Yes, you can feel happier despite Covid19. Humans can hold dueling thoughts in their heads and survive. For instance, we have the ability to compartmentalization, and that’s not always a negative.
As one psychologist says, "Compartmentalization is not about being in denial; it’s about putting things where they belong and not letting them get in the way of the rest of your life."
Neuroscientists say there is increasingly more evidence that what we think and do shapes us well after childhood, but we must take steps to change our brains ourselves. Practicing a positive mindset can even boosts our immunity.
Here are some tips that I need to remember. Maybe they will help you, too.
1.Play music that makes you want to dance. Uptown Funk and some old school R&B jams still get me going, Earth, Wind & Fire, Prince, Funkadelic, Marvin Gaye, etc. Maybe some disco or some Elton John, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, too. This doesn't mean there aren't plenty of more recent songs out there to get you on your feet.
2.Fake out your brain by smiling. No, this not the, "Oh you're a pretty young lady, so smile more" patriarchal advice. This is science. Smiling can trick your brain:
o"A smile spurs a chemical reaction in the brain, releasing certain hormones including dopamine and serotonin. “Dopamine increases our feelings of happiness. Serotonin release is associated with reduced stress. Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression and aggression,” says Dr. [Isha] Gupta. “Low levels of dopamine are also associated with depression.”
oAnd there's more: "“What’s crazy is that just the physical act of smiling can make a difference in building your immunity,” says Dr. [Murray] Grossan. “When you smile, the brain sees the muscle [activity] and assumes that humor is happening.”
3.Strike a power pose or victory, as illustrated in the photo with an image of 1970s Wonder Woman Lynda Carter and Amy Cuddy, chief promoter of “psych yourself out” poses on TedTalks. You can fool your body and mind into feeling better daily.
4.Practice mindfulness also known as meditation. I like the guided meditations at UCLA Health. People who meditate tend to have a more positive mindset, and they are less likely to have as much cortical thinning, according psychologist Rick Hanson. Evidence indicates that people who meditate lose fewer brain cells than those who do not meditate. Also, cortical thinning, while part of the aging process, is linked to a lowering of IQ. The last thing you need in a crisis is a loss of IQ points.
5.Avoid dwelling on negatives, meaning clear your head of resentments and regrets. Hanson says the practice of controlling where you put your attention is called “self-directed neuroplasticity.” Try replacing dwelling on your trials and tribulation with gratitude. Keeping a gratitude journal may be useful. Hanson asserts that we can “use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better.” Read Hanson’s tips about how we can “take in the good” here.
I am feeling Jill Scott's song "Shame" today. I mean the lyrics and attitude of the song, which is absent of the emotion shame. In particular, I'm feeling the line, "And you don't even know my name." However, I'm not thinking of that line in its literal context.
I'm thinking about the implications of saying "you don't even know my name" figuratively, meaning that someone does not see who you really are because they've adopted a negative opinion based on whatever issues they brought to the table and refuse to see that's not you but their negative construction of you. Some people see only what they want to see when they look at another person, and if they have a vested interest in seeing you as the "bad guy" or "the devil," then they will block themselves from seeing anything about you or your actions that contradicts their assessment.
I'm sure you've seen it work the other way when someone you know has been deeply in love with a man or woman who lacks integrity and uses them, but the one in love is blind to the beloved's faults. But back to names and character.
The prayer of Jabez from the Bible gives some spiritual insight on a name as character and destiny. The name Jabez means pain. Although his appearance in the Bible is brief, we do know that his mother gave him that name because she had a painful labor. In context of biblical culture, one's name carried one's nature, infusing the individual with how he or she would progress through life. But, as the story goes, Jabez prayed and asked God to change his course, to free him from going the way of his given name:
Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, "Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so thatI will be free from pain." And God granted his request.
I believe that whether we consider ourselves religious or not, call ourselves Christian, Jewish, Muslim or of some other faith, we all struggle with change when we want to change ourselves, our life course. It takes courage and self-discipline to write new stories for ourselves and not live out the stories our family, friends, bosses, or society in general write for us, or even the gloomy tale (negative self-mythology) we may have subconsciously written for ourselves.
Humans can transform ourselves. However, I doubt that I can change myself when I'm going through a deeper depression, which zaps me of hope. So, depression can be a stumbling block, even a mountain because in order to transform ourselves, our minds must be in a state that lets us at least imagine hope. Depressed people, however, are not always able to see even a sliver of light, so they can't walk toward it.
Is it possible you suffer from a depressive disorder and it's interfering with your ability to move forward? You can check your symptoms here. Shove aside your pride, too, if that's what causes you to resist getting help. And if you realize that you are depressed and you have been for weeks or more, then you may need to take anti-depressants to pull through. Take them if you need them.
Whether you're depressed or not, I also recommend this book: The Power of Habit. It's fascinating and inspiring.
I'd love to evolve into my best self and get to the place of confidence Jill Scott represents in her jubilant song, "Shame." Wouldn't you? But I also believe genetics play a role in how long we maintain a jubilant a state or urge ourselves into it. Yep, I believe there's a happy gene, even the one that influences how we fare in relationships.
But I believe as well that we can fake out our brain's genetics, which is why I appreciate this TedTalk by Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extrayears of life.
