#BlackLives Matter - Bettina Network's Blog

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EVIL EXISTS – The most common way to identify it is through the DENIAL that comes immediately after an act of EVIL!

Saturday, January 28th, 2023

This is a post set to music – the kind you don’t hear much anymore! Go back far enough and you will find evil taking lives in the most horrible ways. And today it is still happening. This hymn takes us back over 2,000 years and a reminder of what Jesus’ crucifixion was like. The same kind of people crucified Jesus as worked on Tyre Nichols. We can’t seem to get that picture of what humans are capable of doing.

We have been given another lesson and another look at the fact that evil exists, is very real and is incorporated into most institutional structures. To find its structural components one must look at the beginning of the corporation – the institutuion – the government – the structure of the group in which we are seeing the evil surface.

In these United States evil is sprouting all over the country. We always seem to have to question and question claiming to not understand why such horrors constantly surface. The latest is what happened to Tyre Nichols.

It is interesting that the news reports all look for parallels and come up mostly with the Rodney King horror with its evil spewing all over. Some go back to Emmett Till for the same reason. To really understand the evil in what happened to Tyre Nichols one has to go back to slavery and what this country was like at that time examining the structures which developed and are still in place maintaining what is needed to maintain “better than”.

This evil happened because we have a police force which was created and structured to capture, torture and do whatever was necessary to subdue and/or eliminate runaway slaves and discourage those who are thinking of running away and trying for another life someplace else. That predates the Rodney Kings and all the other parallels we try to make. We seem to be unable to look at the truth of what is and has been happening in this country for generations. We now have people like Ron DeSantis trying to pass laws to prevent the teaching of the history of slavery in this country and what has happened to minorities – those who are not descendants of those who brought all of this forward. If that history is not taught people who have some inclination to this kind of vile violence just might join in with others to make this the majority.

We know about the slaughter of blacks, but not through our history books. The Tulsa massacre has only recently surfaced. Most of us had never heard of such. Who was it that sang about the fruit hanging from the trees? We hear the song, we are moved by it, but we don’t related that to what is happening today. We also don’t care about the life and trials of the person who used her life and career to make that song and all it stands for important and so well known that it is still heard today.

This violence is not a one time happening nor is it limited to one generation. It has been a part of who we are as a country almost from the beginning and it is not slacking.

We are today missing the fact that African Americans being so tortured and killed or experience attempted murder in the most horrific ways are a part of a long line of people over many generations. We are seeing this happen to elderly African Americans with no one interested and very few looking to see what is happening as that torture is about the destruction of generational wealth of black families and it becomes more prevalent in these United States.

That happens by destroying the life, family, and so much more of the African Americans so targeted. Many have died in the process of being so stripped. Their deaths have been attributed to their age and not to what they have been put through so others can strip them of their life’s collection of wealth. Wealth they amassed at great cost to their lives to pass on to their children so their children could have the kind of life they didn’t have. Blacks who worked throughout their lives to make their children’s lives better and hopefully reduce the racism and other forms of bigotry they experience. Others, who seem to escape the grasp of the greedy, never fully recover from the attempt at such destruction and gradually live out the end of their lives in compromised health, with their wealth destroyed and their families set at odds against one another. We have seen this happen to many blacks with very few knowing about the attempts and even fewer interested in anything except a passing comment.

The Tyre Nichols type of killings, massacres and more have been unbelievably brutal and carried out in front of an audience. Today, in the Tyre Nichols case, the audience was not present, but the videos recorded by many including the government are played so millions don’t miss the carnage. We recoil and talk about how awful and horrendous and all those adjectives which in the long run mean nothing and shortly our attention moves on putting what happened in the background and so it recurs. In the past few years there have been many and nothing done to actually stop the horrendousness of such.

EVIL is alive and well and thriving just waiting for its next opportunity to break out and that will be soon.

What a Trial the Donaldson/Bennett’s have endured. Did we tell you about the attack on them by Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue? Which is still going on?

Saturday, July 9th, 2022

All timed to make sure huge dumps on them happened at the same time. It is the same kind of “dump” which happens to many of the elderly when their assets are being targeted by those who want to lock them up and have access to those assets before the next generation is helped by such.

The Donaldson/Bennetts’ have filed joint tax returns from the first year of their marriage until now. I think that is over 30 years.

Several things happened with their tax returns when Rev. Dr. Bennett was being hauled out of his home by the Cambridge police and the attempt to take over his life happened by the Cambridge Elder and Protective Services for no reason except maybe greed?

A tax return was filed by someone within the Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue in the name of Robert Bennett. It was an individual tax return about which he knew nothing and which was a total disgrace. It is still sitting within the Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue and they are still trying to collect taxes not due. In fact, more than one years tax return was so filed and that happened even after both Dr. Bennett and Marceline Donaldson contacted the Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue to say this is some kind of mistake. So, there are two tax returns filed for the same year with identical social security numbers – one the joint return filed by Dr. Bennett with his wife; the other this individual tax return which the Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue is still trying to collect even though they know it is fake. They know about the joint tax returns. In fact, even the joint tax return which is the same year as the fake returns had massive inaccuracies. Those inaccuracies happened after the returns were filed and were within the Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue system. One was corrected when they contacted the taxpayer advocate and when an investigation happened it was discovered that someone working for the Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue entered a loss as a gain and a gain as a loss – by mistake.

Some other time the “mistake” might ring true. When all of this is happening at the same time we do not believe this was a “mistake.” The good news is it was corrected. Other “mistakes” remain and apparently there is no intention to correct them, just ruin the Donaldson/Bennett’s credit to help prevent them from being able to obtain a mortgage on their home.

Taxes are one way used to attempt to destroy an African American family living in a “redlined’ area. The goal when they are buying is to keep them out. The goal when they are selling is to keep the price as low as possible to give the white family moving in a “steal.”

That story is for another blog – with pictures.

Real Estate – Is this the cause of the extreme racism which refuses to break and go away?

Tuesday, June 28th, 2022

Because of the business we were in, we spent many years closely aligned with the real estate community. During that time our discoveries were shocking and as we try to sell our house all the lessons we learned and tried to address are incorporated in that attempt.

The racism in the real estate industry is well known. We should say – the bigotry – since these actions include more than African Americans. The fact that it has been impossible to eradicate or even mitigate is also well known. Attempts to end/change the structure and how realtors, developers, contractors and all those others aligned with the real estate community, have been notoriously unsuccessful.

Decades ago, there was one big attempt – which everyone thought was brilliant and would make major changes in the apartheid engaged in by the real estate community – it did not.

For a time, if you wanted to rent an apartment, condo, house, etc. and you were turned down or games were played with you so you would not be able to gain the home you wanted, there was recourse. Once you made a complaint to your local or federal Human Rights office they would start the investigation by sending a white family behind the minority family that felt discriminated against in the rejection of their offer to rent or buy the house of their dreams (or the house which fit their pocketbook). Many such cases, after that kind of test, were won and damages paid. However, that did not even put a dent into changing the way racism is institutionalized in the real estate industry.

Neighborhoods and so therefore schools, remain segregated; churches were the most segregated of all and all the trappings that went with the kind of racism maintained by this real estate community remained in place for all to experience.

Today, that bigotry is still practiced. It is more sophisticated, but still in existence and tightly controlled.

Working with realtors in maintaining this system are banks and other lending institutions. After banks fail to maintain residential bigotry it is the turn of the employers of the people trying to rent or buy in what today are still redlined houses and/or neighborhoods.

How does this happen so consistently:

  1. We live in a very racist, sexist, etc. society. From birth we are trained in how to be a bigot. Some of us take to that training like a duck takes to water. Others have some brakes applied and are never quite comfortable, but the everyday things one has to do to maintain a sense of being “better than” infects us all – white, black, latinx, LGBTQ+, muslim, etc. Some fight against the need to be superior to and others just accept their unearned status and do what is necessary to keep it going.

2. What does that include? Well, the first line of defense against ‘diverse neighborhoods” is with the home-owner and/or the real estate agent showing the property. The wrong person shows up and that person experiences foot dragging, obfuscation, excuses, everything that can be thrown up to keep them from wanting to move ahead with the sale or rental of that particular property. Real Estate Agents have been known to bring up another property – supposedly a better buy and one more suited for the client – and in a more acceptable neighborhood for that particular person. When all else fails, the property is taken off the market until a better time to list it for sale. After that particular minority has moved on? Before others get the same idea and start to look at that house? Whatever the reason given the house comes back on the market after a time and we start all over again.

3. f the person looking for housing perseveres and somehow gets past that first obstacle, It is then up to the financial institutions. Banks are better at this than others, but they all come together for the same result. Keep people in neighborhoods with their own kind and especially keep them out of the most prestigious white northern european neighborhoods. Even in those neighborhoods an occasional minority can buy as long as it is not one of the houses really off-limits to non-whites.

Banks have myriad ways they block the sale of houses which were “redlined”, but today not called such. The understanding is there anyway. Not a relevant word need be spoken – which allows for denial. Always make sure there is the ability to deny what you are actually doing.

4. If a minority through some miracle makes it past the financial institutions, the employer is next up to keep the societal segregation. We have seen this happen over and over again. It is a perfect set-up for denial. The person who has been so successful is making it past society’s barriers to ‘diversity’ in housing hits his/her employer and gets fired. The quicker the firing to the date of purchasing the new house the better.

Once fired, it is all downhill from there and the new employee or older employee who moved into the ‘wrong’ house very seldom connects his/her firing to the home purchase. A few have made that connection immediately because they are conscious of the barriers they have crossed and have an understanding of institutional racism. Those who have ‘smoked the pipe’ even when told what has happened and why are too dazed to pick it up.

The person so fired just picks up, gathers up, does whatever is necessary to survive financially and moves on.

Employers have far more ways to accomplish getting a non-white person out of a house they should not have been allowed to buy in the first place and they use them all when necessary.

5. After this comes the time for a minority who has managed to stay in a house so “redlined” to sell and move on. Then the fun starts because the end result changes. It is not to keep other minorities out of the neighborhood and out of that house. They have probably lived there many years. Uncomfortably with lots of racist happenings, but this is a new game.

The goal of this game is to make sure that minority leaves the neighborhood he/she should not have been allowed to inhabit in the first place with as little wealth as possible.

That is a game which would make an intensely interesting game of chess pale by comparison and that is for another article.

Roe V Wade – Another step closer to Adolf and his ilk!

Monday, June 27th, 2022

Two decisions came down from the Supreme Court – one day apart.

Looking at those decisions what strikes us is the fact that they show the Supreme Court of the United States is showing it is deep into “Situational Ethics.” Given that, they can overturn anything, make any ruling and they don’t have to hold to the Constitution or anything else except the convictions of those who support or supported their appointment to the Court.

Situational Ethics is what was the foundation of Hitlers Germany. We are now one step closer.

Trump brought us many steps closer with his extreme White Nationalist attitude and events. We are now moving along in that direction on our own. Many other decisions will be reversed before they tackle “Loving”, but it is clearly in their site.

A Series – Part ONE: Racism, Sexism and more…. – the structurally divided system we call the United States of America! But, it could also be called the World in Which We Live! This series will cover what maintains it in such an evil way with individual examples!

Friday, June 17th, 2022

We write and talk a lot about the bigotry of racism, sexism and so much more. We keep that talk on an institutional level. Very seldom do we write and talk with individual, real -true-to-life examples. That would interfere with our ability to deny – which is the foundation of what allows those structures to continue to exist. Start to talk about your real, true-to-life example of having experienced racism, sexism and all the rest and denial will immediately pop-up to explain away your real life experience. It is the most potent way we have of continuing bigotry’s existence. Raw, unwashed, in-your-face bigotry, maintained, continued, developed through denial.

We see denial being institutionalized in our educational system. Florida and the laws it is passing is an example. Those laws parallel the laws of old which made it a crime to teach slaves to read and write. Why criminalize something so seemingly harmless as teaching reading, writing and arithmetic? Because that was the beginnings of an effective way out of slavery. Today, we are trying to re-instituionalize a modernization of those criminal laws. Why? To maintain the “better than” in this society of white male northern-europeans peoples. And even to make a difference within that group of those who believe one way as against those who believe another. Bringing culture, religious beliefs and more into that “better than” equation.

Our world was rocked when we saw and got to know many of the victims of the bigotry against the elderly. We had seen bits and pieces of it pop-up, but to really experience the bigotry the elderly must live with, ignore and end their lives living in the most humiliating and vicious way – usually very broke after everything they worked all their lives to acquire – is an earth-shattering experience.

Society is structuring itself to maintain the elderly totally apart from the rest of world. That allows grifting, theft, physical – mental – medical – legal abuse to come to the forefront and happen with everyone looking on while denying what they are seeing and turning it into something positive. What is most annoying is that those doing this as the leaders of this pact are just like you and me. They look normal, talk normal, participate in their part of the world just like you and me with no one the wiser. They, however, begin to acquire wealth we don’t even give a thought as to from whence it has come.

We have published several articles on what happened to Rev. Dr. Robert Bennett and Marceline Donaldson. African Americans – Elderly – with fairly substantial assets. Mostly, what we published has been ignored except by those who experienced the same thing. We were surprised at how many elderly are experiencing this “putting the elderly into poverty” and then, let us use a small percentage of what is taken to keep them barely surviving and right under the nose of and with the approval of their families. Or, I should say because of the neglect of their families who are very, very busy. That is one real-life example which has uncovered many more. What we saw is that you don’t know when something like that will hit you. As a society we are taught “denial”. I am not my brother or sisters keeper – let them work it out on their own. That is our attitude towards bigotry of all kind. That is why it is so prevalent, long lasting and horrific in this society and in this world.

Guardianship is one evil in this society which has been practiced mostly against Jews, but is beginning to spread to other minorities as the wealth of different groups increases.

Murder of the youngest generation of minorities is happening because the numbers of minorities in this society are increasing and those who we refer to today as minorities are predicted to be the largest functioning group within a decade or so. How to cope and reverse that? Kill the children of these minorities. Well, you will get a few children of the majority group, but then Hitler targeted and killed Jews, but also included non-Jews to be most efficient and effective in his goal to remove Jews from the world. And the result of this killing of the children? When the oldest working group of minorities retires or dies there will be far fewer minorities to replace them, effectively re-establishing the inequality that currently exists. Those who would replace them have been murdered by the hundreds.

Corporate America has long had a very high wall, to protect those at the top, which they have built over time and are now re-enforcing so that wall will last many more generations. The wealthiest people in this society are those who have developed businesses, new ideas, etc. Those are all white-male-mostly Northern European types who are the world’s billionaires – or working very hard to become such with support of their cultural, racial, ethnic brothers.

How has that happened and how has that line been kept so free of minorities crossing into the land of entrepreneurial opportunity? From our perch, we have seen the ideas and hard work and success of minorities and women in the entrepreneurial area stolen by this group of white male, etc. There has been a re-definition of things like “theft” and more so this group of white males have a smoother road as they cruise down to reach that billionaire status on someone else’s back. Take a look at the history of Silicon Valley – only don’t leave out the minority businesses stolen; the women-owned businesses stolen; the refusal of investors to support and invest only in business brought to them by their “own kind”. Don’t leave out the young white males who raced through Cambridge and places like MIT, Harvard and more to see who was doing what that they could steal and take to investors who would look at the ideas with a cover to induce blindness against those from whom those businesses were stolen.

What has most disturbed us, because it is going unnoticed, supported by the extremely wealthy few, and within this group “theft” re-defined to make the actual theft going on constantly a non-event. If you break into my house and steal one of my artifacts, jewelry, furniture – even food, you are subject to arrest and jail for that theft. If you break into my computer and or corporate location, steal my business plan, take all of the ideas, structure, customers, experience I acquired while building a substantial business, etc. and at the same time do everything you can to destroy my business so I will be busy just trying to survive while you develop the model you coveted, that is not considered theft and subjects you to no criminal action. It also does not disqualify you from being considered for funding for the ideas and businesses you stole from others.

