Monthly Archives: August 2011

On Being Truly Grateful

Posted on by

Often when people are feeling grateful, they are feeling grateful for what they have and can afford. People feel grateful because they can put more food on the table, than they know they can eat in one meal. They know if they throw out those leftovers a few days later they knew they were not going to eat anyway, its okay. They made a huge meal because food is plentiful for them.

People are grateful for the home they can afford to live in and where it is located. They are grateful for the vehicle they can afford to drive, and the gas they can afford to put in it. People are grateful they can buy what they want when they want, never having to struggle or wonder where the money comes from.

People are grateful for the clothes they wear, and the Church they go to. People are grateful for their vacations, weekend trips, and nights out on the town. People are grateful for their weekends, but wish they were longer. People are grateful they are educated, and have a good life.

In the sum of all things, this is not gratefulness. It is hollow and shallow behavior we were taught is gratefulness. Think of the last Man or Woman pronouncing their faith to everyone who would listen to them. What those people have is all they will ever have. This type of gratefulness is the empty shell it feels like, and nothing more.

People are not aware this is not gratefulness. This type of behavior is a frequent feeding of one’s ego, and nothing more. I used to be one of those people. It was always pleasant to be at a family get together and have someone say grace that could really get the message out there. They would make everyone at the table feel good about what they have and what they were going to eat. We would be beaming by the time grace was said, and spend the next minutes happily eating and thinking how good our life is.

Deep down inside, for me at least, it always felt a little hollow. What was the point of being grateful for all the things I have every day of my life? Should I be grateful because my house is better, my car newer, or I am better more handsome, prettier or better dressed than another?

We hear of people who have lost everything, more so now days. These stories will be repeated often, as long as the recent flooding and other disasters are deemed newsworthy. Then they will fade away, replaced by newer more exciting news.

For some of those people who have or will lose everything, a very few will come to terms with the real meaning of gratefulness, and what it really means to be grateful. They will learn that being grateful is not an accounting for all the things they had in their lives before they lost it all.

Being Grateful goes well beyond surveying ones kingdom and feeling good  for all the possessions one has, and the great food one is about to eat. True gratefulness is acknowledging with your heart and mind, all that went into what you have, or what you are about to eat.

Pretend for a minute you are about to eat your next meal. Pretend it came from a fast food place. You are about to eat some type of sandwich with chips or French-fries and an icy cold drink. Think about being grateful for that meal. Take a few seconds and think about really being grateful for your meal and what you think it means to you. Have that thought handy? Now take a few minutes and read about what being grateful for your meal is really about.

Think about only one of your french-fries. Nothing too exciting about a french-fry. A piece of potato sliced and diced into a long small square. Flavored and deep fried. Your burger is nothing special either. There are two pieces of bread on the outside, protecting some lettuce, tomato, pickle, and maybe onion sitting on top of a piece of meat. Not too much there either that is really special. Same meal you have eaten probably hundreds of times before.

For that one French-fry to be created, hundreds of years of modification to the potato had to take place. Toxic pesticides and herbicides (unless it is a GMO potato) have been applied at least fourteen times between planting and harvesting. The soil is so toxic in fact nothing lives around the potato plant. Nothing crawls around or on it. The soil is basically as dead as dead soil can be to prevent any insect or microbe from feasting on potato and ruining your future meal. The soil is so toxic where your future French-fry is being grown that no one who cares about their health entered the potato patch on foot without a gas mask on.

It may be a little less severe for the lettuce, tomato, and pickle, but someone dripped their sweat on the parents of the greenery in your hamburger. Someone worked hard, planting, caring, and harvesting, so you could enjoy your burger.

Think about the meat in your burger. That meat came from a live animal. That Animal was born to Parents who were killed and eaten long before the Animal that became your burger was killed and processed. After being born, the Animal you are going to eat was allowed to do little more than eat. Eating food that may have never been intended for that Animal to eat. Eat and receive injections, or force fed by mouth, steroids, antibiotics, and other growth hormones. The Animal never complained. It could not, and it did not know any better.

