2014 - Happy New Year!

I can't say I'm sad about seeing the end of 2013. For one, how was a year that ended in 13 ever going to be a good one for anybody? So we were all on the back foot right from the start. Talk about a year with an original sin of its own. I never even liked the look of it - 2013. It looks clumsy. 2014 looks kind of sparkly. Please don't ask me to explain that.

Recently the reality of my mortality has rudely thrust itself into my every waking moment. Help, Help! Stop the roller-coaster! has been my mantra lately. But a few days ago I decided to let that old roller coaster whip along at top speed for two and half more days without any resistance from me. Whooeee, what a feeling of freedom! A niggly thought flickered in my brain for a minute - what if I only have two and half days left and I've just wished them away? Then I thought, so what? I'd spend the next two and half days letting go.

Ever the optimist. On a more serious note, as 2014 approaches I’ve been thinking of what I want to carry forward with me as I launch with the rest of the world into a new year.

Be accountable for what’s in my heart. Respect me first before I think of trying to respect anybody else. Without the former the latter isn’t real. Charity begins at home. Rescuing people at cost to myself isn’t charity, it’s control and it’s not going to get me into heaven. It isn’t going to get them into heaven either. 

Know that I count just as much as the next person. My inner authority belongs to me, not to anybody else. I’m the one who can and must decide how important I am. If I wait for people to give me permission to be important, or to speak, or to be noticed I’ll never get it because the kind of people who require me to ask for their permission are the ones who have no intention of giving it. Duh.

On that note, if for some reason – which no doubt will reveal itself in hindsight to be sheer madness - I’m hanging out with people who have me low on their priority list, focus on me instead of them, and think long and hard about what I’m doing there in the first place. If I love them, staying silent and hurt and resentful will drive me crazy, so it’s better to tell them. They may dismiss me or judge me, and that’s going to hurt like hell, but at least I will have tried, and given us a chance and I'll know the reality. Which is better than not trying, and living with the doubt for the rest of my life, or living on a fantasy. Better to get real!

I educate people how to treat me. If I don’t notice myself they don’t notice me either. If they mistreat or dismiss me, yes it’s because that’s what they do and it’s revolting, but it’s also because I let them, and therefore it's what I do to myself. So I can stop letting them. Nine times out of ten they don't have a gun to my head. I hold that gun. Weird, uncomfortable to face. But true.

Use my judgement all the time. Pay attention to my gut. These are very cool organic tools for navigating life. It doesn’t take energy to keep them active; it takes energy to put them to sleep.

It’s okay to say sorry if I’ve done something to somebody that I know wasn’t okay, no matter how long ago it was. It’s not such a good idea to hang out with people who refuse to say sorry when they’ve done something to me that wasn’t okay. And also, it’s a good idea to watch out for a part of me that wants to say sorry when I’ve stood up for myself and they’ve got mad, and I’m scared of getting punished. If I buckle I entrench my powerlessness in my mind and in theirs. Then I’m a goner.
People are allowed to be who they are and where they are in their lives. If who they are and where they are means that I don’t get the really important core stuff I need in a relationship, it’s okay to let them be and give myself permission to seek it elsewhere.

Gotta claim my turf. I’m allowed to claim my turf. It’s mine, it’s got my name on it. I hold the title deed.

It's okay to speak up if I want to, to say my truth. It doesn’t matter if I don’t articulate it perfectly because it’s not necessarily the content of what I say that matters, it’s that I value myself enough to know that I count and that if I need to express, I can, I have the right. I may say it clumsily; people might laugh at me or shout me down, which may hurt, but it doesn’t hurt as much as never opening my mouth.

Why give respect to people who have proved they don’t deserve it? I don’t have to let myself be bullied. And if I am being pushed around, I must reach out for friends who’ll rally behind me and with me and help me stand up to those bullies.

Finally, it’s a good thing to somehow find a way to let the wisdom of life filter in and also give myself permission to not be perfect; to just be, and make big mistakes, really screw up sometimes. To want nice, totally material things, to have fun, to love and sometimes hate, to laugh and cry, to be scared, to be held, to stretch my wings in every which way. No need to live in a nunnery.

Happy 2014! May it bring many things you want and not just the things you should want!

