Is More Security the Answer to Death-Cult Attacks?

Putting it callously, is it the Death-Cults who are getting the biggest bang from our security bucks?

     Like so many on Facebook, I’ve placed a guazey French flag over my profile pic. Somewhere in each of us lurks a bit of the Parisian spirit. So attacks there last week feel a bit personal, no matter where you’re from.

     Security efforts around the world will, no doubt, hit Mach 2. But will this squash today’s Death-Cults?              

     What I saw as a private investigator tells me, “Not likely.”

     Once upon a time I skulked through life trying to catch the bad guys of Wall Street. The company I worked for had a division specializing in corporate security – which included “boots-on-the-ground” guards and the early stumbling efforts at cyber security.

     Our Security Division was the goose that laid the golden egg. Companies dumped shed loads of money in our laps to keep them safe. But here’s what’s odd. It was money poured down a rat hole. Why?

     A company, let’s call it Stultus Corp, decided it wanted security for its operation. They’d hire us. We’d conjure up and implement a sophisticated and quite expensive security plan. Then the game of security Whack-a-Mole would begin. The more security procedures Stultus Corp implemented, the more security problems they had. And the more money they would spend on more security.

     Oddly, it was the same with ever company who hired us. Our CEO was gleefully stupefied that our clients never made the connection that increasing their security measures only begot the need for more security.

     This phenomenon appears to hold true in our fight with terrorism since 9/11. The more money we spend on security, the bigger bang the bad guys give us for our bucks. (298 Words)

Who’s More Likely to Kill Americans?

ISIS or American Hospital Staff?

     I’m living in two parallel worlds right now. In one, I’m watching the tragedy in Paris as ISIS wages war against everyone. In the other, I’ve watched a relative endure mal-treatment by American hospital staff.

     As many as 98,000 of us are killed in American hospitals each year due to staff mistakes – the third largest killer behind cancer and heart disease.

     Much I witnessed in the large Texas hospital chain my relative was in in Fort Worth is too visually revolting and personal to put in print. On the less-graphic end of the spectrum is a doctor refusing to x-ray her back despite wrenching pain in the area. It was five days before he finally ordered an MRI. She had a fractured spine.

     Or when staff forgot to give her crucial medications because they were gaggled in the hall taking selfies; or, as one RN explained, “We’re too short staffed to give everyone their medications every time they need them.”

     My relative is sicker now than in hospital, due to (lack of) aftercare immediately following surgery.

     In the end, she begged me to stop intervening on her behalf. “When you complain, they take it out on me.”

     Once out of hospital, I discovered festering sores on both her legs. They were from an RN who, despite repeated pleas, over-tightened the circulation apparatus on her lower legs when I kicked up dust about my relative not receiving her meds.

     It’s hard to suppress my fury about what I saw in that hospital. And there should be a war waged against what is happening in our hospitals. (276 Words)

Leave the Rules Where God Flung 'Em

     My friend Rafif speaks five languages – a talent that snarls and snaps if I come close. Rosetta flings stones when I hablo espanol. Fish babel when I sprechen Deutsch. And there is definitely une liaison dangereuse between brain and tongue when I ask directions in Paris.

     Apparently, I'm meant to be monogamous with English. A passion introduced to me by my father. Each night, when Daddy returned home from his job shuffling papers, he'd sit in his rocker reading a book or doing a bit of writing himself. There was always a yellow tablet and stubby #2 pencil on his TV tray. Daddy loved words, whether they were his or those chosen by someone else.

     A love of the English language isn't all I inherited from Daddy. He taught me rules are meant to be ignored or flung in a bin. At least the silly ones meant to beat you down when you're growing up.
     I learned this every Saturday when Daddy and I worked on the family car. From the time my hands were big enough to pick up a wrench, I was his mechanic's assistant. It never occurred to Daddy his daughter couldn't...and shouldn't...do anything a boy could.

     Daddy teaching me to fix cars doesn't mean he thought I was the short straw. That he wanted a son rather than a daughter. Daddy wanted a daughter and thought I hung the moon. I had dolls and dresses and dance lessons. But I also had model race cars, airplanes, and a football to go with my little-girl makeup and cowgirl outfit.

