Garrison Keillor wrote a moving article called America Eats Its Young and his words are especially sharp today on Labor Day in the United States where we celebrate the working person before the real work of the Fall takes us over:
In our revived Men and Abortion discussion yesterday I brought up the notion that abortion is really a woman’s issue because no matter what happens to the pregnancy it is the woman and not the man who must persevere and live with the decision for the rest of her life.
HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.
Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.
People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.
To live is to remember.
I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.
There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.
Continue reading → To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS
Orange, New Jersey Detective Kieran Shields was pronounced dead on Tuesday at University Hospital in Newark. A shotgun blast, aimed from above in an ambush-style slaying, penetrated his neck and shattered his collarbone just missing the protection of his bullet-proof vest.
With the recent explosions of vitriol from Mel Gibson against the Jews in general and with the new insurgency against Israel proper by Hezbollah in particular, one begins to wonder about the how and the why of blaming the world’s troubles on the Jews. I decided to do some quick Google searches on historically paired stereotypical keywords to see what kind of hate against the Jews was being officially published on the internet and the results were hateful but not surprising.
Continue reading → Blame it on the Jews: A History of Hating
We all know what a traditional Spammer looks and smells like. They overload your blog with links to diet pills and fat creams and breast enhancers and penis extenders. You can smell their nastiness permeating across the universe.
Is there a universal ideal of physical human beauty that crosses cultural, moral, aesthetic, religious and ethnic lines all over the world?
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