"With a Conscience" - "Happy New Year - Part Two"

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Happy New Year!  Welcome the year 2013 with joy and a toast!"  All right, all right, I know ...enough.  We've all been through enough this year.  We've seen too much.  We've heard too much.  This is our world in the New Millennium.  We have literally over-dosed on information so to show my sensitivity, this column will not be talking about news.  No news, is good news.

When I was young, say six or seven years of age, I used to imagine what my life would be like in the year 2000 or now, in 2013.  I couldn't even have possibly imagined in my dreams that our world would come so far and then take such huge dramatic downfalls.  This, however, is what Mom and Dad used to call, "life."  As a child, I would imagine all kinds of things for the years ahead.  I would visualize what I would be doing when I was "all grown up."  I wished and wished and wished....college came and went.  Family and friends got married, had children, got divorced, got remarried.  I witnessed a spiraling world of change, some life-affirming and wonderful, some just terrible.  But I wished and I wished and then one day, I stopped wishing because well, I had turned 40.  I realized that wishing for things wasn't going to make them happen. I stopped wishing. The next few years, the wishing stopped but oddly I started doing more than I ever thought possible. I also realized, I was wrong to stop wishing.  Hopes and dreams breed passion and creativity for new challenges and hopefully success.  Wishing for things can often "will" them to happen.

Here's what I wish folks. 

• I want to look in my refrigerator and always have the mundane challenge of figuring out what I want to eat.  (There are plenty of people who don't have this issue.)
• I want the roof over my head to protect me from rain, sleet, snow...I am forever grateful for the roof we have now.  It makes me feel secure.
• I want my tenth grade teacher "Mrs. Petty" to know that the student she called "border-line illiterate" now teaches AND teaches in a societal climate she could have never survived.
• I want my friends and my family to know that I understand that no one is perfect, can be perfect, and the moment we try, we are creating insanity for ourselves and those around us.  We are also failing to love the imperfections that make us so damn wonderful.
• I want the guy at the pizza place, (You know who you are...) to continue to add the extra garlic and tomatoes to our white pizza.  I thank God Almighty, for pizza.  We should all be grateful for pizza.
• I want to try and keep the same hair color and same length of my hair for at least, oh a year?!  Is this possible?  Only my husband knows for sure. No more frustration about hair for one year! 
• I want my car to start even in cold weather...always!  I want the frost to automatically scrap itself off too.
• I want my feet not to hurt so I can continue to wear all of the glorious shoes I have in my closet, particularly the pair of boots I was just given by my brother-in-law.  "These boots were made for walking..."  They have serious attitude and I need and love having a serious attitude when I can.  
• I want to continue to work on having patience; particularly when I'm in a 55 miles per hour speed zone and the person in front of me is doing 25. There are so many rewards when we remind ourselves that patience is indeed a virtue. We pause, we breathe and find the appropriate solution to just about anything if we remember this...  "Patience in all things...patience with all things."

Happy Happy Happy New Year.  Life will never fully be what we expect it to be.  Sometimes we get spared, sometimes we don't when we are faced with the unexpected. The real question in 2013 is, "How will we cope?"  "Will we break or bend?"  "Will we love or hate?" "Will we forgive or hold a grudge?"  The answers are fairly important to our happiness in 2013 and beyond.

With a Conscience - "Old Angst Sign" 2013

"New Year's Day is every man's birthday."  ~ Charles Lamb

The holidays are coming to an end for 2012 and frankly, I always feel some kind of weight has been lifted when a new year is approaching.  It never mattered much to me whether I made new resolutions and kept them or simply didn't make any at all.  Every year, when the ball at Times Square falls, I think of one thing.  LOVE.

When I was younger, I had one wish at New Year's.  It was that I would fall hopelessly in love and find someone who could love me with all of my idiosyncrasies. I found him.  He has a bunch of idiosyncrasies too, but hey, if you're looking for perfection, you will remain alone. Human beings are not perfect.  We have all kinds of frailties and faults but when we find love, love rescues us even when we're not looking to be rescued.