     To Daddy, I was sugar and spice sauced with piss and vinegar. He didn't tell me to lean in. He told me to stand tall…and never live by anyone else's rules. (300 words) 

"...not like the people making Twinkies aren't killing people..."

     Whistle blowing isn't for sissies. It’ll cost you friends…family. And you’ll be left for road kill by  the stampeding herd of strangers who find public shaming more thrilling than blood sport. Being right is no excuse for the wanton action of shedding light on Truth.

     “Get out of town bitch!” was scrawled on giant signs littering our front yard one morning. Nighttime had protected the shamers who’d put the hateful placards there.  But everyone knew who the "bitch" was.

     Me.

     As a teenager, I’d exposed a teacher/mentor and fellow student/friend for stealing intellectual property and, in a very public forum, passing the creative work off as theirs. And because they’d drawn others into using what they’d stolen, there were lots of folks in our tiny community exposed by my whistle blowing.

     The blowback was painful, and that experience is why I became a journalist. There should be a safe venue for whistleblowers to tell us the truth.

     Recently, I asked a group of the brightest students from a top-ranked high school in the country what they’d do if they were working at General Motors and realized the cars rolling off the company assembly-line were killing people. Would they blow the whistle?

     Only one said “yes”. The others vehemently defended not blowing the whistle. Why? “If a company gives you a paycheck, you owe them your loyalty because they’re allowing you to support your family. People dying is no excuse for betraying your company. "
     "And besides,” said one student, “it’s not like the people making Twinkies aren’t killing people. It just takes longer.”

     I was suddenly glad there are folks with families out there willing to take the blowback of being a whistleblower. Because often times our families are safer for their courage. (300 words)

Post-Traumatic-Ginger-Cat-Disorder

The Cure? Ricky Roo.

     When you're three-years-old and an only child in a neighborhood with no other kids, you get pretty creative at entertaining yourself. That's why, one day, I decided to put a cat on my head. As we didn't have a cat, boundaries had to be pushed. So I procured a feral cat from the alley - a ginger tom - and perched him atop my never-cut, golden locks.

     Tom must've been tuckered that day. He sat still as anything, while I swirled around the yard. He may have left no scratches, but he certainly left his mark. Ringworm.

     My Godiva-like locks? A pile around the barber's feet. Round "tats" covering my shiny head.

     I lived for decades terrified of encountering one of these blighters again. Didn't have to be feral. Even seeing a ginger cat curled up in a friend's lap brought on an attack of Post-Traumatic-Ginger-Cat-Disorder, aka PTGD. Quaking, I'd breakout in a terrible itch all over my head.

     Clearly, I needed a "hair-of-the-cat" cure. Enter Ricky Roo. He'd been languishing in a cage for over a year after his owner died. Seems no one wanted a 15-year-old cat with a wonky thyroid. About the time his best friend departed, so had Angus, my Cairn terrier and BFF. I needed another heartbeat in my house, and Ricky needed to be cage-free and swaddled in love. Sight-unseen, I made the commitment to give him a forever-home.

     Well, shudda looked before I let my heart leap. Arriving with a carrier, treats, blankets, and toys, who stared out at me from his cage? Ricky Roo, the ginger tomcat. 

     I marvel at how life comes full-circle and all wounds are healed. One look at that ginger tom's sweet face that so many had rejected and I melted. PTGD cured. (300 words)

Racism, Warm Brown Eyes, and Divine Intervention

Warning: This post is more than 300 words...

In light of the shootings in Charleston, SC, I want to share this story.

Reprinted from Inside the Light-Hope and Transformation

Freedom from Bigotry Bought For a Penny

(Prejudice)

     The lowly penny. What can this modest coin buy you? When I was three years old, it bought me my freedom from bigotry.

