Barack Obama is now, officially, the 44th president of the United States. I watched the inauguration and the overwhelming message was one of buckling down and doing all that needs to be done to get us back on the right track. President Obama didn’t mince words. He broke it down for everyone just how knee deep in trouble we are in but he didn’t leave us hanging in hopelessness. He reiterated over and over that we can get through these troublesome times because we are Americans. We’ve been through worse and have survived, we’ll get through this too. As the president says: “It’s time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and remake America.”

The best part of the inauguration was the ending prayer by the Reverend Lowry. By far he stole the show. Even though the Reverend is a Christian, he included everyone of every belief system in the prayer. He also bestowed us with some wonderful nuggets of wisdom such as “We must turn to each other not on each other,” highlighting Barack Obama’s stance that collaboration is the key to our survival. I want to see if there is a transcript of the prayer because there a few other things he said that I want to blog about.

My only fear is that our high expectations may cause us to become impatient. People seem to think that President Obama is some kind of messiah. He isn’t. He’s just a man who will do the best he can to get us out of this mess but he can’t do it alone. He has to depend on the willingness of others to help and sometimes those others have their own agenda and will choose to become roadblocks rather than facilitators. Sometimes the circumstances themselves will not be conducive to a positive outcome. These are not excuses for failure but rather a fact of life. We should have hope that Obama will be successful but we need to temper that with a good dose of reality.

All in all, I do hope that President Obama’s time in office is exceptional and purely for selfish reasons. Firstly I want him to kill the stereotypes about black people that have been prevalent in this country for far, far too long. I want his presidency to inspire my people to much better than we have been doing. There is no excuse for continuing in mediocrity.

Secondly, I want him to raise the bar when it comes to the office of the presidency. I want the expectations of our leader to be such that people like the last joker that held that office don’t stand a chance of getting in.

Anyway, that’s all I really have to say on the subject. Here’s to America 2.0. Now with extra United.

In an event that organizers hope will become a New Year’s tradition, New Yorkers and tourists were invited to bring bad memories from 2008 to Times Square on Sunday and feed them to an industrial-strength shredder.

“This is the perfect way to move on from a bad year, from a bad experience,” said Kathryn Bonn, of New York City, who shredded a printout of her boyfriend’s e-mail breaking up with her.

This is the second year the Times Square Alliance has sponsored the event which they hope will become an annual tradition. I hope it does too. In fact I hope it become a national event.

Every year we make resolutions to be better people. It is a well known fact, though, that by February many of us will have forgotten about our resolutions and another year will go by with us having failed to achieve our goal.

A lot of times our inability to move forward into the future is because we are still hanging on to things from our past. It’s like that story of the university professor who went to visit a famous Zen master. While having tea they talked about the practice of Zen. The Zen master poured tea into the professors cup and didn’t stop even when it was overflowing. Finally, the professor exclaimed, “That’s enough. No more will go in.” To which the Zen master replied, “Equally, you are like this cup of tea. How can I teach you anything more until you empty yourself?”

If you find yourself making the same New Year’s Resolutions you have made the past ten years but failed to achieve, chances are you need to take some time to empty your cup. This means taking a good look around and getting rid of the things that are holding you back. These things could be anything; People, memories and even just plain old crazy ideas.

For example, for the longest time I couldn’t settle on what I wanted to do with my life. I floated from job to job. I would research different industries. I would settle on one thing but then a few months later I would change my mind. Finally, through my journaling, I figured out what was holding me back from moving forward with my plans. I wanted to be successful in life but I was pursuing other people’s ideas of success rather than my own.

To me, success means being able to do what makes you happy. I would be perfectly content with writing fiction stories for the rest of my life even if it didn’t make me any money. But the prevailing idea these days is that success means copious amounts of wealth. So that’s what I pursued. But what I was doing didn’t make me happy and so I never put the effort in required to make lots of money from it. As a result I didn’t get any where.

So in order to move forward, I had to get rid of the idea that I had to pursue other people’s idea of success and instead define success for myself. Sure I’m taking the chance that I might end up on the street panhandling for that night’s dinner but as long as I’m able to write, I’ll be perfectly happy.

Today, take a moment to participate in the spirit of Good Riddance Day. Get rid of those things that will prevent you from moving forward to a better life in 2009. Shred it, burn it, bury it in the backyard. Do whatever it takes to free yourself from the past so you can have a successful future. Happy New Year!