Good, Bad and Ugly News: Iran's Elections, G20 Spying Scandal and Nigella Lawson Abuse

Last night CNN brought the good, the bad and the ugly right into my home. The good was the result of Iran’s elections. 

After too many years of Ahmadinejad’s narcissistic extremism that ostracised Iran from the rest of the world and destroyed the economy, the Iranians have finally been allowed to have enough of a voice to elect a moderate. 

And that’s what they did. There was a lot scepticism prior to the Ayatollah’s Khomeni’s selection that there would even be a moderate to vote for but that scepticism proved ill-founded.

Hassan Rouhani looks and speaks like a reasonable man. Granted it’s two months before he takes office, and it remains to be seen whether he’s allowed to do what he wants, but he has said that the days of extremism are over. That he wants to forge a relationship with the US and the west. The west, of course, is going to have to come to the party as well. 

His requirements are that the US will not interfere in domestic policy and that Iran will have its nuclear program. The US will probably require total transparency regarding that. Personally, I warmed to Rouhani. I’m tired of western media’s portrayal of Iran as the embodiment of all that’s evil. It’s not. It’s a country with ordinary human beings who clearly aren’t extremists and who deserve the right to forge their own destiny. I think it’s kind of ironic that they have voted a moderate in while in the US conservatives still control Congress and hinder true progress for that country.

Moving on, CNN’s bad was also kind of funny. Turns out the British government spied on the G20 in 2009. Or the Guardian alleges they did. Bit embarrassing for the British hosts this time round.

The ugly was a picture of Nigella Lawson and her husband in a restaurant, he with his hand around her throat, his thumb pressing into her neck. Another shot was shown of her outside the restaurant on her own, in huge distress. As if that wasn’t enough, the bastard put out a press release saying he wasn’t being violent; he just had his hand round her neck while they argued about the children. As if it’s normal to partially choke somebody while you argue. He added that she wasn’t upset afterwards because he’d hurt her, but just because they hate it when they argue.

Well I bet she hates it. I wonder what’s been going on up until this point. Nobody gets to that level of abuse in one leap. Why didn’t she kick him in the shins, call out for help, scream? That she didn’t, says more about him than anything. 

He’s a pig and deserves whatever is coming to him. The whole situation is horrendous and shocking. Not just because of his actions in the restaurant but because we’ve believed a lie. Here we have another beautiful woman who’s seemed like such a great role model. She’s consciously created a universally appealing image from which she’s garnered fame and fortune. It hasn’t all been about food. Part of it has been that she’s an independent and spirited woman who has made a life for herself. But it’s been underpinned by being married to an abuser. That part leaves me feeling betrayed. 

Who knows when the abuse started. If she’d been able to be truthful from the start, would she still be so famous? It’s hard to say. Can you imagine her speaking passionately about being trapped in a marriage of abuse, crying, angrily slamming things down, but still creating marvellous dishes? Getting help, walking away with her children. Now that’s real role modelling. What immense courage that would have taken, though.

Raise that Minimum Wage Says Barack Obama

New York Times Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman wrote about the necessity – and the viability – of Barack Obama’s proposal in his State of the Union address that the minimum wage in the US be raised from $7.25 to $9. Krugman, who says that in real terms the current US minimum wage is lower than it was in the 1960’s, believes it can work and must happen, and won’t affect employment figures. Gerhard Bosch, Professor of employment and economic sociology at Duisberg-Essen University, has said the same thing. I think Obama's idea is a grand one.

Businesses, of course, always say that hiking wages will lead to unemployment because they won’t be able to afford to employ as many. People like to point to Germany as a prime example of how letting the market regulate wages is good for the economy. But since the mid 1990’s things have been getting worse for some in Germany. Currently 1.4 million get less than €4 an hour, 1 million are on short-term contracts and 7 million earn £323 a month part-time, with no other job. Germany is doing well but not all its people are. Get your head around that one.

Here’s why I believe wages have to be regulated: you can’t rely on people to do the honorable and sensible thing where money is involved. Self-interest will always govern. It’s honorable to recognize that a business is a symbiotic relationship between management and worker. Without either the business fails. 

