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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.

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Posted in #BlackLives Matter, #meToo, American Corporate Businesses, Andrew Young, bigotry, Donald Trump, Empathy, Feminism, Health, Historical Support, Marceline Donaldson, Native Americans, NOW, racism, sexism | Comments Off on To Wear a Mask or go Maskless says what about you?

Native American or White!!!!

Thursday, February 7th, 2019

Because God knows in this society you can’t be both and be proud of your entire ancestry!

I am Native American and I need to weigh in on this conversation.

It is an amazing conversation to me because we are talking about the fact that Elizabeth Warren’s ancestors at some point “passed”. We are looking at a time in history when 1% was the criteria for whether or not you were a minority. If you had 1% African blood you were African. If you had 1% Native American blood you were Native American. If you had 1% Chinese blood you were Chinese – at least in America.

Today we are dumping all over Elizabeth Warren because she attempted to claim her Native American heritage. That is such a threat in a racist, bigoted society that we get up in arms about it and begin to dump on the person who is causing this uproar. MAKE HER APOLOGIZE SO THE REST OF US CAN RELAX AND NOT BE THREATENED WITH THE POSSIBILITY THAT ‘OUTING’ YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY MIGHT BECOME THE NORM!

Once upon a time, not that many years ago we would have dumped on Elizabeth Warren for trying to “pass”. Today we dump on her for trying to acknowledge her ancestry -trying to respect the stories that circulated in her family when she was a girl – because the ancestry she has held up as a part of her ‘racial’ identity is of a group considered a part of the oppressed minority in this country. We can’t have that! Just think of the chaos that will ensue! Most of you would have to move to the ghetto!

We are even trying to re-write history to get people to believe that if you were Native American during the time when Elizabeth Warren filled out the forms everyone is holding up you would have received some kind of special consideration and that special consideration would have gotten you rights, privileges and other goodies from this society that non-Native Americans could not have received.

Get real people! Stop lying and trying to redeem yourselves and your society at someone else’s expense.

There has never been a time in this society when you would have gotten any small part of the “goodies” passed around to everyone else if you were Native American. You would have been discriminated against and you would have been pushed aside and pushed back in favor of white males – and then black males – and then white females – and then black females – and then male Native Americans and at the bottom would have been any leftovers doled out to female Native Americans, but there never were any. That is history – what you are trying to create is another myth to ease your guilt at your participation in this racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. etc. society.

Today, Native American tribal leaders are concerned because they have profits from the gambling casinos on their reservations which are given to those members of the tribe who “qualify” and the tighter the definition of those who are members of the different tribes who “qualify” the more money and benefits they receive and the less competition for leadership of the tribes.

Remember when the United States took Native American children from their homes and families and reservations and put them into pograms where they were to be acculturated? They were never returned home and they and/or their progeny are someplace in this society where they have ‘integrated’, ‘intermarried’ and whatever else happened to them which successfully insured they would have no connection to any Native American tribe. So what are they? and where are they? Are they Indian Mongrels? No family – no ancestors they can admit to without risking the scorn of a nation? And what of all those other Native Americans who intermarried and became Irish, English, French, etc. plus Native American? Is their history also to be hidden because society does not want to see it to have to acknowledge that a Senator of the United States who was an attorney tenured professor of law at Harvard University is part Native American? My God – there goes the unravelling of hundreds of years of creating and nurturing White Male Supremacy in all things!

That is what this comes down to! Does this Elizabeth Warren thing challenge and upend White Supremacy? You can bet the store that it does, especially in the eyes of those who need to be White better than Black, better than Native American, better than etc. which is most of you. Isn’t that a large part of what elected and is keeping Trump in office? His racist, bigoted appeal to our lowest nature succeeds.

How do you explain such achievement, as attained by one like Elizabeth Warren who has Native American blood? Shouldn’t that disqualify her? How could she and her family have done such a thing to this society?

We have had other members of the White Privileged Supreme Society members who have been “outed”. Major difference – they didn’t out themselves to claim their minority heritage.

Wasn’t John Kerry accused of having Jewish ancestors or was it Madelin Albright? And then there were those accused of having African ancestors who they didn’t acknowledge and being dumped on because of it and because they were accused of ‘passing for white.’ When that is the narrative with the society doing the outing White Supremacy is safe. When the narrative is about someone the rest of you considered “White” and who is fairly frequently throwing up in your face that she really also has Native American ancestors – that is a very different narrative and threatens the very fabric out of which this society was woven.

Elizabeth Warren acknowledges her Native American ancestors without shame and in fact with some pride and so she has to be excoriated because that is totally unacceptable in this society. What if others started to do the same following her example? What a mess we would then have on our hands.

Bigotry pops out in many different ways and this is one way bigotry has jumped out without a white sheet and pointy hat, but with the same emotion and to do the same job.

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Posted in African American history, Bettina Network Blog, Bettina Network Educational Institute, Bettina Network's Lifestyle Community, Elizabeth Warren, Empathy, Feminism, homophobic, Native American History, Native Americans | Comments Off on Native American or White!!!!

American Business Structure and Function – Great or Morally Corrupt

Saturday, May 12th, 2018

by Marceline Donaldson

If we live by truth and not by image, lies, pretense, manipulation and more, we will tell the truth about our American Corporate/Business Structure and Function.

We have Donald J. Trump as president because he is who we elected and who we think we need to bring the world back to where it was at its height of ugliness, viciousness, ‘better than people’, separate and unequal and eventually back to slavery including women as sex slaves or sex objects and so much more – the ugly offshoots of those morals and values.

We have a bully for president – surrounded by the kind of people with whom a bully surrounds himself.   Take a look at Kelly what’s her name who made such a vicious comment from which many of us are still reeling.  Is this how low we have sunk?  You bet!  That is normal life in these United States today.  Those are the values we are showing to our children as what they need to live by.  The Kelly Stadlers and Trumps of the world have risen to the top.  Pathological lying has been normalized and our ethical base lowered to accommodate those, including the U. S. President, who demand the right to lie to us and force us to accept such as truth.

My entire life has been about business.  Whatever else I’ve tried, business has been at its core and my growing-up family life was all business all the time for several generations.

How could that be?  This ‘colored girl child’.  That isn’t the way the world works. And you would be shocked at the fact that I am not the only one – there are many, many like me. with similar histories.   ‘Creole colored girl child’ should be deep into debutante life; clothes; make-up; frilly anything; studying nothing except to be better for some man?  Oh, that is angry?  And so I am, – furious.  And it is about time.  I’ve certainly spent enough time trying to be ‘nice’ in this life.  What was most amazing to me is that once I became an adult and my anger surfaced for whatever reason and that was with great frequency, I was put down.  I was told that it wasn’t ‘nice’ to be angry.  It wasn’t ‘nice’ to explode.  It wasn’t ‘nice’ to speak the reality of life in this racist, sexist, misogynist world.  That would turn people off and then where would I be.  Yes, we all know of the bigotry, but we pretended and one was not supposed to call anyone ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ or acknowledge that you knew what was happening was out of the very deep seated bigotry of the country in which you were born.  And before you try to throw me or my family out as recent immigrants who don’t understand the ways of this fantastic United States – in which at least six generations of my family were born – take a look around?  I was born into a family which was considered outside the norm.  Most had substantial credentials when it wasn’t thought possible that such credentials existed in my ‘community’.  Doctorate degrees; ordained priests; journalists; lawyers, entrepreneurs, and on and on and on.

What has come out of all that?  A person with no ‘racial’ identity’ and no ‘group’ to identify with and so a person with the ability to see straight through this society’s pretenses and lies.  And, since just about every ‘race’ of person went through our house as family and all with some kind of business they were working to establish, I saw that from a small child.

What didn’t I learn?  How to lie the way Trump seems to be able to do with no effort.  Call it like it is was one of my family’s values and that happened all the time.

Once I became an adult I began to hear other things – especially when I moved north.  Friends would constantly say to me –  “yes, we know that is racist but you can’t say so out loud outside of a small group of friends because that will just make it harder for the rest of us.  No, you can’t call that sexist because that is just what women are like and so men have learned to respond and on and on and on.  Stay away from them they are ‘foreigners’ they don’t even speak English, they will turn on you and hurt you one day.’  And we dare to say we really were caught by surprise when Trump surfaced.  We had no idea the racism, sexism, etc. etc. were so entrenched and deep into American society.  We had no idea because we didn’t want to know – we wanted the comfort of the ‘better than’ feelings without the responsibility of what our taking that meant to someone else’s life and the times in which we live.

