Category Archives: family

January 23, 2019 · 20:39

May God have mercy on our souls.

Today, New York state passed a landmark law protecting unlimited preborn infanticide… or abortion, as it’s more commonly called. The bill, which goes under the euphemistic “Reproductive Health Act” effectively allows for abortion at any time for any reason, and removes abortion from the state criminal code.

It’s a sad, sad day in Mudville.

The law, aimed at protecting access to abortion in the event that Roe v Wade is overturned, is nauseating. I won’t go into it here, but you’re welcome to read the text of the bill HERE. Matt Walsh, professional teller of truths, also has a spot on op-ed, You Can’t Give A Lethal Injection to Criminals in New York but You Can Give It to Infants

At this point, the abortion issue has become a part of a larger problem. The world, and western nations in particular, have a cultural sickness. We live in a world that celebrates death and is nonchalant (at best) about life. Suicides, murders, and general tragedy dominate news media for days at a time. Positive stories involving children and families are seen as “fluff” and “feel good” rather than a goal. The traditional nuclear family is the exception, not the rule. Fatherless families, children born out of wedlock, siblings with multiple fathers or mothers, and rampant, no-fault divorce are the new normal.

Overturning abortion is a noble and lofty goal, but it will mean nothing if we cannot get to the root of the problem. We need to challenge ourselves to change our thinking, to see motherhood and fatherhood as joyful callings rather than heavy burdens. We need to recognize pregnancy as the miracle that it is, and not an inconvenience at best, or a disease at worst.

How can we do this? Support.

We need to nurture a culture in which a loving father is the norm. We need to get away from the Homer Simpson stereotype of fathers being lazy, stupid, and worthless. How many times on television and in movies do we see a father figure as the hero? How many young boys can watch television and say, “I want to be like him!” Instead, we get the bumbling idiots -loving fathers, perhaps, but idiots just the same. Homer Simpson, Phil Dunphy (Modern Family), Bob Belcher (Bob’s Burgers), Hal Wilkerson (Malcolm in the Middle) are just a few that come to mind.

As Chris Rock said, “A n**** will say some shit like, “I take care of my kids.” You’re supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What are you talking about?” What kind of ignorant shit is that?”

Instead of devaluing fatherhood, we need to elevate it. Paternal leave. Nor referring to time spent with the kids as “babysitting” or “stuck with the kids”. No more commercials where Dad has no idea how to care for his own child and is desperate for Mommy to come home. Dads matter. One of the most beautiful illustrations of this concept can be seen in “soldiers come home” video compilations. If you can make it through those without crying, you should call your psychologist. Should socioeconomic proofs be more your thing, look up statistics involving absentee fathers, crime, poverty, and soaring abortion rates in the black community since the 1950s.

Motherhood deserves its own admiration. The Mommy-Wars need to stop. For mothers that choose to or must work outside the home to provide for their families, childcare needs not to be so prohibitively expensive, nor should it be the responsibility of the tax payer. Mothers who choose to be stay-at-home moms should likewise be supported in their choices.

The last giant issue is adoption. Did you know that adoption in the United States can run families tens of thousands of dollars? We often hear that adoption is the solution to abortion, but how can it be at that cost? How many couples are desperate to have children, but are unable to conceive and unable to adopt because of the outrageous financial burden? When an abortion costs around $300 and adoption $37,000, are we surprised when there are 638,169 abortions (2015) to the 135,000 adoptions? (Including the roughly 670,000 in foster care).

Bottom line: Before we can change the laws, we need to change our culture. Otherwise, what’s the point?

families

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under abortion, culture, current events, family, health, humanity, pro-life

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 13, 2017 · 15:51

An Ode to Evil

Many of you, I’m sure, are familiar with Facebook’s daily “See Your Memories” posts, in which the algorithm dredges up whatever you posted on that particular date X amount of years prior, giving you the opportunity to re-post it, should you deem it worthy.