Every day, we come across people who have been crushed by such theft after 20 to 30 years of working to build a business with ideas all their own and have been successful in the process as they introduced to society a new way of doing something or a new product or something not out there before. We also see the people who crushed them and tried to leave them and their business by the wayside because they decided to set in place a copy of their business and because the people so crushed tend to be minorities and/or women the white males used to succeed. They have access to capital to grow their business, which the minorities and women don’t have; they have access to partners, those who have worked at the top of large white-male owned businesses which take an interest and the kind of theft and destruction which took down the business they copied is ignored. Unfortunately for all of us the ethics of such businesses are in the gutter, however, most of us go along with the growth of this stolen business as it becomes an intrinsic part of this society with which the rest of us have to live.

Real Estate is a biggy! The structure, wealth, schools in the geographic location of where you live depends upon your culture, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual choice, etc. and that institutionally racist structure was put in place eons ago. It began in slavery and was intensified when we changed our economic structures from “in your face” slavery to a more modified form with which we live today.

The importance of the geographic location where you live and work and have your being increased dramatically and became entrenched and unchangeable during separate and unequal days and today is becoming even more bigoted than it was generations ago. It is now easier to discriminate on such a level without anyone noticing or those who notice and complain being crushed and blamed for their plight after that drastic crushing.

As the world moved forward, that structure moved with it and has been kept in place by realtors, the real estate industry and its cousins. They maintain geographical bigotry in your living accommodations very effectively and much easier than a few generations ago, which in turn maintains racially divided schools which maintains racially divided businesses which occupy the retail spaces in those racially divided neighborhoods with the result that some of such businesses thrive and become very successful and some, in the minority neighborhoods, hang on by their fingernails for a lifetime.

These are some of the areas we will research and write about going forward with actual examples.

We have lots out there in the literature which talks about structural racism and how society separates unequally, but individual examples seem to be the most threatening and the least written about – especially in books used in schools of higher learning where to examine such things might cause a great disruption in this society. It is the area that many will read about and immediately engage in denial and denigration of those doing the writing.

We, at Bettina’s, have lived long enough that such denigration will not deter us. You are encouraged to join us with your stories. After all, we must all experience denial to understand how vicious it is.

In Scripture you will read: “Do you think I come to bring peace on earth. No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other; three against two and two against three”…….Luke 12:51-52.

We talk and sing a lot about “peace”. We knock those who we claim bring “divisiveness’. But when we do that what happens to such passages in Scripture? We think there is nothing wrong with “divisiveness”. We need to look at good and evil and separate those concepts instead of making divisiveness substitute for evil and coming together substitute for good.

………An Elegant Historical House for Sale!

Saturday, April 2nd, 2022
Every corner of this home bespeaks elegance, history, beauty and invites you to stay awhile. Across the street is a park; two door down on the same side of the street is another park and look out the windows, you will see the Charles River!

49 Hawthorn Street – Cambridge, MA. 02138 – $5,800,000.

What follows, under “House for Sale” describes a house which we would like to bring to your attention.  We hope you will consider buying the house – either for yourself, your family or for one of your favorite institutions and/or charities.

A kitchen for those who actually cook with room for everything – your utensils, pots, spices and so much more. Many fantastic meals have come out of this kitchen.

     The house we are describing was designed and built by an MIT graduate in 1900.  She was one of MIT’s  first female architectural students..  Her papers are in the MIT Library.  She is Lois Lily Howe with her own architectural firm and all the architects working with her were women.  Such a history in today’s climate makes quite a statement.

This particular house – at 49 Hawthorn Street – is the only Howe designed house in this area in which the interior has not been stripped and re-built taking away all of the historical design. The only room that needs to be brought back to its original design is the kitchen. It is wonderful as it is, however, to bring it back to Ms. Howe’s design would be special.

A fantastic welcome as the front door is opened to you and/or your guests. It speaks of the elegance which shows up all around the house – from French to Spanish to English to African to South American touches making it an escapee from Old New Orleans.

Marceline and Robert have lived in this house for 40 years and love every corner.  Being people who love history (Near Eastern History was the subject of Robert’s Harvard Doctoral thesis) and with Marceline’s educational background in the School of Architecture under Ralph Rapson, they have totally enjoyed living in this house and discovered much in the process. Selling it under duress they want to know it is in the hands of people who would continue in that design preservation route. The area has a penchant for taking beautiful culturally diverse homes and turning them all into a Northern European Scandinavian aesthetic. They look as though they were all designed in the Ikea Showrooms. So sad! There is nothing wrong with the Ikea Designs, however, what is wrong is making them the ultimate, cultural, design touch stone. This house escaped that “remodel”.

Ms. Howe built the house for William Augustus Maynadier – a Harvard Professor who taught “Arthurian Legend.”- the story of King Arthur and the Round Table.  It was a required course for all Harvard men. There were no Harvard women in those days.

Being very strong feminists, the Donaldson/Bennetts found that Harvard/MIT combination quite special.  While “feminist” was not a term in her day, Ms. Howe clearly was a feminist as we know the term today, stepping out into the world of Architecture the way she did.  Prof. Maynadier would be known as an extreme sexist today. He was teaching a class which laid the ground work for the very horrible sexism which most 20th century women have had to deal.  And yet, he hired Ms. Lois Lily Howe to build his house.

Arthurian Legend – King Arthur and the Round Table – was a way of teaching men how to treat women in that “on the pedestal and out of the equality” area.  The necessity of opening doors and standing on the side as she entered the room and etc. for this weaker sex is what was being taught, although not so specifically – it was wrapped in the Arthurian Legend.  All the things women have fought to have removed for decades so they could be treated as equals is what Prof. Maynadier’s class was about.  It was totally accepted at the time. Most people don’t know that this originated at Harvard.  It was in the general world population at the time, but not to the extent that it became entrenched with Prof. Maynadier at 49 Hawthorn Street.

It was interesting to us that Prof. Maynadier chose Ms. Howe to design and build his home. – which he used to live in and invite paying guests to stay with him.  The house has had that use throughout its 100 plus years of existence.  It hosted seminars, class sessions, teas and many famous and not so famous people, still while serving as a very private home.  

One of four bathrooms in this home – designed with jacuzzi, steam/shower room and separate enclosed toilet. The plumber calls it a “no bad smells” bathroom.

The Donaldson-Bennetts used their home to have what today are called bed & breakfast guests and to build the first network of such private homes working their way across the country and turning a national and an international network of bed and breakfast homes into a commonly known and accepted concept. This house was the beacon.  Besides this house, they had homes also in Thailand, England, France and more.

The guys who founded Airbnb stayed with them before those three even thought of such a company.  They were sent by Venture Capitalists – particularly the Capital Network in Cambridge – who wanted to fund such a venture, but not one designed, created and being grown by African Americans.  So they helped themselves to the Bettina Network, Inc’s business plan and everything else they could find to help them get the same kind of venture off the ground.  They sent people to offer their homes to join the Bettina Network, inc. but were really only interested in the process of how that was done – just as they hacked into and used Craig’s List to get their initial clients. The Donaldsons’ believe that when their web site was stolen, locked and offered back to them for enormous sums of money – it had to do with the genesis of Airbnb, although that was not known at the time as Airbnb was just forming.

While the Donaldson/Bennett’s lived and are living in the Lois Lily Howe house, Harvard sent many guests to stay with them, as did MIT, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College and more.  Several admin people called regularly to make reservations for guests visiting Harvard and other Universities in the area as well as private corporations calling for guests to whom they wanted to give privacy.. Everyone who stayed loved their time in the house and totally were taken by its history stories and general feeling.

Many institutions and corporations used the house when guests were visiting who they wanted to have privacy without being worried that their guests would be stalked in the lobby of the hotels to pick up information that could be used for media articles. They also liked the fact that guests wouldn’t need so many levels of security when they came to Boston.  Guests included such as Ambassador Victor Israelian, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, top management from the State Department, many of the USA’s top families, many scientists – mostly physicists – who loved the quiet and privacy of the house where they could enjoy the patio where squirrels and birds would visit them as they worked on the back porch.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to call.  If you or someone you recommend would like to see the house, we are available at their or your convenience.

Call Marceline Donaldson – 617 497 9166 or email bettinanetwork@comcast.net putting 49 Hawthorn St in the subject line.

What follows is a fuller description of the house as it appears in different publications.

                              HOUSE FOR SALE – Cambridge, MA. 02138

“Marceline and Robert are selling their home.  If you don’t want to buy it, please pass this along to those you know who might be interested and/or know someone who would love to step into their shoes.  As a private home or as a home with a bit of  income so you can live there and do other things.  Income can be in the neighborhood of $1,080.00/night, not including income from events, etc..  

Marceline and Robert did a wonderful job and are now moving to New Orleans – which is where Marceline grew up.  They have not been able to survive the onslaught against them of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the way they treat minority elderly in what was and is an apparent attempt of a group within the state to relieve Jews, African Americans, Latinx and others of any wealth that could be passed on to the next generation. This is the new racism/bigotry that is replacing the separatism that followed slavery.

The house has been newly painted with, among other improvements, a new 75 gallon commercial water heater with a 20 year rating and lots of other elegant restorations which keep the historical design of the house as much as possible..  

It is one of the few homes in Cambridge, which gives you views of the Charles River from many of the bedroom windows and it overlooks the Riverbend Park on one side  with no other building blocking your view.  There is also a second park (the historical Longfellow Park) just two houses down on the same block and the same side of the street as Marceline and Robert’s house.  Fantastic and very unusually elegant to have so many parks within the same block the home in which one lives.  One of the only homes in the area with such and with a spectacular view.

You would have 9,000 square feet of living space in this house over five floors.  5,400 (apx.) finished into three floors of elegant historical living and 3,500 square feet (apx) of attic and basement which can be finished into fantastic living space.   

For a possible future use of the basement take a look at the basement of Harvard University’s Memorial Chapel’s basement.  

The attic could be refinished into an exquisite ballroom for entertaining with its 16 foot height (apx) at its apex with no beams going across to obstruct the wonderful height of this room.  The architect – Lois Lily Howe, in 1900 was one of the first, (she is credited with being the first), to be able to build such an attic.  Most attics are so clogged with structures to keep the roof from falling in on itself you do not have the breathtaking space one finds here.  This attic is a full floor.  Its footprint is that of the entire length and width of the house.  Just think of the elegant entertaining you could do in that attic.

Historically, guests came to events in such houses and went to the second floor living room to leave their coats, etc. and freshen up and then went up another floor or two to the tea, dinner, dance or etc. on the upper floors.  Today, we don’t have attics large enough for such events, especially not one replicating the footprint of the other floors of the house.

Lois Lily Howe was the architect.  Designed and built in approximately 1900, she was one of MIT’s first female graduates.  She established her own architectural firm and the architects she hired were women. 

In the process of designing and building this home,  Ms. Howe scrounged the area for homes being torn down which had historical touches and she brought that actual history into this house.  The mouldings are exquisite and are some 100 years older than the house. 

The history of this house includes a psychiatric history – Dr. Lydia Dawes, a well known psychiatrist of yore, was an owner for some 40 plus years before the Donaldson-Bennetts arrived and the house frequently  embraced many of her friends who were also famous guests.  Sigmund Freud’s daughter stayed often and worked with Dr. Dawes.  Together they produced one of the first psychiatric journals in the area from this house.  Many local psychiatrists remember a part of their training that happened on the couch by the living room window overlooking the magnolia tree.  So much history goes with this house both  within its structure and with the people who have passed through.  

Marceline and Robert have spent decades trying to preserve and create a garden worthy of Lois Lily Howe who ended her career and life as a landscape architect.

You may have heard of  the many outstanding and famous people who stayed under the Donaldson-Bennett’s roof during their time in the house because you were probably one of them.  You can now own this magnificent property so beautifully located. 

Want more information – call Marceline – 617 497 9166 or email us bettinanetwork@comcast.net

Structural Racism/Rittenhouse/Blacks & Jews

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

by: Marceline Donaldson

A huge topic and we will not even skim the surface.

Racism, when it has become “structured” into a society and into its institutions, is a very complex thing. We like to think it is an “unfortunate incident” which happened because the person to whom it happened was complicit in some way. It is not. Every action you take is governed by the bigotry structured into the society in which you live which has successfully structured that bigotry into every core and every cell of its existence. The experience of bigotry is not a one time experience. It is all day everyday for those who are the “minority.” It is also an all day everyday experience for those who are “white.” Their lives move ahead beyond their talents and contributions to this society because of the fact that they are in the “better than” group.

Step out of your house and it starts. Stay in your house where bigotry wafts in with the very air you breathe – it is constantly ongoing and just as constantly denied. Bigotry happens – denial follows and is given credibility.

The United States has much to deal with to become the society it claims to be and the main thing is its bigotry which was installed at its beginnings with the way American Indians were treated and with slavery.

The Rittenhouse case deals mainly with the structural/institutional racism of the Court system. It has been a showcase for all to see how this structural racism works – how and why it was set up – what is to be gained by the “better than” group through the existence of institutional racism.

My background and growing up years is totally intertwined with what happened in the Courts and with what happened on the streets which came before today’s Court system. This “street happening” brings to the forefront the relationship between Blacks and Jews – which is fraught with much bigotry itself and so much more.

What didn’t come out to the general public, until after the verdict is that the men killed were Jews. They were characterized and described as “white.” That is far from the truth. Maybe it is my age, but I remember when Jews were as ostracized as blacks and when the “n” word was applied and Jews were called that and worse – all names most blacks would know and recognize. It is thought today that those words applied only to Blacks. Blacks were and are called “nigg…”. They are not the only group so called by the Northern European-ancestry group. It is spread around to the rest of the world encouraging it to pick up and use those names. East Indians are another group to whom the “n” word was applied, especially when England colonized their country.

Let me give you an example of black/jewish relationships and what happens in these United States – from my own background:

Way back when I was a young child my grandfather used to bring me regularly to #1 Audubon Place in New Orleans when he picked me up (grandparents visiting rights) and he had business with Sam Zemurray or just went to visit. I loved the house. I especially loved the dining room with its spanish feel and walking through the wrought iron decorative gates into the dining room.

My grandfather would announce his appearance by calling out to the cooks to put water in the soup because O.C.W. had arrived. Everyone thought that was funny. I also spent many a summer’s day at the Zemurray home outside of New Orleans. A kind of life I loved and embraced quickly. When we arrived, my grandfather was there to visit with Sam Zemurray and someone working on the estate was called to take care of me. Mostly that meant taking me out in a canoe on a pond from which we could see people walking around in the distance which I was told was to admire the azalea garden open to the public. I never did see that azalea garden, but I saw pieces of it because whenever a shipment of azaleas arrived at the Zemurray estate my grandfather was called and we went out to pick up the latest truly beautiful plant for his garden. Before he died my grandfather had an exquisite azalea garden in his front and back yards all from those shipments.

Other times, we went to one or the other Zemurray estate because my grandfather, with his Columbia University education, tutored two of the Zemurray children. My grandmother was a regular visitor with her skills put to use and my mother was named Doris Taylor after Doris Zemurray – Sam Zemurrays’ daughter.

It is a long involved story which needs to be told in full because it shows the beginnings of a corporation which today is dumped on because of how it developed. The story of its Black/Jewish start is nowhere to be found. That has been “whitewashed.” Could that be the history those in control wanted to hide and wound up instead with a company considered “inhumane” by others?

My great-grandfather was an Episcopal priest. He was the Rev. Dr. David Franklin Taylor. There was a strong connection between one Jewish family and one Black family way back when. My great-grandfather was a close friend of “old man”Zemurray”, the founder of United Fruit. A company which today has a horrendous reputation including in the fields of racism and more. Back then it was clear and uncontroverted that the company was founded by a Jew, but grew because of this alliance between this one Black family and this one Jewish family.

“old man” Zemurray, as he was called then, founded United Fruit by going to the docks in New Orleans with an ice cream-type push cart. The kind that would appear in most neighborhoods with the man pushing the ice cream cart jingling his bells and calling out for the children to hear and they came running with their nickels and dimes to buy ice cream.

In New Orleans there was more than one kind of such push cart. Hot tamales were sold on the street in the same way. As I recall, a dozen hot tamales from such a cart cost 45 cents.