Recently, in Somerville, Massachusetts, I saw the slaughter of one group by another and it was economically, financially, and every other way disreputable – a huge cheat, rewarded by society because it looked financially viable and made money for others.  That is the story of Somerville Lumber and Home Depot.

We walk into Home Depot and up and down the aisles without a thought as to the human cost, the degradation, the lies and manipulations, the unethical and immoral history that made it possible for us to walk up and down those aisles.  What we don’t think about when we shop in the Home Depot’s of the world is the limit Home Depot has put onto the kind and quality of materials we now purchase and accept as what we need.  We are spending more and getting less.  Quality is certainly missing in that store and all of its siblings.  What we buy lasts a brief second compared to what other merchandise in the past was like.  Cheaper, cheapest, falling apart before it leaves the store is what we have become accustomed to as normal and what we support financially and otherwise.

What happened in Somerville, MA happened around the country at the same time?  People who owned businesses and those they employed now out of work, some out of money and worse.  A small handful benefitted to the tune of billions of dollars helping to create and increase the class of American Oligarch’s.  And yes, in the style of the Russian Oligarch’s.

I used to purchase hardware and other items at Somerville Lumber and sometimes at other smaller hardware stores – which were thriving and which had (compared to todays choice) some amazingly strong, sturdy and long lasting products.  It was human sized and when one went into the store it was peopled by humans both in front of the counters and walking the aisles.

Along comes Home Depot – just a couple blocks away.  Stolen from Somerville Lumber and other stores like it across the country was its life and future.  The pattern – the business pattern and structure they developed stolen and copied with the assumption that this is what you do in this society.  This is how you set up a successful business.  Look around and copy what someone else developed by the sweat of their brow.  Let someone else do the hard work of trying this pattern to see if it works and when they have successfully created something new – in swoops the American Oligarch’s to copy, steal and destroy.

Very quickly after Home Depot opened in that Somerville, MA. location, Somerville Lumber was drained of its customers, its life’s blood and it closed.  Very quickly after Home Depot stores opened in several locations not far from that one – other similar smaller stores started to close and people who had put their lives into operating, owning, growing their stores were bereft of everything they had spent their lives growing and developing.  There was no working with – no approach to those who were the creators of the idea – no conversation about anything – no compensation for what they contributed –  just the stealth, the cheat, the ugly of using what others built to benefit those doing the stealing and destroying of those who did the building.

Where did the idea for Home Depot come from?  The idea and business of Home Depot stolen from stores like Somerville Lumber.  But in todays world that is not called stealing, that is normal and happens constantly over many areas geographical and otherwise.  One group of very wealthy people saw an opportunity to make billions and took it at the expense of the rest of society and so our growth into an obscene country – spreading moral filth around the world.  The fast growing class of American Oligarch’s.

Look around you.  Get an idea for a business?  If it begins to be successful and you are not a part of that billionaire crowd your idea will be stolen; financed by others who will enjoy the benefit of your hardwork and life’s blood and you will be left with very little as the reward for being the pattern and having developed the worth of the idea for someone else’s success – stolen success, immoral success.

Try to fight back and you will find those in that billionaire crowd have friends who will make sure you can’t fight back by doing what they can to contribute to your demise so their money will be able to return much more without any competition from you and your kind.  Be a minority of any kind and you will find that push back against you vicious.  What else will you find as a minority?  You will find young white – mostly Northern European ancestry men – running around the country today in minority communities looking for ideas they can steal, have funded and if you were on your way to any kind of a great business you will find it stolen, across the street and draining your business while all the time ignoring the creators of the original ideas. Copying – stealing – replicating – using the vision of others – to produce something that is bereft at its core of any kind of morals we respect and were taught to live by.

That structure and those values have produced Donald Trump and all of those who surround him.

The same morality and value system explains why are we having such a hard time with Congress?  They are foaming at the mouth to benefit financially from Trump and his connections and are ready to do anything to be a part of that to reap what they see as the goodies they see falling all around in this Trumpian world.  Try putting that pattern up against the Nunes’ of the world and see how closely it fits.

Our world is being divided into the haves and the have nots with a gap between them creating almost an eternity of space.  Never has there been as many homeless as we now see on our streets.  Never have so many been so hungry for so long while others discard, waste and live as though the rest of the world is there to serve their needs.  Never has there been such a judgment on those who have not by those who have – the immoral, unethical, gross people of the world passing judgment on those trying to survive in a world which is becoming more and more bereft of empathy, love, caring for one another.  Instead we are becoming a nation of rapists.

As I look around the people I see concerned about those in need are disappearing or finding themselves in trouble and on the verge of moving into that group of homelessness; poor; indigent.

Take a look at businesses – the top business executives in this country.  Take a look at their ethics.  Take a look at what they are willing to do to stay on top – and way on top – not just doing well and making sure everyone else is doing well around them, but taking away from others as much as possible making sure they are among the super rich even if that means increasing those not doing well and pushing them into extreme poverty and oblivion until they are needed to serve the needs of this super rich group.

One of the largest companies in the world today is Amazon.  Getting wealthier by the minute.  What is their concern for those underwater?  None!  They are so busy grasping for more and more wealth and world control they don’t even see what they are doing.  If you are management at Amazon you are doing well.  If you work in the warehouses and are a part of the near-slave-employee-group you are working extremely hard for extremely little and limiting your life span to be able to eat today.  Tomorrow isn’t promised to you at Amazon if you are a part of the lower salaried class of people.  Benefits?  Forget that! Advancement – hardly! etc. etc. etc.  How many businesses and people who have worked in those businesses for a lifetime are being destroyed by Amazon.  How many of us are doing our little bit to insure that continues to happen because we think we see our benefit in patronizing such horrific inhumane values and such a business structure with its future projections which are totally destructive of humanity?

WAKE UP!  BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

Many of you guilty of supporting such a structure are into things like climate change, etc.  You are working for those things in this society which don’t take you out of your way to that brass ring you think you are going to get when the time is right.  Supporting those progressive objective won’t help you and won’t change anything.  The structures you are supporting will take you down in a heart beat and see that your children don’t have a chance.  Is that what you are working for?  Did you not notice when the gold ring was replaced with brass and that brass ring is now about to be replaced with a gold painted plastic replica?

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Posted in American Corporate Businesses, American Oligarchs, Bettina Network Blog, Breakfast Table Talk, Donald Trump, Empathy, Home Depot, sexism, Somerville Lumber, venture capitalists | Comments Off on American Business Structure and Function – Great or Morally Corrupt

Comey/Head of FBI/QuidProQuo?

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017

Listening to the hearings on Monday was quite emotional.  Getting feedback from many – it was amazing to hear that most of us agreed on the same thing.  That is highly unusual.  We tend to be a disagreeable lot!

Most striking about those hearings was to know and remember that James Comey came out with this announcement claiming that Hillary was under FBI investigation just before the Presidential election in November, 2016 telling the world  they had discovered many more emails.  At that time, Comey said nothing about either Trump or the Trump Campaign or Trump Campaign operatives being under a counterintelligence investigation – and they were – and that is far worse.

Since that time, we have seen several Trump Campaign operatives being fired and/or being seriously investigated for these kind of violations.  Some fired or not appointed because they could not get the requisite security clearance.

So far, that cannot be said of anyone in Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  She was under investigation for using an email server that was not considered secure enough, even though other Secretaries of State had done the same thing and many of the emails being talked about were not classified until after the fact.

Trump was under investigation  for what amounts to treason – for colluding with the Russians to have the results of this past Presidential election be the result wanted by Putin and his boys.  Comey had the evidence of Trump having asked for the negative plank in the Republican National Convention about Ukraine be removed plus a few other such things that Putin wanted – much more serious violations than those for which Hillary was being scalded.

As time passed Comey backed down and said the emails, which caused the investigation against Hillary to be reopened did not come from Hillary Clinton’s computer and those emails were duplicates of ones already in the FBI’s possession and they had been determined to be harmless and of very little relevance.