And I know for a fact that music changes mood, which is why I was on the early train for Pharrell's hit song, "Happy." But isn't it unrealistic to think that our goal is to be perpetually happy? While I've used the word "happy" throughout this post, my goal is to be content and self-actualized. I may not reach that all my goals before I die, but I must continue my effort, the process of trying.
What about you? Have you been aware of those moments in your life when you need to change but have resisted that change or been afraid that you can't change at all?
I just heard about Shirley Temple Black's death. I am an African-American woman who associates the child star with my childhood. Apparently she passed away last night, Monday, February 10, on my birthday. At age 85, she was almost 30 years older than I am now, born one year later than my mother. But in my mind, she's still around 6 years old, the symbol of a sweet little girl who can make it through any crisis.
Perhaps, even, she is the first media image I encountered that seemed to prescribe what a perfect female child should be according to Hollywood: cute and curly-headed, sunny and pleasing. How was I to know then that girl was myth?
During the 1960s, it seemed almost every week one of the television stations was running one of Shirley Temple's movies, usually on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes I'd sit with my cousins around the black and white television in my grandmother's home in New Orleans's Gert Town. Sometimes I'd watch alone in my 7th Ward childhood home. Reruns or not, we'd watch her adventures as one character or another. And after the studios colorized the black and white films, we watched again.
This was pre-800 channels, pre-cable. It was either the Little Rascals with Buckwheat, Cowboys killing "Indians," the Three Stooges, or Shirley Temple. Thank goodness for books, but even in those we were hard-pressed to find positive images of people like us.
Most of her films were more than 20 years old when I first saw them, and although my favorite was The Little Princess (1939), when I hear Shirley Temple's name, I see her walking down that airplane aisle singing "On the Good Ship, Lollipop" in Bright Eyes (1934). That may be the image that pops up first because that's often the clip played when anyone discusses Shirley Temple in a documentary or child stars in general from that era.
I link Shirley Temple with happy times. She was innocent, I was innocent, often the center of attention in my family because my parents had struggled to have a child. I had a grandmother, a nurturing aunt, a father and mother all in the same town who I saw daily, and sometimes relatives from California or Tennessee would visit. They made me feel special, too. For the first eight years of my life, I was spoiled. After that is another story.
Back then it was common to coif little girls with "Shirley Temple curls" for holidays and other special occasions. She was so popular that a child's drink, a non-alcoholic cocktail, was named after her. Sometimes, when my parents took me with them to Dooky Chase Restaurant, I'd have one. But now, oh, what creepiness, the symbolism of a little black girl in the 1960s South imbibing Shirley Temple.
And yet, I was not fascinated with Shirley Temple the way the fictional character Pecola Breedlove is in Toni Morrison's classic novel The Bluest Eye. I had no Shirley Temple dolls, no cups with her blond curls shining and her blue eyes staring at me. In fact, I'm not even sure I registered that Shirley Temple had either blond hair or blue eyes because I first watched her in black and white. To me, Shirley Temple was just another white face on television in a time when black faces rarely appeared.
However, by the time I was six years old in 1966, I was aware that many white people did not want black people around them. After all, the ugliness of racism revealed itself on the nightly news. I doubt my parents removed me from the room when the footage rolled of dogs let loose on black teens and high pressure water hoses blasted black bodies during the marches. And these scenes played again over the years as the Civil Rights struggle remained in the news.
Also, I had a personal experience when I was about 4 or 5 years old that I still recall. My mother and I boarded a public bus in New Orleans. It was the mid-sixties, so the buses had been desegregated for at least six years by then. There must not have been many window seats because I did not sit by mother. I sat by the window in a seat next to a white woman. I guess, now, the woman must have been in her late fifties. Soon after I sat next to her, the woman huffed, got up and moved, clearly angry. My mother, watching, called me to her and said loudly, "That's okay, baby. Anybody who doesn't want to be by you is missing the opportunity to know a wonderful little girl." But I was not a dull child, so while I did not yet know the word "rejected," I recognized disgust and knew the woman thought something was wrong with me.
As a child then, for me, the measure of whether a white person was "nice" or "mean" was, Will they let you be near them? I had seen Shirley Temple dance with Bill Robinson in The Littlest Rebel and Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm, so she must be nice. At 5 years old, that was as close as I came to today's critical race theory.
It was not until later that I understood the movie's racialized images and the racism that produced them. Bill Robinson, Uncle Billy in the movie, was the slave of Shirley Temple's character Virgie. Yes, Virgie's family was on the wrong side, but I didn't know that when I was 4 or 5 or 6 because I was not old enough yet to have learned in class that my people were once owned by white people. That's not information black parents share before they have to. And Shirley, when she filmed the movie, didn't know that either, according to what she said in interviews during the 1990s. Still, I knew more about racism when I was 6 than she did when she was 6.
Back then, I also did not know how seeing Shirley Temple on television had begun to shape my understanding of what it meant to be an adorable girl. I don't recall trying to emulate her. According to an older cousin, I was more likely to imitate an adult, but I do recall hearing my mother say to my aunt before she straightened my hair with the hot comb, "And give her Shirley Temple curls."
I recall as well at age 5 that I walked down the aisle of New Orleans's old Municipal Auditorium to the lofty sounds of "Pomp and Circumstance," a train flowing behind me, my body covered with a white, pearl-encrusted gown, a fake piece of hair to hold my tiara in place, and my own hair bouncing at my ears in those desirable curls. I was the princess of my dance school because my parents had raised the most money for my age group. A teen was the school's queen. But I was not very sweet or adorable that night, my mother told me. I didn't want anyone to stand in the pictures with me.
