Matthew 7:5 and policing my kids

I'm not generally religious enough to share bible verses.  It's just not my way.  However, in light of recent events in the US, and in my kitchen this morning, I am going to put this out to the world:

King James Bible
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

You see, I was doing a load of dishes and I asked my two girls to "please get the dishes off the table so I can put them in the dishwasher."  This was met with my tiny protester yelling "Why do I have to always do all these things that you tell me to!?!?"  And I explained to her that if she did not like my rules she is at any time welcome to get a job and move into her own home and live life how she wishes.  She is 6.  I got a huff and an eye roll but the dishes from the table moved to the counter.  Now, I could have gone back and given her a smack for the eye roll.  We have a rule about that in our house and it even holds true to myself, because I believe in leading by action.  However, I chose to pick my battles with my tiny protester, because while her opinion is important she needs to understand the proper time and place that it is appropriate.

Now some people are not going to like the way I deal with my kids and I'm cool with that.  But these are my kids and my house and life is not going to get any easier for them than it is right this minute.

What does that have to do with the verse and what's happening today?  Accountability.  Responsibility.  Respect.

This morning I woke up to new information about certain events in the media and I was angry.  I am being told that if I don't show support for criminals, because of the color of their skin, that there is something wrong with my way of thinking.  I'm not having any part of it.  For me, this is no longer the difference between #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter.  This is about respecting authority, following the law and if there is still violence against a particular race, I will stand behind #youmattertome.  I cannot erase history, I can only move forward, and since you have no idea where I am from other than what I post to social media, please don't try to tell me how "privileged" my life has been.  I have worked hard for who I am and what I have.

The first step is to educate and it should start at home.  Educate your child about your history, about where you come from.  Educate your child about being respectful to all people regardless what they look like.  Educate your family to not blindly follow the crowd, no matter how much you agree with the initial sentiment of what that group is fighting for, always demand to know the end game and the call to action.

History is a funny thing and no matter how much we are screaming to learn from it, we are constantly repeating it.

What do we do now?

There are some days I just have to go silent when it comes to being online.  Today was one of those days.

I am a big supporter of speaking out against hate and violence, about speaking up when someone is being untruthful, but this week has just about done me in.  Here's the thing...  I am a supporter of gun rights, I am Pro Choice, I am pro gay marriage, and I am someone that believes that we should not be giving hand outs to people that refuse to help themselves or people that come into this country illegally.  I believe that the American flag should stand for something and be respected.  I believe we should respect our Veterans, even when we don't agree with violence, because they are putting their lives on the line to keep our freedoms safe.  I believe that there are more good cops than bad, that not all Muslims are terrorists, that a person who has a different skin color than mine isn't any better or worse than I am and should be treated with respect.  But my biggest problem is that I want to believe that there is always good in people and that there is a justifiable reason when bad things happen.

This week, the government, my government, decided not to prosecute a presidential candidate, not because they didn't have evidence, but because they knew they couldn't "win".  This week, at least two men were shot by police and the color of their skin shouldn't matter, but it does.  This week, someone reached into a business and grabbed a little girl and tried to run off with her.  There is so much more that happened that I just can't even process; bombings, murders, criminals getting away with crimes, victims being created out of chaos.  Where do we go from here?

So what is the plan?  How do we combat this?  How do we stop hate and violence, lies and corruption?  Standing on the side of the road is not helping.  Screaming about which lives matter is not helping.  Videos of police brutality is not helping.  Angry mob videos showing destruction of property and violence against others is not helping.  We have been falling apart for lifetimes and nothing is helping.

I have always believed that my voice is loud, that I can make people hear me, and in the small crowd or my world it is; but my voice is so very quiet against the noise of this violence.  So what do I do?  How do I help?  How do I work towards making things right?  This is where the hopelessness creeps in, there is no fix for what we are, we have always been this way and as a society we are not learning from the generations before us, we simply lie to our children about making a difference and that some day their children may live in a world that is not polluted by the people that exist here.

So here I am, admitting that I have been living in a plastic bubble.  I am admitting that I have been lied to by others and by myself.  It doesn't matter that I have friends and family of all colors and nationalities.  It doesn't matter that everyone I know and care about has varying beliefs.  You see, I truly believed that what is good will rise above and that racism is something that happens in small-minded places but that as a country we will rise above that.  I don't believe that now.  I believe that eventually the next Hitler or Hussein is going to rise up, they are going to find the right weak spot and we are very much in danger.  Schools are brainwashing our children to believe that they can change the world, but they are not being taught how.  People are standing in the streets, screaming to be seen and heard, and some are silent, waiting for more information, waiting for it all to die down and pass.  The media is out in full force, they are exploiting the events, spinning stories to get their sales, telling just enough of the truth to make it real but highlighting what makes it incite rage and fear.

What do we do now?

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

The time is always right to do what is right.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Voices In My Head

Hi there!  Did you miss me?  Sorry!  I've been, you know, living the dream and all...  Uh, you know, working, taking care of the kids, pretending to keep up on housework.

So, I have all these thoughts tangled up in my brain and that usually means it's time to type them out so that the voices will stop shouting at me to be heard!  Yes, that's right, I hear voices.  I'm not ashamed of it.  I'm not scared of them, they are just loud and sometimes make my head hurt, but they are just voices.  Sometimes they tell me to do bad things, but I have what some people would call "will power" so, you know, I move on from that.  And that is pretty much why I felt the need to sit down and type this out, because sometimes the voices in my head say horrible things and in today's society we just don't know what to do with that.