     I grew up in the South in the Fifties. One morning, while at the grocery story with my parents, I inched ahead to watch as customers well in front of us paid for what they wanted to buy. I call where we were a ‘grocery store’ because this was long before the days of giant supermarkets where you place your items on a moving belt and see them whisked away to be scanned by a cashier. And there was certainly no such thing as self-service checkout. Back then grocery stores were intimate places. You knew your cashier, and you chatted with the folks standing around you, even if they were total strangers. Anything anyone said was heard by one and all.

     No moving belt meant that people put what they wanted to take home on a ledge where the cashier could take each item and ring it up. After she finished ringing up the man I had pushed forward to watch, he reached into a pocket to get his money. As he pulled out his folded bills a penny dropped onto the ledge where his food had been. I wanted to help out, so I stretched on my tiptoes and put my finger on the penny to push it closer for him to reach. 

     Suddenly, a big hand grabbed mine, and from behind me I heard, “Don’t touch that! Don’t touch anything a n***** has touched!”

     I froze. I didn’t know what that word meant, but I knew the man attached to the hand that had grabbed mine meant business. As I looked at what I was told was an untouchable penny, the coin took on a sparkling white glow. Then a thin shaft of golden Light shot up from the penny. It happened so fast, and the Light was so bright, that my vision exploded and blurred. The Light seemed to burn right through my eyes, into my brain and down into my body. 

     For a few seconds I stood transfixed, my tiny finger refusing to retract from its position on the penny. Then I looked up at the face of the man the penny belonged to. He looked back. Even a three-year-old knows what hurt looks like.

     The man’s brown eyes had a deep, moist kindness in them, but there was an even deeper look of pain and humiliation. Whatever that word meant I knew it really hurt his feelings. I kept looking straight into his eyes because I didn’t want to look back at the man who’d grabbed my hand. I certainly knew better than to talk back to the stranger, but I thought, “You’re not a very nice man. Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to call people names that hurt their feelings? Someone needs to wash your mouth out with soap!” 

     I hoped the man looking down at me could see how sorry I was the other man had been so mean.

     When I got older, I came to understand what happened that day in the grocery line. I was introduced to bigotry and racism. Mercifully, the “n-word” has become what it should have been in the first place–a word not worthy of being spoken. Despite what some may say, there is nothing about that word that symbolizes freedom of any kind, least of all freedom of speech. To me, a world without that word is a far better place.

     I said at the beginning my freedom from bigotry was bought with a single penny, and that’s true. Throughout my childhood, every time I heard the “n-word” or witnessed any kind of discrimination, I remembered the Light shining up from that penny and the pain in the black man’s eyes. 

     The Light from that modest coin gave me a priceless gift. It relieved me of the burden of fearing and hating another person because of the color of their skin or because they were in any way different from me. It was a moment in the Light and Grace of God that allowed me to see the world differently, and that everyone in it is swaddled inside the same Divine Light. 

Fosters Who Murder. A Foster Who Saved.

     There were violent deaths, sex abuse, and other tragic outcomes at some of the foster homes...

     Words from an article by reporter Aram Roston on the nation's largest foster care group. Makes you wonder if there's good in the world. 

     Well, this post is about one foster mom I know who's the proud mom of ten. Youngsters she fostered and then adopted so they have a forever family. 

     Some of her children are counting less than 10 candles on their birthday cake. And one, in her twenties, has given her a grandchild not old enough to blow out the first candle.

     Elise is in her early forties, but looks late twenties. She always has a smile on her face. Not because she's got a posh life with a nanny to corral and ferry-around her brood while she takes a spa-day. It's because Elise decided to give her heart to children who'd had theirs abandoned by parents in sad circumstances.

     Elise has no outside help, yet never fusses about balancing job and family. Nothing thrills her more than taking off time to be at school events or discovering each child's secret talent and seeing they get to activities that support their passion. She's set to go on vacation, and it's not about her getting away from her brood for some "me" time. It's about giving her kids the next new adventure.

     Elise may sound like a saint, but she's a saint whose feistiness and verve lets her rule her roost with the firm guidance it takes to keep a passel of kids on the straight and narrow.

     Just as she knows how to balance her time, Elise knows how to balance love and discipline - with the scales tipping in favor of love. (299 words)