But the west has grown a culture that exploits the varying degrees of ignorance and low entitlement of the lower and middle classes. As sectors of society, in all countries, they haven’t known they had rights, they can’t see how much power they held in their hands, they let themselves be taken hostage. If you don’t work for peanuts I’ll fire you, because somebody else will take the job. 

When you have low entitlement you let yourself be exploited and it becomes so uncomfortable that you do something about it. And it is true that since the industrial revolution people in the working and middle class the world over have become increasingly aware of their power and their rights.

But not enough to have prevented this huge imbalance in society despite regulations that haven’t addressed what boils down to unfair reward for output. It’s why we have ultra poor and ultra rich. There’s nothing right or rational about it. And with huge corporations and the stock market being a big factor in economies now, the problems are getting bigger. Large businesses want to keep their profits as high as possible because people are investing in them on the stock exchange. People who never ever have to think about the workers whose lives are being sacrificed so they, the traders, can make a buck without lifting a finger.

Small business owners need to compete with giant businesses and if they pay the kind of wages that workers actually deserve there’ll be no money to reinvest, to grow, to keep the cash flow flowing.
I’m not suggesting communism or even socialism. But I can see that all these years of what does really amount to exploitation of workers’ ignorance of what an important role they play in anybody’s business has led to. Societies with three sectors – upper class, middle class and workers - that are fast dissolving into two, the rich and the poor. The rich are increasingly making their money off the stock market. The more they do, the less businesses want to pay decent wages.

It’s an unreal situation and the result is that first world countries have reached or are slipping dangerously close to third world realities. No economy can survive in that state. If things aren’t getting better they’re getting worse, because nothing stays the same. 

The people who have slipped out of the middle class, and the workers who are getting poorer, get demoralized because, that’s right; they’re human beings, not economic statistics. They realize that their sense of honor and dignity, wanting to play their part, was just horribly exploited. They get angry. They riot. They refuse to work. They’ve got nothing to lose, so there’s nothing to exploit.

Eventually we’ll have a world where there aren’t any more workers and middle class people to create the fundamental engine without which there is no stock market.

No Pedophile Priests, Exploitation, Guns or Corrupt Politicians / Corporations

I was recently asked what I'd do if I was the supreme leader of my country and I had carte blanche. Well, if you're going to fantasize you might as well go the whole hog. So I thought about what I'd do if I was world leader. 

I’d order mammoth research into the drug and psychiatric industries and I’d get rid of all guns. Yes, all guns that shoot real live bullets. Every single last one of them. People could go to counseling if it was traumatic. They’d get over it. I’d get rid of all armaments and shut down all military industrial interests. No more war. Anybody who had a snit about territory or religion or power would have to learn how to debate well. If it was traumatic they could go to counseling. They’d get over it.

  

I'd decree that the Vatican is no longer an independent state, that it is part of Italy and must declare its earnings for the past hundred years. The backtax it would owe would be used to create an organization to provide social security benefits for people who have been demolished by austerity measures, globally. 

The pope and all the bishops around the world would be forced to adhere to their vow of poverty and stripped of all their wealth. They’d all have to take a truth drug so they couldn’t lie. Those assets and that money would be put into a global proactive investigation to unearth all pedophile priests past and present and defrock them, to pay settlements to all legitimate victims who came forward. 

The Vatican would be investigated by a team of the best experts in the world to unearth its connections to the Mafia and other thugs in organized crime. It would be stripped of any excess wealth and some of that money would be used to create organizations in different countries that provided job opportunities at decent salaries, and education for people who needed it to be able to do decent jobs. These benefits and jobs wouldn’t only be for Third World underprivileged but for anybody who has slipped through the cracks.  

Some of the money would go towards counseling organizations so that everybody who wanted it would have a chance to know what it is to get decent parenting, unconditional love and sane, practical guidance and teaching, so they could learn about self esteem and entitlement and how to live the good life.  

Some of the money of course would have to go to preserving the beautiful buildings of the Vatican City. I know, it seems like a waste, but I’m sure there’d be more than enough. If there wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter because the Vatican coffers would be emptied and all the corrupt leaders in the world who are still alive would have to cough up the money they got by abusing their power. Since Berlusconi is still around, there’d be plenty from his bloated fortune. Relatives who are living off fortunes of dead corrupt officials and politicians would have to cough up too. 