Just when that Animal’s life was starting to be good, and it was sensing there was more to life than growing bigger, that Animal was taken away from wherever it was living and slaughtered. The Animal you are now eating did not have a choice in whether it lived or died.

No one asked that Animal if it wanted to die so you could eat a sandwich you really don’t care all that much about. If it was lucky it was killed humanely, whatever that is. If something went wrong, it was killed anyway. Every day many people have to do or oversee the killing, cleaning and packaging of that Animal.

The soda you are drinking has flavorings that were collected by someone in some hot or dry climate. The flavorings were mixed with water and sugar, and secret ingredients, bottled and shipped by people who probably do not like what they do for a living. Someone trucks that soda from the plant to where you bought it. The paper and plastic wear you received as part of your meal all came from somewhere. People worked doing jobs they do not like so you could have those things. Finally there are the people who served you.

The process goes on and on, from where you bought your meal, where your body chooses to evacuate it, to the people who take care of the sewer system and reclamation process. This whole process of buying a sandwich is not an exercise in being grateful. Being grateful for having a few dollars to pay for a sandwich is serving ones ego.

The next time you feel like a sandwich, contemplate the Animal and Plants that died for you. Think about the People who perform some very distasteful job so you can eat that sandwich. Think about the lost lives, labor and sweat that went into making everything you own.
How does it make you feel knowing that being able to pay a few dollars for a burger has nothing to do with being grateful? Being grateful in its finest form means thinking about an animals life that was taken, not given. What Farmer put his health at risk, and turned his field into a hazardous waste site for you, and who ached from harvesting the bounty for you. Pondering how many people worked hard at a job they do not like doing so you can have a meal.

Thinking about these things and being thankful for all of it before you take your first bite is what being grateful is really all about. Being grateful for the food you are about to eat, and thinking about the process to make it happen, so you can eat, is what being grateful is all about.

Share

HP Left Me Behind Years Ago

Posted on by

Long before Hewlett Packard was making computers the average person could afford, HP made the finest calculators in the world. HP calculators used a method called, “Reverse Polish Notation”.

As strange as the name was, the more complex the formula was, the easier it was to input on a Hewlett Packard Calculator. Not only were those calculators the finest in the world for complex mathematics, they were also almost indestructible.

The only ‘real’ computer in the eyes of professionals was an IBM Desktop Computer. There were many other companies making computers, but only IBM had the words “Business Machine” in their name. Who else could dominate the early business computer market without having the words Business Machine in their name?

Almost anybody with a basic understanding of electronics, computers, and a garage were placing themselves in a position to sweep the new Home Computer industry. That is how Apple got their start. A little electronics knowledge, access to hardware, and some assembly skill were all that was required. Many electronics hobbyists were in the computer making and selling business before they knew it.

If IBM could sell a computer for five thousand dollars, they could sell you the same computer for three thousand dollars minus the big name on the label. Around that time,  the term “Plain Vanilla” arrived on the PC scene from the finance industry for the name of these no-name computers.

While I was plodding along on my mere twenty-five hundred dollar Plain Vanilla PC, I was secretly craving a real IBM PC. I remained a faithful HP  calculator consumer.

Around that time HP entered the home computer market in a fashion. Hp Computers were built like their calculators. The world might end, but your HP Computer would keep running. Drop it off your roof, and plug it in and your HP Computer still worked. But it was expensive!

In an effort to stifle Plain Vanilla computers, the big players, HP being one, started a new trend. Proprietary. Whenever you bought a big name brand, you were chained to the company. If you wanted more memory, bigger hard drive, new processor, you paid through the nose from the BIG manufacturer whose computer you could not live without. This drove the cost of long term ownership of these computers further out of my price range.

Those beige Plain Vanilla Computers were making headway, and the proprietary strategy further isolated consumers from the big name Computer makers. Eventually the big companies pretended to compete with Plain Vanilla computers.