Did I think I was like Shirley Temple? I don't remember thinking that. Did I ever want to be Shirley Temple, no. Like Claudia in The Bluest Eye, I was not impressed with my white baby doll. I recall holding a black doll, and later I think I begged my parents for a life-sized doll (3 feet tall) that only came in white. Of course, it had blue eyes. But once I had it, I didn't like it. It scared me, and I hid it in the closet. The next year, I gave it away.
Was my mother trying to make me Shirley Temple? No. She was the one who made sure I had a black doll and the one teaching me black history facts, telling me about George Washington Carver and the story about my grandmother meeting him. She was the one who taught me about Phyllis Wheatley and had me memorize James Weldon Johnson poems. She was also the one who made black history intimate. Not only were W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Nat Turner important, so were my grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother, so were my great-uncles and aunts.
As for my father? He liked Westerns, war movies, and every sport on the planet. He had stories about cows, Gypsies, snakes, his grandfather's horse, and Mount Vesuvius erupting as the Germans bombed because he was there. He didn't watch Shirley Temple. He kept an ear out for The Platters and an eye out for Lola Falana.
Eventually, I no longer watched Shirley Temple movies. I moved on to swashbuckling tales, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Dracula movies, and Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney teen flicks. I liked those more than the teen Shirley Temple in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.
But I could never really get away from Shirley because America kept talking about her, so sometimes, I'd see one of those late night commercials from Time Life or something like that, selling The Shirley Temple Collection, and I'd wonder, What's she doing now? What's it like to no longer be a little darling? Did that make her a nobody? Hardly. She became a public servant, unscathed even by her ardent support for Richard Nixon. So, she'd show up in the news occasionally.
Her name filled the airwaves again when I was 14. President Gerald Ford appointed her the American Ambassador to Ghana. That may have been when I noticed that she'd married, and her last name was Shirley Temple Black. With that appointment came the great controversy. It was the mid-seventies. African-Americans were still riding the "Black is Beautiful" high, and the segregationists' flight to the Republican party remained fresh in black people's minds. So, some argued that because Shirley was a conservative, white Republican, she should not be an ambassador to an African nation. And due to the hostility African-Americans sensed from the Republican party, the belief spread that she was also "a racist."
I was in high school then, and not paying attention to why people were calling her that. All I heard was, "Hmph!" and "Shirley Temple racist." Typical teenager, my attitude was "Blasé blasé, par for the course." By that time, I had become more acquainted with disappointment and the personal wounds of racism.
With her death, these accusations have arisen again and where else other than on Twitter. Is the controversy worth anyone's energy? I have strong doubts. At this point, isn't it really about what Shirley Temple represented to those who were aware of her or influenced by her icon status in society?
I went for years without thinking about her unless her work appeared on television. Next, my daughter was watching The Little Princess and Bright Eyes. Honestly, I thought that Shirley Temple had passed away already sometime while I was in the middle of divorce.
When I had to do a presentation on The Bluest Eye two years ago, I didn't even bother to look up Shirley Temple despite her presence in the book because I felt I already knew what I needed to know about Temple's reach. I knew enough to understand Pecola Breedlove's obsession with the star, with her desire to drink milk from a Shirley Temple cup. After all, Pecola's story unfolds during the 1940s when the blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel was still everywhere, probably on billboards towering over towns, and her movies were in theaters on a big screen, not small in a little box.
And Pecola didn't have a mother teaching her black history or a decent father or the Civil Rights Movement and "Black is Beautiful" posters. She didn't have Diana Ross and the Supremes on the Ed Sullivan Show or the Julia sitcom on television or anyone to crown her "princess" for a night and counter the forces of her self-hatred and destruction. I count myself blessed as Claudia was blessed.
And yet, six years before I conducted my presentation, I wrote a poem, "Ducks and Swans on the Lagoon (at City Park in New Orleans)." In it, the spirit of Shirley Temple appears. I pulled that poem out today and studied it. Then I posted it to my blog. So much stuff is there: the heaviness of navigating race as a child, of steering around demeaning images of the self, the idealization of whiteness, and rising above America's tragic racial history. Somehow, I had processed it and made something for myself.
No, I don't hate Shirley Temple as Claudia did. Neither do I love her madly. She was part of the scenery of my childhood, and like it she, too, now is gone.
I don't know what overtook me today, but for the first time in maybe 30 years, I heard Aretha Franklin's "All the King's Horses," which I've posted above, and started crying. My first thought is that I needed to cry because I've been holding so much in over the last year (family deaths, health concerns, a variety of fears).
Once in my life I was known for crying often--sobbing because someone hurt my feelings or rejected me, weeping at sad movies, and sniffling over Hallmark commercials. I learned that I had to toughen up and stop that or nothing would ever get done. Plus many people that I have known think crying is a sign that the weepy one is a manipulator. Really, that was not the case when it came to me.
I know it was not the case because my mother used to say that people use the behavior that gets them the results they want, but no one ever gave me anything because I cried. I have not been the kind of woman that people rush to assist, and much of my crying after a certain age, I did alone because I didn't want a lecture from anyone telling me not to be so sensitive.
But, Lord, this old Aretha tune got to me.