The media and others were more interested in dealing with the content of Hillary’s emails than in the circumstances around all of this which screamed to be dealt with.  Who said what to who from Podesta’s emails was petty bickering compared to this environment of the Trump Presidential campaign going back and forth with the operatives of a country which was very adversarial to the United States.  This was not England, Canada or France – this was Russia and Putin.  And what that means is clearly born out by the number of Russian oriented people now working in the U. S. Government at a very high level having been appointed to their jobs by Donald J. Trump.

And then on Monday came the revelation, during the hearings, with Comey and others under heavy pressure to reveal possible ongoing investigations into folks.  The FBI and Comey, its head, did not and would not reveal if anyone was under investigation – he/they said that kind of disclosure violated FBI policy.  That was verified time after time after time as questions came up and Comey repeated constantly that he could not reveal if anyone was under FBI investigation.

Apparently, during the presidential election, Comey made an exception and broke that rule so he could announce that Hillary was under investigation to make sure Donald Trump would be elected and he – Comey – would have his job by being reappointed as head of the FBI under Donald Trump.  Quid Pro Quo?  And was there anything else involved in this that would benefit Comey besides what looks like a definite quid pro quo about which we will never know all of the details?

After Comeys announcement, right before the election, destroying Hillary’s chances of winning the presidency –  this announcement made by Comey followed weeks of the Trump campaign promising that there would be a big announcement, close to the end of the campaign, that would turn the election in Trump’s favor.  In spite of this one sided announcement with Comey mentioning only Hillary Clinton – we heard during Mondays hearings that Donald Trump and his campaign were under criminal investigation from at least July, 2016 and probably from as early as March, 2016, throughout the rest of the campaign year and throughout the election.  Comey, at the time of his announcement about Hillary Clinton,  said nothing about that investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign operatives.  That clearly was a move to strengthen Trump’s chances of winning and to destroy Hillary Clinton’s.  No one in Comey’s position is naive about politics and what would result from such an act

The way Trump and his campaign operatives dumped all over Hillary and hit very hard on how awful that was and the criminality involved and the country put in serious jeopardy because of Hillary being under FBI investigation, it was clear they knew they would not have to eat crow before the election – which means they knew the announcement that Trump was under a much more serious investigation would not be made before the November votes were cast.

That needs to be clearly stated.  When Comey was reappointed as head of the FBI shortly after Trump won the presidential election our question is – Quid Pro Quo?  YES!  An FBI director knows he must avoid even the appearance of evil – so Comey knew clearly that he was not doing that.  He announced a Hillary Clinton investigation and was quiet about the Donald Trump investigation which would have produced a very different result.  Donald Trump would not now be President of these United States – wrecking havoc in world affairs, totally out of control.

Mr. Comey needs to be questioned under oath as to his role in all of this and what, if anything, did he receive for the part he played in getting Donald Trump elected.  It cannot be denied that he played a very crucial role.  Hillary Clinton’s numbers showed a landslide victory until that announcement came from Mr. Comey.  I am sure that landslide victory possibility was a serious concern for Mr. Putin and we think he would have been willing to pull out all the stops to prevent that from happening.

Comey was showing the world whose camp he was in and it wasn’t even close to Hillary Clinton’s, nor was it a neutral camp.  That was also reflected during the hearing in little places here and there that apparently went unnoticed.  When Congressman Turner asked a question during the Monday hearing in which he claimed unequivocally with no if ands maybes, etc. that the Washington Post and the New York Times reported lies – Comey not only let that pass, but quietly agreed with him.  I won’t go through all of those kind of moments, but there are clearly several in the record.

Trump and his campaign hit Hillary hard about the Constitutional Crisis that would happen if Hillary were elected President and how immediately thereafter she would be swamped with this criminal FBI investigation and on and on they went and there was no announcement from Comey about Trump and his campaign being under a very serious investigation which involved Putin, Russia and the possibility that Trump and his campaign people were colluding with the Russians to interfere with this election and to make sure that Trump won and Hillary lost.

We can’t emphasize enough that Hillary was the subject of an investigation because of her emails, and using an email server that wasn’t considered private enough.  That is like kindergarten kids playing in a play ground compared to what Trump, Putin and their boys were doing and does not begin to reach the heights of an investigation which is looking at Trump and his campaign for what would amount to treason – opening the door to the American voting process being manipulated and controlled by a foreign government.

James Comey needs to be investigated.  He clearly had something to gain – keeping his job, for starters, and he showed he was willing to take serious risks for Trump in the way he talked about Hillary being under investigation and keeping quiet about the fact that Trump was also under investigation for much more serious transgressions than was Hillary.

So where are we today?  Trump is making threats to Republican politicoes that if they don’t listen to him and do his bidding he will take his rallies to their districts and turn voters their against them.  That is a very potent threat.  How much more of this ugly and vicious control by a man who is a pathological liar are we going to take as we watch Trump and his close supporters working very hard to turn these United States into a fascist Nazi-style dictatorship which will finally be put under Putin, if Trump has his way.  Just about everyone at the top of this current government is involved in Russia, bigotry personified and/or mafia.  Trump, Tillerson, and on and on and on.

We have always thought that the closeness  between Trump and his daughter was because she is one of the few people who know about him and his purported business dealings with the Eastern European mafia.  She was with him at some crucial moments during their time together doing business.  It is time for this to be investigated and exposed – especially now that she is in the West Wing of the White House.

Trump’s rallies are dwindling and he will probably have to go back to the way his rallies got started – with people being hired to act as though they are simply attendees and Trump supporters when in reality they are hired actors and others to swell the ranks and get people to respond the way Trump would like them to respond.

And finally, Trump claimed all during his campaign that he had a secret very potent way to defeat ISIS and we would all see that happen when he was elected.  Well people, he has been elected and his secret, potent way to defeat ISIS is to continue the program and the way Obama set down for this to happen.

This Trump presidency is a house of cards and it is time to collapse that house.

For us – Trump, Pence and all of their appointees need to resign enmass and get out of the way so we can get on with the business of living under a democratic republic without lies, thievery, treason, viciousness, stealing from the poor to give to the wealthy, destruction of arts and other programs which took generations to build, moving away from health care for all – even though that was one of Trump’s promises and more.

Enough is enough!  It is time for a recall – or at the very least an Independent Prosecutor so Trump can be investigated outside of a Republican controlled Congress.

That Republican controlled Congress was totally uninterested in an independent and unbiased investigation.  Their questions during the hearing were questions which tried to make Trump and his boys look good and to get him clear of all the ugly he has done instead of questions pointed to what needs to be answered honestly, forthrightly and clear.  Trump is appealing to that side of those White Northern European Republican men that is a little like him – give them a piece of cake with the promise of the entire sweet and their ethics begin to crumble.  That is what is beginning to happen and to stop that needs to be done TODAY!

It took Hitler less than  a year to turn Germany into something they paid spent decades repenting and paying for.  Trump is moving much faster and we are watching United States ethical base falling pretty rapidly.

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

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Juneteenth

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016

We celebrated Juneteenth in several ways this weekend and wanted to share some of that with you.  It was a fun time over breakfast and dinner.  How could such a sharing be called “fun”?  When you share something this serious with friends around a table with food you can talk about much that you might not broach otherwise.  Try a Juneteenth dinner!  Or a Juneteenth breakfast.

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For all the freedom we now enjoy. Keep us safe and keep our freedoms inviolable.

What is Juneteenth?  See a portion of the article that follows written by Zeba Blay for the Huntington Post to find out.

Zeba Blay 
Voices Culture Writer, The Huffington Post

It took two whole years after President Abraham Lincoln declared the abolition of slavery on January 1, 1863, for the end of one of the darkest chapters in American history to take hold.

The Emancipation Proclamation marked the end of the legalized institution of slavery in America, but in the small town of Galveston Island, Texas, black slaves had been carrying on their lives of bondage and subjugation, oblivious to the fact that they were actually free.

On June 19th, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger and his band of Union soldiers (who had been traveling throughout the South for two years spreading the word) arrived at Galveston Island to tell the last remaining slaves in the United States that they were finally free.

The day became known as “Juneteenth,” a kind of Independence Day for African-Americans, a day of celebration and remembrance. Juneteenth is a state holiday in Texas, and is officially celebrated in 43 states in America, usually with parades, barbecues and memorial ceremonies.