This is where I became a HP fanatic. Out of the blue, there was a HP computer I could almost afford. It was more than plain vanilla, but instead of saying “xyz’s” on the label it said “Hewlett Packard”! The goodness of the earth came into my life at last! I owned an HP computer!

That first HP desktop was everything one could ever want in a computer. Then I passed it on to family and bought a newer HP computer. Thus started the trend that made HP lose my and thousands of other consumers business, driving down both price and quality of home computers in the process.

Every HP Computer model I upgraded to started having problems about a year later. The CD reader/writer would fail, the memory would die, the hard drive would crash. The first two times this happened I was sure it was a fluke. The third HP computer I owned started to die, and I let it die without throwing more money into it. I bought another HP Computer to replace it. After all they were the best company in the electronics industry, so why wouldn’t I buy HP?

Then I wised up. HP had changed their business model and I did not notice. Bottom end computers were one-third cheaper and lasted longer than the pricier HP Line. I finally did what my smarter computer enthusiast friends did a few years before me. I quit buying HP and started buying no name computers.

Now HP announced they are giving up on the home computing industry. I read HP claims there is not enough money in low end computers for them to bother with. I am totally indifferent to this news. For me HP quit making computers many years ago. In the intervening years  they succeeded on their reputation and their marketing wizardry. Today, the HP computer uses I know say once again HP computers have improved and once again are among the best computers in the market place.

Today computers are commodity purchases. The software is once again running behind the hardware, trying hard to catch up. Plain Vanilla generic computers are making a few dollars a sale times millions of sales each year.

When the software catches up, the computer market will once again boom, but it may be to late for the Giants of the industry. They move to slow, and do too little, too late. Long live HP, and other companies like them who created an industry, took all they could out of it, and moved on.

Hp and other companies who went down the path they did have made me grow up as a consumer. Whenever a company large or small wants me to jump on their bandwagon, I will be looking carefully to see what the wagon is made of, hot air and hype, or real value.

Share

Slut Walk, Serious Movement or Errant Eye Candy?

Posted on by

Many years ago when racial tension were a lot higher than they are today, I found myself in Gary Indiana. Gary was at the time sharply defined between races,  Black and White. It was not unusual living a few states away to wake on a Saturday and hear of shootings or other violence that happened the previous evening in Gary.

Yet here I was in Gary, having taken a cab from the docks, out walking and enjoying the morning and the energy of the city. Because I was a Country Bumpkin and did not know any better I took a wrong turn. Every step I took I was walked further away from the White neighborhood I had been in and entered a Black neighborhood. At first I was unaware as nothing seemed any different to me. Then the neighborhood started to look poorer. Then I finally noticed that the only white face on the street was mine and people were looking at me.

I kept walking because I didn’t know what else to do. I was not from there. I picked up one follower. He walked some feet behind me, and followed me wherever I walked. About fifteen minutes later a second man joined the first, and I was getting ready for a fight or worse. Five or Ten minutes after that there were three men following me and the gap was closing between us. I was still walking, faster now, aimlessly. I was hoping to cross the invisible line that separated their world from mine. I finally made it unscathed.

My Grandfather once told me a story of when he was a young man. It occurred probably in the 1920′s or 1930′s when he was in Detroit Michigan for work. He was a blue collar worker and quite by mistake he fond himself lot in a Black District. He was walking along the back streets and alleys, when a kind hearted Woman saw him. She told him to come with her before he was “stomped and beaten” because he was  a White Man wandering in a black neighborhood. He definitely was not wanted there.

The kindly Woman took him to what he called her two room shack, sat him on her orange crate furniture, fed him, and told him she would not let him leave until morning. After a night of sleeping on the floor the old Woman walked him to the street corner where Black ended and White began.