But then two things happened that snapped me out of that fantasy world that I had been living in for the past four elections; Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was added to the Republican Party ticket and the economy took a nosedive. That’s when I realized that our political leaders are anything but leaders and that the political process had deteriorated beyond all recognition.

It has become quite clear to me that we, as a nation, have fallen asleep at the wheel and as a result, we have been appropriately sideswiped. I can make a compelling case as to why we fell asleep. We are stressed out, over medicated, under educated and too busy. Most of all, we are afraid. We are afraid of losing the lives we have built for ourselves, however meager they may be.

The fact of the matter is these are really just excuses we tell ourselves to justify not being involved in the governmental process. We knew that there was something very wrong with this country but we chose to ignore it. We thought that to confront it would mean the loss of the things we hold dear. But through our inaction, we brought about the very thing we feared; the loss of our hopes and dreams. Our dream homes, our wonderful jobs, the loss of our children and spouses to war and the loss of the adventurous retirement we had been saving up for. We only have ourselves to blame.

The good thing is, dire though it may seem, it’s not too late. However we need to take action. Now. We must take back control of our government. Government officials are called public servants but they have been serving special interests for far, far too long. My favorite line in the movie V for Vendetta (A movie I highly recommend watching by the way) is when V tells the citizens of England that “People should not be afraid of their government. Government should be afraid of their people.” Meaning that control of the country should always be in the hands of the people and that government should be LISTENING to us not DICTATING to us.

This presidential election is only the start of the road that leads back to the principles this country were founded on. Congress in its entirety will need to be scrutinized and anyone who has been putting their own self-interests above the interests of the nation needs to be shown the door. We need to encourage and support the people in office (or who would run for office) who truly believe in honesty, fairness and integrity.

Eventually, this bi-party system we have will need to be replaced with something more effective and less divisive. Why is that we can go to a grocery store and select from 30 different types of cereal but when it comes to something as important as governing our country, we only have two parties to choose from? Seriously.

We owe it to ourselves, our nation and the world to demand higher standards for our leaders and ourselves. We can no longer afford to sleep walk through life. It’s time to wake up and take responsibility for our future. For as Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Do something. Vote.

Comedian/Actor Bernie Mac and Singer/Actor Issac Hayes passed away this weekend within two days of each other. Bernie Mac died of complications arising from pneumonia. The cause of death for Issac Hayes is still unknown.

Bernie Mac, born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough, is best known as his role as the put upon father in the hit television series “The Bernie Mac Show”. The show earned him two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. Bernie Mac began his career young, putting on comedy shows for friends, family and schoolmates. He was quoted as saying in a 2001 Associated Press article, “I came from a place where there wasn’t a lot of joy. I decided to try to make other people laugh when there wasn’t a lot of things to laugh about.” A goal which he achieved many times over in his long career.

Bernie Mac’s popularity as a comedian soared after he performed on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam. He also had his own talk show on HBO for a short while called Midnight Mac. Afterwards he began a career in acting that included movies such as Friday, Charlie’s Angels and the Oceans Eleven series. He was working on a new movie called Soul Men when he passed away. Bernie leaves behind his wife Rhonda McCullough, his daughter Je’Neice and a granddaughter.

To the current generation, Issac Hayes is most well known for his role on South Park as Chef. However right around the time the founders of the politically incorrect animated show were born, Issac Hayes had established himself as a successful singer, songwriter and musician. Issac Hayes’ music career spans over four decades and includes twenty studio albums and two soundtracks. He also wrote the theme song for the movie Shaft for which he won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Grammy.

Hayes came from humble beginnings. He was born in Covington, Tennessee where he grew up picking cotton. At five years old, he began singing at the local church and taught himself how to play the piano, the saxophone and the electric organ. Hayes is best known for his music style of long, orchestral songs and deep bass vocals. Popular artists, such as Barry White, have cited Hayes as being a major influence in their style of music. In 2002 Hayes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Hayes has also been seen in television shows such as The Rockford Files, Girlfriends and Stargate SG-1 as well as movies such as Truck Turner, Escape from New York and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. Oddly enough, Issac also stared in the upcoming movie Soul Men alongside Bernie Mac. Issac Hayes leaves behind his wife Adjowa Hayes, 12 children, 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren.

To learn more about these two great men, follow the links:

Issac Hayes Website

Bernie Mac Biography

Wikipedia Article: Bernie Mac

Wikipedia Article: Issac Hayes

Issac Hayes tribute site

Bernie Mac tribute site

The show I watch was titled “Same Sex Parenting”. The issue up to bat? Gay adoption. The show paired Kati, a Mormon housewife and mother of two adopted children, with Tom and Dennis Patrick who had adopted four boys out of foster care. Based only on her religious convictions, Kati believes that gay adoption is wrong and that children need a mother and a father. For 30 days she lived with the Patricks to get a firsthand look at the issue of gay adoption and same sex parenting.