I cannot lie, the song made me think of the unraveling of my marriage, even though I know divorce (a type of death) was the right thing for me. The song hurled me back to when I was a teen listening to it on my stereo, having no idea that someday in the future, the feelings in the song would be mine.
You never know how deep a wound is, even your own--sometimes especially not your own because stopping to investigate its depth would toss you into a pit of non-functioning. As the saying goes, "Don't pick at a scab," and so we learn not to contemplate the harder stuff of life: the pain and sorrow, the moments when we think perhaps life is meaningless and the silence that bounces back to us when we don't sense the presence of God or the Universe with us. Who wants to pick at a scab and watch new pus erupt?
Perhaps, as a person drawn to poetry, I can't help but think on such things. Perhaps it is part of my sometimes gloomy nature. I think now of Jericho Brown's opening lines of his poem "Again" from Please:
You are not as tired of the poem
As I am of the memory.
A returning toothache
On either side of the mouth.
The speaker of the poem is returning to a troubling childhood memory and is aware that others are weary with his worrying over the past.
Yes, some events mark us, and our thoughts return to them. However, we do not return to wallow in being wronged or in the guilt that we've wronged someone else, as someone seemed to suggest in a comment once on another post about divorce; we return to assess where we've been and where we're going and to try to make sense of our existence.
Ask anyone who's experienced a death or another deep loss, the brain returns and rehashes; it recirculates memories as the heart does blood, those memories that shape who we become. I think that while it's true we should not dwell too long with misery, it's equally true that if we ignore or fail to acknowledge that we still hear the echo of painful moments and wonder what they may have taught us or that we still sense sometimes the phantom of something that feels unresolved, then we run the risk of emotional clotting the same way we run the risk of getting blood clots if we ignore symptoms of physical circulation problems.
Healing takes for each person however long that it takes.
I didn't want to run from whatever it was I felt when I heard the song. I had to probe it at a deeper level, which is something that poetry also causes us to do, according to poet Julie Kane. And whoever wrote the "All the King's Horses" lyrics was also a poet (I think Aretha herself wrote the lyrics).
We sat on the wall of happiness
We sat on the wall of love
We sat on the wall of security
So high above
With his arms all around me
It was like a fairy tale
Two people so in love
Tell me how could it fail
The wall started shaking
I heard love cried out
Happiness is given away
Security is coming down
He fell, I fell
And all there is left to tell
Is all the king's horses
All the king's men
Couldn't put our two hearts
Together again
This month the Barman's Fund of New Orleans will give a boost to the city's only street paper, the New Orleans Street Exchange. According to the newspaper's newsletter, "the Barman’s Fund is a motley assortment of bartenders who pledge all earnings from one shift a month for charitable organizations."
The N.O. Street Exchange is a street newspaper benefiting the city's homeless community and addressing issues of poverty. The proceeds from the Barman’s Fund this April will help the N.O. Street Exchange purchase supplies for the newspaper and aid its vendor program.
This means that when you visit one of the fund's participating bars during the shifts identified below, you will "drink with purpose."
Sunday 4/7 George White @ Hoshun - 6pm-close, 1601 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans
I remember seeing on Facebook the picture of the NYPD police officer who gave the homeless man a pair of boots. The story moved me, and I learned more watching this video at CNN with story. Officer Lawrence DePrimo, who's received lots of attention for helping the man, said it was very cold; he saw Jeffrey Hillman's blistered feet and wanted to help him. He asked about buying him socks, and ended up buying him boots.
Hillman's brother said that Jeffrey's been on the streets for years, but some New York agency says he has an apartment. This story has become very complicated. I wish I had time to write more. In my own city, New Orleans, I intend to do more. (If you're near New Orleans, consider helping the New Orleans Street Exchange, a nonprofit running a literacy training program to help individuals in the homeless community.)
CNN also ran an opinion piece by Frida Ghitis in which the writer says,
"The shoes help; the cash helps. But the more effective act of generosity, the real miracle, would come if the millions looking at the picture of the generous police officer trying to help a man in need wrote the perfect Chapter 3, pushing for better mental health services, more affordable housing, more job training. For enough attention from the government to those who need it most."
According to Ghitis and the NYC authorities, Hillman is a veteran. He has benefits, but it seems he is not mentally present enough to use his benefits.
If you're aware of this story, then you may recall that it began when Jennifer Foster of Florence, Arizona, posted a photo of the officer helping Hillman on her Facebook page. Read more here.
Pima Community College released the following video of Jared Lee Loughner rambling and ranting around its campus, and media enterprises are calling in more experts to decipher meaning behind his jumbled words and bizarre behavior. The school suspended Loughner last year after he showed myriad signs of being mentally disturbed and possibly a danger to himself, college staff and students. Multiple sources report college security was called five times to disturbances concerning Loughner while he was a student at Pima.
College officials told Loughner that he could not return without a mental health clearance from a psychiatrist. They also visited his parents, Randy and Amy Loughner, they've said, to discuss Loughner's case. However, the college did not try having Loughner committed.
Months after that suspension, Lougher shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 of her constituents on January 8 in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people. The FBI considers the act to have been an assassination attempt after finding plans at the 22-year-old's home. Among the six killed were a federal judge, John Roll, and 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Greene, who was born on September 11, the day of the World Trade Center attack.