I want people to love what they do for a living.  I wish for all of us to get off the roller coaster of the ridiculous pressure that every corporate or public service position has been handing off to each employee.  You hear this from everyone, every where.  The middle class is working its fingers to the bones only to be honored by more layoffs, skeleton crews and expectations that simply are not attainable.  We should love what we do.  We should have a passion for our work.  If we don't love what we do, we should find the courage to do what we feel passionate about and dedicate ourselves to without looking back.

On that same thought, I want us to love our children.  Forget about the fiscal cliff, unless we all cooperate and teach our young people to respect a good education and have a serious work ethic, the new years ahead will be filled with mediocrity and apathy.  Other countries understand this.  We should too.  Forget about the fiscal cliff folks.  It's our children we need to be concerned about more than dollars and cents.

I want us to the earth.  I want us to respect nature and its relationship to mankind.  I want us to not dread a snow storm but to walk in it.  I want us to understand that with every news-breaking natural disaster comes a bigger warning about sensationalism.  Respect nature and mankind will survive.  Forget about nature and we will continue to see how it reacts to us in the most violent of ways.

I want us to love each other.  We have had two wars overseas, sucking us dry financially and spiritually.  I want us to look at each other and accept the differences we have and perhaps learn from each other at the same time.  There isn't one person that has become my friend, that I haven't learned something valuable from them at some point.  Surround yourself with strong people with a sense of humor and you can overcome just about anything.  I want those who are so desperate to fall in love to remember that nothing good comes from desperation.  I know those feelings well and it never served me well.  I made more mistakes when I felt desperate.  I have had more success when I took my time and used my gut to tell me what was right.

So to those who read this column, "Happy New Year!"  Kiss your loved ones, kiss a stranger when the clock strikes twelve! Those who are strangers often become best friends and well, even husbands or wives.  Take a chance!  Tell each and every person who means something to you that you love them and admire their grace and their strength.    Let 2013 be the year we embrace change and embrace ourselves.  Let us not be indifferent but let us BE different without guilt.  Happy 2013 everyone!!! Uncork the champagne!

With a Conscience - "A heavy dose of reality"

"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."  - John F. Kennedy

After a long, and I mean looooooooooooooooong day of teaching, I stopped at the grocery store to buy a couple of things for "the husband" and I.  As I was entering the store, a middle-aged gentleman was hovering over a over-flowing shopping cart of a very elderly woman, probably in her 80's.  "I'm sorry," he told her.  "We have to take back more than half of these items.  You can't afford all of this."  The older woman stood there blankly staring at the cart.  My heart, and I'm sure his heart, was breaking into bits of remorse and fear.

We age.  We all age.  When I was 13 or 14, I wanted to be 20.  When I was 20 or 21, I wanted to be 40.  When I reached 40, I felt like the entire world was opening up to me.  When I reached 50, I realized that I had just begun my life.  Every decade, I am re-inventing the possibilities of my future.  Today, I had one question.  "Could that ever be me?  Could I end up like this woman?"  I drove home in a complete and utter fog.

I had a second reaction by the time I reached home.  "Anyone of us can end up in the situation this elderly woman was in at the store.  Perhaps she had Alzheimer's and was trusted to buy what she needed and her care-taker's trust was overly invested.  Perhaps, though, she really needed the groceries in her cart and simply couldn't afford it.  That realization devastated me. I was then ashamed because I was focusing on my own feelings and not hers and certainly not on her relative, caretaker who started taking the groceries back to the store.

It's a sad, sad state of affairs when older people are shamed into returning basic necessities because they can't afford them.  This is a harsh, harsh reality.  I realized today, that there is so much I need to be doing before, before, my energy and my passion leave me.  What is happening to the elderly of our society is not kind.  No elderly person should have to make a choice over the types of groceries they can keep or not keep.  