Being the naïve idealist that I am, I honestly expected her to change her opinions once she experienced the reality of gay adoption and same sex parenting. After all, the only reason she was oppose to gay adoption was that homosexuality is against her religion. However, I was not surprised that Kati remained close-minded throughout the entire experiment and stuck to her opinion that gay adoption was wrong.

I can accept that. Really. People have opinions and, right or wrong, they are entitled to them. However, it quickly became obvious that Kati had put no real thought into issue of gay adoption at all, which aggravated me. If you are going to oppose something, at least take the time to get all the facts and then formulate an intelligent reason why you don’t like the idea. Instead, Kati subscribed to “The prophet sayeth so I believeth” method of reasoning. Her religion says it is wrong, so it is wrong.

Several times she was asked if she believed it was better for children to stay in foster care rather than be adopted by homosexual couples and she never answered the question. Not once. Instead she would get offended and jump on the defensive. Throughout the internet community, many people are speculating that the only reason Kati agreed to do the show was to proselytize and I agree. I felt she was more interested in being “right” than in trying to understand the issue or even see it from another perspective.

I felt she had no empathy for the plight of gay parents. In one heartbreaking scene a lesbian tells her the painful story of when her partner left her, took the child they had together and refused to let her visit him. The woman went to court over the issue but the courts were unsympathetic. Kati expressed her sympathy to the woman at losing the child but quickly followed up with a lecture that pretty much stated it was the woman’s own fault. That the situation wouldn’t have happened if she, being a lesbian, had simply chosen to not to have a child with a partner she loved. Are you serious?

Throughout the show, Kati defends herself by saying that she was entitled to her opinion and suggested that they should simply agree to disagree on the subject. However, the problem with opinions is not the belief itself but the action that is taken based on those beliefs. She clearly stated that she would vote against gay adoption and according to Dennis Patrick, she planned on actively advocating against gay adoption when she returned home. The sad thing about it is that if someone attempted to get the Mormon religion outlawed, she would be up in arms and calling on the same human rights she wants to deny the Patricks.

What makes this whole situation even sadder is that she was shown how bad it is for kids in the foster care system by two people who had grown out of it. But while she abhorred the situation, she was still against gay adoption even though denying gay adoption meant that the number of children left in the foster care system would continue to rise. She couldn’t seem to understand that there just aren’t enough heterosexual homes available to handle all of the children in foster care. In 2006 there were 510,000 children in foster care. Only 51,000 were adopted out. According to the Urban Institute, a ban on gay adoption could displace up to 14,000 children and cost the nation between $87-$130 million dollars.

Kati’s narrow-mindedness is shared by many. People like her cannot see beyond the tip of their own noses. If they had their way, no one would have any rights who did not believe or act like them. Does this sound familiar? It should. This was the basis for the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition.

Kati, and those like her, come from a place of fear. They are afraid that that gay marriage and gay adoption will affect them, negatively, in some way. A relative of one of the children adopted by the Patricks asked Kati how gay adoption affected her since really, well, it didn’t. Her response? It offended her moral fiber. Well you know what? It offends my “moral fiber” that you would rather see children suffer, needlessly, in foster care rather than be adopted into a loving, stable home that is provided by a couple who happen to be homosexual.

I support gay marriage and gay adoption because neither has anything to do with sexual orientation. Gay adoption is not a homosexual rights issue; it is a human rights issue. Every person on this planet deserves to love and be loved whether that love flows to and from a life partner or the care and raising of children.

Kati’s attitude really left a bad taste in my mouth which worsened when I learned that The Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) is inciting its members in California to get the same sex marriage legislation overturned. So instead of expending effort towards solving the foster care problem, or alleviating child starvation and homelessness or even towards putting an end to child abuse and exploitation, these people are working hard to turn their very wrong opinions into very bad laws.

In the immortalized words of The Dictators, “What’s up with that?”

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21st Century Homesteading: Why Grow Your Own Food?

The great thing about growing your own food is that even city dwellers, such as myself, can have balcony gardens. It’s certainly worth looking into especially since with the cost of gas going up, the cost of food will soon follow.

I will be participating. Will you?