Last night, my youngest brother, Joe,  mentioned to me that it was twelve years ago on that date (January 12), that Resident Evil IV had just been released and we (myself, and my brothers Joe and Frank) had spent the entire afternoon after school watching Frank play. Watching this horror show (and it was a horror show on so many different levels) meant that none of us got our homework done, and we were all pretty sure that our teachers were not going to accept, “But getting past those chainsaw-wielding bitches was way harder than previously anticipated” as an excuse. So we did the next logical thing and prayed for a snow day.

The Biohazard gods answered those prayers.

So why do I bring this up?

Well, for one, RE7 is coming out in a few short weeks, and we’ll be doing the exact same thing: gathering to watch each other play, get slaughtered, offer advice at solving puzzles and what weaponry should be used where, reminding each other of past epic failures (oh, and they were indeed epic) and in a way, reliving a piece of our childhood. Resident Evil was the one thing we really bonded over in our teenage years. As we’ve become *cough* adults and our lives have pulled us in different directions, it’s good to know that a little bit of zombie obliteration will always bring us back together again.

img_4150

Leave a comment

Filed under family, pop culture

August 8, 2015 · 22:54

When Lions Trump Babies, You Know We’re Screwed

 

Imagine, if you will, your friendly neighborhood veterinarian. We’ll call her Dr. Farrell. Dr. Farrell loves dogs. She loves dogs so much, that she runs a dog-specific clinic. She especially loves puppies and mama-dogs, so she concentrates on them. She says she treats them for all types of diseases and testings and screenings to ensure their health, but she’s most concerned with the ones who are pregnant. She knows that the ones who are pregnant and have owners that want the puppies will be fine, so she tells those dogs to go somewhere else for their care. Dr. Farrell takes care of the dregs. She specifically sets up her clinics in areas that have a lot of poor, stray dogs. Dogs that don’t have owners, or have owners that don’t care about them. Dogs that aren’t spayed. Dogs that wouldn’t be able to take care of their puppies. So everyday, Dr. Farrell makes sure her clinic looks hip and inviting, with comfortable doggy beds, bones to gnaw on, fresh food and water. When a pregnant lady dog comes in, Dr. Farrell assures her that she doesn’t have to worry about half a dozen new mouths to feed. She’ll take care of the problem and send the dog on her way.

So Dr. Farrell forces open the dog’s cervix, and reaches in with some sort of suction device and a knife (curette) to cut the puppies apart and extract them from the womb. One of Dr. Farrell’s assistants will have to put all the pieces together again later to make sure all the puppy-tissue was gotten. Sometimes, if Dr. Farrell didn’t get to the dog early enough, she might burn the baby puppies to death with saline, or wait till the puppies are almost born, then as they’re coming through the mama dog’s birth canal, she’ll just stab them in the back of the skull with scissors. Whatever way she chooses, the puppies are dead and no longer the lady dog’s responsibility.

Running a clinic like this is hard though, and even though places like PETA give her a lot of money to keep the unwanted puppy population down, Dr. Farrell has found that she can get a lot of money by selling those puppy bodies to cosmetic companies. People get so angry when they hear that companies test their products on animals, but no one seems to care about the puppies that Dr. Farrell has killed. For whatever reason, they are blind to it. So Dr. Farrell is able to sell those bodies to Covergirl and Bath and Body Works, and they pay enough to buy Dr. Farrell a new car. All thanks to dismembered puppies.

 

Now, be serious. If an undercover journalist had come out in the last 10 days with videos proving that PETA was dismembering and selling unborn puppies or kittens, the country would be in an uproar (see: Cecil the Lion). Instead, an undercover journalish has undeniable evidence that abortion giant Planned Parenthood is selling the bodies of unborn children. More than that, they are line items. They are profit. They keep PP in the black. There is good evidence that many of these children are intact, which means PP is blatently ignoring the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban one way or another. As of this writing, three states (NH, AL, and LA) have cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, and several others have launched investigations.