In New Orleans, “old man Zemurray” had such a cart full of ripe bananas he picked up from the docks and some given to him by those on the ships that came into the docks. They could not be sold to the stores, for which the other bananas were sent because they were ripe and they would be black by the time they reached the stores for which they were intended. Zemurray’s business grew rapidly. He had a business selling a product for which he paid nothing. So very quickly, he went from the push cart selling bananas on the street, which is how he started United Fruit, to a business hiring employees mostly from Honduras.

Mr. Zemurray’s problems grew with his business, as happens to most who start new businesses. His were mostly personnel related. The people who came to the United States to work at United Fruit came from Honduras and had a very different culture, a different way of living and that began to cause major problems. My great-grandfather was the priest/rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church (a part of the Anglican communion). Most, if not all of those from Honduras were members of that Anglican communion and so Rev. Dr. Taylor and Mr. Zemurray formed an alliance beyond friendship into business. Rev. Taylor would work with the people United Fruit employed to help them acclimate to this American culture and Mr. Zemurray was then free to dramatically grow his business.

Today, United Fruit is a huge corporation, but that Black/Jewish beginning is almost lost in history. In today’s world it would be seen very differently from what it actually was. It was beginning to lose that history when I was growing up because Jews were beginning to call themselves “white” and the general U. S. society could not see such an alliance and friendship as one amongst equals as existed between the man who founded United Fruit and the man who was responsible for a serious part of its early growth. When I was a small child, the stories and the talk were about how United Fruit would not have existed or grown as it did without the friendship and working together of those two men – the Jew and the Black. Back then Jews were not hired to work regular jobs. In fact, it is within my lifetime that banks went from hiring no Jews to now hiring Jews for jobs up and down the bank ladder. Jews back then had to either start their own company or find some other independent way to make a living. That is what Mr. Zemurray was doing. Looking back into that history from today, it is easy to re-write it so that its real beginnings are “cleaned-up”.

When I became an adult the relationship between Blacks and Jews remained, but had changed. There were many Jews around Martin Luther King and the black civil rights movement. They were there because they were experiencing bigotry because of their Jewishness; they were struggling to overcome the “n” word and all that it implied; and they were fighting for the freedom and equality of both groups. In many places where you had to fill out forms, it was clear that Jews could not fill out and check “white’ as many do today.

All throughout the Jewish community in this country and abroad there was that alliance. Sadly, it has substantially diminished because many Jews see themselves as a part of the Northern European-ancestry group and discriminate against Blacks the same way they do.

Before we get too ‘sanctified’ I think I need to point out here that there are many Blacks who have taken the same route. The more money the more they feel “different from” those with the same skin tones and the more justified they feel in doing to other blacks what was done to them and/or their ancestors.

What the Rittenhouse case surfaced is the fact that there are still many Jews working in civil rights groups with Blacks to gain equality for both groups and so the two Jews who were killed by Rittenhouse. They were not bystanders they were participants in a movement which they and their families saw as important. They had been trained, apparently, as children not to be bystanders to benefit from the sacrifice of others, but to be participants in bringing about a world where we all enjoyed equality and took responsibility for each other.

The Court system in this country, from the smallest court to the United States Supreme Court, has grown from its beginnings to where it is today, laced with bigotry and put in place to maintain the superiority of the Northern European-ancestry male, especially over the slave.

One need look no further than the Plessy decision at the end of the 19th century which brought into being “separate but equal” as a doctrine we have had to live by and which continued and put in stone the separation of the races with non-‘white’, none Northern-European-ancestry people as those who had to be controlled and kept in an inferior place. When society could no longer keep those inequalities then the Court stepped in to make sure white was also “better than”, “superior to”, and all those other terms by which we have lived almost from day one of this country’s founding.

Brown vs the Board of Education came along and reversed the Plessy decision and we all rejoiced. However, the rejoicing became muted as we saw what that meant institutionally/structurally.

An integrated educational system has never been a reality, in spite of the Brown decision. Real estate interests, amongst others, were employed to keep that from happening. Even today, separate neighborhoods and thus segregated schools are the norm – which is one way we found around the Brown decision. What did happen was the promotion of a group called the Black Muslims or Nation of Islam which promoted the Jews as evil and tried to promote Blacks as “better than.”

The real “better than” people allowed and promoted such groups because they would cause the split between Blacks and Jews that this Northern European-ancestry group had been trying to bring about, but couldn’t because of the long history of such cooperation. They did manage to do a great deal of harm to that relationship and did help to spin a tale, even though not true. It put a lid on real equality for generations to come.

Jews didn’t help because many tried to move into the “better than” group and did everything they could to hide and move ahead without their Jewish identity showing.

The one place it was clear the “better than” people could not lose was the Court system. Lots has been happening in this Court system under our noses and we are just now awakening to the damage done. The “better than” group has been able to structure into its system what is needed to maintain bigotry. The loudest verdict so far is the Rittenhouse verdict, but more is coming. The Republican Party has focused intensely on “stacking” the Court with judges who would maintain a system of inequality where they and those like them would always win and the others would increasingly be denied their rights.

The judge, the defense attorneys, the prosecution all worked together like a well oiled machine – set up from the start of slavery and has just been given an overhaul after the shock of the general voting public having elected an African American president. It is clear the concern before that was not as strong as it is today. Not even looking at the fact that the general population in this country is now about to turn majority-minority. That was true in the south during Reconstruction. There were blacks elected to Congress, to their state legislatures and in all areas of the south. That was not so true of the north. The majority of citizens in the south were black and mostly former slaves.

Violence raises its head quite high today – as it did when there was a threat of African Americans gaining equality. The huge threat in Tulsa-Black Wall Street – brought the ancestors of those who are the white terrorists of today out to kill Blacks who seemed to be gaining equality and in fact, had achieved more than they and/or their families had achieved in terms of education and finance.

Today that is also beginning to be true as you look around at the condition of today’s minorities and so we are attacking and attempting to eliminate generational wealth of minorities, health, property and more of those considered “less than” and we are doing it through a corrupted Court system.

Take a close look at your Courts. Many incorporate a mafia where all else fails. In Massachusetts who was head of the Court system? Whitey Bulger’s brother. The problems we are facing in the Courts in these United States are much larger than we will talk about, write about or attempt to rectify.

Amen?

FACEBOOK, AirBNB and all the other startups turned billion dollar corporations!

Monday, October 4th, 2021

There are some things we know, but do not talk about. We flesh out our knowing with hypocrisy, lies, reasons which we know are false and more.

For example, we know there are minuscule amounts of minorities who receive investment money for their startups and lets include women in that group. We don’t really stop to analyze what, why, how to change things.

At Bettina’s we became involved in all of this when – and you know the story by now – the Capital Network, a group funded by and involved with the City of Cambridge – sent three white males to one of the homes in the Bettina Network, inc. – to see what they were doing and to steal the idea and anything else they could in the process.

It was Cambridge working its structural racism making sure a black-owned business, with great potential, did not succeed in its territory. It was Cambridge pulling on its structural racism, solidly in place today, to force blacks who were moving too far too fast to back down and/or move out.

Out of that came AirBnB. A company whose founders used several stealth ways to steal from Bettina’s. The Business Plan; by sending people in to steal as much more as possible; whenever they ran into something they couldn’t fathom, more calls to Bettina’s without identifying who or what to keep their business idea looking as though it was really theirs….and on and on. A prototype for business development in this society.

At the time, Bettina people were going to the Thursday afternoon meetings of the Capital Network, inc. trying to understand and apply for and get better acquainted with the “investor class.”

That was a waste of time.

After the visit of the three guys who had never before been to a bed & breakfast, talked about not even knowing private homes could be put together in a Network, etc. etc. Bettina people went to the next Thursday afternoon gathering of the Capital Network and were surprised to see their company name had been taken down and they were held at the door because they were no longer listed as part of the group.

Someone who knew Bettina’s appeared and re-entered Bettina’s as a part of this group with their name appearing on the board letting people know they were “in the space”. An “oversight” they said. Even though Bettina’s was at the Thursday meeting the previous week and the one before that, etc. they were ‘unintentionally’ dropped.

As we discovered a few years later, substantial investment money was given to the three white guys forming AirBnB and the black folks – male and female – developing Bettina’s were totally cut out and had to fight for their continued existence, fighting one swipe across the bow after another, rather than continuing to move ahead with their business, which was growing substantially.

Friends began to appear talking about their problems, not knowing that Bettina’s was going through the same thing. These friends start-ups, which were right on the verge of expanding exponentially, but without the funds to do so and able to expanding only on current income, which we all know doesn’t work – caught our attention and time to research asking the question what do we have in common?

“This” – was and is the way this society maintains itself as northern european-ancestry white males.

Seeing and following that bit of structural racism, we tried everything but the system was tight, immovable and carefully constructed to eliminate and destroy anyone trying to do something different. Something different is and was to attempt to build a new business idea into a billion dollar plus business. Anything which looked as though it had that potential was stolen and the minority and female founders were put through horrendous experiences to handicap their following through with what looked to everyone as fantastic. Not only was their business handicapped with few to no investors of substances, but their daily lives were destroyed in as vile and ugly a way as possible to keep them from being able to wind up being competition.

At the same time we noticed a parallel occurrence. There were white males treated the same way. Not as crudely, but there were similarities. For example, Facebook – was founded on an ethical fault line. Like AirBnB this was not Zuckerberg’s idea, it was one he stole from others and promoted as his own. When all of this became public, it was ignored and had little to no affect on the growth of Facebook. It certainly did not slow down or dampen investor enthusiasm.

Given its unethical beginnings where was it supposed to go and how was it supposed to get that unethical mess out of its structure? That does not happen, it just grows with the business and that is what has happened.

These were not just “thefts” by people on the outside looking in who saw something, picked up the core idea and went on their own to fill in the rest. This was “theft” in the crudest way which screamed to all who could hear the very unethical way it was done. This spoke volumes about the ethics of those involved.

What we saw was that unethical base of those doing the stealing was what the “investors” – conscious of it or not – were looking for in an entrepreneur they would fund. Take a look around and see the history.

Today we have people speaking out loud and clear with proof about the highly unethical way of Facebook. What we don’t understand is why the surprise? That has been known for quite some time and has been pointed out to the many. The result – you could almost hear the cheers as Zuckerberg was embraced as one of our own. He could be “trusted” to be someone who develops and developed a company which could almost be called the Devil’s Spawn.

We are a society which has developed “big” businesses on the most evil platforms. That seems to be what the West Coast investor class looks for as do all the rest. That is not done above board, but the choices made show clearly the ethical base of those doing the choosing.

We are watching and experiencing horribleness because of those beginnings – and – the history is carefully ignored with claims that this history is irrelevant as the company has grown. And yes, it has grown but its beginnings are structured into the company because that willingness to do whatever it took is a foul beginning which takes on a life of its own within the corporate structure. We seem to be programmed to blot that out and try to achieve a good result from that kind of beginning. Is that our laziness or our evil side.

In the Christian Scripture there is a story of Satan tempting Jesus with all kinds of earthly delights. He takes none of them but sticks to the business about which he has come. It seems that from this story there has come a long line of people who called out to Satan asking to be given the same choices. They were and this is the result.

There is an unwritten, not talked about agreement amongst investors who get such companies off the ground that monies will be spent developing businesses which have structured bigotry into their corporate forms, boardrooms, etc. and which have structured – anything goes if it gets us where we want to go let the ethics of what we are doing be damned. We are smart enough to give back an intellectualized reason which sounds good to deflect, at least as long as we need to deflect, those who would hold up to the general universe what we are doing which is and will continue to hurt our world, our galaxy and put our human species in jeopardy of extermination by itself.

May God’s judgment be swift and sure.

Christianity/Love/Sex

Thursday, September 2nd, 2021

If you are Christian you struggle constantly to understand and explain all those Christians who seem to purposefully take the Lord’s name in vain as they use it and much more to justify their greed, power needs and more by putting a Christian title on them. They not only justify but redefine what is right and live by a set of ethics, as Christians, that would make Jesus recoil.

If you are in the other group of Christians trying to live by the Gospels and more, you struggle constantly trying to explain and understand what this first group believes and how can they call themselves Christians. They have been doing that since they were slave owners, climate change deniers, genocidal to those not culturally and physically like them.

If you are not Christian you look askance at what you see and use that first group to say – Thank God I am not a Christian.

From what we have seen it all comes down to Love vs Sex. Reach out to someone in “love” and they will almost always translate that friendship overture as sexual. A friendship in this society based on love is practically non-existent. We don’t know such and can’t understand such so we push it away.

It took us many years to understand how love and sex are used in religion generally and Christianity in particular.

To a Christian – God is love! The beginning and end of the theology.

But the problems begin there because what does “love” mean? We think we know, but actually we define love to be what is most convenient to our lifestyle and generally that is using the term “love” to actually mean and talk about “sex.”

Love covers everything. Male/Female/Animals/Insects, etc. But we limit it to covering humans – male and female – and then we define and segment love into love of family, love of another human being and more. We then define sin by using love – defining the ‘wrong kind’ and then making those who fall into the categories we set up as living in sin.

It is quite a society we have created and we have blamed God or claimed our society is ordained by God and comes from God. Christianity blames Jesus.

We are just coming out of a huge fight over marriage. We claim marriage is of God and by God and more. Don’t know where that came from because marriage is clearly a state phenomena. You are married by the state. Even ordained ministers have to get a special license to marry people and those who are not ordained can apply for a license to marry others without being “ordained.” But we, this glorious society, which has defined everything in varying degrees of good or evil (sinful) according to that things’ cultural background, have been part of a fight to keep “marriage” as an institution only available to a “couple” defined as one man and one woman. That fight has pretty well ended, but others are beginning over “love”.

We have “illicit love”, “illegal love”, and so much more, which if we look clearly we would find none of what we talk about is what Christ defined as love in the Scriptures.

Christ talked about love – we denigrate the term by meaning the feeling we get when we are sexually attracted and we have used that belief to destroy, demean, discredit others. Love in our society is about power and control. It is about who is better than others because of who they “love” and who is less then and to be demeaned and sometimes even jailed for who they “love.”

Think about your use of the term “love” and the next time you have to deal with that concept see if you can seek out and destroy the “sex” that is there as a part of what you mean. Doing that over time one can come out with a pure love which follows biblical teachings.

Most people marry because of a sexual not a love connection. People come together in culturally defined groups because of a sexual attraction – “love of self”. How strong is it to bond with people who are like you. How difficult to maintain a friendship bond with someone who comes from a very different cultural background and has different physical features. How strong is it to feel a love for the other and the superiority of you and others in the group over those unlike you physically, politically, financially. Take a look at what those feelings really are about and sex is hiding in the corner.

It is no accident that the issues of the group of Christians who fight to take power and control to have their ethical base be universal generally look alike, think closely similar thoughts, and need to enforce their feelings, their ways of being on others under the guise of the superiority of their Christianity. What strips them of their cover and claim that they are taking the Lord’s name in vain comes from the fact that most of their issues within that group of Christians are about sex. Who can have sex with who and how. What does love mean and its existence only true amongst certain groups. The miscegnation laws came from that need. Abortion is the current issue and it is promoted with great vigor and lots of emotion. An issue claimed to be a Christian issue about love and what Christ ordained is really about power and based in sex?

A friendship between a man and a woman is suspect because if it is a close love relationship we don’t believe it exists without sex. In fact, very few of us believe there can be a love relationship between a man and a woman without sex. With the opening up of relationships we don’t believe there can be a relationship between same sex people without sex being the motivator or being involved.

It is sad that we are going further down the rat hole of abusing the term love to mean whatever we need it to mean to either sway some people or destroy others. May we repent our abuses of Christian love and live a life which moves us closer to being what God has called us to be – totally in love with one another without sex hiding in the shadows to destroy that love potential and grab it quickly to turn it into power, jealousy, destruction and more.

A Reader Submits A Response!

Monday, August 23rd, 2021

I have been reading what has and is happening to Rev. Dr. Bennett and his wife. I knew them well enough to say hello, but that is about all. What I saw of them and was most impressed by – they were always helping someone steady their lives and move on. It was not a big deal and never involved a lot of money, from what I could see. They used their friends, acquaintances and strangers to help another human being get their lives on a better track.