Whilst I’m on the subject of corruption, some of the money from corrupt leaders would be used to investigate bankers who would be charged with crimes if they committed them. Their wealth would be added to the pile used to educate and empower people who needed help.  

All corporations that have committed crimes and been able to avoid prosecution, or that have won their cases because of intimidation etc. would be retried and forced to pay huge sums. Those that were prosecuted and convicted but got away with a relative slap on the wrist would have to pay fines and compensation commensurate with the crime and how much they earn. In other words, it would hurt. And the proceeds would be really useful. 

And on the subject of hurting, all the corrupt church, government, corporation people, once they’d been properly tried and had paid their dues, wouldn’t have to go to prison. They’d be set free and if they’d learned anything they’d be left alone, but if they didn’t, they’d miraculously find themselves in dire poverty. They wouldn’t be told that it wouldn’t be forever and all their efforts at pulling themselves out of it would be blocked. In other words, they’d know the humiliation and pain of being disempowered unfairly. 

Remorse and a desire to change would be the key to them being offered counseling and assistance. Would I make sure there was intervention for anybody who looked like they were ready to commit suicide? I wish I was nasty and vindictive enough to say no, but alas I’m not. Yeah, yeah, there’d be intervention.

Imagine a world with no guns, no pedophile priests, no super-wealthy corrupt Vatican, politicians or corporations. Not because they’d been stripped of their power with one wave of my hypothetical and utterly fantastical wand, but because we’re all so conscious of our rights and our worth that we didn’t let anybody get away with exploiting us in any area of life. That’s a world I look forward to.

ADHD Drugs and Mis-diagnosis Cause 24 Year Old to Hang Himself

I’ve always wondered about ADHD, and how easily doctors prescribe medication for it. I’ve never believed it’s a viable solution, any more than I believe anti-depressants work to solve the problem of depression. They don’t, they simply anaesthetize emotions – which people often believe is the core problem because they’re uncomfortable.  

They’re not, though, they’re only symptoms that something needs to be attended to. If a person is depressed, it’s got a whole lot to do with how they’re living, their relationship with themselves and those around them, their inability to know their own value and rights, their social skills, their inability to trust and receive love and walk away from people who aren’t treating them with love and respect. 

The depression has also got a whole lot to do with suppressing emotions – but it’s only because doing so means they can’t get to the cause of the problem. By the by, one of the results of repressed emotions and unmet needs is inability to concentrate. There are four choices: do nothing; seek therapeutic or counseling help so you can learn that you do have value and how to take a stand against people who don’t respect you and all the messages in your head that tell you you’re worthless; take anti-depressants; or commit suicide.

In life it seems to me that five things are guaranteed. We’re born, we die, we can’t alter the law of cause and effect, symptoms have a purpose and if they’re ignored the problem doesn’t get solved, and nothing stays the same so if it isn’t getting better it’s getting worse.  

Logic tells me that if the things I believe about myself, my self esteem and entitlement and my environment and the way I respond to it are the essential cause of my depression, unless I change them, nothing can get better. Taking anti-depressants makes it easy for me to stay where I am, because I can’t feel those uncomfortable emotions. So I continue being disempowered. And that means things can only get worse.

Of course I don’t see it because I’m drugged out of my mind, but it takes its toll nonetheless and one day even the drug can’t hide that toll. By then I’m addicted, either physically or psychologically and my body is damaged often irreparably. Getting back to ADHD, I think it’s most likely to be a symptom directly related to the quality of nurturing and understanding a child receives and the emotional health of its family environment.

It kills me when parents let doctors prescribe drugs for their children. Imagine the soul of a child frantic for some kind of nurturing input that it isn’t getting and desperately needs – but can’t articulate. Instead of getting what it needs it gets drugged down. Now there’s a real solution for you. 

One of the problems is that adults don’t realize how sensitive children really are and how easily they’re traumatized. How easily they’re conditioned to not speak out, to not articulate when something is wrong. Plus, we’re a society that’s been so conditioned by a prescription drug industry remorseless about exploiting how hard it is to really grapple with the things that bother us in life, and how scary emotions are if you don’t know what to do with them.   