Now, this is going to be my opinion, I did not research facts, I am not claiming to be knowledgeable about other people or their lifestyle or whatever, this is me, thinking, listening to the voices in my head, looking back on years and years of people watching...  So here we go...

We have a serious problem with mental health in today's society.  I don't have any suggestions for cures or ways to help, and that makes me feel helpless for others.  Why is it so much more of a problem now than it was when my parents were young?  When my grandparents were young?  How did we get here?

Years ago, I had a boss that I had an amazing relationship with.  I believe that she was brought into my life exactly when I was in the most need of what she could teach me.  She taught me to stand up for myself in a way that I had never seen a woman do, and she told me stories of her childhood that really stuck with me and pave a pretty little path to the beginning of my mental health ideas.  You see, she was a first born Irish-American.  Actually, in America, you can't actually have a dual citizenship, so really, she is a first born American of Irish immigrants, just in case you prefer the clarification.  She lived on the East Coast and went to Catholic schools her whole life and spent many summers in Ireland.  She told me amazing stories of the wars and making pipe bombs, hitchhiking and about the differences in what things are called; I still use the term skip lorry as much as I can!  The thing that stood out to me was that she said as a culture, the Irish never speak of illness, death or dying.  When a person dies, you just refer to it that they moved on.  Is that really so different from the American culture at the time my grandparents were growing up?  I mean, we just don't talk about those negative things, right?  We push them down, push them away, you don't really have to deal with them, you just move on, right?

Fast forward to my parents generation...  They are being raised by this generation of "push it down and move on" types, right?  Well, we had this crazy hippy movement; peace, love and all that...  People started saying "Hey, we shouldn't be pushing down these feelings, we should be turning it into something positive."  We came to a point in time when we stopped just ignoring things and started saying stuff like "it could be worse", "look what we learned from that", "it'll get better".  We were telling ourselves to look for the "happy" in the worst of situations because that was the real goal, right?  Love, life and happiness?  But they weren't finding happy.  Because all that crap that they ignored before was the yucky, angry, hurtful stuff that we don't want to deal with, how do you make death and illness "happy"?  So they turned to drugs and alcohol because if they couldn't find happy, they could at least find numb.

Then I was born.  No wonder the world is a mess.  Raised to believe that I needed to be happy, make things happy, make others happy, see the world happy even when it's not.  Did you know that by the time I was eight I had started thinking about ways to die?  I don't talk about that much.  You see, it's not part of the make up of what is happy.  I pushed it down, I ignored it, I made myself happy.  I learned to be funny because people were already laughing at me.  I was too white, too fat, to strange.  I was beaten verbally and physically by people who claimed to be my friends and more by those that didn't.  That was okay.  I ignored it, I made myself happy, there was always something worse.  In Junior High, my parents got divorced, we moved and we got back into a religious routine.  At 13, the only thing that my brain was hearing was "REPENT, THE END IS NEAR!"  I've come a long way, I don't blame the church like I used to, but I was pretty pissed that the end was not as near as they promised.  You see, as a teenager, the voices started getting louder, telling me that it would be interesting to jump out of moving cars, to walk in front of traffic, to find a bottle of pills.  But I would push it down, I would make myself happy, I would be extra funny and people would laugh and it didn't matter if they laugh at me or near me, I would make the voices quiet down.

I never walked in front of traffic, never tried to jump out of a moving car, never looked for that bottle of pills, those voices could not control me.  I never wanted to murder those people that did or said things to me, that hurt me in the ways that so many of us have been hurt.  I am bigger than that, I am better than that, and if I keep telling myself that, eventually I will believe it.

So this is what I was thinking today, what I have been thinking a lot about over the last few years when acts of violence happen and society rushes off to place some blame.  We are raising generations to really "feel" their feelings, but what are we teaching them to do with it?  Don't tell them to be happy, it doesn't work, there is no happy.  You can be miserable and still be a functioning member of society, I'm proof of that.  So what do we do?  Here's my advise:  Do what generation after generation have done!  Deal with your crap and move on.  The voices, they still tell me to do things, I just know that I am stronger than all that.  Teach your kids to talk it out, write it out, get creative.  Buy them a drum set, some paint and a canvas!  Stop filling their heads with this nonsense that they are entitled to things in life, because they are not, they need to earn things to appreciate them.  Teach them to read and encourage a love of reading.  Put down your phone and your tablet and talk to your kids!  Be involved!!!  My parents, they made mistakes, but they were there on a level that I needed, it reminded me that there are happy things in life, even if there's no way to achieve "happy" in your life.

It takes a village to raise a child.  Yes, it very much does, but it takes a hands-on village, not a cyber-judging group of entitled whiny-babies!  Get off your duff and do something!  It's okay to move on, it's actually more healthy than you could believe.  Find your happy, and know that it will change, it will be harder to find some days than others.  Pass along the hippy vibe and be good to each other for no reason other than to just be good.  What you put out is what you will get back, life is a wheel.

Alright, I think I'm done for now.  I've given you a lot to think about.  Don't worry about me, I'm looking forward to growing old with these voices in my head, eventually they will be keeping me company when I forget who I am.  Just so you know, not all the voices are bad ones.  I often hear my grandfathers, I hear the voices of the people that I love, I hear the voices of those that have passed on, reminding me how precious life truly is, they give me strength when those other voices try to bring me down.

Peace out!