In the video above, Loughner roams the Pima campus accusing its administration of denying him freedom of speech and of committing genocide against its students. He definitely does not seem to be functioning within the range of reason.
Time.com has a full profile of Lougner, "The Troubled Life of Jared Loughner," with an altered graphic of that spooky picture the media's running of him. Time has taken the spookiness a step further, coloring him red, and so, he looks more like some kind of devil.
I refuse to put that mugshot of Loughner, red or otherwise, on my blog. It's just too creepy.
Also, CNN.com had a guest on a day or so ago saying he thinks Loughner was into lucid dreaming, something I said in my first post that I published the day of the shooting, "Conscious not Conscience." It's not that mysterious. To dream lucidly simply means that you become aware that you are in a dream and can change the course of the dream's story, move objects, change the scene, etc.
I can't find the CNN video with the guest discussing conscious/lucid dreaming, but the person interviewed speculated that Lougner may have gotten to a point of not being able to tell whether he was dreaming or awake because he was obsessed with the phenomenon. If that's true, then Loughner could have been shooting the people at the Safeway and thinking it wasn't real, he suggested. But we don't know what Loughner may have been thinking because he's still refusing to speak, sitting in a federal prison with a smirk on his face, say sources.
A CNN article gives directions for having one's own lucid dreams. As someone who came of age in a household with a mother studying various spiritual paths that incorporated meditation and also dream studies—keeping dream journals, etc., I'm familiar with the techniques; however, I think CNN is sensationalizing an experience that became far removed from its ordinary use in the mind of a madman.
In a video below, a former girlfriend tells ABC News what she remembers of Loughner.
And in other news, today all over the nation people celebrated the life and message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose most popular speech is "I Have a Dream."
Oprah Winfrey tells Piers Morgan in an interview for his new CNN show that her greatest failure was the movie Beloved based on Toni Morrison's novel that won the Nobel Prize in literature. She said that after the movie bombed at the box office, she went into a depression for the first and only time of her life, feeling that she existed under a veil and asking her chef to prepare macaroni and cheese, her comfort food.
Morgan asked her how much macroni and cheese did she eat. She said "30 pounds worth." Winfrey has struggled publicly with weight issues for most of the 25 years of the Oprah Winfrey Show.
I didn't hide her revelation that she feels Beloved was her biggest failure the way some news sources have in their headlines because the information is not a secret to the multitude that follows the television mogul. It is a good movie, but I've always had the impression Beloved failed due to too much Oprah; she not only produced it but also starred in it, and some people felt she should have chosen someone else to play the role of Sethe, the main characer.
I'm not saying Oprah didn't do a good job of acting in the film (while a New York Times reviewer saw a few flaws in her performance, many critics thought she was "pitch perfect"). What I'm saying is that before I even saw the movie, I remember some average people in 1998 voicing objections to Winfrey casting herself in the leaing role.
I remember people back then saying they felt she wanted too much too soon even though she'd already debuted in the movie The Color Purple and also had appeared in Native Son. You have to wonder, however, why these people were so hard on Oprah starring in her dream project, one she took 10 years to bring to fruition, but have applauded stars such as Barbara Streisand for doing the same thing, producing and starring in movies.
Oprah blames Beloved's poor box office sales on her not understanding movie distribution and marketing well enough. She was surprised when her artistic film's box office sales were upstaged by the horror movie Bride of Chucky.
Piers Morgan's show premieres on CNN January 17 at 8 p.m. central. It replaces Larry King Live.
Did you recognize the image Clay Duke painted on the wall from the movie V for Vendetta? When I saw this story about the Florida school board shooting yesterday, I got a chill, not just because the video was scary either. I used to cover school board meetings in other parts of the country and sometimes the people coming in to protest budget cuts or ask for school board backing on some project did seem wild-eyed occasionally, but not one seemed as disturbed as yesterday's gun-weilding shooter in Florida.
It was a life-threatening situation, but the potential shooting victims remained calm. Afterward, the school superintendent, William Husfelt, said in interviews that this is America and school board meetings are still safe. So, the district won't go overboard now with increased security measures at meetings.
The AP calls Clay Duke, 56, the "burly, bipolar man" in its lead about yesterda's shooting at the Bay District Schools board meeting in Panama City, Florida. (See series of videos below that tell parts of the story.) Using spray paint, Duke drew a red "V" within a circle on the meeting room wall, the image used in the movie V for Vendetta and the same image he posted to his Facebook page. He then said somebody was going to die as he objected to his wife, Rebecca Duke, being fired. (More on the V for Vendetta connection)
His wife had previously been employed as a school teacher for the district. She was dismissed in February after she failed to pass the probationary period. With her firing, the Duke family lost health benefits. He shot at the school board members, was shot at three times and hit in the knee by a district security officer, and then he shot himself in the head and died. Read the entire AP story here.
His wife had a press conference today and said her husband was a "gentle giant" and that "the economy and the world just got the better of him."
Her husband was an ex-convict, according to news sources, with a history of mental illness. Mrs. Duke said in a press conference that he never missed his medication. Based on reports about Clay Duke's fears that the world was ending ever since Y2K, his comments on his Facebook Page about government-sponsored media, and other fears about taxes, etc., that his wife seems to reference in video of her press conference, I'm guessing he had some kind of paranoid personality disorder in addition to bipolar disorder.