This article is my way of trying to help them. Sometimes helping others understand is the best you can give to one another.

I am a black journalist. Having worked in several places, including Boston, it struck me that what has been true of Massachusetts for generations is still true, only being done in a different way – and – the African Americans being negatively affected are different people. Shame has kept those I knew from fighting back, they just wanted to crawl into a hole someplace and be quiet. Rev. Bennett and his wife are putting everything happening to them out in public. Kudos! May it ever be so for everyone and so the system will buckle and break and racism will be a thing of the past.

My family was very negatively affected during their time living in the Greater Boston area. There was always something blocking them; something making their lives difficult. It wasn’t until they moved and were able to look back did they realize and understand who and what was attacking them – and they were being attacked.

As a young person I didn’t understand that. As I have grown older and seen much more of the world and learned of the history of that part of the country, understanding has helped me and has majorly helped my family.

Massachusetts – especially the Greater Boston area – was a part of the country that did not allow African Americans to migrate and live within its borders unless you came “in service”. In other words, unless you were of the ‘servant class.’ I do not say this to denigrate anyone, just to speak truth. That maintained in a very vicious way until my mother’s generation and then it changed. It did not go away, it just morphed to keep that part of institutional racism hidden and to keep up with the times.

One exception that began to be made over time was – if you were hired by Harvard University. The assumption was you would never reach the heights in that Massachusetts Society to threaten the need for New Englanders to feel their identity as part of a group which is greater than and above others.

Today, I am living in the south and it is a very different place. I used to turn my intellectual nose up at southerners, especially African Americans. My assumption was they were somehow intellectually inferior. That came from my New England upbringing.

Racism in Massachusetts is some of the vilest I have seen. Having lived many places, that is my experience.

If, as an African American, you achieve too much, the ‘powers that be’ begin to destroy your life. Either move out or be denigrated, destroyed, stripped of everything you have. It is a racism that is and has been very effective, especially since it is practiced by those pulling the strings and those who simply see someone being pulled down and decide to help because somehow that helps them – white, black, no matter – lots participate.

In my mother’s generation that began to change. There is one caveat. If you are African American and you are ambitious you have to have the traits that New England society deems necessary in its African American or you will be taken down.

I can see what has happened to Rev. Dr. Bennett and his wife. They were not “adopted by” the establishment. They are not willing participants in maintaining the status quo and being one of those willing to do their part of taking down and blocking the path of another African American.

I can hear the howls of protest as you read this. I thought long and hard before writing it, but someone has to stand up and speak truth. This is also much more difficult to write than I thought it would be. This is getting done painfully and pulling on my insides where some excruciating memories live.

My family moved out of the Boston area. They were not ready to adopt or adapt to White Male English Culture and so they didn’t fit and since they were quite intelligent, very well educated and entrepreneurial, they had to go or they would be destroyed. I saw what happened to them over a few years and there is a parallel to what is happening to the Bennett family.

My wish for the Bennett family is that they maintain their personal integrity and always continue to be who they are without making the decision to pick up the “yes ma’m and yes sir” style very prevalent among African Americans in the Greater Boston area. Those who have and are succeeding without blockages, if you notice, have a uniqueness about them. They will never accuse anyone of racism – even if true and needs to be said. They will never step out of a stereotype which makes whites comfortable. They will maintain as low key and invisible as they can and mostly they will polish their ability to make whites as comfortable around them as possible. Which translates to mean they will maintain on a level to make changes only when whites are ready for those changes and choose them to move ahead with the activity which creates those changes.

Even as a journalist, I don’t know how to end this. It has been extremely difficult to write because it is so personal and because I know how negatively it will be received. Sometimes you have to put lessons you have learned through your life out there without caring about how others react. Very rare in journalism, very rare for me.

Generational Wealth, Minorities and Criminal Conspiracies!

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

It is amazing what is happening in the United States around “generational wealth.” An area to reduce the number of minorities achievements and especially to help to put a cap on how high they can go. A few will slip through, but other blockages are going up for them. This one is for those who could move quite far with the wealth acquired and put aside for them by their parents and other relatives in their parents generation. How it is being taken and repurposed so it will benefit white male northern european ancestry people in these United States.

What happened to Robert and Marceline was about the attempt to strip them of whatever they had so it would benefit white northern european ancestry people and their families. Well, until recently, when we became aware of minorities gathering around to do the same thing to other minorities. Are we such a country so full of greed that this is how we treat one another?

What happened and continues to happen to Robert is a well established pattern with the same people involved, basically stripping the elderly of their wealth with the help of the state and the Court. We are appalled, but no longer in disbelief. It is too clear for denials.

We believe this is a criminal conspiracy.

The pattern:

  1. An attorney comes along with a client to make the claim in Court that the target is “indigent”. The opposite of what they know, but what is needed to get the Court to relax its standards and help these poor minority elderly almost destitute folks.

2. The attorney asks – on behalf of their client that the person involved not be notified of motions, etc. That the hearings be held without their knowledge. After all, this is an “indigent”, elderly person who we can’t afford to allow to have any rights. The goal is to strip every right the person has to make it easier to strip their earthly goods.

3. Usually the tact taken is to claim the person has some kind of mental illness, shove them into the psych ward of a cooperating hospital – or at the least a hospital where there are people working who are cooperating or who can be bamboozled.

4. Have the Court appoint an attorney to represent this person – stripping away the persons right to choose their own attorney. And again, without notifying the person for whom an attorney is being appointed. The attorney will be paid by the state – but not named in the hearing. The naming of the attorney who will fill this role will be done by the attorney who first brought the action representing, most probably, a state agency.

5. All of the above and more done within hours on the same day. No notice to the target and move quickly before anyone realizes what is happening.

6. Have the named attorney file the basic case without the knowledge, consent or involvement of the target on any level. Mental illness comes first in the line. Indigent comes second with the person filing a motion with the Court that they are indigent and the state needs to pay the attorney. Usually that is enough to move along to hiring a psychiatrist, paid for by the state, to declare the target “incapacitated” and make sure Mass Health (in Massachusetts, some other group in other states) is either already in place or has been applied for because nursing homes don’t take patients who don’t have Mass Health or its equivalent.

7. Shove the person into a nursing home after their stay in the psych ward of a hospital which has declared them “incapacitated” after a substantial bout on drugs that have incapacitated them and the patient then takes their “incapacitated” status with them.

8. The attorneys then show up again and motion for a “temporary guardian” declaring the person without family or anyone else capable of being the “temporary guardian” without the control of assets, but shortly there after for full guardianship with control of the persons assets.

9. The attorneys know every detail of the targets assets, where and how to reach them and whatever else they need to know – told to them by Mass Health which gives the attorneys a well documented map to all of the targets assets. You don’t need to have been accepted for Mass Health. This is mostly for those who don’t qualify – too many assets and income – but even the application gives the attorneys that much needed asset map. The goal? To know where to place liens, etc. to gain ownership of the assets of this person who is now in a nursing home, under restraint, alone because family and friends are not allowed to visit and declared without “executive functioning” to be able to live alone. When you do the research, however, you find many of these folks have family and close friends who have been driven away by the attorneys and their ‘helpers’ and the state agency and, of course, the requisite home health care people who are key to this entire thing being successful.

10. The target, at this point, has been pumped full of an incredible array of drugs usually including anti-psychotics which becomes legal because of the court’s going along with the program with very little to no oversight and the group – usually a guardianship corporation which the attorney oversees – in charge of this elderly soon to be destitute person starts the process of drawing down the elderly persons’ assets.

11. The end of that persons life is made horrendous because others want to strip them of whatever they have managed to accumulate over a lifetime. Usually they end up in a state of shock in constraints in a nursing home – preferably one where COVId-19 is raging or some other kind of illness awaits to help shorten their life to run on a parallel track with the drawing down of their assets. Death when the assets run out is a particularly good outcome.

Insurance is a major part of the stripping and drawing down – it can provide in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to institutions involved.

Retaliation or Coincidence?

Friday, June 11th, 2021

by: Marceline Donaldson

So much harassment has happened since the last Bettina Network Blog was circulated. That last article was about the $300,000.00 and counting drained from our assets by Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services. I should add, since our horribilis experience we have discovered several African Americans and Jews who have had similar experiences and wound up the poorer for the experience – by the same state agency.

That does not surprise me. I sent a copy of the $300,000.00 article to the Governor of Massachusetts’ office and received a response back which sent me to the COVID-19 resources available within the state.

That particular Bettina Network blog was released on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, we received a citation brought to the door by a Cambridge City employee, citing us for having growth over the sidewalk, clogged sidewalk gutters, out of control grass that supposedly needed cutting and a lot more. None of the claims were true.

When we went outside to check, we realized we have no lawn and so no overgrown grass. We garden constantly and we love flowers and flowering trees. As a result there were flowers blooming all around the property. The Cambridge City employee was there supposedly because of a neighbor complaint. And we have had neighbor problems. Recently, those problems have escalated with new neighbors on the block who apparently have a real problem with African Americans living so close.

There were leaves on the sidewalk after a memorable weather time. Considering the many trees on the property that was no surprise. Rain for several days followed by a heat wave had many trees dropping leaves. We took pictures because we wanted to document what is clearly harassment.

We called the relevant Cambridge city department and were treated abominably. We called the Cambridge City employee and he was worse. Hope in this picture came from the Cambridge Mayor’s office which we hope is real and there is follow through.

We do have a fairly new neighbor who has, apparently, been shocked and angry about discovering an African American family on their corner.

One person from the fairly new neighbor’s house walked their small dog and brought him to our garden. We watched from the window as he picked up the dog and put it in our garden to crap. I went outside to say that is criminal trespass and I would appreciate him not bringing his dog to have its bowel movements in my garden. In a fit of anger he resorted to calling me the “N” word and stomped on my toes suggesting we move.

After he aggressively came to within an inch on my face he looked fearful, picked up his dog and practically ran away. I was a bit confused. All of that anger turned into fear within a few seconds? I realized why when I turned around and there was my husband coming around the corner. He saw what happened through the window and came out to make sure I would not be further hurt.

It was totally amazing to see the anger on this neighbors’ face turn so quickly into fear and watch him grab his dog and practically run away. Who was he running from? A very slightly built African American man. But then I realized, I saw a slightly built African American man who didn’t look threatening at all. I wondered what my husband looked like through his eyes.

We waited outside until he had gone around the block to make sure he was a neighbor. As he came around, walking from Brattle Street, we saw him with his dog enter the house where we had fairly new neighbors.

Next act of harassment came from the Department of Revenue of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Having filed joint income tax returns since we married several decades ago, imagine our surprise to get threatening notices from the DOR charging Robert for income tax they claimed he had not paid from his individual income tax returns.

Amazingly, Robert does not and did not file an individual income tax return. Someone called us from the DOR with threats. We thought it was a ruse or a scam. It turned out to be the real DOR. He said Robert needed to pay his overdue taxes from his individually filed return. Since Robert did not file an individual tax return ever, that was mystifying. Is there something about Robert that he must file joint returns with his wife and then individually by himself?

This all started happening around the time the SCES and the police started to invade our space. We challenged it for months, but to no avail. That telephone call came right after the $300,000.00 Bettina Network blog was circulated.

We have had enough such experiences that I could go on writing to produce a book. I won’t because as a younger person I read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and it took me a long time to recover. I don’t want to do that to others. However, I want this publicly known. We have come across too many people in this Cambridge area with similar and worse problems because of age, race, sex, etc. We have seen them ignored and broken. Clearly, the media in the Greater Boston area is totally uninterested in any of this. I have called them and had the reporters hang up on me. Others have had similar experiences, which were brought to us because of shared experiences and our interest in this community not glazing over serious and very long standing bigotry.

I could add the story about the bank which stopped sending statements for a couple years -timed very nicely to what happened to Robert – and restarted only very recently. That is only one such problem with the same bank – there are many more – but that is for another day.

Just a little bit to let you know what its like to be African American in the City of Cambridge and to be African American living in Harvard Square. Within our little historical district I have not found another African American buying into the neighborhood in 38 years. Is that by choice – there aren’t any qualified? Blockage by realtors? – goodness knows we have referred several moving to this area who seemed to be steered someplace else? Something in the air that pushed African American home buyers away? Something else?

$300,000.00 – and climbing! The amount spent to destroy the marriage, business, life and health of an African American family!

Sunday, June 6th, 2021

Rev. Dr. Robert Bennett and his family are still trying to recover from the anti-psychotic drugs given to him daily in Mass General Hospital when he clearly did not want to be in the hospital and did not want all of the drugs forced down his system.

Dr. Bennett was forced to take many drugs which he did not want and had no idea what they were or why he was having to take them. Hallucinatory drugs and many more were given to Dr. Bennett on a daily basis for five weeks at MGH when he was forced into the hospital a second time after having been discharged at MGH from the police enforced incarceration after a psychiatric exam determined there was no reason for him to be kept. That discharge on March 4th was with all vitals normal, including blood pressure. One of the drugs he was given less than two days later was blood pressure medications. From his discharge from MGH until today, he has not been prescribed blood pressure medications because they are not necessary.

Dr. Bennett was forced into MGH, not for medical reasons. We think it was because of the greed of those pushing him into a horrible space so the generational wealth of an African American family would not be passed on to the heirs, but would be drained off by those who forced Dr. Bennett into the psych ward and police ward of MGH.

Dr. Bennett was forced into the hospital on March 3rd by a psychiatrist, a Dr. Warner, who was affiliated with Mount Auburn Hospital. Dr. Bennett had no relationship with either Mount Auburn Hospital or the psychiatrist. He was never at Mount Auburn Hospital even for a checkup.

The people behind the psychiatrist who forced Dr. Bennett into the hospital on a Section 12 – psychiatric charge – also had no relationship with him. They had never talked to him, never interviewed him for any reason and he is one of several African Americans so treated. The end result? The Jews, Blacks and other minorities so treated had their assets taken along with their reputation and their family destroyed fighting abuse and other such charges. What a way to rid this society of its successful minority citizens.

How did we know of the drugs he was forced to take? MGH sent bottles of drugs home with him demanding that a Home Health Care Service monitor his continued intake of these drugs on a daily basis or Dr. Bennett would be forced back into the hospital. The drugs made him ill after taking them and as he began to recover it was time to take the drugs again. This was not the Home Health Care Service attached to MGH. This was the group put in place by SCES.

At this point we started to read the Bettina Network Blog – with which Dr. Bennett is affiliated and it gave answers to our most basic question – why?

The psychiatrists at MGH sent Dr. Bennett home from that first forced incarceration. All vitals normal including blood pressure and no mental health issues.

The very next day Cambridge Somerville Elder and Protective Services with their attorney O’Sullivan were back in Court having the police pick him up again and force him into the hospital. They had no proof . They had a sworn statement by the head of Cambridge’s Protective Services – Nora Al Wetaid. Ms. Al Wetaid has had no conversation with Dr. Bennett. She claimed his wife abused him and he had to be removed from his home immediately because the abuse was so horrendous and he had no one to turn to or to care for him. SCES also claimed he was alone with no place to go so he was brought to MGH. THE TRUTH? In Dr. Bennett’s home at the time were his adult children, and his daughter-in-law. The family is also surrounded by many other family and friends to whom either one could have turned for help. Ms. Al Wetaid did not know that because her job, apparently, was to have Dr. Bennett demeaned, disgraced, destroyed financially so she could benefit.

What is most amazing SCES and the attorney supporting them along with others along the way did not know Dr. Bennett or his wife. They had never met him – never had a conversation of any kind with him, knew nothing about him and yet they gathered together to have him incarcerated in a psych ward – their hospital of choice was Mount Auburn Hospital.

Dr. Bennett did not go to Mount Auburn Hospital because his wife was going to throw herself under the ambulance if they tried to take him there. It is not a hospital either one would choose. Since both knew quite a bit about local hospitals – Dr. Bennett’s wife having served for a time as chaplain at Deaconness, among others and Dr. Bennett, as an ordained priest who responded to requests from people needing help as priests are expected to do – they have quite an in-depth knowledge about local hospitals.