On Feb. 03 2013 nytimes.com ran an article about Richard Fee, a 24-year old from Virginia Beach. His doctor, from Dominian Psychiatric Associates, diagnosed ADHD, despite that Richard had never had it in childhood. He prescribed Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication. Richard’s mother pleaded with her son to stop the medication when she was sure he was becoming addicted. She was also sure he didn’t have ADHD.  

Richard wasn’t able to hear her, and became violently delusional. He was put in a psychiatric hospital. As if that isn’t horrific enough, his doctor prescribed another 90 days of Adderall. Richard hanged himself two weeks after the prescription ended. We see stories like this in the movies and think it doesn’t really happen in real life. Yes it does.

ADHD – and depression – could be caused by underlying stress in the home that isn’t being acknowledged by parents who don’t know how to deal with it, or by all the things a child or an adult doesn’t know how to do, or all the misbegotten beliefs that control their actions and the way they relate to people and themselves, or the way they deal - or don’t - with emotions. Humans are complex and our needs are myriad. We’re so unconscious of most of them, which is why we have uncomfortable emotions; they wake us up. 

The thing is; whatever we don’t know can be learned at any age, and whatever we lack can be corrected. It doesn’t matter whether we’re a child or an adult. When that happens, the depression is resolved and the triumph is phenomenal. When people are disturbed about something they can’t concentrate. If it’s so in adults, why would it be any different in children? So instead of prescribing medication for the child, maybe the parents need to seek counseling.

Drugs don’t fix depression and I don’t believe they do anything for ADHD. They either procrastinate on the inevitable crisis that’s caused by living in a disempowered way, or they lead to addiction and getting trapped in a nightmare of psychiatric misdiagnoses. Are depression and ADHD purely a chemical imbalance? Or is the chemical imbalance caused by something that’s treatable and accessible and has nothing to do with science and pills but everything to do with the complexity of what human beings – adults and children - need to be able to live balanced, healthy lives? 

One thing I know; giving a person nurturing which includes unconditional love and really good, sane, guidance, for as long as they need it, never led to them being violently delusional and hanging themselves. Rest in peace, Richard Fee. My heart goes out to his family.

Armstrong Comes Clean to Oprah and Gets More Publicity for Himself

So Lance Armstrong has come clean to Oprah. I use the word ‘clean’ with reservation since I haven’t seen the interview yet. Oprah made a cryptic comment about it, saying he came prepared (her emphasis), that his confession was not what she had expected, and that it was riveting at times. Her interview will be streamed globally tomorrow. South Africans can watch it at 4:00 am.
 
CNN ran an article about public reaction being mixed prior to the interview being aired. Reaction to the article was mixed, with most people being angry and disillusioned, although some believed he shouldn’t be judged for the doping because its importance is way overshadowed by the good he’s done with his Foundation. One reader said people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and that it was up to God to judge – and created a storm, like disturbed hornet’s nest. 

Everybody loves a hero, and it’s not surprising that so many myths have gathered around Armstrong. Especially since he’s so good at marketing himself. He did survive testicular cancer, which had allegedly spread to his lungs, stomach and brain though, and that he did is amazing and admirable. He made much of not being the hero, saying that modern medicine should take that prize, but his self-effacement simply added to his image of the hero. Maybe it wasn’t consciously intentional, but in the light of what the world knows now, it seems part and parcel of a neurotic need to self-aggrandize.

In October, Sporting News Fanhouse  reported that the reality about the Foundation – which is what all his admirers pin their adulation on now – is that it has spent millions on marketing which actually focuses on Armstrong more than it does on cancer survival, that Armstrong has used it to pump himself up and that the Foundation hasn’t actually donated as much to cancer research as everybody believes (it hasn’t donated anything since 2010).

The extent to which Armstrong intimidated and threatened members of his team who either didn’t want to take PED’s or wanted to speak out once they had, is horrifying, and shows a psychopathic aspect to his personality that isn’t going to be erased by a confession. Therapy, maybe, and not just one session with Dr. Phil.

Armstrong was raised by a teenage mother; his father left when he was a couple of years old. He’s reported to have said that she taught him the value of hard work and never quitting, which sounds lovely and utterly heroic.