"My Testament: Some people (the government-sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster (V) … no … I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95% of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats… same-same… rich… they take turns fleecing us… our few dollars… pyramiding the wealth for themselves. The 95%... the us, in US of A, are the neo slaves of the Global South. Our Masters, the Wealthy, do as they like to us…"
(Leaving suicide notes on social media pages or actually killing oneself on YouTube. Remember Abraham Biggs? Is the way of our social media age?)
CNN's video, some from Florida affiliate WJHG, shows school board member Ginger Littleton attack Duke with her handbag/purse after the gunman began his speech saying everyone can leave but the "assholes" sitting at the desk. He threw her to the ground but did not shoot her.
Survivors are praising God. Superintenddent Husfelt told CBS News that "God blocked the bullet." Mrs. Duke says her husband was an excellent shot who probably missed on purpose.
The next video shows a Full view of school board members reactions.
School board members, including Husfelt, discuss the shooting in the following video. He says that Duke looked determined. From CNN's story:
"It was surreal," Husfelt told CNN's "American Morning." "He had already told us that he was going to die, he was prepared to die, and we were going to die as well. ... You could tell by the look in his eyes there was going to be some killing going on.
Husfelt also commends Mike Jones, the retired police detective and district security guard who shot the gunman in the knee, and Littleton who tried to stop Duke with her handbag. He says, "She's like us even though she's a female."
Littleton says her three daughters asked her "Mom are you just stupid? What were you thinking?" She says she was thinking her fellow school board members were lined up like ducks and about to die.
Here is an interview with a witness who left when Duke told the audience to go.
And finally, here's CNN's later story with gunman saying, "Somebody is going to die."
A friend sent this to me, the "Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way." I wish I could adopt it because I honestly believe that sometimes no matter what you do, you can't change the outcome of a bad thing. The old way to say this would be "Let go and let God."
BlogHer.com, a women's blogging website, with help from OperationBeautiful.com, is running a series about owning your own beauty that features stories and pictures from ordinary women. That's a praise-worthy project. If I were younger, I'd ask to participate because I, like many other women, struggle with self and body image baggage, but who wants to hear about an older woman's emotional struggles with self-image unless she's saying she's fully recovered, right? People expect that with age comes wisdom, that some sagely magic overcomes you and you never ever again internalize self-destructive messages.
For a variety of reasons, I have trouble opening up these days publicly about inner turmoil with deep roots. You have to know when to risk facing darkness. For me, I have to choose a time when self-examination won't sink me, conjure my Sylvia Plath side, and since I'm in no position to take time off and spend weeks with a therapist, I'm disinclined to dig at the core of self-affliction right now.
When I was younger, I was willing to talk more about emotional pain. And make no mistake, to own your own beauty you must first wade through some emotional pain. If after being raised in a culture that values thinness, youth, and perfection over inner peace you have never, meaning not even once, experienced the prick of self-doubt about your looks, then I'll wager you're someone who is genetically predisposed to positivity or you have a knack for repression that's let you forget your awkward years. If not that, then perhaps you're attractive enough to have never been rejected based on your appearance. That's nice. Count your blessings.
As I was saying, when I was younger I was more willing to talk about pain, I think, because I was puffed up with idealistic dreams. I had higher hopes then for the 30-minute-sitcom solution to self-loathing--you know, just reveal the monster, laugh at it, and it goes away. But always I was more likely to address psychic slime from a safe distance, to speak to it in poetry, and even then I felt pressure to reveal less by putting a positive spin on the problem. See the poem "Fat Is." That's my issue, the shame of obesity, and so, I'm one of those people who feels sexy and pretty at a lower weight and like an ugly loser at a higher weight. Therefore, when I'm having trouble with losing weight the way I'm troubled now, I'm no damned fun. I can't play the role of the jolly fat lady.
I've also addressed these kinds of issues in fiction about childhood (Sunday Dinner), but the long, true personal narrative about how I feel about my physical appearance or a realistic picture showing my face and a belly of stretch marks? No. You might read this and think I'm sharing a personal narrative now, but I'm not. I don't have the courage for that. These are not the words that tell all and bare the soul. These are abstract, distanced blah blah words broadcast from the supposed cynic's cloak. These are what another writer I know calls "top of mind" words.
I'm reluctant to spill the deeper stuff because whenever I've broken down with a group in a face-to-face setting, my experience has been that people get all concerned, run at you with the hugs and tissues, but later, they go off and talk behind your back about your emotional instability. Someone describes you as "a drama queen" seeking attention. Others discuss your stupidity and the lameness of losing your head before a crowd, and they whisper buzz phrases such as "TMI," and eventually these opinions all come back to you by way of those gossipy "little birds."
Those birds tell a lot of people a lot of mean stuff when you're not around and if you put it in writing on a blog, God help you. You've archived the bird shit that pops up later and bites you in places like work or in a divorce hearing. I speak from personal experience here on the later, court. Being strong enough to share means being strong enough to take what people say after the sharing's done.
The fallout after sharing has never helped me, making whatever healing that reportedly comes through sharing incomplete. The aftermath of sharing has only made me feel more like I should climb in bed, turn off all lights, and pull the covers over my head. For others, though, sharing seems to work, to help. I'm in graduate school now taking rhetoric courses and reading theorists who swear the personal narrative works like Gilead's balm.