MGH knew better. Their psychiatrists had examined Dr. Bennett the first time SCES forced him into the hospital against his wishes and found no reason to keep him. They did nothing except accept a patient who would bring lots of money into the hospital because of this incarceration.

Involved in this, we believe, was the fight amongst hospitals as they push to gain patients. This started, after all, by the police pushing into Dr. Bennett’s home to force him into Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. There has been quite a bit circulating about such competitiveness amongst hospitals which comes at the expense of a patients health. Here is a clear cut example.

If we had to give a verdict about all of this it would be that this is how the generational wealth of minorities is being drained so that White Supremacist have an easier time maintaining the oppression and more that they have traditionally practiced against minorities. From our investigation this has been practiced particularly against Jews. It is now being practiced against Blacks and other minorities. Much wealth has changed hands from minority to white quickly without notice using the guardianship laws in these United States. Even those minorities with small estates find themselves destitute and indigent. Not before this happened to them, but at the end of the process.

Dr. Bennett had just been discharged – two days earlier – from Mass General Hospital after what appears to have been successful brain surgery.

Dr. Bennett had been in MGH for brain surgery. He was there for a week and recovered beautifully. During that entire week not one doctor involved in the surgery talked to Dr. Bennett’s wife in spite of her asking to speak to them each day she arrived to visit. They ignored this African American woman who had been married to this African American man for 38 years. In talking to him and her they had a very happy and solid 38 year marriage with no hint of anything negative – especially not abuse. Here, we believe, the negative stereotype of African American women comes into play. In addition, the racism we found through all of this was extreme and horrendous.

In fact, the Protective Services at MGH finally decided there had been no abuse. They decided that after some $200,000 was spent on medical services at MGH.

Rehab was another issue that caused horrendous suffering to the Bennett family. Without either Dr. Bennett or his wife (who was his HCP) had any discussions with anyone as to rehab and the choice of a place. Dr. Bennett was not in favor of rehab. He had expressed a choice of Spaulding as did his wife. Instead, with no discussion of any kind, Dr. Bennett was forced into rehab at Sherrill House.

Interesting to note that when one enters Sherrill House the color is brown to black. When one enters Spaulding the color is white with very little of any other color. Is this how those places are maintained as segregated? It happens at the hospital before the patient leaves?

Without any discussion, Dr. Bennett was forced into Sherrill House. His wife arrived at MGH to visit and was told Dr. Bennett had been sent by ambulance to Sherrill House. What neither one knew, but what MGH and Sherrill House knew was that Sherrill House was going under quarantine because of the flu in their midst. They knew that before MGH sent Dr. Bennett to Sherrill House and Sherrill House knew that before accepting him. Sherrill House, however, waited until Dr. Bennett arrived to declare their quarantine and so subjected Dr. Bennett to the flu for their own profit related reasons. When the quarantine became clear, Dr. Bennett decided he wanted to go home where it was much safer and his wife took him home.

Next day, in Court, Dr. Bennett is declared “indigent” – destitute and not able to pay for an attorney to defend himself against actions filed against him by Nora Al Wetaid and Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services ordering the police to take him out of his home to Mount Auburn Hospital.

Interesting to us is the fact that Dr. Bennett was not so destitute that Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services – who brought this action – saw to it that Dr. Bennett was charged for just about everything. Bills have poured into the Bennett home having been created for them by Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services. None of the bills were authorized nor agreed to by the Bennetts. Amazing that Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services did not think he was destitute when it came to charging the bills they created. It is also interesting that the bills SCES found some other way to get paid – ie by the state – are those that paid for the people they wanted involved so they would be able to control both sides of this issue.

Dr. Bennett has been personally charged as well as through his insurance for bills he did not create and for services he neither needed nor wanted. His right to choose who would supply whatever services he did need and want was completely taken away from him by SCES.

Dr. Warner, the psychiatrist, who signed the Court Documents to commit Dr. Bennett to the police ward and psych ward of Mount Auburn Hospital and who knew Dr. Bennett had been sent to MGH instead and discharged from MGH countering her claim, showed up at MGH later to be the “Independent Examiner” paid for by the state to give Dr. Bennett anti-psychotics amongst other medicines to be able to declare Dr. Bennett ‘incapacitated” and Attorney Cheri Myette, appointed as Dr. Bennett’s attorney by the opposing attorney – O’Sullivan, was also paid by the state. Attorney Myette was paid by the state after Dr. Bennett’s wife hired and paid attorneys to represent Dr. Bennett. An entire system conspiring to take away basic rights from an African American citizen of these United States. The people needed to be a part of this incredible criminal conspiracy were state of Massachusetts funded. Everything else was billed to Dr. Bennett.

From other such situations we have investigated, the state is usually repaid after the person so attacked is shoved into a nursing home for life with the claim that they are totally unable to care for themselves with no one around to care for them.

One African American escaped the nursing home he was shoved into and constrained in bed after he was declared to have no “Executive Functioning” and no ability to either provide or care for himself. He had to escape being constrained in a bed in a nursing home to have a life of freedom instead of incarceration on psychiatric drugs. He had a family who cared for him and they were charged with abuse. He also had to escape because while in the nursing home, the state was in the process of taking all of his assets. Somehow, this does not meet the SCES criteria for a person having no Executive Functioning, no ability to either provide or care for himself, etc.

So the attempt to incapacitate Dr. Bennett and claim that his wife abused him was not the first African Americans have had to fight. Unfortunately, this is happening to the elderly who mostly don’t have the experience, or circle of supporters to be able to fight such. They are shoved into the nursing home after an agency takes guardianship over the person, including their assets. Those assets are drained down and the state reimbursed. The elderly person dies and causes no distress to anyone. No need to account for anything and that ends that story. The whites are richer and the minorities dead.

In the case of Dr. Bennett, SCES went to Probate Court. They asked that Dr. Bennett not be notified of the hearing. They described Dr. Bennett as very old, indigent, alone with no one to care for him and he was a psychiatric threat to the community.

The Court knew Dr. Bennett knew nothing about that hearing because SCES asked that he not be informed. The Court objected to Dr. Bennett not being informed about the hearing and appointed an attorney. Not a named attorney, but just an attorney.

Attorney O’Sullivan, who was representing SCES decided that attorney would be Attorney Cheri Myette. So , in effect, the opposing attorney appointed the attorney who would be appearing in Dr. Bennett’s name.

The Court, with a new judge now in place, said to Attorney Myette that she should contact her “client”. She did not, but she did file a motion in his name including a claim – under oath by the attorney – in which Dr. Bennett was supposed to be swearing to the fact that he was “indigent.” Dr. Bennett knew nothing about this. Attorney Myette apparently felt she could make such claims in a motion all on her own without her “client” knowing anything about the motion – have the motion impounded so no one would be able to read it or know of the charges – and the case then goes on from there with no one knowing how it got started. Common with the cases we have investigated is the confusion the people so pushed around have, not knowing nor understanding where all of the mess and upheaval came from because there is nothing showing that answers any of those origination questions. The answers to those questions have been hidden in the bowels of the Court.

There is a blog in this Bettina collection of blogs which replicates the statement Dr. Bennett made denying that he made such a statement and saying clearly he knew nothing about the motion – nothing about an attorney being appointed to represent him – etc. That statement is notarized.

Attorney Myette was appointed and filed the motion accusing his wife of abusing him – knowing full well that was not true. She wrote the motion as though it was being written by Dr. Bennett in which he claimed and ‘swore’ to being “indigent” and in need of state funds – knowing full well that was also not true. Attorney Myette did all of this within an hour or two of her being named Attorney for Dr. Bennett by the attorney representing SCES – Attorney O’Sullivan. The one thing Attorney Myette did not do was to contact her supposed client. No one saw any need to notify Dr. Bennett of any of this. Why would one bother to confuse everything by getting an African American man involved – his stereotype and the stereotype of his African American wife was enough. Winning usually means dealing with the stereotype instead of the real person.

How many elderly have lost their lives, their estates, their family because of this kind of attack?

Interesting that the people doing the filing knew 1) Dr. Bennett was not destitute nor indigent at the time and 2) they knew Dr. Bennett had just left MGH so why the push to immediately take him to Mount Auburn Hospital just a day or two after he left MGH where his records, etc. were?

Dr. Bennett’s wife turned to a friend to recommend an attorney. Caroline Tribe recommended Shippen Page. Ms. Donaldson hired Shippen Page who in turn hired Lisa Cukier with Burns & Levinson. Ms. Cukier to represent Dr. Bennett. Attorney Page to represent Ms. Donaldson.

That didn’t quite happen the way it was planned. Ms. Cukier decided to represent Ms. Donaldson, without Ms. Donaldson’s knowledge or consent. In the process of that representation it was clear Ms. Cukier’s respect for her client was non-existent. One condition Ms. Donaldson had before hiring Ms. Cukier was that she agrees to file an emergency motion to have Dr. Bennett released from the prison of the hospital (MGH) where he was being held in a locked ward with guards outside the ward and being fed medicines without his knowledge or consent with no one knowing what he was being fed when he was supposedly not in the hospital for medical reasons, but according to the papers filed, because of the claimed abuse and the claim that Dr. Bennett was alone in a house with his wife who was abusing him. In actual fact, in the house were Dr. Bennett’s two adult children and a daughter-in-law. All black so they could be discarded as irrelevant.

Once hired, Ms. Cukier did not file the emergency motion, but decided to wait until the hearing date for the motion – which was a bit into the future giving everyone time to do what was necessary to attempt to incapacitate Dr. Bennett, create a medical record which is spurious along with a number of other activities which our investigation shows were meant to drain Dr. Bennett’s assets along with the assets of his wife, which is apparently the reason they had to accuse her of abuse – to open the door to opening the door to their home to be able to use it to line their pockets. We have talked about in the past because we have talked to several people – African Americans and Jews who were subjected to the same and whose assets were drained and they were left much poorer after what turned out to be trumped up charges.

When Ms. Cukier was hired she asked for a retainer and her terms were that once the retainer was paid Ms. Donaldson would receive monthly bills every 30 days which she would be expected to pay within 30 days.

Things didn’t quite work out that way.

The retainer was paid promptly. The day of the hearing, much less than 30 days into Ms. Cukier being hired, Ms. Cukier called Ms. Donaldson to say she should bring to her home $9,000 because this is what was needed. She changed the terms of her hiring. In addition, she said she would not appear at the 4pm hearing that was to happen that day unless Ms. Donaldson showed up at her home with the $9,000. This was just a few hours before the hearing took place. She also was very clear that Ms. Donaldson was not to go to her front door, but she ordered this African American woman to take the money and go to the back door to deliver it.

Those of you who know Ms. Donaldson, know that did not happen. Ms. Cukier and her assistant called several times about the money and the abusive telephone calls so unnerved Ms. Donaldson she could not function for several few days.

At the same time, there was an email from Attorney Page asking about the motion response Ms. Cukier intended to file because it left out very important and relevant information and he didn’t understand why.

The motion papers did not make the Court aware of the fact that Dr. Bennett had been discharged from MGH less than two days before he was forced out of his home on a Section 12 (psychiatric charges) and the papers said he was fine. They noted his vital signs were normal including his blood pressure.

Ms. Cukier did not change her filing to include that fact. Reading what she submitted it is clear to us those submissions were to keep Dr. Bennett in MGH. Ms. Cukier ignored Attorney Page’s concerns as well as the concerns of others.

This was clearly shaping up to look exactly like a criminal conspiracy which has happened to other minority elders who have suffered much in the process – and some died.

We won’t outline everything that happened, however, this resulted in Attorney Page resigning – Ms. Donaldson discovering much that had been kept from her – Ms. Donaldson firing Ms. Cukier – Ms. Cukier continuing on in spite of the fact that she had been fired for some really strange actions which appear to be those meant to work with Attorney O’Sullivan to attain his and Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services’ goals. They have some serious problems which clearly are not going to be addressed. From what we have seen they are allowed to very irresponsibly destroy the quality and life of others.

Doing research we find Ms. Cukier involved in other places – similar – where she made legal moves which we think are questionable.

This, plus everything else involved in the attack on Dr. Bennett has a price tag going over $300,000.00. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts with its agencies which were involved bears some of the blame for this and allowed its agencies to spend tax payers money to engage in extreme bigotry – among other things. Since what happened and is continuing to happen to Dr. Bennett has also happened to other minorities – we seriously question what is going on within Massachusetts Government which is clearly encouraging such by doing nothing about it except supplying money needed to gain a law-breaking result.

For example – Dr. Bennett was sexually abused through this process. That was reported to Maura Healey, who did nothing about it. There were witnesses who were neither questioned about this nor contacted in any way. Ms. Healey is today running for political office. Needless to say, we will be there calling attention to some of these horrendous occurrences.

Dr. Bennett was removed from his home forcibly by the police without a Court Hearing, in spite of Massachusetts laws which forbids such – so laws were broken and the people involved not called up for this.

Dr. Bennett was forced to take anti-psychotics, which he did not want, but had no choice in the locked police ward of MGH. The Courts have just verified that this is definitely a violation of the law.

Every right that Dr. Bennett and his family have under the federal laws and the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were violated. His medical record also does not accurately reflect what happened to him.

To our knowledge, this has happened to African Americans and Jews and we suspect also to other minorities. It totally violates both federal and state anti-discrimination laws.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

It is interesting to us to bring into this picture what happened to Dr. Gates from Harvard University. He was ‘arrested’ by the police for breaking and entering his own home. They tried to put him in jail on a criminal charge that was bogus.

The attempt was to what – demean? embarrass? destroy his reputation? At least put into the public mind the picture the media took of him being arrested in his own home.

By the time they tried to do the same thing to Dr. Bennett their tactics changed. It was not a “criminal” charge. Dr. Bennett was picked up at his home on a Section 12 – a psychiatric charge. He was not the first. The way the media has steadfastly ignored all of this from the several people so treated it is clear there will be more of this happening in Massachusetts. It appears to have someone’s support for its continuation.

Others – particularly African Americans and Jews have been so treated with no restitution and no investigation into what this was all about. Ignore them. Let them struggle. The goal will be to reduce the achievements of minorities because their generational wealth will be eliminated. What they could do with such a backing will not now be possible.

The court papers documenting the Court part of these actions are being impounded in an action led by Attorney Lisa Cukier. Those papers need to be available to the public so others can see and know what has happened in the past. The impoundment is not because the families want those papers impounded. Several attorneys are consistently involved in such and their names need to be known – the actions they have taken need to be known, etc.

We appreciate your feedback and your experiences with such. Please don’t hesitate to email us at bettina-network@comcast.net

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Historically Speaking –

Tuesday, June 1st, 2021

We need to become more knowledgeable about history. What is happening today will make a lot of sense if you know your personal history – the history of your country – the history of your family, etc.

Let’s take a look at what is happening in Texas and put it in a historical context:

What is the history that seems to almost shout at us to – PAY ATTENTION. This is not new what is happening in the Texas Legislature and other places. For example take a look at one of the roles Texas played during the war against Nazi Germany.

Nazi Prisoners of War were held in prison camps in Texas. One reason was because so many Texans spoke German. Their state was settled by Germans.

One result of that, especially because there were many Texans who were “soft” on the Nazi’s – was the fact that on Sundays, some Texas families would go to the prison camps, get a Nazi prisoner out for the afternoon and take them to dinner at a local restaurant.

In those same areas, African American soldiers – either on leave, or home, or passing through to their next assignment – needed to eat. Almost all of the restaurants in Texas were segregated and refused to serve African Americans and other minorities. If they stopped at those same restaurants where Nazi prisoners of war were treated to Sunday dinner by some Texans, those African American soldiers would not be allowed into the restaurant. They would be served the same meals, at the same cost, but they would have to go around to the back door where the trash and other undesirables were kept and that is where they would have to eat their meal.

In that historical context, does what is happening today in Texas and in the Texas Legislature as it attempts to change our democracy into a more controlled, fascist one make any more sense to you? That attempt does not come ‘out of the blue’. IT HAS A HISTORICAL CONTEXT.

Identity Politics – U.S.A. Style

Tuesday, May 4th, 2021

We are currently deep into “Identity Politics” – put there by Donald Trump and his push for power at any cost.