But Juneteenth isn’t recognized as a federal holiday (though attempts have been made), and for that reason few people get to publicly celebrate it or are even aware of its existence and legacy. And that’s a shame, because Juneteenth is an opportunity for black people to truly celebrate all that they’ve overcome through the power of community.

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The History Behind Loving Day

One aspect of Emancipation, which we included in the Nuneteenth Celebration was the law suit which made intermarriage – marriage between Black and White in the United States – legal.  The Loving Case.  Click on the above and you can read about it from Time.com

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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1211439892199949&set=a.200817423262206.56928.100000018504263&type=3&theater

250 to 700 Blacks murdered in East St. Louis by an angry White mob.  Angry about what?  This happened in 1917 – does this look similar to some of what is happening today?  Only today it is not so egregious – only 50 or so being killed by those who feel their identities as “better than’ threatened, but it happens far more frequently.

Like drugs, which were considered a “ghetto” problem during the last and previous generations, that problem was ignored and wrapped up into the negative Black stereotype.  Not until the drug traffic expanded into the upper-class White ghettoes did it come onto the front pages and get far more attention.  I have yet to hear these killings being called “White on White” shootings, bombings or massacres.  Starting with Oklahoma they most certainly could have.

As long as these shootings and massacres happened in the Black ghetto, they were ignored. And called “Black on Black” crimes.  They are now front page because they are now happening all over.  Nothing will eliminate them until we stop trying to blame one group for what obviously is a false claim against them and work together to bring about a society which does not have as its first need – proving its superiority over another group and parading out its anger, today against its own, when that artificially created superiority is threatened.  Is it an accident that most of the people doing these killings are Young White Males – mostly from the far right?  Not the ISIS far right, but the American far right.  When our response is to obfuscate and cast blame on others, these killings will continue.  What do those Young White Males have in common?  They perceived themselves as being outside the “White Privileged” class and were treated as such by the small group in which they functioned – their school, etc.

Do we want to stop these killings or do we prefer them to continue and escalate because we can use them to increase and hold in sanctity “White Privilege.”  We are now trying to claim these killings are being done by “the other” and are trying to use that to turn this country into another Nazi Germany – and we are beginning to succeed.  When a Donald Trump becomes a presidential candidate – whether he wins or not – clearly the forces of evil are succeeding.  We either step back and let it happen or we take part in promoting the mythology that they are being done by the unwashed masses.  Currently, that group is defined as Muslims.  If that continues the definition of that group will expand to encompass other minorities – one group at a time.

Was it Martin Luther King, Jr. who said – if they come for you in the morning, they will be back for me in the afternoon?

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Everything talked about in this blog and in any other blog in the Bettina Network, inc. is the opinion of the person who wrote the blog and does not necessarily represent the opinions of Bettina Network, inc. It is the property of Bettina Network, inc. and/or the person who wrote the original blog.

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

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A Response to “Dogs = Emotional Slavery”

Sunday, November 8th, 2015

Thank you for your blog on dogs.  I didn’t think anyone would have the guts to say what many of us are thinking and afraid to say because all around us are people who are so totally into their dogs it is pathetic, while the rest of the world just shakes its head in disbelief.

My pet peeve is the filth that dogs bring.  We are afraid of rats and talk about the diseases they bring.  It takes over 500 rats to make the kind of ‘shit’ that dogs make with one bowel movement and the smell is awful.  Does the real difference in the way we think about these mammals comes from the fact that we control dogs, but can’t control rats?  It is clearly not cleanliness or the spread of disease.  Dogs are, hands down, able to spread disease much faster and more lethally than can rats.

I’ve also noticed how dogs walk all over the place and when they get home they walk into the house bringing whatever is on their feet and the first thing they do is to shake themselves to get rid of all the ‘stuff’ their hair has collected during their walk.  Dogs themselves aren’t so filthy, they know what to do to keep themselves clean, it is their interaction with owners who either don’t know or don’t care about the negative reaction of their dogs with the rest of society.  What comes off when they shake is amazing.  Check it out and see if some of your diseases haven’t come from your home collecting all of this stuff.

I am so tired to taking other people’s dog shit out of my garden that I would like to outlaw dogs in my neighborhood.

What is most amazing to me is the fact that dog owners take their dogs for a ‘walk’ twice a day – at least.  Actually, they are taking their dogs to the bathroom to pee and shit in another area – at least several blocks away from their own homes and gardens because they don’t want that mess, germs, bacteria and smell close to them.

I’ve seen dog owners take their dogs to other peoples gardens and hold the dogs to pee on the flowers and recent plantings that others have paid for and are taking care of to beautify their homes and neighborhoods. Why do the dog owners do this?  So they don’t have to pick up the filthy shit.  I’ve seen people walking their dogs with bags in their hands to pick up the dog excrement.  Do they use the bags?  Many don’t.  It is mostly for show.  If the dogs have a bowel movement in your garden, the owners can walk away from it and leave it there.  The same thing with the small garden areas around trees, especially if there are plantings around the trees which cover the dogs shit so it isn’t found until they have moved away from what they have turned from a lovely garden into a dog toilet which does not flush.

It is time for this to stop.

I love dogs – but the dog owners are making life impossible.  I read your blog when I had just come in from picking up dog shit off my lawn.

How do we get this to stop?  It is time to stop romanticizing dogs and look at the reality of their lives amongst us.  Particularly,  their owners need to be trained and to understand this is not playtime or snuggle time, but reality time.  The reality here is its not the dogs who are the problem, but their owners.

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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

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Dogs = Emotional Slavery

Wednesday, October 28th, 2015

copyright 2015 Bettina Network, inc.

We are and have been for hundreds of years a society/world of slaves.  Either you are a slave or a slave master.  Many have tried to break free, but in some part or parts of life, that historical connection gets us and changes us from a free people to a people enslaved to each other and to the things which bind us.  What is that new word that has entered our vocabulary in a terrifying way, and growing fast, intruding on life in many cities, suburban areas, country towns – human trafficking?

We enslaved Africans.  However, long before the enslavement of Africans we enslaved the Hebrews and we can go back to many other peoples and animals who we enslaved.  Is there something wrong with the human spirit, that we cannot be whole and a people functioning on their own two feet and even reaching out to help others?

Our history seems to say that we have to destroy and desecrate others so that our needs can be met without our putting forth too much energy and effort in the process.  We must make sure those who serve are categorized and marked so that their role in our society is clear and definitely defined as subservient and never even close to being equal!  Do our security needs demand such?

Enslavement  is a necessity because we need to make sure our needs  are never left unfulfilled even for a little while.  We need to make sure that whatever – whoever – we have designated and oppressed and labeled to make their purpose and use only  the fulfillment of our needs is close by and unable to function except at our bidding.  The slave’s food, shelter and even their ability to take another breath depends upon our continuous need for them and our willingness to fulfill their basic needs because their enslavement becomes a part of our identity!

For some time now, it has become more and more noticeable that we have emotionally enslaved dogs.  They are a group, which in the wild run in pacts with a pact leader.  We have taken advantage of that and become the pact leader to our dogs – even if that is only one dog.

What we demand in return is total unadulterated worship.

We are becoming more and more isolated from one another – almost a reflection of what is happening in space as the planets and all the otherworldly objects are moving further and further away from one another.  So to are we as humans doing the same thing.

Because we need to feel a closeness to something or to someone, we have chosen to make that the dog.  We don’t have to return to the dog what the dog gives to us.  When we make an attempt to respond to what we are given,  it doesn’t have to be fully and  when we have other things to do, we can go our way and ignore that animal which has been so faithful to us. We have even justified killing the dog when it has outlived its usefulness.

Of course, not everyone reacts in this way, some are the exception.   The role of the exception – which is meant to disprove the rule – only proves, to those watching closely enough – that the rule is rigid.  Kind of like what is happening at this tail end of racism.

We are moving to formalize this emotional slavery of dogs by naming an increasing number of them “therapy dogs”.  Dogs, whose mission it is, in this society, to be to others what normal human beings no longer are capable of being.  Our own lives have become so “busy” that we don’t have time anymore to reach out to those in need.  We no longer get any satisfaction out of giving to others in need.  We are delegating those jobs more and more either to society’s underclass or – even better – we have discovered the “therapy dog.”  Society’s underclass were the people to whom we entrusted the care of our elderly, sick, mentally challenged, seriously handicapped.  They also served to be there and help the dysfunctional.  But, they are getting to be a nuisance, expecting equality, beginning to be unhappy with their lot, being ‘undocumented’ but needing and beginning to demand more; no longer being able to quietly serve the rest of society making do with less than humans need to survive.