Relevant Links

Earth Hour 2008 site

Wikipedia Article

World Wild Life article

I wish I could say that I was open enough to accept this and intellectually I am. I understand that this is just another step in human development. I predict a time when pregnant men will become a fact of life. It will be another thing for couples to decide on. Volvo or Volkswagen? Ranch house or Colonial? I have the babies or you?

I also understand that there is a lot that we do not know about our beginnings. The physical evidence of our existence goes back only so far. Who knows what information has been destroyed by time, natural disasters, human ignorance and greed. Maybe at one point men were able to have babies but for some reason, lost the ability to do so and this experiment is simply closing the circle.

Emotional acceptance, on the other, is another matter. It is hard to describe how I feel about this. It’s like this experiment is a direct attack on my womanhood. Women have always had the babies. It’s sort of our thing. Being the child bearers of the human race is one of the things that defined us. We have breasts, a vagina, a menstrual cycle and babies.

Enabling a man’s ability to have babies brings up the feeling that this is just one more thing that “they” are trying to take away from “us”. I suppose this feeling comes from centuries of oppression and sexism that continues to exist even in today’s “modern” world. Seriously, in parts of the world women are beaten for not covering their bodies, are being bought and sold like chattel and have no say about their destinies on this Earth.

Who knows, perhaps I’m looking at this from the wrong angle and in the end this will be turn out to be the thing that finally liberates us from our cultural shackles. What do you think?

Last week in New York, he unveiled the updated version of SpaceShipOne called SpaceShipTwo and its carrier plane called WhiteKnightTwo. The pair is designed to ferry passengers to the edge of space, 62 miles above our heads.

WhiteKnight, a two-fuselage, four-engine plane in its new incarnation, will ferry the smaller spacecraft high into the sky and release it. The spacecraft pilot then fires the craft’s rocket engine, which burns a combination of nitrous oxide and a rubber-based solid fuel, and shoots the vehicle upward to an altitude of more than 62 miles, the realm of black sky. Once there, the pilot is to activate the craft’s innovative feathered wing, which rotates into a position that greatly increases aerodynamic drag and slows the craft for a glider landing back on earth.

Excerpt courtesy of: Entrepreneur Unveils New Tourist Spacecraft

Though quite a bit away from being ready to actually take people on “space trips”, the company Virgin Galactic has already made 200 reservations and has received $30 million dollars in deposits. Most notable is the fact that they had about eighty of the company’s customers take a ride in a centrifuge to test whether or not they could withstand the high G-force of space. All but two passed.

Mr. Attenborough said that means the company’s initial premise — that one did not need to be in absolutely top physical shape to go to space — is sound.

“We’ve proved that ordinary people can go to space,” he said, “and almost all of us have the right stuff.”

With tickets going at $190,000 a pop, though, I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with a trip around the block.

The small town of forty thousand has experienced seven suicides in the last few weeks amongst their youngsters with no apparent explanation for them. However, many are blaming the town’s lack of activities for teens, high unemployment rate and rising drug use.

The despair is not surprising to Wills, a lifelong resident who works in a clothing shop and said there is nothing for young people to do except drink alcohol and take drugs. He said even the bowling alley closed recently.

“There’s nothing for anyone to do,” he said with a shrug. “There’s a recreation center for kids, but you have to pay to use it.”

In earlier eras, there was steady work at the coal mines. It wasn’t an easy life, but it could support a family. Now there are fewer opportunities in Bridgend, 165 miles west of London, and in the surrounding valley towns where many of the deaths have occurred.

Source: Apparent suicides shock Welsh town

I believe that one of the major causes of suicide is hopelessness. Having experienced this before, I can tell you that being without hope is the worst possible feeling you could ever have. It immobilizes you. It makes you feel as though everything you have done in the past, are doing now and will do in the future is nothing but an exercise in futility.

The cure of hopelessness, of course, is the infusion of hope. One of the ways to infuse hope into someone is to give them something to do. A purpose. Something to live for. I was listening to Steven Chandler’s 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself on audio and in it he mentioned that studies have shown that in times of war suicide rates go down.

As sad as that is, I think he is on to something. War engages people. It draws them in and assigns them a purpose. Whether that purpose is being on the front lines fighting the enemy or at home reporting about what is going on or camped out on the front lawn of the White House protesting the insanity of it all. People become actively engaged in a “cause” that makes them feel involved and a part of the collective that is humanity.

I’m not saying that the Welsh need to go out and start a war with someone but I think they should look for ways to get the young people engaged in life. Find things for them to do besides hanging around drinking and taking drugs. Get them off of the computer and outside to explore the richness the world has to offer.