is to it.

So, we moved here pretty much knowing what to expect. My next-door neighbor, Paul, is a character. He's retired from a utility company and he's a terrible alcoholic. Keeps his yard a mess, but is trying the best he can to improve his house. His buds come over and work all day when the weather is nice. Then they take a break; out comes the bottle of moonshine and a six-pack of beer. The guys duck behind an old half-wrecked cinder-block toolshed instead of going inside to use the bathroom. But I feel a genuine warmth fro m him, his friends and his extended family and am happy to have him for a neighbor.

The people on the other side of us ... well, I have very little idea of who they are, because they just come and go like the tides. This time last year they were trying to fix the place up. But they had no phone and were coming to our door sometimes at 4am asking to use the phone, asking for food, even asking for clothes. We gave them hats, scarves and even jackets. I popped popcorn for them. Other people on the block said not to give them anything because they'd keep coming back.

Well, they eventually quit coming to the door, but we did find a few things missing off our back deck (before we got wise and started locking everything up). Still, no one seems to live there permanently. Someone brings in old cars (often big stretch limos) and keeps them in the driveway for months on end. Boats, too. The owner of the house lives somewhere else; he's 80-something and during the summer, he comes over, trades his walker for a lawnmower and cuts the grass. I think eventually the house will just be torn down. He'll likely die and the taxes will go unpaid, and that will be that.

One of my earliest friends in the neighborhood was named Rita. She always sat outside and when we first moved here, we enjoyed walking to the local stores and around the streets to explore. That's how I got to know Rita. We talked a bit; she had two sons and one of them, from what we could see, was sort of limited. He didn't have a job; he just pushed a shopping cart around, picking up aluminum cans and bottles. Rita told me she'd been recently diagnosed with some sort of heart condition.

Last year there was a series of arson incidents close enough to our house that we could see the flames over the rooftops. The neighborhood gossip reached us: "That strange kid with the shopping cart did it -- his mother passed and he just lost it." That was how I found out that Rita had died. I had just started getting to know Rita and felt a great pull of loss finding out that I'd never see her out on her front porch again. I have no idea what happened to her son.

The president of the neighborhood association spotted me sitting outside one morning and immediately started inviting me to meetings. I went out of curiosity to see what everyday life was like here. Most people were very welcoming and I slowly got to know who everybody was. There were a lot of different ways to be involved, so now here I am. However, I WILL NOT be available for another officer position next year. Enough is enough.

My involvement with this group has been very eye-opening. I get to hear what people are really thinking, and two sides of some very public debates.

This town is typical of many in this country wherein the people feel that the public schools are going downhill and parents should get vouchers so they can send their kids to private schools. But it's a chicken-or-egg type question:

Did the parents bail on the public schools because the schools were so bad, or,
Did the public schools go downhill because the parents bailed?

Then there's the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations," coupled with what the Suothern Poverty Lw Center calls the school-to-prison pipeline.

Deborah, who works for the non-profit, told our group today that she was at a local school for a program and while she waited, she saw one kid just wandering the halls. He'd peek in one classroom door, then move on to another, but spent an entire class period just wandering back and forth while all the other students were in assigned classes. When she asked the hall monitor about this kid, the teacher said nobody could make him go to class, so he just did whatever he wanted. Better he wander the halls than the streets. And when the kid went by, he'd peer at the hall monitor from under a cap and say "Sup." The hall monitor would respond, "Yo, sup." Deborah was outraged. "What's this 'sup' business? Why isn't that kid at least being taught to say "Hello," "How are you," "Yes" and "No?" The underlying belief is, if that were a white kid, he wouldn't get away with wandering the halls all day and speaking in monosyllables. The soft bigotry of lowered expectations says, you can't expect more of the black kids, and if you try to make them obey rules, you'll get accused of racism, and lose federal funding. Or there will be a riot, so just let it be.

And then what happens when Yo Sup turns 18 and has been socially promoted up through 12th grade? If he's very lucky, he'll get a minimum wage job and/or stay with his momma who will somehow find a way to keep a roof over their heads. Probably by working 12-hour days until she drops dead of renal failure at the age of 56.

Meanwhile the white parents complain because some of the Yo Sups aren't content to wander the halls. They have bigger issues such as guns and drugs. But then the SPLC claims that when these kids act out, they're just being set up for the prison pipeline. That's why I've been holding back money from that organization lately. I want to hear what they have to say about this issue. Do they really understand it in 3 dimensions? Anything less just sounds like they're making excuses. Click Here to Read More..