That elderly person whose family has left them to be cared for by others will buy them a dog.  Or that person, in serious emotional need will find their own dog to replace their human family and friends.  Or, someone else buys that “therapy dog” so that deserted person has love and affection and does not have to depend upon another human being and does not have to be beholden or give to another human being in return for any affection given to them.  What a new form of “freedom”.

What kind of society is that creating?

Dogs have been trained to pee and shit wherever they feel like taking care of their bodily functions.  They can do this with impunity as long it is away from the area where their owners live.  On someone else’s property?  Around the trees in the city – which can then get sick and infect all of the other trees? Dogs have been trained to leave their bowel movement wherever it falls, which means, wherever they decided to drop it, and if it affects the health of children who come along and come into contact with the dogs feces, the dogs owner walks away doing nothing and with very little to no responsibility for what their dogs have done.  The more upscale the area, the more infected with dog feces it becomes.  The more upscale the area the more enslaved dogs one finds.

At the end of winter and the snow melts, one sees enormous amounts of dog feces on the ground, where the dog owners have allowed their dogs to drop their “business” and walk away leaving it.  The snow covers everything so why not?  The small gardens all over a lovely area with flowers and others kinds of growth where the dog is encouraged to hop in, do their ‘business’ and hop out with the owners walking away leaving the dog feces to infect whoever and whatever comes along – including other dogs when the feces is diarrhea feces and another dog sniffs, eats or otherwise interacts with that diarrhea laden feces.  Many dogs are infected with disease in this way.  One dropping of diarrhea feces – given a couple days – generates many more droppings of diarrhea feces from other dogs who inhabit the area.  When the leaves fall, the same phenomena happens and just before the snow falls to continue the process.

Parks, which once belonged to children, who could run, jump, fall down, now belong to dogs who run, jump, drop their feces and play with their owners since this is their one time of ‘freedom’ during the day.  The other part of the day they are locked in a room; kept in a basement; confined to a dog cage; or etc.  The more privileged dogs are kept behind a fence in a small yard.

Slavery of any kind breaks down a society in the most desperate ways and this emotional slavery of dogs is no exception.  The most dangerous part of this slavery is our refusal to see and/or name it for what it is.  We call them “pets”.  Animals were not made to be the “pets” of humans. They have their own lives and go their own ways except when they are kept enslaved and begin to understand their well being – their food supply – their shelter are all dependent upon that human slave owner who demands that they wag their tails vigorously when that human owner approaches, who demands that they jump for ‘joy’ all over the human to show excitement that they have not been abandoned to a cruel and unresponsive world that treats dogs without owners viciously.  Need I describe more…………………?

And here come the denials!

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Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

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WHAT IS BED & BREAKFAST?

Thursday, October 15th, 2015

The term “bed & breakfast” has been garnering more and more excitement over the years.  Every corporation, small business, mom and pop shop, wants to gain in their marketing and advertisement so they add things that are totally irrelevant to their businesses in the hope that you will be fooled into thinking they are “bed & breakfast” and will patronize them.  You can then be acculturated into a definition of bed & breakfast which has nothing to do with the actual concept.

Let’s take a look:

There are VACATION RENTAL HOMES.

These have nothing to do with “bed & breakfast”, but some unscrupulous, or ignorant merchants, PR people, media, etc. will put them under “bed & breakfast” because they have something to gain – if nothing more than to not have to think and write at the same time.

A Vacation Rental Home is a house which is put up for rent – furnished, with everything you need to move in and set up housekeeping for one week, two weeks, a month, sometimes an entire season.  No one else shares the house with you.  They are put together for the purpose of renting to those who want a time away from home, but in another house near the beach, near the mountains, in a historic location, etc.

There are ROOMING HOUSES

These are still popular and much used, but they are never advertised as such.  The term, which once referred to a temporary community of people, living together in their own rooms with – usually – the local widow providing breakfast and dinner fell into disrepute.  As generations passed, the breakfast and dinner fell by the wayside, the community disintegrated into a collection of disparate people who were temporarily down on their luck and rooming houses became what are sometimes known as “flop houses” and so the entire industry fell on hard times until some enterprising “Rooming House” owner discovered he or she could rent their “Rooming House” easier if they called it a “bed & breakfast.”

There are HOTELS

The hotel corporation has been pretty vicious about getting rid of the competition.  So, when it became clear – as more and more people travelled, particularly to Europe and especially England – “bed & breakfast” was discovered in the United States and a growing number of people wanted to travel “bed & breakfast”.

Seeing this growing number of people and losing many paying guests, hotels added “bed & breakfast” to their name.  Sometimes to a part of the services they offered – Smith Hotel and Bed & Breakfast.  Grand Dame Hotel, also offering bed & breakfast.  And more such appellations appeared – more and more frequently, until today we think nothing about the conflict of a Hotel and a “bed & breakfast” being conflated into one place.  We see “bed & breakfast” advertised by a hotel and do exactly what the marketing and public relations people expected us to do – go for it bringing the romance and reputation of the “bed & breakfast” into the hotels circle.

There are INNS

Once the “Southern Lady” of the accommodations industry, INNS had a romance around them that began to be moved into the sphere of “bed & breakfast” so INNS started calling themselves Smith Bed & Breakfast Inn.  Or sometimes, the Smith INN bed & breakfast.  Trying to get back the romantic and historical reputation it once had until they got knocked off their pedestal by actual bed & breakfasts.

There are GUEST HOUSES

This category never quite got itself together since the marketing and advertisements were and are usually done by the owners rather than the professionals so they went all over the map.

These are usually private homes which have gone commercial.  The owners would normally live in the house, but they live in it the way a funeral home owner lives in a funeral home.  There are places in the house which are ready for their close-up and other places where the owners and the help reside and/or work.  They can have a restaurant, rent parts of the house out for parties, weddings, etc. and just generally pretend to be a private home/hotel.  They vary all over the map, but most call themselves – what else – “bed & breakfast.”

There are the “AIR” people

Started normally in the living room of the apartment they rented from someone else with an air mattress on the floor of the living room which they rent to strangers, this has gotten all out of hand and Attorney Generals, cities, villages, counties, states, are getting into the picture to regulate such.  Except they generally don’t know what it is they are regulating.

The “AIR” people have begun to include all of the above, plus more as they define their business and characterize themselves as “bed & breakfast” which has totally disrupted the “bed & breakfast” industry as well as all the rest.

Since some of the “AIR” people started their companies by stealing the concept from others and moving on without any acknowledgement, compensation, or permission of any kind,  their ethics have not improved as they develop the concept pushing out others and acting like the mafia of the industry.

There needs to be some authority which sorts out all of these groups and has them identify themselves as what they are rather than trading on a marketing and advertising concept which fools the public and attempts to confuse everyone to their advantage.

So – let’s look at what is actually “bed & breakfast”.

It is a stay in a private home.  Where people actually live on a daily basis, going about their lives as we all normally would, except those who offer bed & breakfast welcome guests along the way who are traveling from one place to another.

They do not offer a place for a wedding, party, meeting, corporate retreat, etc.  They offer a place to stay for a few people.  They do not have 30 or more rooms where people can stay, they have just a few rooms with just a few people staying.

Every culture has had some form of bed and breakfast.  In India – those traveling on a religious pilgrimage had places to stay which welcomed those making a pilgrimage – and more.  In the United States bed & breakfast comes mostly from the “Bishop’s room”.  The place in a home reserved for the Bishop, when he was in town.  When the Bishop was not in town, the room was used by the home owners to welcome other guests.  The guests left a discrete offering on a side board, quietly, so as not to embarrass the homeowners.  That offering could be a chicken for supper, etc.  It was also sometimes money.

One family got to know many travelers and the travelers got to know a local person, generally one with whom they stayed in contact over the years.  It was a way to reach beyond your circle of friends, your class, your race, your everything into an area you would not reach otherwise.  The people who travelled and the people who welcomed them met serendipitously and there a community was formed.  You had a contact in another area to whom you could write, later on as telephones came in – you could call – if you needed something or some influence that person with whom you stayed – could provide.  It was and remained a personal, one-on-one arrangement.

