Thoughts from the Mountain Top

The title is a statement I heard today from someone in the debate about the police brutality out there.  Most of us realize this is not true.  Philando Castile was doing nothing wrong.  He obeyed everything the police officer told him to do. He told him that he was legally carrying a weapon.  He reached for his wallet as the officer told him to do.  He still ended up dead. Regardless of that, there is the matter of what police are really after when they question you about something.  Just as all police officers aren't like the officer who murdered Castile, not all police investigate a cast the way I'm about to tell you.  There are enough, though, that I would not talk to them without a lawyer.  Investigations do not happen like we see on television.  Many times, the police create a narrative then search for evidence to fit that narrative, rather than seeking justice and the truth. I worked for a freight company near Kennedy Airport in NYC. ...

Over the past eight years (at the very least) those of us who tend to "lean left" have been subject to a barrage of hate, disdain, and abuse from those who disagree with us.  This was particularly the case after the United States' first African-American President was elected.  Racism that bubbled beneath the surface for years boiled to the surface. I'd keep seeing this characterization of "liberals" as some type of coward who sat in a corner crunching on granola.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Liberals are actually more courageous, preferring the randomness of "the undiscovered country" - the future - to the comfort of a false history.  They tend to see the world as it really is, rather than some false Norman Rockwell-like painting. I put up with threats and intimidation tactics from people who assumed liberals never touched a gun or knew anything about them.  I thing this false image gave the taunters and abusers a level of comfort - t...

Living in a small town that is largely built on tourism makes for an interesting cross-section of people.  After all, the things people come here to enjoy are the same things that drove me to move here.  I was the tourist that came to visit, and I am now the local. I found in my years working at the hotel that the tourists have a pretty simplistic view of locals.  They see us all as ignorant and talk down to us.  They treat us as if the fact that they decided to come visit our town means they are entitled to treat everyone as servants.  We even get "hair flip" letters our local paper is only too happy to publish, fueling the hate part of our love/hate relationship with the tourists. We have an attraction known as Diana's Bath.  It's a series of waterfalls that was once the site of a sawmill and is now a popular swimming area.  It's part of the White Mountain National Forest and operated under the U.S. Forest Service.  The parking lot isn't exactly...

Anyone who has followed me knows I'm pretty liberal.  One issue where I differ from the typical liberal is gun control.  I just don't think it's possible with the number of firearms already in circulation to prevent the majority of shootings that happen.  Does that mean we shouldn't try?  No, not at all.  I believe in closing the loophole of private sales and treating guns the same way we treat vehicles when it comes to selling and transferring titles.  This will create a paper trail, at the very least.  In addition, I don't think someone should be allowed to own a weapon without taking a gun safety class, similar to the way we get driver's licenses. Beyond that, I'm not sure there's much we can do.  I listen to the arguments, and I agree we should likely get the rapid-fire weapons such as AK-47's out of circulation.  They serve no purpose except to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time.  If you're that paranoid that you think w...

The other day a lovely rant appeared in my Facebook stream about how the South might have lost the Civil War but they were in the right and by gum, just look at all that area!  The south is rising again! Praise Jesus! Okay, I"m paraphrasing because the "lady" was booted out of the airlock so fast I didn't think about copying her post for entertainment purposes.  But that was the general gist of it.  It was all talking about the Civil War and how the South was coming back. Let's get something straight: the Civil War, from the point of view of the south, was about a bunch of rich, white men convincing stupid, poor white men to fight for their right to keep black people as slaves. Hold on, what about States rights?  What about them?  There was no issue between the signing of the Constitution and the start of the Civil War that was "states-rightsy" enough that anyone wanted to go to war about it.  But a bunch of rich white guys being told they couldn't ...

A friend of mine posted an article this morning about a professor who ended up fired because of a minor disagreement that ballooned because of her inability to accept that she was wrong about something.  Whether this professor was, in fact, a racist in sheep's clothing or just an idiot could be debated, but the fact that she basically blew the incident in question way out of proportion in a way that ended with her own firing begs the question of her mental stability. Which brought to mind my own version of the crazy college professor. I was attending Nassau Community College in New York after my 40+ hours of work each week.  My area of study was computer programming with accounting.  In the core curriculum there was a health requirement.  At the time, there was a huge controversy going on over the Human Sexuality class there.  (The only article I could find about it now is here:  http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0118_Textbook_Undermines_.html )  O...