So, I applaud BlogHer and Operation Beautiful and the talented photographer Karen Walrond for trying to "change the conversation" about women and our perceptions of beauty. Part of their message is "it is never too late to learn to love one's self and influence the lives of those around us." Seems like that should be a message for me, and it is, but like I said, I can't do that publicly right now. Maybe I'll do those positive affirmations recommended by Operation Beautiful in a private space at a quiet time, but mostly I think I'll take heed of research on neurogenesis. I've been thinking lately that the better route is to reinvent the self, to take practical steps in raising up a new you and purge the demons that way and to do so without advertisement. I'll advertise the cure after it's worked because these feelings are like a long, love-affair where self-doubt, like lovers' passions, comes and goes.
But the rest of you, please go. Do. Get a healing now! Don't be like the me who writes in this moment.
I see that this pressure to look like a perfect dream rips through America and the world. It's a disease. It's a cancer eating its way from women to men. I've heard my son speak of being self-conscious about not having the buff male body promoted on television and in magazines. My daughter's self image is stronger, and I suspect her being hard of hearing (she wears hearing aids) may have helped there. Natural deafness has prevented her from hearing some of the crazy talk that makes us crazy.
It seems that to love our children to wholeness, we must work daily and desperately against Spiritus Mundi, praying that we too may be exorcised. In my son's case, I rage against rise of the Adonis Complex. After seeing the Rocky Horror Picture Show episode of Glee in which the character Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) confronts his body-image issues, I know it's not just my son feeling this pressure. I doubt a show as successful as Glee would broach the subject unless they knew it would resonate with teen viewers. And I wish someone had raged against Madison Avenue's Venus for me when I was a child, a teen, a young woman.
Even the Beautiful People Feel Ugly These Days
The Glee episode brings me to one celebrity's story. While BlogHer and Operation Beautiful are giving ordinary women the opportunity to share their feelings about their looks, a chilling story runs in MSM news this week about actress Portia de Rossi, Ellen DeGeneres's wife, and her battle with a negative body-image and an eating disorder. The video below has clips of her talk with Ellen, whose love she credits with helping her heal.
The CNN report talks a lot about the actress emotionally telling her story on Ellen's show, but Portia was also on Oprah earlier in the week telling Winfrey and audience about how she was once 82 pounds and thought that was beautiful. When people who cared about her told her that she was too thin, she perceived them to be giving her a compliment, and happily considered, "Who can bee too thin?" But her life was at risk at that weight.
Featured in the latest edition of People Magazine, she says:
"But at the time, I thought, 'Okay, my arms look awful so I should cover them up, but my legs look pretty okay now," says the actress, 37. "I didn't think I was crazy to only eat 300 calories a day. That made perfect sense to me."
She says, according to CNN and the Daily Mail, that as she grew to feel more comfortable about herself with Ellen, she reached a weight of 168 pounds.
Portia connects some of her issues with negative self image, anorexia, and food to trying to hide her sexual orientation. She's sharing her stories on talk shows because she's recently published a book, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain.
I came across an old song today that reminded me of colorism issues in the black community, and again I remind my fellow African-Americans that other people of color have similar dysfunctions. Ask someone observant from India about it, for instance, and they'll tell you that some of their people favor lighter skin.
Curtis Mayfield (June 3, 1942 – December 26, 1999), opens the set in the embedded video with "We the People Who are Darker than Blue," bemoaning colorism and lack of unity in the black community back in the day. He makes one brief statement, referencing the matter in the same context I recall it, and then moves forward with musical allusions to Africa, the mother of us all.
I recall colorism within a dysfunctional social system snaking through the black community and overall favoring lighter skin, which is why I'm glad Field-Negro occasionally mentions his wife, who grew up in Louisiana, as did I, and recalls the old-school hang-ups. I'm glad because what she has to say corroborates what I have to say (He's commenting on some drama with the singer Fantasia who thinks she was mistreated by the media because she's dark-skinned with "more African" features). Otherwise, to hear some people tell of our past today you'd think no light-skinned person was ever favored. Any favoritism is discounted by their recountings because some of our lighter-skinned members say the hatred they felt from darker-skinned members outweighed any benefit they may have gotten from being born with lighter skin and straighter hair in a society favoring such hair and skin. Furthermore, they think that if a lighter-skinned black person was ever favored, they are no longer favored today. (No comment on the Fantasia drama b/c I don't follow her.)
I hate it when people try to rewrite history and current events so they can feel good about themselves and their mommies and dadies (Yes, I see you Haley Barbour), which is why I'm also glad I have friends who will tell the truth who grew up with light skin and curly or straight hair and will admit that their lives had a bit of both rain and sunshine connected to skin color. Sometimes they were hated for their lighter skin color; sometimes they were loved. They don't deny, however, an awareness of bias in their favor in the world, either in their families or in certain social settings.
I agree that colorism affects people of color in ways similar to the way Zora Neale Hurston observes it in her play Color Struck. It's a terrible thing, a double-edged sword jutting from a traveling merry-go-round gone wild. Scars for everyone! What's more terrible is that while that play was written in the early 1900s, we still have people struggling with the scars of colorism today.
Consequently, I come across light-skinned black people between the ages of 45 and 60 who say that during the era of black pride, mainly the late sixties and early 70s, they were put down for having lighter skin, a trait over which they had no personal control, and some of them are still carrying a lot of baggage and anger toward their darker brothers and sisters for that rejection. Some of these wounded souls blame darker black people for everything from their never feeling accepted to never finding true love.