During the time when African Americans were not welcomed in hotels, motels, inns, etc. they travelled bed & breakfast.  There was a list of people in different cities who welcomed guests, who you could call and make reservations to stay for the night or for several nights during your time in a particular area.  One of the reasons some African Americans grew closer with people they would never have met otherwise.  A community was formed across the country as people who couldn’t get a glass of water from a restaurant found a way around a stone wall.

This has all gotten out of hand as greed pushes us to make ever more money on someone else’s back – on someone else’s concept – inconveniencing many who were perfectly willing to accept a neighbors bed & breakfast, but appalled at the streams of people now appearing, the loud music from the parties, the intrusion into their lives which has happened as the “bed & breakfast” industry is now being destroyed by those who don’t begin to understand the concept, but understand the money they can make by using the name – concept be damned.

“Bed & breakfast” was and is a way for many to use their homes to supplement their incomes and sometimes even to carry them through hard times.

We have helped people get out of mortgage foreclosures, evictions, and more by using the original “bed & breakfast” concept – which is also what it was meant to do.

We hope, that as you read this and go through your life with a better understanding of “bed & breakfast” you will help to calm down and maintain an industry which has meant a lot to many people and should not be so exploited as it is today.

If you want a corporation; a business; which makes reservations for other kind of accommodations, then have that and call it what it is, don’t trade on “bed & breakfast” to promote a fraud.  Don’t have a business where people arrive expecting breakfast only to discover they are in a commercial setting and there is no breakfast nor really, no bed & breakfast, but something else they didn’t expect.  Don’t have a business which someone who just wants money and has figured out a way to use this concept with your help to rent apartments which they then re-rent to others for “bed & breakfast” reducing the housing – especially affordable housing available in a very tight area.  Don’t facilitate the destruction of a wonderful industry because of your out of control greed and empire building.  Don’t rent your living room to someone with an air mattress on the floor because you want to do this rip off thing instead of living comfortably and honestly with your neighbors.

It is time for all of this to stop and for the world to come to its senses.  Chasing after – greedy for – hurting others – it is enough.  It has led to people’s homes burning down because of guests who were ill prepared for where they were staying and got the idea they could use the accommodation anyway they saw fit and consequently didn’t respect the homeowner or the neighbors; muggings because people arrive at these accommodations knowing there would be no one home and instructions given when they rented the place to look under the porch for the key – only to find someone else knew about the emptiness of the house and was inside waiting for them and relieved them of their belongings, money, dignity.  It is time to take care with whatever business you call yourself and stop pushing to the point where people using your services feel free enough to rent a house for one thing and instead have a party bus pull up and destroy the house using it as a cheap place to have a loud, destructive party which winds up tearing the house apart and destroying someone’s home which was onlyrented for the night to a couple.

IT IS ENOUGH and time to deal honestly with who you are; what you are doing; and to show respect for the rest of the world by naming yourself correctly and not trading on a concept which has nothing to do with your business.

For the above reasons and others we are putting AirB&B in Bettina’s Hall of Shame.

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Sexism 101 – Father Figure Problems

Monday, September 28th, 2015

copyright 2015 Bettina Network, inc.

One guest brought a problem to the breakfast table.

She was late arriving and most people were ready to leave.

Her agitated state made all of us stay and the resulting conversation, we felt, belonged on your blog.

We deal with sexism in all ways and places.  Mostly, we talk and write about it in the workplace because that is where your income and vocation come into play.  This breakfast table talk was about sexism in the family.  Particularly with daughters who have father issues they don’t think about, recognize, work on or see as anything having to do with them.

Many women – especially those above 30 – have father figure issues and work them out in their lives.  Most particularly in their romantic lives and in relationship to their mothers.  Have a problematic relationship with your father and your mother gets trashed.

Sexual abuse has come into play now more than ever.  In those above 30 it was not the issue it has become today.  Men with ego problems work out their issues by using women, usually their wives and their daughters are the ones who suffer.

This woman was trying to talk with her daughters about their choice of male companion – husband, boy friend, fiancé, etc.  She noticed that the male companion they chose was always one who was sexually abusive – and – we were not talking about beating or being physically abusive.  We were talking about the male who pursued them being their teacher, boss, someone who was over them in a father-like position.  The young women were protesting to their mother that she was being “hyper” and didn’t understand, paranoid with a chip on her shoulder, etc..  We thought she understood only too well because her own history reflected the same abuse, only at a time when to marry a male above you was looked upon as your having made quite a “catch”.  The woman making that “catch” was looked up to, but in real time, on a day-to-day basis paid a heavy price in her personal life. As she talked we realized she basically hid this side of her life from everyone and presented a great looking marriage to the world.  She couldn’t hide it from her children, but they saw her life through a child’s eyes and interpreted it through their own veils – through which she didn’t come out very well.

A woman in that position, so the table conversation went, would probably be very angry most or all of her married life.  Basically, because she would not have recognized the sexual abuse she experienced during the courtship process, the marriage and the rearing of family.

Such a spouse needed the ego boost of having made a ‘conquest’ and would expect that ‘conquest’ to be in an inferior place to him.  When that didn’t line up with the reality of the relationship, the woman suffered as the man tried constantly to pull the rug out from under anything she did to fulfill her life.  She thought he did that even if the cost was to him, her, the marriage and the children.  The things she did and contributions she made, if they were not according to her ‘stereotype’ he did not want them to succeed and did what he could to kill all of her initiatives and hard work.

He was her fulfillment and that is what she was limited to.  He was her fulfillment according to his judgment and expectations.  Whenever she tried to live her life on her own path she would find herself mired in mess.  If she hadn’t dealt with what was happening and could or would not look at the reality of her life with this spouse then anger, frustration, explosions would follow.  The children, witnessing this anger and those explosions put the blame exactly where it did not belong – on their mother, who then shouldered the negativity of her children and the abuse of her spouse.  The abuse was never – in the family being discussed – physical, it was always on a very different, totally accepted level.

With her children now grown and having walked away from her to their father, what does she do!

Her agitation and unhappiness at breakfast, we thought, was coming from the fact that she either hadn’t seen her life as it was and how she had lived it during this marriage or the truth of that marriage was trying to come out and she wasn’t ready to deal with it.  She was concentrating on her children and the pain of their rejection.

I reflected on how many older women with children I knew, whose children were now alienated from their mother and all in the bosom of their father.  Most of the fathers I knew were divorced and in ‘new’ marriages where their ‘new’ wives were mightily puffing up that male ego.

We did a lot of talking, but didn’t know where to go with this or how to help.  We skipped our morning appointments because this topic drew all of us – wonder why it had such a strong draw.  I suspect it is something we all have inside and have not allowed to come out because it is not such an accepted, commonly discussed topic.  I don’t even know how to write about it for this blog, but feel it is important enough to at least make the attempt.

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

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A New World Order

Tuesday, April 21st, 2015

copyright Bettina Network, inc. 2015

We first heard of a “New World Order” when George Bush was president and let those words slip.  We want to pick up those words and expand and change what that means – just a little.

We live and see others prosper as we recapture the past and move into the future world order.  Some of us see the past as that place full of light and goodness.  Others see this new technology creating that place full of light and goodness.  We think they are both wrong and totally destroying what they are trying to achieve and capture.  How does that happen?  How did and do they get it so wrong?

We have to go back to the old world understanding that we don’t own anything on this earth.  We contribute those ways of thinking to the ‘primitives’.  Those groups of people who didn’t understand and were very ‘unintelligent’ in their ways of thinking.  Their basic belief was that we don’t and can’t own anything in this world.  All of that changed.  But did it really or only in new constructs we chose to use to define who we are and how we live!

When we enter this world we do so with nothing except the body we take on at conception.  When we leave it, we leave with nothing – not even the body with which we have identified for as long as we have lived on this earth.  So how have we gotten everything so messed up, mixed up, confused and just downright wrong?

We need to go back to accept the fact of who we are instead of who our leaders have created us to be through their mythology – which we have accepted – and look at and accept who we really are and what we really own, if anything.  Once we do that, the Bettina Lifestyle is simple – it is a “New World Order” based on our shared humanity – and a joy to live.