It is the very young and the very old that seem to be the least respected, cared for and vulnerable in our modern society.  We don't make time for either.  This is the cost of modernism.  This is the cost of putting "things" over "beings."  Our young, our elderly, give us the balance and the ability to love.  It's frustrating at times.  It hurts sometimes.  However, if we don't start putting human life ahead of our own materialistic needs, we are bound to longer, harsher winters than the present one.

As I was driving away, the elderly woman was still outside, looking at her cart.  Her caretaker no where to be found.  I suppose he was busy returning items.  I was busy wondering why I hadn't realized until now that life changes on a dime.  The new year is almost upon us and I'm now thinking that I still have a long, long ways to go in developing my understanding of the human condition.  Being 50 doesn't mean I have all the answers.   Unfortunate situations can happen to any of us at any age and it's how we look out for each other that make and keep our souls healthy.  How willing are any of us to step out of our own "self-absorbed," self-effacing" behaviors to remember that when we have more than enough, we need to advocate for those who don't.

With a Conscience - "Give a boy a gun"

"I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water." -  Maya Angelou

A few years ago, when I was in my masters program, one of my professors had us read Todd Strasser's Give A Boy A Gun.  It chronicled through interviews (in a fictional premise) a "Columbine" type incident.  It was one of the most powerful pieces of young adult literature I have ever read and still stays with me today...particularly today with the horrific news coming from Newtown, Connecticut.  

Sandy Hook Elementary School now aligns itself with a history of tragic, unforeseen rampages that continue to baffle, mesmerize and sadden us.  The incident also disgraces the very ideals we have about public education and our "No child left behind" mentality.  Children were left behind today.  We failed miserably in protecting them and those who committed themselves to educate and protect them.

Gun control measures, the second amendment are the antithesis of the current news.  Let's face it; We have always been fascinated with guns.  We cannot deny this but how can we embrace the notion that all of us are entitled to own a weapon if we choose and justify that very concept when it kills the innocent.  Guns have killed thousands of innocent people.  That should be the wake up call.  

Adam Lanza, today's shooter of the innocent, enters the current historic timeline of mass rampage murders innocent Americans experienced, suffered and dealt with in the most public of circumstances.  The media makes it so and frankly, I don't think the media has done these events any favors.  The innocent children and adults of these events needed the media to protect them and televising the events on continual, hourly basis is inappropriate and setting our society up for more desensitization to violence and encouraging a lack of acknowledgement that life is indeed precious. 

It is also worthy to note that these rampage murderers were young, with a history of troubles, and entitlement.  Their families were caught off guard but those who were close to them knew full well that something was terribly wrong and that they were destined to  get the so needed attention, some how, some way.  They always know but it's difficult to admit that something has gone terribly wrong and that these young people were capable of planning and executing horrendous acts of violence.

Lastly, our public schools are burdened with being parent, psychologist, nutritionist and then teacher to our young but we are still in a vulnerable state and protection is a vital, necessary component now,  now more than ever.  Frankly, protection of administration, teachers and most importantly, our children needs to be addressed.  Forget standardized testing for a brief second and take the millions and millions of dollars spent on standardized testing and spend it on the safety and protection of our schools with security cameras, security officers, not seniors, or temporary hall monitors but how about hiring those military officers who have served our country and now need jobs.  How about instead of testing mandates, we mandate safety first?

Across the country, teachers, I  will bet, like myself, are asking themselves, "Am I helpless?"  "Am I a target for the dysfunction that is increasing in our young every year?"  "Do I want to be a target along with my students who have no idea about the fragility of human life?"  "How can I teach, when my students feel vulnerable?"

I have a heavy, heavy heart about what all of this really means for education.  I have a heavy, heavy heart for what this means for young people and my dedicated colleagues who have no answers.  I have no answers. I serve the public.  I work for the public good.  When do we, as the public wake up and collectively protect our young and make them see that their future can not be built on the success of video games and Facebook but on respect of themselves and human life.  

As a teacher, as an unknown fellow colleague, I extend my condolences, my sadness to Sandy Hook Elementary.  May this never, ever happen again...anywhere.