As Americans – hell, as decent human beings, why are we even pretending that this is okay? What makes us think that it is okay to kill a child at any stage of his or her development? If one killed a panda in its mother’s pouch, he would be in as much legal trouble as if he killed the adult panda. Probably more. Why? Because a developing panda is still a panda. Why are animals protected, and not human babies? They are equally defenseless.

Planned Parenthood is beyond defending. Please, if you haven’t already, watch the videos or read the transcripts. (All of which can be found here.) Urge companies like Pepsi and Bath & Body Works to stop their donations, as others like Coca-Cola have already done. Write your members of Congress on the State and Federal level to defund them; you do not want your tax dollars supporting state-sanctioned murder.

Save the humans.

save-the-baby-humans-panda

 

Leave a comment

Filed under awareness, family, humanity, politics, pop culture, pro-life

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

November 15, 2014 · 23:18

Teacup Children and the Socially Impaired

Since the mid 1980s, a trend has been developing that has me severely worried for my generation. Lately, that trend is coming to a head and I’m afraid that we as Millennials are not going to be able to handle the inevitable.

I couldn’t put my finger on the cause. It could have been one thing, or several. It could have started way back in 1974 when Timothy O’Bryan’s father slipped a cyanide-laced Pixie Stix into his Halloween bag, killing the child and frightening parents into thinking there were child-hating maniacs handing out candy for decades. (How many of you weren’t allowed to eat your candy until your parents checked it first?) Maybe it was when Mary Kellerman, aged 12, became the first victim of the Chicago Tylenol murders. Perhaps it was the Satanic daycare sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 90s. Whatever it was, it led to the rise of “helicopter” parenting, the practice in which parents hover over their children to ensure the child never fails, is never allowed to fall, never allowed to take risks or experience pain.

These are the parents who won’t let their child ride a bike without knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, and a helmet.

They are the parents who made sure the monkey bars and the swings were removed from the playgrounds to reduce fall and choke hazards, and there isn’t dirt or grass under what remains, but several inches of recycled shredded rubber or mulch.

If their school system still uses traditional grades, and Johnny gets a poor grade on a test, Mom and Dad will be in the next day to negotiate a better one, or finding out why the teacher didn’t teach better.  Often, Mom or Dad will just do Johnny’s work to make sure it’s done right.

Afraid to let them out of their sights, parents schedule as many after-school activities as possible. From t-ball to soccer to dance, everyone gets a trophy just for existing. There is no concept of “winning” or “losing” and thus no chance to fail in a fairly safe environment. Where there is no chance to fail, there is no room to grow. No internal motivation is developed. Children learn to depend solely on external motivators, a trait which will not serve them well in the “real” world. One would think it ludacris for a parent to accompany her grown child to a job interview or complain to the dean of students about a test grade, but it happens.

An argument between friends or classmates is immediately sorted out by teachers or parents. Children don’t learn crucial social skills, and often any conflict is immediately labeled “bullying”. What children DO learn is to quickly manipulate the system to their advantage, crying “wolf” (or “bully”) to gain attention from adults.

This lack of social skills leads me to my other big worry: the millennial generation today doesn’t have any. For that, I can go back to 1992 and IBM. Most 20-somethings today could barely remember their home phone number then and were too busy memorizing their colors, numbers, and ABCs, but that was the year IBM introduced the first smartphone, nicknamed “Simon”. Since then, we’ve all gone downhill, and it’s been well-observed that most people under the age of 35 are lacking the basic skill to carry on a conversation. It’s difficult to sit through a dinner with someone who is constantly checking their phone for email, texts, Facebook, etc. Eye contact is impossible – many can’t maintain it. When our eyes are glued to a screen all day, we forget what real interpersonal contact is like.