Being neither very light nor very dark, I experienced neither side of this specific tribulation long enough to carry its deep psychological scar, meaning I'm not aware of being ignored, favored or rejected by other black people because of my coloring. I have run, however, into a few people who revealed assumptions about me based on my being a little lighter than they were and speaking in a way they labeled "proper" or "white," but these encounters were so brief that I brushed them off or they happened late enough in my life that I was equipped to calmly analyze the dysfunction rather than internalize the insult.
So, I just have regular black folks stuff--issues with white supremacist propaganda and practices in general, issues with being fat in a thin-loving society, and since I'm female, some gender-discrimination baggage, too. I listen to everybody's whining and occasionally I want to slap black, white, brown, and yellow; fat, thin, skinny, and voluptuous; rich, poor, and comfortably oblivious; cat ladies, dog ladies, and gentlemen zookeepers; progressives, intellectual liberals, conservatives, the self-proclaimed tasteful, and all the culturistas.
Generally, I'd like to have a global altar call for humanity, including me, with a conversion line where prior to reaching the altar, God (in my world, God exists) gets to swat us each upside the head until we experience whatever epiphany required to make us treat each other with greater compassion and respect, and afterward, we fall on our knees destined to never forget again our own stupidity. In this vision, we arise, eternally embracing the practical lessons of forgiveness and love, and go forth healed.
But wait! Isn't life supposed to accomplish this end?
I don't hide that I have some anger issues, which means I really have to put the brakes on sometimes when I read comments from people supporting Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. It's usually not that they like these people that aggravates me, but that they try to declare the two men don't make racist statements or spread misinformation. I think you can like idiots all you want, just don't pretend what they're saying is something other than what it is.
Recently I saw a comment from a troll agreeing with Republican nominee for congress in New Mexico, Tom Mullins, who proposes putting landmines on the the Mexican border. (I guess New Mexico politicians are tired of Arizona stealing their thunder.) I'm holding my tongue better, reminding myself that trolls, especially anonymous trolls, revel in creating chaos and stress.
Now and then I can't contain my frustration, however,as you can see in what I had to say here to someone about healthcare reform. The person was not a troll but a pundit, however.
I work hard to disguise the rage when it creeps up sometimes, and that's evident in my poem/post "I Wish I Were in the KMA Club." I felt guilty about even saying KMA in a nice way. Too much Sunday School, perhaps, too many "be a good girl" lectures, maybe?
Consequently, I almost rolled on the floor and definitely LMBAO at Lily Allen's song, "F*ck You." I will be buying it and adding it to my music player.
How do you feel about your body? That seems like a simple question, but for many women, even attractive women who choose to be honest, the answer is neither simple nor positive. Throw weight or shape into the equation and rarely will you hear a positive answer. Did you ever think that maybe it's not your actual body holding you back but your feelings about your body?
Research conducted by a clinical psychologist at the Pennington Biomedical Center in Baton Rouge, La., indicates negative feelings about our bodies--obsessing about weight, internalizing the criticisms of others about our looks--hinders us from reaching legitimate health goals. ... Please read the full post at BlogHer.com
Take a look at this CNN report about rising number of militias and mostly white people afraid of the government these days.
Now compare what the "patriots" say in the CNN video to what Naomi Wolf was saying in 2008. She is the author of multiple books, but the video below is about her book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. I like Naomi, but I became concerned that she may have been suffering some kind of mental collapse when she started saying a coup took place on October 1, 2008. Still, she's not as scary as the people in the CNN video who are calm and armed.
Wolf seems to think in the video that Bush was going to take over the government and not let Obama take office. So, she's more to the left while the people in the first video who seem to not trust government in general, but more so now that Obama's in charge, are way to the right.
If you believe Wolf, then we're already in a police state. Ironically, she and the "patriots" and Tea Party folks seem to agree about the color of trees in odd parts of the forest.
What keeps crossing my mind is that these Tea Party/militia/so-called patriot birthers get a lot more mainstream media time than Naomi Wolf ever did. However, she's getting love these days from the Tea Party crowd or maybe giving them some. She says, per an article at AlterNet, that the Tea Party crowd is fighting fascism and she'd go speak at one of their rallies in a heartbeat.
Justin Sharrock interviewed Wolfe in March:
How can both sides be speaking the same language, yet see things so differently? Or are we just not listening to each other? I telephoned Wolf to ask her what it means when your book ends up bolstering policies you oppose.
Justine Sharrock: First off, is your book still relevant under Obama?
Naomi Wolf: Unfortunately it is more relevant. Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever. It is terrifying and the left doesn't seem to recognize it.
JS: Did you realize that your book is being lauded within the Tea Party and patriot movements?
NW: Since I wrote Give Me Liberty, I have had a new audience that looks different than the average Smith girl. There is a giant libertarian component. I have had a lot of dialogue with the Ron Paul community. There are [Tea Partiers] writing to me on my Facebook page, but I figured they were self-selective libertarians and not arch conservatives. I am utterly stunned that I have a following in the patriot movement and I wasn’t aware that specific Tea Partiers were reading it. They haven’t invited me to speak. They invited Sarah Palin. (Full interview)
Yes, you can feel happier despite Covid19. Humans can hold dueling thoughts in their heads and survive. For instance, we have the ability to compartmentalization, and that’s not always a negative.