We had a hilarious time as we gathered because someone brought up the current Republican drive to become the WASP Party in America.

It was hilarious because the remaining people who identify as Republicans are anything but WASPS. We have identified them as RepublicanX.

As this RepublicanX Party becomes solidified – or should be say ossified – they are backed up and “protected” by a mostly Irish police force.

We said this post was about “Identity Politics” so get ready for some hard ‘facts’ which most of us don’t want to deal with. We have not created the “identifies” – we are just using what others have created so if you object to our identifying the current police force as “Irish” – go read something else.

As you all know by now, the police in the U. S. were created to back, protect and maintain slavery – particularly to maintain the slave property of White America. In the early days, they did go after the runaway slaves and others involved in such transactions and treated them roughly. Today’s treatment of protestors and others trying to free todays slave replacements would be an analogy to how slaves were treated in the old days by the Irish police force.

The Irish police were protecting the property of those who were identified as WASPS. In case you are new to all of this – WASP = White Anglo Saxon Protestants do not include the Irish, nor the Italians in this RepublicanX Party. Once the dust clears and the RepublicanX clearly win those will be treated as the second class citizens they are in this country. And besides, they are probably Catholic.

WASPS are the people who ran the country, owned everything therein with some very few exceptions, held the power, etc. etc.

Today, however, the Irish police are protecting the WASP wannabes. Those who are trying as hard as they can to identify themselves as WASPS. Since they can’t, according to the old definitions, we will call them “WASP Wannabes.”

We have seen them acting out the stereotype of WASPS and it is the most hilarious thing you have seen. We wondered why some serial television shows like Downton Abbey were so popular. Is this the history they are adopting as the history of their family and friends? And – are these shows documentaries or wishful thinking on the part of those RepublicanX as they try to pattern themselves after what they have conceived as the 21st Century Downton Abbey reproduction.

WASP Wannabes have coerced Senator Tim Scott into renouncing what he claimed to believe in 2016-2017 about race, etc. to make his big speech on the night of President Joseph Biden’s speech to the joint session of Congress. He put himself into the role of the Africans slaves and newly ‘exonerated” slaves and those colored folks who became a part of the White Supremacist groups in these United States. Even the KU Klux Klan had a black ‘hanger-on’ although they were not called that. They were called the “N” word and accepted the appellation

One black person – one African American – would be attached to each White Supremacist group – like today’s White Supremacist RepublicanX Party – and they would spout the philosophy, beliefs, etc. of that group. Racists all, including the African American. Oh, and lets now forget the minority group called the Jews. Stephen Miller succeeds admirably as the one Jew attached to the White Supremacist RepublicanX Party to disprove the rule of its anti-semitism.

Senator Tim Scott has turned himself and his career away from the path it and he were taking into that follower of the White Supremacist Group because? – he could thereby maintain the fiction of power they have given him and gotten him to believe that he is going to become “a big power” in the party? Maybe its next presidential candidate? Or has Senator Scott done something this group has unearthed and is now holding something akin to blackmail over Senator Scott’s head?

Racism oppresses minorities in very vicious ways. Racism creates an unbelievable insecurity in whites which we have seen for decades – in fact for some 400 plus years in this country and each year the insecurity becomes worse – larger – more unexplainable for people who have arrogated power unto themselves and a lesser status to others. Don’t they believe the lies they tell about the “inferiority” of others?

That insecurity is showing – looking like the elegant dress of someone who has somehow acquired a designer original outfit and when putting it on the outfit shows this filthy and raggedy and torn slip hanging out from under the designer original dress, suit, etc.

Under their leadership and under their enforced so called superiority we have climate problems; homelessness out of control; poverty amongst innocent children because their families are being so screwed over so the third generation immigrants can have it all; space exploration when our problems at home on this earth are exploding; and on and on and on.</p>

In their attempt to have the Republican Party become the RepublicanX Party so they can take it over, function therein and come out with the identity of the former WASPS – is this what we are seeing. Hey wasn’t that an Italian we saw in that RepublicanX Party? No French, however, because they have long identified as “better than.” The English class structure has a few loop holes which allow English who have acquired money, property, power, etc. to rise to the top after some really difficult decades. The French class structure doesn’t even bother with that – you are either a member of the ruling family’s family or you are less than. Nothing leaving space for a bit of ‘shade’. Even those New Orleans Creoles have adopted that class structure – which is how the ‘shade’ has infiltrated into French identity.

Besides Senator Scott and his new position as the “N” to the White Supremacists, we understand he is about to be joined by a woman who will be playing the same role to the White Supremacists as Senator Scott is now playing. A more complete picture of the insecurity in the white identity being shored up by an “N” word person and a “B” word person.

What happens next? Where does this story go? Can Joe Biden pull off a great ending Hollywood style as he moves on from the hero of the Pandemic – the COVID 19 Pandemic – to the eliminator of poverty and the one who solves the immigration problem?

BTW – the immigration problem looks so much like a replant of the White Supremacist system amongst those who come to this country looking for ‘freedom’. How do you solve a problem where the White Supremacists are the former immigrants who were so reviled during the generation they ‘escaped’ to these United States and endured the horror of the oppressive treatment meted out to the newly arrived – those who want to become U. S. citizens and risk everything to escape from their current countries – and more.

Are we ever messed up. It is time for the White Supremacists to resign – find a spot someplace to sit themselves down and observe others doing better what they messed up.

This is the legacy of White Supremacy. This is the group the WASPS want to imitate. This is the road on which the RepublicanX want us all to keep treading. This is the road from which they have gained their superiority.

Did slavery end because the New England WASPS finally had enough money and power and needed for slavery to end so the Industrial Revolution could gain great control because machines were cheaper than, better than, easier to control than Africans stolen from their countries?

We have worked our way into quite a mess and the RepublicanX are trying to dig deeper holes around which we are supposed to walk without falling in.

Good luck America!

P. S. About the Irish Police – did you know everyone writing this and/or contributing has Irish ancestors? Did you know our leader – Marceline’s family name is “Adams”. Maybe even related to John Quincy?

Now – don’t you all respond at once. We need to recover from a few responses at a time.

Truth is tough to deal with, to accept. It gets in the way of our trying to move forward correcting the mistakes that the lies ingrained in us all have caused.

A Private Message to Governor Romney: Want to know how to move out of the mess you are in as a RepublicanX? Want to know how to use your intelligence, wisdom and partial ability to stand up for what you believe? Call us – we will help!

An Offering for black history month from “American Diversity Report”

Thursday, February 11th, 2021

WHO IS Q – as in QANON? What are “Q”s other accomplishments!

Wednesday, February 10th, 2021

The United States and hence the world are being torn apart by one man’s craziness (or should we say one man’s evil)!

It is as if satan has arrived and started to work through a few and is now successfully pulling in their friends, family, organizations, life.

Let us not keep you in suspense. Q is Donald John Trump!

His claim to such evil fame is not limited to Q – so let us trace a bit of conspiracy theory – which is Trump’s stock in trade and that which has moved him into the position he now occupies and into those positions he once occupied.

Why has he been so successful on this kind of evil level? Probably because he has a very keen sense of how to manipulate the negative emotions of human beings. He knows how to use evil to gain his goals and to draw them around him to do his bidding even when they know better.

Early in life, he had and still has many gifts and graces. Every once in awhile you can see the goodness of what could have been for him had he used those gifts and graces for good instead of using them for ill. For whatever reason, he has chosen to use those gifts and hone those gifts on the blades of satan.

To become president, Donald John Trump used bigotry. He saw how effective bigotry is in the attempt to control humans for one’s own aggrandizement. He saw and felt how close one comes to the deity cultivating feelings of being “better than”. He saw how to manipulate the laws in the United States which pertain to bigotry and how people react in the passing and breaking of those laws. He saw that those who used the evil side of the human spirit became extremely wealthy and wielded much power and these were the people he wanted to copy.

As a very young adult Trump was involved in his father’s business and together they made sure blacks were not allowed to rent the apartment buildings they built and owned, in spite of the fact that they used and misled the government. It was during the time in this country when blacks and whites were going to different apartment complexes and applying for an apartment. First the African American went to apply at the Trump owned buildings and behind him/her came a White American after the blacks were turned down because there was no room in the Inn. When the White Americans were able to get apartments – down came the law suits and up came the legal experience Donald Trump has drawn on most of his adult life. The fertile ground from which has sprung QANON and Donald Trump’s takeover of “Q”.

Sometimes a few of his followers have slipped and attributed to Trump the moniker of “messiah”. We have become outraged at such a thought instead of being quiet to let those followers say more about why they applied such a term to Trump.

Trump walked his life’s path with “friends” from whom he learned to instinctively manipulate people at the level of their identity. He learned how strong the identity of “better than” was with even the nicest people, held in highest regard by this society. He saw the evil that “better than” wrought and the power it generated for those using that identity with others and he adopted it. A “messiah” who lifts those around him to the level of “better than” and promises them such largesse and such a life if and when they deal with those “less than.”

He walked alongside Roy Cohn – a Jew. He saw first hand the conflict Cohn had about being a Jew and at the same time seeming to hate Jews. He saw Joe McCarthy and watched Bobby Kennedy who sat right next to McCarthy as his right hand man and he saw how the Kennedy’s moved and used the filth McCarthy was spewing for his political benefit and McCarthy’s ability to use that filth to control others. He watched as the Kennedy’s moved, without taking along the tar thrown at them and others which did not stick to any of them from their involvement with McCarthy. He watched as they moved from the power achieved by being McCarthy’s First Lieutenant to sharing that power throughout the family to become President, Attorney General, Senator of these United States. A family of legend in these United States whose beginnings in the McCarthy power movement rolled off them as if they were made of teflon.

Trump saw and for a time was a part of the Gay Community and saw that community through the eyes of Roy Cohn.

So many influences we could go on for pages, but the above, known to all of us should give you an idea as to Donald Trump’s development and the forces and influences which dictated the direction in which his life would go.

His strongest influence was the Nazi German influence, probably because that is the group from which his family descends. A connection Trump maintained – keeping “Mein Kampf” on his bedside table and imbibing all that it put out.

Fast forward to recent times and we see all of those influences coming to fruition in the political world of these United States when the “birther lie” came along. Whether Trump originated that lie or not, he saw it as a way to achieve the money and power he craved and he jumped into the fray and brought the ‘birther lie’ much further than it would have gone without his work.

That ‘birther lie’ is what brought Trump to the United States presidency.

During his campaign and just before it started, Trump needed something stronger than the “birther lie’ to give him the power, pomp, money that he wanted so into his life comes QANON – a group that could become incredibly powerful and the kind of cult which developed around other things. This one Trump felt he could grow to be the institutional structure out of which he would rule the world.

While others were talking about Trump being lazy, not taking care of business, not working hard as he should as president of these United States.

That is both a lie and the truth. Fascist dictators and would-be fascist dictators have one trait in common – laziness. The whole idea is to have everything and be able to tell others what, how, when to do.

Within QANON, Trump could have not just one lie – like the havoc he wrought with the “birther lie”, but a structure into which he could put many lies and build all of that to the point of world control. He could do what Hitler tried and failed to do. Hitler used some conspiracy structures to gain power, but not enough nor widespread enough to gain the world control he wanted and needed. Trump would not make that mistake.

Within QANON there began to be carved out the “messiah”. The “messiah”, of course was “Q”.

The strength of QANON and Q comes from that side of human nature which needs to come together as a community, but in the world of “Q” the identity of those who are adherents to “Q” is strengthened by the fact that QANON “members”, adherents, disciples, shamans are all considered to be “better than” blacks, latina’s, gays, muslims – those considered to be “minorities” – less than.

This time the world would be better for the arrival of “Q” because there would be no concentration camps. The same thing would be achieved by killing these minority groups in any way possible – even one at a time – because there would soon be enough people in QANON doing these individual or small group killings in so many places that they would be untraceable to the original group and to “Q” himself and yet there would quickly be tens of thousands of such minorities killed with their numbers reduced to where slavery and other forms of “less than human” would be where minorities, needed for the work the “majority’ should not have to do, would be placed and kept.

Take a look at the “accomplishments” of Trump and his administration. It has been all about creating “identity”. Putting people who would do the will of “Q” into substantial places. Not because of the qualifications that the outside world considers before putting people in specific jobs, but those “Q” needs to do the work he has decided was needed to create the world according to “Q” and the inner circle of “QANON.” Many people considered to be “minorities” by “Q” have been killed – into the many thousands.

The latest example of such killings comes about when you look at the killings that took place recently on “death row” in the federal penitentiary. Those slated for execution, but who were on death row for years and some for decades were all killed in short order by “Q” and they were who? – minorities, you say?

Take a look at the gradually escalating police killings and the infiltration of the police departments by white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-nazi’s and all the rest. This started long before Trump, but it accelerated created under his presidency as more of those in the QANON group infiltrates the ranks of the law enforcement in this country the more minorities would and have been killed with the killers facing no punishment of any kind.

This recent they ‘stole the election lie’ which Trump started perpetrating months ago even before the election happened, is another such instance which allowed for the beginnings of what the QANON followers thought was going to be a way for wholesale killings and publicly done – the killings to come that the “noose” hung on Capitol Building grounds symbolized and so much more.

The Charlottesville re-enactment of Krystallnacht with many coming down a small mountain with their tiki torches lit chanting “Jews will not replace us” is another example of calling into the QANON group those who could hear the message and understand where this was all going.

The recent taking over of the Republican Party is not something new. It was started quite a long time ago to change a group that was the support of the abolition of slavery and the attempt of the United States to move towards equality. The Democratic Party, doing all those days past was the movement to keep apartheid in this country with those who espoused it in political control.

A parallel would be the retribution which was aimed and thrown at Haiti which is today suffering from its successful revolution which attempted to liberate Haiti from colonial control. They are still paying the price for that action. And so the Republican Party is being targeted to pay the price for its past support of African Americans.

At one point in the deep south, the head of the Louisiana Republican Party was a black man. That was before the institutional structure which supported and maintained African Americans and other none Northern European-ancestry groups as inferior and to be kept from participation in the political as well as all other groups in the U. S. Society started to weaken.

QANON has been cultivated as the power needed to bring Donald Trump into position as the fascist, Hitler type leader that is needed to make sure the majority of people in these United States, especially the voting majority and those who are heads of businesses, never flips from majority Northern European-ancestry types to those today considered “minorities” – African Americans, Latina’s, Asians, etc. with Northern European-ancestry types as one of instead of what they have been – “better than” and served by.

We have never explored what bigotry does to the human spirit. To see a bit of what happens and which should be studied minutely, take a look at those in the Republican Party today who do not move depending upon right and wrong, but who move depending upon what “Q” wants them to do. Their identity has gradually moved from a mostly white Republican Party to being a part of the cult of QANON with Donald Trump as “Q”.

To be “better than” is more addictive than alcohol or any kind of drugs which addict the body, mind and spirit. It takes away your ability to reason on a human level where you understand we all are of one race. It makes you follow the directives of the person and group that keeps you pumped full of the “better than” identity. It keeps others asking “what’s wrong with them” – when a little thought would tell them because if they really went into “what’s wrong with them” they would have to delve into the extremely painful place that exposes their adoption into their identity of being “better than” – which in these United States is simply camouflaged because we all have been raised to incorporate the “better than” and “less than” spirit into our being.

So now “Q” has become totally entrenched in our society. What happens now? The birther lie was also fully entrenched. We have done nothing about that lie and so it has given birth to other lies much more dangerous than that from which it has sprung.

Many who knew better took some solace in the fact that they could keep their bigotry covered because others were carrying the torch and going out in public to maintain the “better than”/”less than” lie.

So now dear God – what happens next? Are we capable of living in a world where we are equal to? Can we even write and talk about all of the institutional structures that need changing to keep such evil out of our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Mostly, we take down one institutional structure only to put up others which do the same job only in a more genteel and hidden way.

So, where do we turn? How do we reach your mind and heart to be able to cleanse our own? Will those who bring about basic change always have to pay the heavy prices we have required of them to discourage others from following in their path? Will this ever change or is this how we must live until death!

Harriet Tubbman is back and will soon be the face you see on the $20 bill. First woman on American Currency!!!!!!!!