This spring there was a Slut Walk in Toronto. It started as I understand it by a women or a few women taking offense to a comment made by an instructor in a woman’s self defense class. Of course self defense course should be sterilized as much as possible from the reality of why one is in the class. Just as attending a concealed weapons course the Instructor should never mention that carrying a hidden weapon on your person puts one in jeopardy of killing another human being, and perhaps being killed yourself for doing so.

These classes or courses should be sanitized shouldn’t they? Classes should be dumbed down, made cutesy, and be politically correct so they are socially more palatable. Seriously, if I were an instructor teaching self defense, I may be less willing to teach groups of Women how to protect themselves. It would be more important to lose a few dollars than be the focus for a well intentioned comment.

The Slut Walk is spreading across the land. It reminds me of Gloria Steinem and her emergence from nowhere to becoming an almost daily celebrity on six o’clock World News. Gloria Steinem and other women were angry back in the day. They were burning bra’s and making demands. As a young man at the time I was all for bra burning!

Nothing has changed over a generation, what average heterosexual young man, or adult male for that matter would not be deep down happy about the Slut Walk coming to his town? Where else can a man get free eye candy? It doesn’t matter whether these Women are protesting a laundry soap commercial, or what they see as furthering their personal rights, the view is all the same.

From my small unscientific pole. Most Men see the Slut Walk as entertainment, almost as if the Women of Desperate Housewives stepped out of the television, and physically moved into their neighborhoods. As the off color only semi-joke goes; “Men have two brains, and only blood enough for one at a time.” We Men are simple creatures, not generally well known for our thoughtfulness and concern for Women’s Rights in particular.

I personally am all for what these Women wish to accomplish. I think deep down once the sexual clothing is replaced with something more appropriate most men are also in favor. We are Husbands, Fathers, Brothers and Uncles. Everyone should have the right to dress as they want without suffering overtones that go with clothing choices.

I would have felt the same for the Flappers, or Zoot Suiter’s, as I do for Cowboys, Gay or Butch dress, as I was for Hippies, and Women Libbers of the sixties and early seventies. It is fine by me when people want to express themselves through their clothing. I only prefer people be reasonable and responsible in their choices.

Personal expression however does not change the world on its own. The Dark Ages of Europe and onward into today show what we are really capable of. Any person, Woman or Man, who puts themselves at risk through personal expression, must be prepared for all possible consequences of their actions.

Women can’t have it both ways. Women can not dress in a provocative manner and expect every Man that looks at them to know you are simply defending their right not to be looked at as a plaything or victim. Personal violence waiting for some unfortunate woman who does not understand the implications of their actions is lurking on the other side of the filmy veneer of our society.

The silent majority generally wants what is best. The opposite of the silent majority is the smaller silent minority. Part of the silent minority are criminals and deviants looking for prey. They do not care why a woman looks like she does. They do not care about personal rights. They don’t care that an active participant in the local Slut Walk movement is a Mother of three, a PTA member, and goes to Church on Sunday.

There is the saying, “It’s all fun and games, then someone gets hurt.” Someone getting hurt from participation in the Slut Walk movement is a given. It is just a matter of when. I would not think of denying anyone the right to express themselves in a manner they choose as long as they are not hurting others.

I do have concerns over who is going to be hurt and maybe killed because they are too naive to understand the risk they are bringing upon themselves when it comes to their choice of public dress. There is no safe point, where a Woman can dress in a certain manner and not draw the attention of that silent minority who could care less about promoting her civil or personal rights. While the intention of the Slut Walk is above board, the ramifications and fallout are a cause for concern.

On the political side, how do these women expect to be taken serious when they dress and act like they have a small part in a movie? If Slut Walk expects anything other than some publicity of dubious content, they are going to have to clean up their act, and make it something that can be discussed at the dinner table in front of the kids, and from the pulpit on Sunday morning.

If a metamorphosis of this type does not happen, Slut Walk will be short lived. Right now it gathers attention like Lady Gaga, but the attention span of the public is short, and the Politicians of the world have more serious issues to contend with right now.