I firmly believe this is what has given rise to the #YesEveryWoman and #ThatsWhatHeSaid, as well as videos in which people with hidden cameras walk around for hours and record the reactions and statements of others. As human beings, we have lost the ability to interact properly with each other. We have become so used to hiding behind a screen that we have become incapable of just being.

The world of social media means never hearing emotion. You read what is written without hearing the reflection or intent. How many conversations have spiraled out of control because something was misinterpreted? Have we become completely desensitized to others’ emotions and feelings? Has that lack of seeing and hearing someone’s reaction allowed for the rise of disrespect, whether real or imagined, between the sexes?

Not too long ago, what is now considered “catcalling” was thought of as a man getting his act together, taking the plunge, and saying hello to a lady. Sadly, today’s society is severely lacking in ladies and gentlemen equally, but unless your friends had sisters, sometimes randomly addressing an attractive stranger was the only way to meet someone. Often one ended up saying something incredibly stupid as he stumbled over himself in his nervousness, hoping that in the approximate 12 second window that he had to make a good impression that she would either be willing to continue the conversation or let him down gently.

To the men out there, you kinda stink at this these days. Women, you’re pretty bad at it yourself.

Men: The way to get a lady’s attention is NOT to make any blatant sexual comment. Just, no. Don’t even go there. Do not touch or follow a woman without her permission – that’s illegal. Say hello, or something funny, or compliment her.

Women: If a man, stranger or acquaintance, says hello or compliments you, it is polite to respond “hello” or “thank you”. If you don’t wish to converse, that’s all you need to say. “F*** you” is not appropriate. If you think you’re in danger, or if you’ve been grabbed or touched in any way, scream and call the police.

Everyone should have a few fall-back subjects to talk about that don’t involve television shows and Buzzfeed lists. Read a book or two. Have informed opinions on national politics and stay current with current events. Find a hobby. Start challenging yourself to put the phone away one day a week (or if that’s too much, one day a month) and dedicate that day to one of those things.

It’s time to put on our big kid underpants and learn to be big kids, without holding Mom and Dad’s hand or the equivalent – the smart phone. Let’s learn to be people, not robots.

free range

I highly recommend the article The Overprotected Kid for more on helicopter parenting, bubble wrapped kids, and how one community is trying to give kids a new chance at childhood.

Leave a comment

Filed under family, men and women

Tagged as , , , ,

August 19, 2014 · 03:22

Stop! Don’t open. That door!

There’s a lot of lousy things going on in the world today. A laundry list of them. (Note to self, do laundry.) As I am very, very sick of turning on the TV and the radio and the interwebs and hearing about suicides, looting, race-baiting, rape, and the crucifixion of children, I’m going to my happy place.

Now is a good time to warn all of you that my happy place involves killing zombies. Lots and lots of zombies.

I discovered Resident Evil 2 when I was a sophomore in high school through a boyfriend, and in turn, I introduced it to my brothers. There isn’t a lot that a 16-year-old girl and two boys ages 13 and 10 can agree upon, but for the three of us, it was Resident Evil and the extremely unusual  and rather bloody crime fighting adventures of Chris, Jill, Claire, Leon, Ada, and the rest of the gang as they battled the evil Umbrella Corporation. Alright, maybe “crime fighting” is stretching things a bit, but Chris and Jill were RPD special ops, Leon was a cop, and the second game took place in a police station. Close enough.

I don’t know what it was about those games. We watched each other play like we might watch a movie – offering advice, shouting out warnings, and always ready with a clever insult when someone did something stupid, whether that be the character or the one controlling him. And oh, did we screw up. Or, better, tried to make each other screw up. Like the time I neglected to mention that licker that was going to burst through the two-way mirror, and I’m pretty sure the story about how I missed Birkin during the final battle with one of my precious rocket-launcher shots (you only get two) when I had the game set to “auto-aim” will be told at my funeral.

Then again, so too will we recall my brother frantically pointing at the gate and stammering “Use the bent-pin-door-opener-thingie!”