Thursday, January 28th, 2021

FANTASTIC!

Thank you President Biden. We shall be forever grateful.

Much work was done to achieve this goal. What I like most about how this happened was the way not one huge organization did the work, but many people across the country did their own thing; involved their neighbors and friends; brought in small organizations and didn’t need to be cajoled by the heads and marketing people from one group. Self-motivated by the correctness of the cause and what that change could do for all of us – it is exhilarating.

One of our most fun things that we did was to talk to several people we know who manage estate sales. Hunt Estate Sales came through and thought it was a great idea for Harriet Tubman to be on the face of the $20 bill instead of Andrew Jackson and they decided to stamp the $20 bills that came to them via their estate sales with the image of Harriet Tubman wiping out Andrew Jackson. I shall never forget what great fun that was for private industry to work with a worthy cause to bring about a just result. And no money changed hands. Well, almost. The $20 bills so stamped went all over the place for many different reasons – large and small.

We hope you will look for the Hunt Estate Sales and be one of those buying from them. We know them and their values. You will always come out ahead – whether you are someone with an estate you want or need someone to manage so it can be sold in the best possible way or if you are a buyer looking for something beautiful, unique, and to make a part of your estate – because that is who they are.

There was a Tubman stamp one could buy on Etsy.com. That is where we purchased ours with extra ink because we expected to stamp millions. That didn’t happen, but we did our share. However, there were also Harriet Tubman stamps created by others across the country which they sold to others, used it themselves and the story and project reached into corners it could never have hoped to reach otherwise.

There were many petitions. I think we tried two or three. Not much energy behind any of them because I am not sold on this way of achieving results.

And so much more.

We went to a few breakfasts of different organizations and friends. The Harriet Tubman stamp brought a bit of excitement at Mel King’s house before that breakfast group disbanded. We brought out the stamp so people around the table could get their $20 bill stamped with the Tubman image to frame, spend or whatever else they decided to do with that piece of history. I had forgotten the connection that many present had with what was going on in the neighborhood around Harriet Tubman.

Boston is one where the Tubman House was in trouble trying to save the blood, sweat and tears, that many people invested over years, from being destroyed because neighborhoods which were African American were turning white. Those neighborhoods, in Boston and a few other places, are in downtown areas with white professionals moving out of the suburbs into the city trying to save money on gas and wanting to be close to work and recreational possibilities and god-knows what else. When are we going to start thinking more broadly than about our particular needs and wants of the moment.

We were overjoyed when President Biden announced that the Harriet Tubman $20 was back and would be printed soon.

Thank you to everyone who worked with us on this project. Thank you to those who worked with others on this project. May we move on to even more successful events, projects, protests and may you live long and prosper as your work builds and shows what you value in life.

Hope you will keep up with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. – which gave us the backbone to move ahead with this project.

Our latest project is a legal and educational fund for the elderly to take on happenings like the one which tried hard to destroy Robert, our marriage and our home. We hadn’t thought of ourselves as “elderly” before. We do now. Having been around, even though very young when the NAACP LDF was founded, we are going to do what we can to bring about such a group for the elderly. Many changes from the original, but sort of similar. We had no idea this society was so vicious against its elderly citizens. We don’t seem to realize that we are destroying the carriers of the wisdom we need to survive and thrive.

Marceline Donaldson and Rev. Dr. Robert Bennett

To Wear a Mask or go Maskless says what about you?

Monday, January 25th, 2021

by: Marceline Donaldson

I am old enough to remember and to have been through the campaigns against smoking.

When it was discovered that smoking caused cancer and even second hand smoke could damage the health of the person inhaling another persons’ cigarette smoke, it was quite a brawl. Sort of like the one we are having with masks or going without a mask. The arguments are the same and the people I have encountered without a mask are the same people who refused to give up blowing smoke into the environment of those who don’t smoke.

What is also amazing is that these are the same people who refuse to give up their identity as “better than.”

Your identity is basic to your being. To have been raised with an identity which claims you are “better than” and experience that as comfortable and that by which you live and move and have your being and by defining others as “less than”, as people who owe you their agreement to stay in “their place” and not disturb the outer, better, larger environment where the “better than” thrive, is a soul destroying thing.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I was on the National Board of NOW. At that time, the law suits and one push was on stopping people (actually men) – (actually white men) from smoking cigars on airplanes because the exhaust and replenish system on the airlines could not effectively remove all of the smoke and other pollutants which such smoking put into the air. Only one or two people were needed to smoke cigars on the plane in which you were traveling to cause problems for everyone else. That, according to the science coming out, not only caused health issues with everyone, but created an extremely uncomfortable environment for those flying.

It was a pitched battle. Finally, after many resources spent – time, money, etc. – the airlines decided to eliminate cigar smoking on planes. That was an incredible victory.

Later, the battle began to eliminate cigarette smoking as the scientific papers were published about the damage cigarettes could do to the human body. That battle was worse than the one around cigars. The cigar smokers just started smoking cigarettes on planes instead of their beloved and deadly instruments of disease.

Gradually, the fight was and still is being won as people today have to deal with even apartment buildings which now say if you live in that particular apartment building and are a smoker you have to agree to smoke outside and not in your own apartment building for which you pay substantial amounts of rent.

Restaurants were another place where the battle against smoking inside the restaurant raged. It was won and people started moving to eat in the “bar” side of the restaurant so they could smoke while eating. The war against smoking found them and today even those in bars can’t smoke inside the bar, but must go outside for their favorite bit of poison.

When that fight was raging I was at IBM. They had a thing where you had to go to Atlanta, GA. for six weeks of training before you could sell those wonderful machines. In the training classes people, of course, could smoke. Light up anytime and foul the air for those in the class who found that a horribly filthy and very uncomfortable habit.

We fought that in many ways. During my class time, success was not gained, but in subsequent classes smoking was outlawed in the classroom. One had to go outside to smoke. So progress does happen. It happens excruciatingly slow and people lose their lives and health in the process, but it happens.

One action we took, as an aside, was to also challenge IBM’s inviolable “dress for success” class and rules. On one of the last days of class we arrived (females, of which there were almost none), in MuMu’s, hair in large curlers, no make-up and slippers. The men arrived (not all, but many) with their jockey shorts over their dress pants and cut off t-shirts over their dress shirts. It was hysterical and great fun, but produced no change in IBM’s dress rules or the necessity of taking such a class.

What is it about human beings and the human spirit that everything must be as we are and everyone must live according to how we live and want life to be. We change facts to accommodate our comfort zone and claim we have the “right” in this country to jeopardize the health of and make uncomfortable and even denigrate and destroy those who aren’t like us?

Those who don’t live our lifestyle? Those who insist on refusing to change when the growing body of science shows us problems which we could address and make better with some simple changes of our lifestyle? We prefer to demand our “rights” to do things harmful to others while totally overlooking the other persons’ “right” to be safe and more. Doesn’t that come from our basic need to be “better than”? The belief system, culture and more that many would rather died for than give up and change.

If we are “better than” our neighbors, friends and all others then we can go about without a mask because we find wearing a mask uncomfortable, not pretty or stylish and all the other reasons we have thrown up. We do not want to become comfortable wearing a mask because it is our “right” to go around without one. Isn’t it interesting how we can demand what we consider our rights, even when those rights that we claim jeopardize the health and well being of others?

It is no mistake that we elected a man who exemplifies all of that and demands his rights over all other human beings? The man who demands to be top of the heap and all others are under him accepting what he doles out to them and for which they are grateful. How come we do all of that? What is there in the human spirit which thinks that is great. We join wild groups because they reinforce the identity we are on the verge of losing – “better than”.

That “better than” need is more lethal than the most terminal and painful of cancers. Yet we insist on living through that kind of culture and that kind of life.

That “better than” need led our ancestors to euthanize attempt to exterminate American Indians. It allowed and encouraged us to use slavery to build these United States. Used the Chinese in a slavery kind of structure to build our railroads – and all through we use denial so we don’t have to acknowledge what we have done and are doing to the detriment of ourselves and others.

To care for others. To be concerned about those with whom we live on this planet doesn’t take much.

An example from my IBM experience shows the difference. I lived in Ambassador Andrew Young’s house while I was in training at IBM. I could not live in the townhouse apartments right next to the classes during that time because I had two young children with me. They had me and I had them and wherever I went they went for all the years of their growing up.

It was difficult driving the 30 to 45 minus to class each day instead of walking a short distance to the classes. It was horrendous trying to figure out and find ways of making sure they were taken care of during the day. That would have been simple had I been able to live in the housing provided by IBM, It took a lot away from my time and ability to really get into the training – although I did a respectable job of it.

No one at IBM cared about the situation I was trying to handle. Men were the main people in those training classes. Men had wives at home who stayed there and took care of the children and anything else that needed to be taken care of because society looked at that as the job of women.

Towards the end of my time in training at IBM, I had caused such an upheaval that a couple people turned their attention to seeing what they could do to make things right.

My girls were learning horse back riding during that period of time so the IBM people found a camp not far away which had young people – about the ages of mine – who lived at the camp and followed their program of learning to ride, show and jump horses. That was a near miracle. I picked up the girls on the weekends and we went ‘home’ and were able to do touristy things satisfying to all.

How wonderful if IBM had put together a few people who gathered such possibilities for people in my situation so my time during training could have been more productively spent. It didn’t take a lot, just caring. Their response, at the time, was to eliminate people like me because it was too much to include us and much better to carry forth the “better than” attitude.

The caring that is missing amongst the people who refused to smoke outside; who wanted to smoke while in class; and so much more.

There were only two or three people in those classes who smoked. They, however, made the room unbelievably uncomfortable and dangerous to the health of the rest of us. The same attitude prevails among people who refuse to wear masks. One would think that past ones time as a rebellious teenager, the need to “prove” things would have abated.

All of those folks have something in common – their identity, which contains the strong belief that they are “better than” the rest of us and why should they accommodate. What a wonderful change in this world when and if they are able to do show some kind of caring for others where there is no payback that they can see for themselves.

“Better than” is a vicious philosophy by which to live. It is incredibly destructive of the human soul as it takes hold of ones personality, character, lifestyle and makes them so incredibly ugly to the rest of society. “Better than” so blinds us as humans that we can’t even see how negative is the way such people are seen by others.

May God forgive your sins against one another and give you the ability to open your hearts in a caring, healing, wonderful way to experience this life as it was intended to be experienced, not to experience it within the confines of a lifestyle with ways of living and choices which lead to a life of denial which leads to a life of lying, cheating, etc. etc.

Senator Danforth – Episcopal Priest – White //// Rev. Dr. Robert Bennett – Episcopal Priest – Black “A democracy for white Americans, but simultaneously a dictatorship over black Americans.”— MLK

Tuesday, January 19th, 2021

Part two of a series: – Rev. Dr. Robert Bennett – black Episcopal priest

You and we have seen the power of one Episcopal priest – white. He was able to subvert the democratic process by using money and power. Not the power inherent in why he was called to the ordained priesthood nor giving a thought to what God was calling him to do.

Using his earthly power and money he did his own thing. Something that would bring him – Senator Danforth – more power and money and earthly prestige rather than something that would help bring in God’s kingdom on this earth.

He brought us one Josh Hawley. A man who did what he thought he was called to do, subverting and attempting to destroy American democracy. Senator Hawley saw himself, with the blessing of his backers, as being the one to lead the charge calling Americans to overturn a legitimate election for president of these United States and put a fascist, authoritarian government in its place. He was, after all, backed by the aristocracy of these United States. He was close to the powers which put Donald Trump into office as United States President.

Hawley has been living an autocrat’s dream and the nightmare of those who choose to live under a democratic government. Backed by One who used the money and power he inherited ( Senator Danforth) to help install a government more in tune to corporate America’s need for an authoritarian government which could subvert, overturn, patronize and so much more the lives of the people it needs to produce and carry to fruition its programs, projects, products and/or services.

Before there was a Josh Hawley to spend time, money and other resources on, for Senator Danforth there was a Clarence Thomas and probably even more. Clarence Thomas is a man who many believe should never have been confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, but who was with the advice, consent, power and money of the Rev. Senator Danforth.

Clarence Thomas, a black man, widely disrespected in the African American community and even more so amongst many white Americans. By manipulating the system the way only one with power and money can manipulate, the objections to Clarence Thomas were cast aside. The people who could have shed more light onto who he was and his character were not allowed to testify in the hearing at which Anita Hill was allowed to testify and then nothing. Senator Danforth’s inability to see those he is moving to a more powerful place in the light of who they are and what they might contribute to or destroy the society over which he is majorly responsible for placing them carries a lot of negative weight for what he has done for and with Hawley and Thomas.

Thomas is a man whose wife recently sent her love to the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021 during their time of uprising against the government her husband serves as a Supreme Court Justice. The insurrectionists who tried to destroy democracy along with its Capitol buildings. Insurrectionists she has been encouraging and supporting for quite some years.

Clarence Thomas cannot be so above board with his actions, but he clearly supports his wife. As a Supreme Court justice, what does it mean when his wife goes the distance and sponsors 80 buses to transport those who were a part of the “Save America” rally on January 6, 2021. The Thomas family aided and abetted those trying to overthrow a legitimate United States election in favor of putting in place a government which was, apparently, not legitimate from its beginnings, but which had philosophies, beliefs, actions of which Virginia Thomas approved and for which she spends a great deal of time publicly backing. I think it can be safely said and by his own admission that Clarence Thomas is now a Supreme Court justice thanks to Senator Danforth – white Episcopal priest.

Rev. Dr. Robert Bennett – black Episcopal priest – is the other American side of that story. The side on which he is vulnerable to white Americans who feel they can obliterate African Americans who step out of their place and have institutionalized ways to establish a dictatorship over even in 2020 and even in places like Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cities which constantly brag about their ‘openness’ and where Black Lives do not matter – especially those of consequence; those that dare criticize white Americans in power positions; those that are not subservient to the autocracy. In fact, many believe Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts are among the most racist cities in these United States.

We recently wrote many Bettina Network articles about what was happening to Dr. Bennett. We wanted everything to be public because we were taken off-guard by the way he and his wife were attacked and having had decades of civil rights experience we knew where those attacks were headed from the day Rev. Dr. Bennett, after brain surgery at MGH, was forced into Sherrill House against his will when he was told places like Spaulding Rehabilitation Center were not open to him and he had no choice.

After his discharge from MGH, Dr. Bennett and his wife were told an ambulance was going to immediately take him to Sherrill House. Neither Rev. Bennett nor his wife, Marceline Donaldson – who was his Health Care Proxy – had a choice in the matter. What was the problem? Two fold -Sherrill House was under quarantine for the flu at the time and they did not know about that and were not told Rev. Bennett was being sent to a rehab center after brain surgery which was under flu quarantine. When, having arrived at Sherrill House and they discovered the quarantine and they complained there was no doctor available. Not physically present nor available via telephone or other communication possibilities. So their choice was to go home where they had a set up which was far superior to what they were exposed to at Sherrill House.

What they discovered through that experience were the racial discrepancies between Sherrill house and Spaulding. Once you turn from Huntington Avenue into Jamaica Plain the medical institutions mostly turn from white to brown to black.

A black man – a black family which did not choose Sherrill House as a place for rehab was forced into that institution and told Spaulding Rehabilitation Center was not where they could go. When they checked, there was space available so what was the problem. No one ever said, however, their investigation showed a clear color problem.

That was not the first nor the last such situation with which Rev. Dr. Bennett and his family had to deal during some very difficult times in their lives. Because Dr. Bennett needed brain surgery, it was as though the society had gone crazy with glee over being able to be the dictators over this African American man and his family. Because Dr. Bennett needed surgery, he was exposed to the worse and discovered there were other elderly African Americans who had and were going through very similar situations with no help and had to face the overwhelming and very racist power of “Protective Services” in Massachusetts. This was supposed to be an organization to aid the elderly in need. In fact, it is an organization which pushed into families that do not need nor want their help.