World War II was termed "the greatest generation."  They came back from the war and built the middle class.   We followed through on our promise to those veterans and gave them opportunities for education and housing and to raise their families on decent incomes.  The children they gave birth to are the "baby boomers".  They had a lot of ideals about changing the world. We lost our way.  That's my only explanation for what the world turned into: we lost our way. Somewhere from the ideals of the 1960's to today, everything changed.  We went from "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country..."  to "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"  Not "is the country better off" or "will the country be better off" but a focus on the individual instead of society.  Add into that the takeaway from the movie Wall Street being that "greed is good" and we were well on our way...

My Grandpa on my mother's side was a car salesman.  I never got to meet him, which sometimes I think was a good thing and sometimes a bad thing.  He was an alcoholic and could be a mean drunk.  He cheated on his wife and his son (my uncle) caught him at a fairly young age.  I heard stories from my mother.  There were also funny stories, too, though.  He would carry his Manhattans on the boat with him in a thermos.  My mother had some great memories of parking the boat near Jones Beach in New York and going over to dance at the bandshell. One of the stories I heard often was about Grandpa's customers.  He could tell who had money and who didn't.  In those days, he saw that poor people would get dressed up in their finest when they went out, wanting to impress people.  They'd be cleaned up completely and looking the best they could manage.  People who had money tended to do the opposite, thinking by looking dirty and dingy ("poor") ...

It's coming up on the fourth anniversary of my daughter's suicide.  With everything I see happening in this country with the racists and xenophobes in power, it's a hard time to begin with it.  Add in the upcoming anniversary, and I'm already on the path to being a basket case (and in case that wasn't enough, add in a little respiratory infection as well - yee ha!) Imagine my distress earlier this week when the attached meme came through my newsfeed.  God's plan?  I don't want to hear it.  That might sound fine to you when it comes to losing a job or platitudes about the state of the world.  You want to tell my God's plan was for my daughter to become addicted to heroin and commit suicide?  You want to tell me God's plan was to destroy my family in three years? You want me to "enjoy" that?  Fuck you and fuck God. That's not where I needed to be.  As I watched more and more stories about the hideous orange thing that currently is our ...

This is one of my more personal blog posts, more for venting than anything else.  Still, it might shed a little light on the situation for people going through something similar. Seriously people - do not get married before you live with someone for at least a year.  And then don't think it's going to get any better.  Watch what happens with their family and what you see there.  You'll see a lot of indicators for what your future will be like if you do choose to marry them. The signs were there.  I didn't grasp it. My husband (DH) grew up living with his mother and siblings in the house his grandparents owned.  To put it quite frankly, they treated his grandmother like shit.  Maybe she did encourage it and got some satisfaction out of it.  I dunno.  I wasn't there the whole time. Grandma did work at some point.  I know that because when I knew her she was collecting a pension from Prudential.  My mother-in-law, with 4 kids to rais...

When I worked overnights at the hotel, it was either bang-out crazy until the end of the shift, or dead quiet.  In the off-season, dead quiet ruled.  Netflix was my savior after everything was done and the cleaning and re-stocking done. Along came Facebook, and soon Facebook games, and I had another way to kill time and prevent falling asleep. A phenomenon that popped up soon afterwards were groups for people who played the game where they could talk and strategize.  In my case, I mostly played puzzle games and a couple of others where people collected stuff if they won.  It was stuff I could pick up when I want and put down and not have to worry that there was a battle going on or something. I noticed one thing early on.  The people who get involved in the running of these groups must have no lives.  They are often online 12-18 hours a day, every day.  The game I was in a large group and it had the group owner and a number of administrators. ...

About a week ago, I got in a discussion about parking. Another friend on Facebook posed this scenario: You live not too far from the airport and one day you look out the window to see a couple park in front of your neighbor's house, get their luggage out of the car, lock it up, then a cab comes to pick them up and they disappear. The friend expressed that he felt the situation was wrong somehow, but then listened to the arguments that the street is public and our property rights end with our property. There was a discussion where someone who likely does this chimed in that the people were doing nothing wrong and it inconvenienced no one, so why was everyone worried about it. My arguments is the people doing this don't know if it's an inconvenience or not. How do you know if parking is a premium in that area? If you have a family with two parents who drive and 2 kids or more who also might drive, you're looking at the possibility of four cars for one house, and someone...