Quote of the Week

“We might not be in the same boat, but we are all on the same river!” –  Sonya Olds Som

Words Matter

You Are Murderers
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What has our society come to that we call people who have different opinions, make different choices “murderers”? Haven’t we learned anything about how practicing discrimination, and putting labels on individuals who are not like us demeans the ones labeled? We’ve stopped calling physically challenged individuals “cripples”, intellectually challenged people “idiots” and gays “faggots”. Some believe that this word substitution is really only bowing to political correctness. However, any label that makes a person less than what that person is as a human is an unconscionable misuse of language.
Obviously, nothing has changed. As this COVID-19 pandemic rages on, we seem to have stepped back in time to another pandemic – AIDS. Gays were not just shunned and feared that they could transmit the virus and kill others, they were denied basic legal rights and many were murdered. Then the truth of how that virus spread was discovered and the outright discrimination and shunning stopped. But it went underground in society, like a Shingles virus, awaiting another time and group of people to rear its ugly head.
We have a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. That is a blessing. However, its very existence has splintered our society. For those individuals who refuse to “take the shot” society has labeled them “murderers”. The unvaccinated are now blamed for spreading the virus and causing deaths. Yes, they (and even vaccinated individuals with “break through” infections can!), can but to be a murderer you must, both in the dictionary and the legal definition, do your act with an INTENT to take a life. No unvaccinated person is doing that. There is yet another fallacy: all unvaccinated people don’t want the vaccine. The unvaccinated are a diverse group ranging from the hard core anti vaxers, to those who medically can’t take any type of vaccination, to those who are in parts of the country where getting access to it is difficult.
All Germans were Nazis, all gays were infected with AIDS, all Chinese are responsible for bringing the virus to the US…all unvaccinated individuals are murders…when it comes to discriminating against a group of individuals, nothing has changed over the decades. What a sad commentary on our society.

Remembering 9/11

This year is the 20^th anniversary of that dark day

As a writer, immediately after that black Tuesday, I started to set my grief to words. As the poems and essays piled up, I decided that others could benefit from reading about my pain and thus created a website, The World Trade Center Journal (which I’ve been updating for the last 20 years!), containing my writings, photographs, and photomontages.
My hope is that by sharing my memories and my grief, the Twin Towers can live on in our hearts and our grief can, at some point, be quelled.

That Which Survives – 9/11 20 years later

That Which Survives – 20 years later
9/3/21
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Each year, it begins with a name
All that survives of you,
And the 2,976 names that follow
All that remains of them.
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The crowd stands and listens
Some clutching photos
Of what once was and is no more;
Now only on paper.
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Standing on sacred ground
With water rushing down
Like the tears
For the departed never found.
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You stand on the perimeter
Silently remembering back
To that horrible dusty, death filled day.
In your town,
And in towns across the nation,
Memorials have a piece
Of metal, twisted and sheared.
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A woman born on that day
Feels life move inside of her.
She hears the names,
Her father’s spoken
Brings tears to her eyes.
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The image and smell of smoke
Invades my mind.
Can it be 2 decades since
The time when the Towers fell?
How did we all survive?