“The lock pick?”

“Yeah, the lock pick.”

Ah, the good old days. Today, it’s rare to get my brothers and me in the same room for more than five minutes at a time; our lives pull us in so many different directions. I’ll always look back with fondness though at the appreciation for a perfect headshot, the achievement of shaving a few seconds off a record time, the beating of the extra game with ‘Hunk” or “Tofu” (yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like. You race through the game as a giant block of tofu.)

Or when someone is in desperate need of a smile, you just look at them and say, “You were almost a Jill sandwich.”

Leave a comment

Filed under family, humor, pop culture

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

July 18, 2014 · 03:06

Thursday Night Funnies*

*Subject to change (literally) as soon as I think of something more witty. There aren’t a lot of synonyms for “joke” or “humor” that begin with “th” or “n”, oddly enough.

 

Anyway, in honor of my dear old Dad, who, as I previously mentioned was Head Bedtime Story Teller, and often times shied away from the likes of the Little Golden Books and Dr. Seuss in honor of E. A. Poe and Sherlock Holmes; I present the joke that has, on more than one occasion, been rated the funniest joke of modern times:

Sherlock and Dr. Watson Go Camping

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson decided to take a camping trip. After dinner, a bottle of wine, and some conversation, they settle in to sleep.

Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

Watson replied, “I see millions of stars.”

“And what does that tell you?” asked Holmes.

“Well, astronomically, it tells me there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all-powerful and we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, the skies are clear and it will be a beautiful day tomorrow.” He paused. “What does it tell you, Holmes?”

Holmes sighed. “Watson, you idiot. Somebody stole our tent.”

Leave a comment

Filed under family, humor

Tagged as , ,

July 17, 2014 · 20:40

Hail to the Chief

No, not the president. At least not the sitting one. Someday I’m sure I’ll write about my undying admiration for men the likes of Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, Generals Lee and Chamberlain, PM Churchill, and Bishop Sheen, but not today.

Today, I want to talk about my dad.

Tomorrow is his last day on The Job. It’s been a good job, considering it’s meant he’s been able to keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs. The medical bills have always been paid for: The Job is unionized and came with a most excellent insurance package. I’ll be the first to admit it was a tough job – long hours outside in all weather (I think the only time they ever called it off for weather was once during a hurricane and then again in the October Blizzard.) and “peak season” – black Friday through New Year’s we all knew just sucked. If Dad made it to the family Christmas Eve dinner it’s usually been a miracle of Christmas proportions in and of itself.

But he did it. For all the long, cold, wet, icy, snowy, sweaty, hot, humid, “insert weather conditions here” he stuck with it for thirty long years. The Job had nothing to do with what he went to school for. The man has multiple college degrees, including a Masters, he’s a Navy veteran, and he’s spent the last 30 years as a blue-collar package delivery man because it was a surefire way of making sure his family got taken care of. He was unemployed when I showed up and since babies are on the expensive side, he took what he could get.

So for all the dance recitals and baseball games missed (I practically forced him to take a personal day when I graduated from high school. I didn’t want to take the chance he’d get stuck at work and miss commencement.) For all the late hours you came home really too tired to do anything but eat dinner, take a shower, and go to bed, but stayed up and read us a bedtime story anyway (you’re never living down Henry the Duck and the cood fooking on the stove) or help us with homework or explain why politicians were making no sense and why a president had to ask what the definition of “is” is… thanks. Thanks for being a man of great character and integrity, and for always putting your family first.

Thanks for being a Dad, and not just a father.

Enjoy your retirement*.

 

 

*No one can hang around the house too long. Trust me. I highly recommend volunteering, or a golf membership, or a part-time job, or something, anything. Long experience has taught us that if you’re home and underfoot too long, your children may kill you. In a totally loving way. But seriously. Get out of the house every once in a while. ❤

family 2010

Leave a comment

Filed under family