Friday, November 23, 2012

Black Friday? Not Me!

To me, Black Friday (or Black Thursday night) is an abomination.  This year, many stores opened up early Thanksgiving evening.  I don't understand the greed of stores who just can't give their employees a day off to celebrate a day that should be spent with family and friends and remembering all the things that you enjoy and are so grateful for.

Those of us who don't shop for Christmas just sit back and watch the mayhem gleefully presented by all the news programs.  At first it's a little funny to watch the frenzy.  But when you hear of people being trampled, hurt, spat upon and cursed, it's not funny at all.

It's one thing to try to purchase stuff at remarkable bargains.  It's another to push, shove and elbow through crowds to get something for less money.

When people trample others for cheap goods mere hours after being thankful for what they already have, it's just terrible.  I can't imagine this whole gift-buying frenzied process is something people enjoy.  Hey, I could be wrong but I'm glad I'm not a part of it.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Thoughts As I've Aged

Much as I'd like to think of myself as a little kid still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, I am not a young person anymore.  And over the years too many people whom I've loved have passed away, some way too young.  As each family member or friend passed, the state of my own mortality reared its ugly head.

I was just 30 when my parents died.  And now I am among the oldest generation in my family. I am one year older than my mother was when she died.  And over the years the fear of death washed over me at various times.

I reconnected to some high school friends a few years ago.  I wonder if they, too, have had the same thoughts that I do.  We're all still entwined with busy lives, some have had medical issues, others are doing well, physically.  At a special high school class reunion about a year ago (which I did not attend because of distance and timing), the names listed on the In Memoriam page had me reeling.

I simply don't think of myself as part of the "older generation."  And that's probably a good thing.  Perhaps, as 'they' say, age is just a state of mind.  I can't do some of the stuff I did when I was 20 or 30 but I over the years I've learned to do so many other things.  And I've got so much more I want to do.

So, maybe these thoughts of my mortality serve to encourage and stimulate me to continue to be active, to learn new stuff (Photoshop comes to mind), to do things I haven't done before and see things I haven't seen before, to be active politically as a liberal living in a looney red state, to do things to help the community and on and on and on.

Learning and activity can be powerful tools to keeping a younger outlook on life.  I hope those tools and living a healthy lifestyle keep me going for a very long time, at least until I'm 120!

Monday, November 12, 2012

YIDDISH CURSES FOR REPUBLICAN JEWS

I didn't write these.  Someone sent them to me via email but I thought they were funny enough to share.  If anyone knows who put this together please let me know so I can properly attribute this piece and thank her/him profusely!



YIDDISH CURSES FOR REPUBLICAN JEWS

May your insurance company decide constipation is a pre-existing condition.

May you live to a hundred and twenty without Social Security or Medicare.

May you be reunited in the world to come with your ancestors,
who were all socialist garment workers.

May you find yourself lost and stranded in a village of Palestinian Muslims,
and may you be treated only with dignity, kindness and respect.

May you grow like an onion with your head in the ground,
and then may the ground be fracked.

May you grow so rich that your widow’s second husband is thrilled
they repealed the estate tax.

May God give you a daughter-in-law who is as kind as she is beautiful, as patient
as she is rich, as wise as she is devoted, a virtuous woman in every way. And then
may a ballot initiative invalidate her marriage to your fat lump Rebecca.

May the secretary your husband is schtupping depend on Planned Parenthood
for her birth control.

May you feast every day on chopped liver with onions, chicken soup with dumplings,
baked carp with horseradish, braised meat with vegetable stew, latkes, and may
every bite of it be contaminated with E. Coli, because the government gutted the FDA.

May your state outlaw the morning-after pill the day before your daughter
comes home from the NFTY convention.

May your child give his Bar Mitzvah speech on the genius of Ayn Rand.

May you spend your whole life supporting and voting for and sending money
to Israel, and may you one day be actually forced to move there.

May you have a rare disease and need an operation that only one surgeon
in the world, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, is able to perform.
And may he be unable to perform it because he doesn’t take your insurance.
And may that Nobel Laureate be your son.

May your son be elected President, and may you have no idea what you did
with his g-ddamn birth certificate.

May you find yourself insisting to a roomful of skeptics that your great-grandmother
was "legitimately" raped by Cossacks.

May you have a large store, and have it all dismantled by vulture capitalists.

May you have a hundred houses, and in every house a hundred rooms, and in every
room twenty beds, and then may you fall behind on just one of your mortgage
payments and have the bank repossess everything.

May you live to a ripe old age, and may the only people who come visit
you be Mormon missionaries.

May you make a fortune, and lose it all in one of Sheldon Adelson's casinos.

May your grandchildren baptize you after you’re dead.

May the state of Arizona expand their definition of "suspected illegal immigrants"
to "anyone who doesn't hunt."

May your son the doctor introduce you to his fiancée, Bristol Palin.

May you sell everything and retire to Florida just as global warming makes
it uninhabitable.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

I Can't Pledge Allegiance......

If, on Wednesday, November 7, 2012, Romney steals* the election (*What else can I think given the fraudulent voter ID laws, the Romney connection to the voting machines, the throwing out of Democratic voter registrations, the misprinted voter information pamphlets, the incredible amount of GOP lies, and on and on...),  my head will explode, my heart will be broken, my anger will be gigantic and my allegiance to this country will totter on the precipice.

I would never pledge allegiance to a country that legislates what I can do for my own body, for my own health, which sticks it's nose in places that must be completely private and off limits, to a country whose legislative body (think GOP) thinks it can foist it's Christian religious views on every citizen through legislation (totally against the Constitution), whose elected officials (again, GOP) think that women are second class citizens and don't need equal pay for equal work, a political party who would deny many of its citizens their civil rights, who would dismantle all the safety regulations we've enjoyed for so long thereby putting our health and essentially our lives at great risk, who thinks education is only for the rich, all for the love of enriching the huge corporations who care nothing for the United States and its citizens so long as they add mega bucks to their bottom line, hide their profits offshore and refuse to pay not only their fair share of taxes but think they are entitled to pay so little or nothing because they are the "privileged."

Our Congress and our political system has been bought and paid for by those who are super rich.  They feel privileged, entitled, and righteous about lording their power over every aspect of people's lives and see nothing wrong with an oligarchic form of government that they laughingly refer to as democracy.  It is not.

And so, if Romney and his ilk get in, we are condemned to a life of subservience to the wacked out views of the GOP.  This will be a country whose shining light will have gone out, replaced by an oppressive "regime", not a country with a government of the people, by the people or for the people.  God help us if Romney gets in.