But it’s the stuff of Hollywood. In reality what his childhood clearly left him with is a pretty pathological need to be the hero no matter what the cost. It taught him how to get what you want, how to manipulate everybody’s emotions, how to use the vulnerable, how to intimidate those who want to be honest. How to con the world and consequences to anybody else be damned. 

That he chose to reveal all on Oprah, who is known for her need to see people on the road to healing emotionally and is most likely to want to find a reason to forgive him, is just more evidence that he hasn’t stopped trying to con the world. I’m a big fan of Oprah’s but this one turns me off a little. I can’t help wondering why, if the truth was really all she cared about, she didn’t encourage him to quietly tell all, make reparation and be done with it. 

Instead his confession has turned into a huge publicity stunt at a time that he’s desperate to restart his career in some way. Last month Armstrong met with US anti-doping officials to discuss what he’d have to do to mitigate his lifelong ban. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about truth. It’s not about remorse. It’s not about the value of hard work and being a hero. It’s sure not about cancer survivors. 

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if something like “they made me do it” doesn’t hit the headlines. This story isn’t over, not by far. Somebody's going to investigate the finances of that Foundation, if it isn't already happening.

If Women Ran the World, Would We Have Wars and Guns?

I recently read a book on the American Revolution. You’d think that women didn’t exist in that time because not one was mentioned.  The history of America was simply about the battles. Never mind about the general people and how they thought and what they did. I love the story of America’s development, but after a while it got old. 

Who gives a damn about who shot who? I wanted to know about everyday lives. I definitely wanted to know what the women were doing, what they were thinking, who they supported, how they did it. Virginia Woolf wrote a book Three Guineas which was, as far as I remember, about why women wanted so much to have what men had.

Why they didn’t forge their own way of doing things in the world. How much they contributed to war when they supported their men, sent their sons off to be shot to pieces, worked in factories and hospitals. I liked her perspective, and I agree with her. If women refused to let their sons go to war we wouldn’t have any war. Leaders would have to fight it out. 

You can bet they wouldn’t want to risk being shot themselves. So women are just as responsible for war as men, I guess, because we didn’t take Virginia Woolf’s advice at first. We didn’t forge a world where we operated on different principles, we fitted into the one that was already established. I guess that’s how we learned. 

We followed example until we had a foundation, then we started separating out, doing ourselves differently. Everybody does it like that. Still, I wonder what the world would look like if women had always had the power, run governments and corporations, been responsible for all the big decisions. If they had been the educators and the educated. 

Would they have kept men down and resisted their empowerment when men finally woke up and realized hey, we want a slice of this pie, too? Probably, because whatever the inner drive that impels people to carve an exclusive place for themselves in the world and keep competition out isn’t about gender. Women are control freaks just as much as men are.

It’s a factor of entitlement and self esteem. Too much entitlement of the unhealthy kind – I can do whatever I want because I’m more powerful than you - and not enough self esteem. A lethal combination. It’s what keeps women down and the decent men quiet, ties them both into a system where the only way they can hold onto themselves is to be passive aggressive and manipulative. 

We’re all late developers with regard to that, we’re all learning how to really know what our worth is, how to be conscious of our own behavior and be accountable for it. How to find the balance between claiming and compromise. Without a doubt, though, women have been late developers in the sense of knowing they have as much right to anything in life as the men with bullying power do. 

But that awareness is developing exponentially. Women are doing great things these days, and claiming their turf in ways they couldn’t have done in generations past, because they didn’t know they could. Now they do. And the more they come into their own, the more they are creating a world that’s quite different from the one forged by men hell-bent at one time on holding onto all the power. 

For women and young girls who still struggle to find themselves and carve that niche in the world, there are brilliant role models to help them along. And men who aren’t bullies are finding themselves too. This bodes well for humanity, I reckon. But the thing I wonder about the most is; if the power of the sexes had developed differently, how would the history books read? 

Would women have conquered through killing? Would they have instinctively designed and manufactured arms that were a projection of their sexual organs and developed them to the extent that they controlled world culture?  Since bullets and bigger destructive arms look remarkably like penises and do what rapists do, it’s hard to imagine. 

How would you create a weapon of destruction that resembled a vagina?