Share

How To Live Forever Better

Posted on by

Have you noticed how people are in such a hurry these days? They dash from one place to another. When you pass someone in a hallway, or on the street, unless you know them, they generally display a don’t approach me look. This thing we do has always made me curious, why we do this to ourselves.

I know I catch myself doing this at times, usually when there could be an encounter with another person which I would rather avoid, like a panhandler for example. Unfortunately we go overboard with this behavior because we are often driven by how we plan our life.

So we spend our day flitting around from place to place, meeting to meeting, appointment to appointment. At the end of the day we wonder what what we did all day. We know we were busy, yet the day was such a blur, we are not sure what we did exactly. Trying to pull the enjoyment out of day when we are like this is harder.

Some days, at the end of a particularly busy day, we get home, start to relax, and wonder why we do it. Why do we race through our day, and end the day with little or no personal satisfaction for our effort? What is the point of it all? If it sound familiar, it is because many of us feel we live hollow, unfulfilled lives.

What if we had ten or more lifetimes ahead of us from this moment? How would we spend our days knowing there is no need to rush? What would be the purpose of hurrying from point to point through the day, when it would matter little in the long run whether we were two minutes early or two minutes late. Would we change the way we manage our lives?

With a little schedule shifting and changing of how we manage our life, we can do just that. We can change the way we manage our life to where a few minutes here or a few minutes there really are of little importance. Think about how much pressure and stress could be removed from each and every day! We could feel relaxed knowing a few extra minutes several times a day were not that important over our lifetime?

It can be done if we really want to do it. All it takes is a little planning and wanting to change how we manage our life and our time. After all we do have forever. We have forever because we can not imagine the finite in our lifetime. No one pays any attention to wasting a few minutes when they have nothing to do, because looking ahead in our life, the minutes stretch on beyond any point we can quantify them.

If you want to use your lifetime as if you are living forever instead of feeling harried and rushed at the end of each day, here are a few easy ways to start. Once you have the basics down, you can modify your life plan as you wish to make each day of your life exactly what you want for yourself.

Unless we are forced into a different choice, we are creatures of habit. We have some moments in our day which can not be altered and we feel rushed. We have to be somewhere for something at an exact time. Not only would it be rude to be late, but it may be a detriment to our overall well being. We would not want to do anything to make our life more difficult than it has to be. That would be going against the idea of making life simpler.

Most people think of the morning when they start their day as the beginning. This is the first thought that has to change. The next day starts with the time you go to bed the night before. Because you have all the time in the world, there is no need to go without enough sleep trying to do something that is not really all that important. By going to bed early enough that when the alarm goes off you are ready to get up and start he day, you are on your way to having more time in your day. This is why the night before is when you really start your next day.

When the alarm goes how much time do you have before you start feeling rushed? If you only give yourself ten minutes between the alarm going off and getting out the door, you may want to think about the rest of your day. You have all the time you need. Why put off getting up until the last minute? It does not make you feel good, you feel busy and you are barely awake! Adjust your schedule to go to sleep earlier, so you can get up earlier and enjoy having more time to leisurely start your day.

Give yourself an extra ten minutes or so from the time you leave your home to where you are going. The travel time is not wasted time, and you do not want to make it a high stress time. Plan this first event after leaving your house to be as stress free as possible, not scurrying along becoming frustrated because you are being delayed. If this happens, you are not being delayed, you left to late because you did not give yourself enough time, and you have all the time you need.

Some people feel a need to stay up to a certain time. Why? If it is television, record it and watch it tomorrow. If it is something else, can it be moved to an earlier time so it does not effect your sleep time? If it can not be moved, is it really that important, or is it a time filler that has become an inconvenience?

Give yourself extra empty time as you go through the rest of your day. There are moments in every day when time is limited, and these are out of our control. Most of the day however, we can plan out at an enjoyable pace. If we do not get it done today, we can do it tomorrow, we now have all the time we need.

Share