Actually, elderly and protective services is out of control and their racism, sexism, sins against immigrants virulent and long standing. It is instead becoming the means of making the minority elderly vulnerable to many health care institutions with no choice of any kind as they enter or are pushed into this world. Most often their assets are drained and redistributed into the white community so the minorities die with a life of hard work spent accumulating assets for their children to have better and more comfortable lives taken away and given to the white establishment – the white autocracy/aristocracy with many in the middle to upper classes assisting, most without even realizing the damage being done and not interested.

That was the first in many steps to drag down and attempt to destroy the end of life of a man who achieved and received a Harvard University Doctorate; had a life of service to the Episcopal Church; taught in its seminaries; taught as an adjunct professor at Princeton University, Atlanta University and several more. A man who served on the National Council of Churches Lectionary Committee using his work and study to help edit scripture to make it more available to both sexes. Well, maybe that wasn’t so good since the FBI had to intervene at that point because the members of that committee received death threats – through the National Council as well as at their homes. The minorities we have heard from or heard about include African Americans, Jews, Latina’s, Immigrants, and more.

We could go on for pages with how Dr. Bennett spent his life, but that is all well documented. We are outlining here the way this society tried to strip him of the quality of his life, making horrible the end of his life, his assets, his reputation and so much more. Who? Which institutions? The Commonwealth of Massachusetts through its Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services. Particularly its ‘Protective Services”

Recently, they were dubbed #1 in the state. That was not even surprising to us because we knew the forces which support such institutions would be coming to their assistance to try to drown out what Dr. Bennett and his wife were exposing.

The real “tell” of what was in store for Dr. Bennett happened when 8 white Cambridge police arrived at Dr. Bennett’s home demanding to remove him from his home to put him into the psych ward at Mount Auburn Hospital. Besides the eight white policemen there were TWO ambulances, five or six EMT’s and assorted people. No one knew where all the people were coming from until a neighbor of the Donaldson-Bennett family saw and talked about all the attention the police and their coterie were receiving as people came running from the Charles River to see what was happening with all the police and people and police cars parked and left in the middle of the street around the Bennett/Donaldson home.

The police arrived to force Dr. Bennett into the Mount Auburn Hospital psych ward. He was just a couple days out of MGH after brain surgery and had no relationship to Mount Auburn Hospital. He had a very low opinion of Mount Auburn Hospital, had expressed his concern for the racism he knew about as a minister. His family insisted that if he had to go someplace it be to the hospital he left just days earlier. After some back and forth the police agreed. They did not, however, arrive with any Court papers to back up their demands. After quite awhile and with Marceline Donaldsons’ insistence they produced such a paper which was a Section 12 – used by the police to hospitalize people who have had too much to drink and were a public nuisance; people who overdosed on drugs; people having a psychiatric break of some kind and are endangering the public, etc.

Rev. Dr. Bennett did not fit any of those categories. In fact, once in MGH having been forced into the psych ward after leaving days earlier having been discharged from the Neurology Department and having undergone the indignity of having been examined against his will by one of the MGH psychiatrists, Dr. Bennett was found to be someone who should not have been so treated. They saw no reason for his having been picked up and forced into the hospital in the first place. No medicines prescribed no reason for his having been forced into MGH nor did they find any reason to keep him. So the Section 12 was lifted and Dr. Bennett was sent home.

Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services are the group – the state agency which signed out the Section 12 against Dr. Bennett. No one at that agency knew Dr. Bennett – no one there had ever interviewed him – no one had any kind of relationship with him of any kind. They would not have known him if they passed him on the street.

Dr. Rebecca Warner, the psychiatrist who had Dr. Bennett so “committed” said on the papers she signed to send him to the hospital with which she was affiliated – Mount Auburn Hospital – where several African Americans have complained of their very racist treatment – that she did not know Dr. Bennett, had never met him, had never examined him, had never been to his home – but she claimed his home was ‘not safe’. So much for medical ethics and why does she still have a license to practice?

After Dr. Bennett was released from MGH it is as if enormous anger broke out amongst the people at Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services. Who did he think he was, after all. And then the fun started.

Attorney James O’Sullivan, who was given an award by the Archbishop O’Malley for the great work he supposedly does amongst the poor, especially the poor elderly, was in Court the very next day with an “emergency motion.” As we did research on Attorney O’Sullivan and the award he was given we discovered that the last recipient was ex-Attorney General Bill Barr. There is something wrong in the Diocese that this is the case, especially with the elderly because much suffering has happened and been condoned by Archbishop O’Malley with such an award.

O’Sullivan is actually someone known to use and from this experience abuse “emergency motions”. He asked the Court not to notify Dr. Bennett of the hearing, claimed he was not capable of participating, claimed Dr. Bennett was “indigent” and asked for “Protective Orders” so Dr. Bennett would not be further hurt, etc. Attorney O’Sullivan was acting on behalf of his clients, but he had never met Dr. Bennett nor his wife nor his adult children yet he talked knowingly about someone he was asking the Court to forcibly remove from his home and family and put into a psych ward for reasons not even clearly spelled out in Court.

The “Protective Orders’ were against Dr. Bennett’s wife who Attorney O’Sullivan claimed was abusive to Dr. Bennett and because of that Dr. Bennett was in grave danger. The Court refused to give Attorney O’Sullivan the “Protective Orders”.

What Attorney O’Sullivan did not tell the Court that this was not his first move against Dr. Bennett on behalf of Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services. He did not tell the Court that his first move failed because it should not have been filed in the first place. He did not tell the Court the hospital into which Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services tried to force Dr. Bennett dismissed and lifted the Section 12 his clients tried to get against Dr. Bennett. As we further investigated we found Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective services were trying to have Dr. Bennett committed for an extensive time in Mount Auburn Hospital’s psych ward and they had no reason, authority nor anything else to have pushed themselves into this family nor to try such a thing.

Leaving out the most important information when Attorney O’Sullivan went to Court, what he included was the lie which said Dr. Bennett needed to be represented by attorneys, but said Attorney O’Sullivan on behalf of Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services – Dr. Bennett was “indigent” and could not afford attorneys. Since O’Sullivan claimed Dr. Bennett could not afford attorneys and asked for a state appointed attorney, the Court appointed Cheri Myette to represent Dr. Bennett without Dr. Bennett’s knowledge – without anyone speaking to Dr. Bennett or his family about all of this and Dr. Bennett still not being notified of any motions filed in Court against him and with Attorney O’Sullivan moving ahead with an ex parte motion to take away Dr. Bennett’s freedom in violation of state law. To circumvent state law, Attorney O’Sullivan on behalf of his clients constructed what we have been told has been done many times against elderly black people in Massachusetts and other places – a series of court events which actually did not take place as represented, but put in place to be able to “win” against Dr. Bennett who then had all of his rights taken away from him as though this was a fascist Court system which sets up a case without the defendant knowing anything about the case against him and putting in place what was needed to move against the Defendant giving a public relations set of motions, etc. so the plaintiffs – Somerville Cambridge Elder and Protective Services could gain their ends without going through the democratic process, but coming out with the result they wanted with this very fascist way of functioning. It is common today and many are in great pain because of this allowed way of functioning violating everything this country and its court system stands for.

Attorney Myette immediately filed a motion – in Rev. Dr. Bennett’s name without Rev. Bennett’s knowledge or consent. That motion had Dr. Bennett swearing to the attorneys claims that he was “indigent” and needed the state to pay his bills and that his wife was guilty of elder abuse against him.

Dr. Bennett knew nothing about that motion. In fact, that motion stayed very “secret” for quite some time because it was immediately impounded by the Court as soon as it was filed by Attorney Myette. We found out about it when someone put the papers showing that through the mail slot at the Donaldson/Bennett home with copy of the motion and more papers having to do with the workings of SCES and some of the papers needed for Dr. Bennett which had been withheld.

Because the Court appointed an attorney for Dr. Bennett even though Robert Bennett knew nothing about any of this – the Court moved ahead and gave the attorneys who were clearly conspiring with each other over this the right to have Rev. Bennett picked up by the police, forced out of his home for a second time and forced into the psych ward of MGH.

When the police arrived with this Court order, copy of which they again refused to give to Dr. Bennett or his wife or to anyone else in the house at that time, but insisted on taking him out of his house and if he refused they would carry him out. They said to all present that if anything was broken in the process of chasing all over the house looking for Dr. Bennett to drag him out of his own home, it was not their fault or responsibility and they claimed the Court gave them the authority to go anyplace in the Bennett/Donaldson’s home that they had to go to get Dr. Bennett and drag him out if necessary. They claimed Dr. Bennett was in grave danger because of the abuse they accused his wife of and because he was alone with no one else to care for him.

That was March 6th at 6pm. A Friday. Dr. Bennett’s wife was not allowed to see him from the time he was shoved into MGH for more than a week. She had to have the attorneys they hired go to MGH to negotiate some way for her to see him. When she tried to see him she was told many different things like Dr. Bennett did not want to see her; Dr. Bennett had been to court to get a restraining order against her which said she could not come near him; Dr. Bennett was asked and declined to see her. In actual fact, Dr. Bennett knew nothing about this. He was told his wife had done this to him and didn’t want to see him ever again. All of this time, Dr. Bennett was being drugged apparently by MGH people getting him ready for his “independent Exam” by Dr. Rebecca Warner. When she was finally able to see him he didn’t recognize her, he was so groggy he couldn’t keep his eyes open and more.

What was happening at the Bennett/Donaldson home at the time Attorney O’Sullivan was in court describing Dr. Bennett as being alone, destitute with an abusive wife and no one to care for him or protect him? Dr. Bennett, his wife, his adult daughter, his adult son and his wife were about to sit down to a candlelight dinner. They spent the day cooking and preparing for this celebration meal because Robert’s surgery was a success and they were giving thanks. Robert Bennett did not have dinner that day because the police and hospital were so concerned about him they shoved him in a corner of a room and left him there.

When Dr. Bennett arrived at MGH and was shoved into a room, he was immediately started on anti-psychotics; anti-seizure medications, hallucinatory drugs, blood thinners forced on a man just days from brain surgery, plus 10 more medicines. 10 days later Dr. Rebecca Warner shows up at MGH to do what she called an “Independent Exam” although she is affiliated with Mount Auburn Hospital. She – the one who signed out the Section 12 against Dr. Bennett for which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts paid her $2,000 because, after all, Dr. Bennett was “indigent”. So many people and institutions road that “indigent” gravy train that our minds have been twirled around many times trying to nail down all of it.

Dr. Warner appeared 10 days after Dr. Bennett was forced to take all of the above drugs, which he did not want, but did not have a choice. Examining him those 10 days later – a man who did not want to be there and constantly wanted to leave, but was kept on an alarm blanket on his bed so nurses would be notified if he tried to get out of bed; he could move to a chair next to the bed, but that was also alarmed and he could not move without someone moving him; being forced to take medicines which could do serious and long term harm to him was then given an “Independent Exam” – which he already had been given the first time he was taken to MGH, but the circumstances were very different. This time, Dr Warner found him to be “incapacitated”. Those drugs were not put on his medical chart until months after Marceline Donaldson discovered the discrepancy and insisted on an answer as to why. They knew about the drugs because they were sent home with him with MGH insisting that he be required to continue to take them daily or he would be brought back to the hospital for a more “permanent” commitment.

How did would they know if Dr. Bennett was not taking the drugs? Dr. Bennett’s family was forced to accept a Home Health Care Company coming to the house daily – 5 or 6 people each day going in and out of the house during the time of the Pandemic. They were supposed to give him the pills and watch while he swallowed them. And – one thing that resulted from this – Dr. Bennett was sexually abused in the process. His family reported all of this to the Massachusetts District Attorney and the Attorney General’s Office and to the office of Elder Services. None of them paid any attention and in spite of the fact that there were witnesses, none of those institutions bothered to contact and/or interview those witnesses.

Before his transport to the MGH he was walking, talking, in a good state of mind and friends interacted with him – he walked to Harvard Square – sat by the river to soak up the sun and more. When he was sent home from MGH some 5 weeks later he was in horrible shape. He had no shoes on – his feet were swollen and his shoes didn’t fit – he hadn’t been able to get out of bed for five weeks and at Dr. Bennett’s age that could have been a death sentence or one which would have produced an “incapacitated” person for the rest of his life. He looked as though he had been homeless on the street for years. and he could not walk. That is what MGH and SCES contributed to Dr. Bennett’s “health”. It was disgraceful and heartbreaking.

The Court Order said Dr. Bennett was being taken to MGH not for medical reasons, but because of elder abuse and because of that they had to immediately take him from his home. They treated him in a disgraceful way. He spent the five weeks in a space 7 by 9 feet and he shared that space with unused hospital equipment. He shared the room with someone else who had two beautiful picture windows, the sun coming through, a chaise lounge kind of chair he could sit in during the day and a lot more. Dr. Bennett didn’t see the sun because curtains were kept drawn around his bed. If you entered his room you would not know anyone else was in that room.

We are finding others who have gone through the same thing. The elderly are particularly vulnerable because most who have gone through this have not fought civil rights battles the way the Donaldson/Bennett’s have nor have they had any other fights so they are ‘taken over’ by people like Nora Al Wet-Aid and Angela Clary with the acquiescence and consent of their superiors.

During the entire time no one talked to Dr. Bennett. They did what they wanted to do and what they felt they needed to do pursuing the goal they have for people like him. Being moved from a psych ward into a nursing home for life with the Court’s permission to feed him and others like him anti-psychotics for life along with others drugs which ruin their health and the quality of their life. Why? Assets!

Dr. Bennett’s wife was told – and a letter to other lawyers attest to the fact – that she would be given a small stipend and could find a room someplace – maybe even with her own bathroom because the family’s assets would be needed and taken over by a Guardianship Corporation – drained down by that Corporation to supposedly pay for Dr. Bennett’s bills.

It gets worse from here so we won’t go through all of the gory details, but as you read this can you imagine Senator Danforth being so treated? Or reaching out to help someone like Rev. Dr. Bennett? And how have others in the Episcopal Church reacted?

As you read this we hope you realize the very authoritarian system in which the health care institutions are functioning and the way it is so much easier to have blacks put out of commission with their assets stripped so their children cannot inherit and therefore lose the edge in this society that assets inherited would bring to them.

Add to that the very aggressive stripping of the vote from minorities which is what Senator Hawley – who was backed by Senator Danforth – is trying to do with his attempted takeover of a democracy turning it into an authoritarian government.

Dr. Bennett, who hired attorneys to represent him was not able to be represented by the attorneys of his choice. The Court appointed an attorney to represent him before he even knew he needed any kind of representation. Dr. Bennett was not “indigent” and paid the retainers requested by those attorneys. Didn’t matter. The attorney appointed by the Court in an “emergency motion” about which Dr. Bennett knew nothing – he was not served or contacted in any way; the attorney so appointed by the Court did not contact him she simply did what others told her to do, resulted in the “dictatorship over” way he was treated during every moment of what must have been a nightmarish experience for him. He was treated as though these United States are a system of “dictatorships over” in the areas necessary for whites to keep control.

There is talk of “defunding the police”. The problem is much more serious than what is happening with the arrest and killings of blacks and other minorities who supposedly have committed some kind of crime. When the police can push their way into your home without your knowledge of why or what for and can forcibly take you out for no reason the ‘police problem’ in this society needs to have its entire structure and what it can do unearthed before any solutions are sought or rendered.

When the people, like Senator Danforth, with the power and money are calling the shots on who is elected; who is appointed to important positions in this society which can bring substantial changes to our individual and collective lives those people need to be highlighted and call out on what they are doing and why they are allowed to wield so much more power and have so much more money than the rest of society.

We are still living in a “slave society” which we inherited from the many generations who went before. Instead of looking at that and making major changes, we are playing games with “riots” and attempting to force those changes in physical ways which will most hurt those making the physical and psychic sacrifices to bring in a new way of being in society, which will simply bring a more concentrated form of wealth and power to the aristocracy at the top calling the shots – manipulating the strings of the puppets who are dancing without any thought to what it is they are doing.

Don’t you think it is time to stop all of this? Don’t you think it is time for us to live in some other kind of community which benefits all? That is such an incredible threat to most we are afraid to even go there. We might encounter people who don’t look like us – talk like us – have our history – etc, etc, etc. and isn’t that the greatest threat of all?


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