Burning Questions

I say this often, I’ve lived a charmed life. Unconventional, but nevertheless charmed. Full of love, surprises, joy and companionship. Over our 25 years of marriage, I’ve done many things to preserve our family: Agreed to go camping instead of shopping in New York, compromised on the color of the den, rethought some rules, standards and beliefs to fit the seven personalities that comprise my clan. I would throw myself into the path of a speeding bus, fight my way through burning forest, wrestle a wolf to the ground if I needed to protect one of these people I love with every cell of my body. I’m sure every wife and mother can say the same thing. There is nothing I won’t do to preserve my family.

So why am I so shocked and disturbed by the fact that one in four women are beaten by their life partner? That every fifteen seconds a woman is the victim of domestic violence. Even in these enlightened times, with a glut of information, music, and video shouting that “love doesn’t hurt”, that message can’t get through the fact that women will do almost anything to preserve their families. “All I had to do was fix me.” Chilling words, those. The mindset that exists when women are doing what we were genetically engineered to do: nurture and preserve our families, no matter what the cost.

Rush Limbaugh, shame on you for criticizing Michael J. Fox’s demonstration of just what Parkinson’s disease looks like. Because we have a medication that will mask the symptons, he’s supposed to be satisfied with that? Well I’m not. I’m not satisfied with our treatment for aids, cancer, heart disease, diabetes or alzheimers either. I’m sick of seeing young, vital people struck down by these hideous diseases they have no control over. However controversial, however wrought with the potential for mismanagement, I’m losing my family to these diseases and I’m in favor of stem cell research. It’s a glimmering symbol of hope.

Physicist Costas Efthimiou, professor at the University of Central Florida: Big old raspberry at ya fella! He thinks he’s proved there are no such things as ghosts, vampires and zombies through the probabilities of physics. Oh yeah??? Come live in my old house for a weekend and tell me there’s no such things as ghosts. Fun sucking old busybody, you could have released that news anytime but Halloween.

Apparently I’m much too crabby to blog today. I must need a nap.