Whatever we receive in this life is a gift and something we own only temporarily.  It really belongs to the earth – whatever that means.  So we should take care of every pin, every dot, every tittle and iota that comes into our possession because it is not permanent and it is not ours.  We keep all of these things for a second and then pass them on to someone else, unless we have ruined all of what we have possessed in the meantime and then we throw our things into the landfills.  Those things we claim to own came from someplace else and are going someplace else when we no longer have use of whatever we have acquired.

Enter the Estate Sale – the Yard Sale – the Garage Sale.  All ways we use to get rid of our ‘old’ stuff’ that we no longer want nor think we can use.  The thought of taking care of our things because we are passing them along in the future very seldom enters our minds.  We are the throw away society.  We use it and throw it away.  And what happens to those waiting to receive those throw away items?  Sorry, but they were trashed, discarded, uncared for because the person using them interrupted the cycle by their inability to recognize their humanity and the need to share everything with those waiting to receive.  We have dehumanized those waiting to receive to justify the way we have dehumanized ourselves.  We have re-created ourselves in the image of the god we created who would put up with our sins, and wastefulness and uglinesses to ourselves and to others.

If we had taken good care of what we ‘owned’ temporarily, and understood that what we have must be used by someone else, those things would continue their lives and would continue to be useful someplace else and to someone else.

Some people can only buy and use “new” stuff.  Some of us delight and cherish the ‘old stuff’ that we find at Estate Sales.  It is like winning the lottery to find something wonderful for a fraction of what we would have to pay for the same item “new”.  It is living on society’s throw aways, but what a luxury life.

Clothes are the best example.  If you wear your clothes carefully, you can pass them on to continue to be used by someone else.  So Bettina provides for that.  Bettina Network, inc. has estate sales.  Bettina Network Foundation, inc. gives away that which is given to us to those who need the give-aways to be able to participate in this society.  How wonderful to find those give-aways in good condition.

There is no understanding of the ugliness and selfishness of the society in which we live until one becomes homeless.  You can understand it on a very small basis as you interact and see the political fights, the petty jealousies, the coveting thy neighbors belongings. You can understand it only so far, if you also have a position which pays you money to work; friends in the same or better position of whom you can be jealous; belongings which don’t quite measure up to those of your neighbors.  Homeless,  you are cut off from all of that and are standing outside alone or with children or with other family or with friends- all of you alone -it is a stark emptiness, fear and feeling of what was it all about and what is it all about now that I am on the street!  But oddly enough, that tendency to create negative structures in which to live is so strong that the homeless recreate the same scenarios only on a different level from that which we find in the society at large.  What stops that?  What intervenes to get rid of all the myths which we have created to continue this insanity?

To be homeless raises the question as to what got me in this place? Did I do something or not do something that I wound up homeless and cut off from everyone and everything except those in my condition?  There are a few people who reach out to help, but they are not my friends.  They are making themselves feel good as a part of their “belonging,”‘  enhancing their position in society; reaching out to ‘do good’, but going back into the lifestyle and the society which created the underbelly of people that are not doing so good.

Why do we throw away our children onto the streets?  Why do we cast our elderly into buildings which harbor and collect all of the germs and diseases one gets as one gets older and keeps them from being seen and interacted with by others – the normal younger ones?  Why do we eliminate youth and family from these buildings and put those who are only one step above the elderly in such places to ‘care’ for them?  Is there something about youth who don’t tow the line and the elderly who shouldn’t be seen with the rest of us that makes us segregate?

As racism subsides are we so quickly replacing it with this form of elder-ism and creating more isms – so we don’t run out and might have to acknowledge our equality?  Separate and unequal now true for the elderly and for our children?

It is interesting that one sees, on the streets, people active until about age 70 and then it is rare to see those much older unless we see them amongst the homeless.  We have to go out of our way to these elder-buildings to see anyone older than 70.  Why do we so desperately need to be better than, that we will destroy other human beings to fill our need to be better than?

Marketing and advertising create the image of being stunned by those over 40 who look good (translate young) – who are not ill – who are active in society.  We just gasp at a 50 year old who looks younger and is still very active.  Corporations almost totally refuse to hire anyone over 45 and we go along with that.  Somehow, wisdom does not count.  And we can see that in how our society operates.  If wisdom were allowed in, and we commonly shared the experiences we have acquired  from having lived many years through much,  that might change the structures of our world and those who are busy creating this horror might have to give way to others who understand, acknowledge and act out of our common humanity.

If we treated our possessions as being with us only temporarily would that change all of this?  If we consciously understood that when we leave this earth we would not even be able to do so taking our own bodies?  Would that make a change?  If we passed on what we now own and use when we either no longer want or need it and we passed that on in good shape to others would all of this change?

As of now, wearing clothes someone else bought and wore and now throws away is not considered great.  Many of us won’t wear other peoples’ clothes.  We expect to immediately get sick and die from some terminal disease we catch in that process.  This need for new stuff and only new stuff has been created by a marketing and advertising campaign which has made us deathly afraid of each other and sometimes of ourselves.  We must feed the “growth through throw away” societal structure.  The faster we can get others to discard and throw away the faster new industries and companies can grow.

Look at this, –  we can’t stand to be around someone who has an odor. That has created a whole industry, which is thriving.  Try it sometimes and see how repulsed your friends and even your family can be if you smell.  And we all smell.  The exception is those who temporarily get rid of their smell by using chemicals which in the long run are harmful to one’s health.  Maybe those products need the addition in their television commercials to list all the bad things they do to the body, if you use them, as soothing music plays in the background.  Your smell is as unique as everything else.  Get used to it.  Can you walk into a room and know any of the people who just exited by the odors left or do you know the odors left by the brand of the chemicals used by the individuals?

We prefer to be around those who have more than we do and we will do some strange things to each other reaching ‘up’.  We cater to those who seem to have more, hoping they will acknowledge us and pull us ‘up’ with them.  And those already ‘up’ are doing their best to distance themselves from those who have less because they don’t want their ‘position’ compromised, especially by the unwashed.

Take a look at what keeps us without an odor – full of chemicals.  Take a look at what  keeps us clothed – chemicals, oil, especially in the middle classes and you will find these  chemicals and processed oils giving off gases into our bodies.  The food the chefs, who now make millions of dollars for the prattle produce, – can be really fowl, only we claim it to be exquisite because we repeat what we are expected to repeat to stay a member of the group.  Once upon a time these Chefs touted Olive Oil as the only Oil to cook with if you wanted to be healthy.  Slowly, too slowly, word got out that one can’t really cook with Olive Oil because it goes rancid as the temperature in the pot goes up and it doesn’t have to go up very far for the rancidity to appear killing all of the B vitamins in our system.

Try life in this New World Order.  Take good care of what you currently own,  with the thought that it will be owned by someone else in the not too dBettina Trademarkistant future and you want to preserve it so it can continue to be used and enjoyed.  Pass your belongings on to those who either won’t or can’t pay the top dollars required of the people buying new stuff.  What is this new stuff they are buying?  Shoes full of chemicals way into four figures; New pocketbooks which show off a certain status costing into five figures.  Instead of landfill, make sure those items with which you currently live are in such good condition they can be passed on to others to enjoy.

Find someone homeless and bring them into your social circle.  Include them in your parties, your dinners, your outings, your vacations.  You don’t have to provide them with permanent housing.  When dinner is over they go back to their homeless state.  When you return from vacation, they go back to their homeless state.  When you pass someone homeless on the street – smile and speak.  When you pass anyone on the street – smile and acknowledge your common humanity.  What will that do?  Possibly cure this society’s penchant for creating homelessness and then not taking responsibility for what we have created.  How? By acknowledging our common humanity.  If I have a lot in common with that person on the street how can I do otherwise than to at least speak.  Maybe one day……………..

As the homeless are more included in your life and the lives of your friends and family maybe they will see another way to move out of the state they are in.  Maybe doors have been opened for them and within them to help move them off the street.

Try this beginning of a truly New World Order and see how far it takes you and us.

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com

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PTSD – Yes, Posttraumatic Stress

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014

copyright by Bettina Network, inc. 2014

Our breakfast conversations don’t shy away from any topic.  This one dealt with – what is Post Traumatic Stress?

I went to Wikipedia to look up what this means and found the following:

“Posttraumatic stress disorder[note 1] (PTSD) may develop after a person is exposed to one or more traumatic events, such as sexual assault, warfare, serious injury, or threats of imminent death.[1] The diagnosis may be given when a group of symptoms, such as disturbing recurring flashbacks, avoidance or numbing of memories of the event, and hyperarousal, continue for more than a month after the occurrence of a traumatic event……

People who experience assault-based trauma are more likely to develop PTSD, as opposed to people who experience non-assault based trauma such as witnessing trauma, accidents, and fire events……”

Most of us only know about PTSD from movies we have seen, which includes actors portraying people with such a problem. Very few of us actually knows someone with PTSD.

Our breakfast included one person who was trying to recover from PTSD and not being successful in the effort.

Most of us these days, no matter the religion or lack of religion, believes human beings are basically good.  Our conversation at breakfast centered around the fact that human beings are mostly self-centered and self-absorbed and have to work very hard to overcome the jealousy, greed, anger, power-hunger and other emotions such self-centeredness engenders to be able to reach the other side where there is good.  We make it to that other side once in a while in our lives, but never on a consistent all-the-time basis.

Without a lot of education around the topic; without a lot of knowledge about people suffering from this problem; and without anything else which would say we are  certified by today’s standards  to deal with it, we, nevertheless, reached a conclusion as to what we thought PTSD is about:)

To us, PTSD transcends race, class, religion, sex, sexual choice, ideology, politics, or any of what we normally talk about.  People who wind up with PTSD can’t be categorized by any of the normal classifications that we use to pigeonhole ourselves.  We decided PTSD comes from the fact that as humans we are basically evil and only achieve goodness on a very rare occasion.  Those with PTSD have come face to face with the raw evil that exists in us and in them and it put them into a reality space, kicking them out of the space where we exist in our  woven and interwoven mythologiess that we use to get through life.

We  live with the assumption of the basic goodness of human beings and we talk about the evil in all of us as being the exception.  We can actually claim, without missing a beat, that all of the evil of the world comes from those few ‘bad eggs’ who cast aspersions on the rest of us.

The problem with that thought is that in this world, evil is the rule not the exception.  Even during those times when we reach that small island of goodness, we are flawed.

Once upon a time Christians believed humans were born with ‘original sin’ and that ‘sin’ was washed away by the waters of baptism.  Today, baptism has become a social act and a social time.  It is like an initiation into a fraternity or a sorority.  Many parents bring their children to Church for baptism, have a party after and they are gone until the child becomes an adult and marries.  So we see a society becoming more and more inerred of the sinful nature of human beings.  The need to raise up a child aware of how hard it is to walk that path away from evil towards good is gone. We can see the results of that attitude by looking at the increase of horror in the world.  Our little group could only talk about Christianity since all of the people at breakfast were either active or fallen away Christians, but this is not limited to Christianity.  I think, if you look at every other religion in the world today, you will find we are moving towards religion as a kind of physical exercise to move the body closer to physical perfection and theology as a justification of the self being in need of more self-control and self-actualization.

Go back to Hitlers Germany, with its destruction of some six million Jews.  It was a horrible time.  But we came out of that throwing crap on the Russians who were with us in that war and who lost some 25 million people.  We did nothing to raise them up and everything to re-create them as the new world enemy.  We worked hard to raise up Germany and those German Jews who suffered loss, but we worked harder to put down Russians and forget about their losses.  So we wound up with the predictable – a new enemy to whom we sacrificed our children, our homes, our futures, because it was necessary now to wage war against this new enemy and former friend.  We branded and put down people who did not agree with us by calling them Communists and that was a bad thing – the civil rights movement of the time was particularly subjected to this name-calling.  And the Communists waged war and trained their people to hate and distrust those who didn’t believe in and accept their ideology. That mentality is beginning to raise its head today as many don’t want to deal with the demonstrations aimed at the evils in our society.  So instead of listening and trying to address the problems, we are beginning to move back to that day when those ‘agitators’, who held up that mirror to our faces, were the problem and those who did not get involved in anything except taking advantage of the goodnesses that come from the work of the ‘agitators’  are the ones we held up in our communities as the role models.

When we come face to face with the trauma from the evil that lives in all of us, some have a hard time overcoming that experience, because they can’t climb back into the myth of the basic goodness of human beings.  Are the ones who suffer from PTSD the ones amongst us who are temporarily or for the long term living with stark reality?  Are they experiencing reality without its covering of mythology; the myths we seem to be able to crank out constantly and instantaneously?  Are we good, or have we so shocked ourselves with the extreme cruelty we can inflict on us and others, that we have to straighten up for a brief period of time and really be and do good?  Do those who experience PTSD know that and can’t reconcile the reality of life with the myth they are asked to participate in with their family, friends and colleagues?  Have they experienced something which does not allow them to do this?  Whenever they try, does truth intervene and demand that they step out of the storybook and live in the real world?  In that real world, they  can’t make excuses for others and can’t accept the same potential for evil they find in themselves.

The rest of us can live with the assumption of humans being basically good.   When we experience trauma from the evil that lives in all of us and we can’t escape that reality and can’t climb back into our created myths, will we spend our lives with the initials PTSD sewn into our clothes and drawn across our breasts?  Will we be haunted by the evil that can and has come out of humans just like us and just like them.  Will faith, trust, love – all of it – be put in a time warp, because we will have seen just how evil humans can be?  Will we then be able to face the fact that there are more people in this world  acting out of evil than out of good?  To live in a world facing that reality must be almost or completely unbearable.

When you have experienced the terrors of the world as anything other than a story in a book,  it is very difficult to see goodness as anything other than the exception.  Who we really are can be life-haunting for those who have seen humanity in its rawest form.

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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

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Posted in Bed & Breakfast, Bettina Homes, Breakfast Table Talk, Empathy, Spiritual Reflection | No Comments »

Playing with Words

Friday, October 24th, 2014

copyright 2014 Bettina Network, inc.

So much pops up at breakfast and gives one enormous amounts to think about and digest over the day.

This morning it was how heavily laced with superiority and inferiority are our words.

For example;

sympathy – This word came up because of a Bettina Network Blog a guest had read on Sin.

She wanted our feed-back on her thoughts and she got it in strong terms.

She was contrasting sympathy and empathy.  We all show sympathy to our friends, colleagues, family, strangers – we sympathize with many we don’t know and many who are close to us.  It keeps us in a superior position to them.  Sympathy is always shown between and among unequals. I sympathize with you because there but for the grace of God goes I.  For a brief moment, I can pull myself up to be heads taller than you when I find something within you and your life with which to sympathize.

empathy – however is a different concept and a different word.  It brings us into equality with our friends, colleagues, etc.

Isn’t it interesting that the word we use most often is sympathy and the word which is not even in most of our vocabularies is empathy.

We stay away from the family, of our friends who have just died because we don’t know what to say to them.  We want to sympathize with them, but the right words don’t come and we become all thumbs and stutters and awkward.  We have not yet learned the facile way to sympathize – bringing ourselves up above them because we are not in that position of grief.  Maybe being awkward and not knowing how to sympathize with someone is a good thing.

If one practices empathy one goes inside oneself and pulls up those experiences when we were in that place and we become one with the person with whom we are trying to relate through empathy.  In that circumstance there is no lack of what to say or do. It is easy to meet and comfort a friend or family member with whom we feel empathy or can empathize.

There are many such words in the English language – paired concepts.  The most common word of such a  pair is always the word/concept which elevates us above the rest.  The other half of the pair, which we rarely use, are  the word/concepts which make us equal to.

We spent an incredible time over breakfast coming up with these pairs and trying to correct the way we talk and relate.  Amazingly, it wasn’t very difficult, it was a conversation and an exercise we took to like ducts to water.

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE about Bettina Network, inc. try www.bettina-network.com

IF YOU ENJOY OUR BLOG, USE OUR SERVICES TO BOOK ACCOMODATIONS WHEN YOU TRAVEL!

1-800-347-9166 inside the U. S. or 617 497 9166 outside or inside the U. S.

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Posted in Bed & Breakfast, Bettina Homes, Breakfast Table Talk, Empathy, Spiritual Exercises, Sympathy | Comments Off on Playing with Words

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