9/ 11 NEVER FORGET THEM..GOD BLESS THE 3000 PEOPLE LOST

9/11/2013

                     9/11 never forget the 3000 people lost, God bless them and always
                     remember them , freedom rings out...

                                                                Joe.... 


 

Joe, I think we'll always remember 9/11 and the people who died.
I wonder if the Iraqis will also remember 3/19/03 when our invasion cost the lives of more than 150,000, some of which were our own service men and women.  If we are reminded never to forget 9/11, I think we also need to remember 3/19/03.  People who die needlessly anywhere in the world is sad. especially for the families.

My patriotism is in my soul.  It comes from birth in a country of great ideals sometimes tarnished by our inability to implement them.  I have lived in wonderful places, Germany, the Caribbean, South Korea and more.  I traveled extensively.  I nearly retired to Panama.  However, every place I lived was even more special because it's mountains and oceans reminded me of California, its rain forests of the deepest swamps in the Everglades, it's forests and autumnal splendor of Michigan and the families and celebrations of my own extended families and celebrations at home.  I could love another country because I love my own, not in place of my own. 

It is often said that to love another, we have to love ourselves.  Thus my joy in experiencing other countries is from my love of my own country.  I am free to live anywhere because I can always go home.  I am free to see the good in other races and nationalities because I understand and appreciate the ideals of my own nation.

I don't need to wear a flag on my lapel if I wear one in my attitudes and behaviors, if I represent the ideals to which this nation strives as imperfectly as I am imperfect in all that I do.  My heart breaks for all mothers and fathers and siblings and friends and loved ones across the world who suffer from the heinous experience of wars and destruction whether it be deaths or the pain of living after.

I just finished reading a book that described in detail the experiences in Poland during and after World War II from the perspective of a boy, and my heart goes out to all children who have suffered from the inhumanity of the human race that spends its resources on murder and mayhem instead of food and health and education.

When we can remove revenge from our hearts and learn to forgive and rebuild relationships beyond each failure, building on positive progress, that is the greatest honor and recognition for those whose lives are lost to those failures.  When we change our political process from wealth and power rules to the benefit of the citizens rule then we honor those people.

9/11/2013

                        Another great story is Anne Frank , a courageous girl, who was
                        murdered by the Nazi's , it's ashame that God allows Dictators
                        and cruel leaders to be born !

                                                                        Joe

They are made--not born.  Hitler's father beat him daily.
He learned--how to be mean.

I've always thought that being evil is a choice. For instance, had Hitler not gone to war with the world, had not attempted mass genocide, he would have been a wonderful leader and an inspiration to millions. instead of being known as the most evil person in history, he might have been known as one of the greatest people of the 20th century. Yet, he chose not to. He chose to commit those atrocities.

While it is true that a terrible past can influence future decisions, we cannot let it dictate who we are and what we become. It all comes down to the choice to do good, or to do evil. We all have free will, that's the way God made us, and to say that this or that person was born to do evil is complete BS. No one is born evil. It's the decisions we make in life that define us, and it all comes down to whether we help the old lady across the street, or throw her into traffic. it's always a choice, and it's up to us to make the right one.

Hitler was a victim of extreme child abuse.  Alice Miller does a documented study of this in her book, For Your Own Good.  The title speaks for itself.

This short article from the home page of her extensive website gives a good, if brief, explanation of the destructiveness that comes from such abuse, and ends with  what seems to be the way to help a child overcome and to be able to make those positive choices:

Quote :

Child Mistreatment, Child Abuse
What is it?
Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders. Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love. They don't know that the only reason for the punishments they have ( or in retrospect, had) to endure is the fact that their parents themselves endured and learned violence without being able to question it. Later, the adults, once abused children, beat their own children and often feel grateful to their parents who mistreated them when they were small and defenseless.
This is why society's ignorance remains so immovable and parents continue to produce severe pain and destructivity - in all "good will", in every generation. Most people tolerate this blindly because the origins of human violence in childhood have been and are still being ignored worldwide. Almost all small children are smacked during the first three years of life when they begin to walk and to touch objects which may not be touched. This happens at exactly the time when the human brain builds up its structure and should thus learn kindness, truthfulness, and love but never, never cruelty and lies. Fortunately, there are many mistreated children who find "helping witnesses" and can feel loved by them.

http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php



A longer article on the importance of "helping" or "enlightened" witnesses can be found here:
http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=41&grp=11

Quote :

When I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on the examples of Hitler and Stalin, when I tried to expose the social consequences of child abuse, I encountered fierce resistance. Repeatedly I was told, "I, too, was a battered child, but that didn't make me a criminal." When I asked for details about their childhood, I was always told of a person who loved them, but was unable to protect them. Yet through his or her presence, this person gave them a notion of trust, and of love.
I call these persons helping witnesses. Dostoyevsky, for instance, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn't strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have been unimaginable. Many have also been lucky enough to find later both enlightened and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them. People who found such witnesses never became criminals.

9/12/2013

                           DM..

                                   Well said.... 

                                   Cheers................Joe....

Choice is sometimes wired by experience that changes the brain -

Good posts, all.
I find it interesting that when people go to a psychiatrist, he takes them back to their childhood. 
It is not just parents, but also the environments in which children are raised that influence them. 
When I watched small children begging in the streets of Beirut, it opened my eyes.  They were hungry and did whatever it took to survive.  Stealing was part of that survival.  One thing they learned well was persistence.  They tuned-out "No, go away". 
 
Finding a balance is the key.  To say that parents that smacked their kids was child abuse is BS.  If that was the only method they used, it was wrong.  Sometimes extreme measures are needed to make a lasting impression, especially when it means the safety of the child.  Obedience is learned in childhood.  JMO.

9/13/2013

                      When I was growing up my Mother gave you the "LOOK," and you
                      knew not to go there. I always said it was the German look, I was
                      told once that both my Mother's parents did the same and my Mother
                      and her brother knew " The Look meant don't go there." Matter of
                      fact I was so stubbron my Mother called me a Prussian German ?

                                                              Cheers.Joe..

Abe,

Why is it illegal to hit an animal, but permissable to strike a child?
The child is smaller and unable to defend itself, it is also dependent upon its parents for protection.
Just curious.

My parents  treated our animals with more kindness than they afforded my brother.

Every child is different.  It is the discerning parent that learns to discipline to that child's needs.  Ideas and customs about children have changed over the centuries and across economic groups.

Starting with my generation, striking a child was just beginning to appear as child abuse.  I only struck mine twice, once when he was two and climbing in the pond (and I should have struck myself for not putting a gate at the pond) and the second when he was 17 and said Fxxx Yxx - my hand just raced to his face of it's own accord.  He stepped back and said, "you ever hit me again and I'll report you for child abuse" and he left the house before I could react further.  He didn't come back for years and my tears would have filled a pool.

As the priest said, "bury them at 14 and dig them up at 22."

So Sad!

Alice, you infer that I believe in beating kids.  I think you misread my post.
One cannot judge the actions of anyone unless they are present.  Trying to explain or justify punitive actions is futile.

I have told this story before, but have a point to make in repeating it.

Dave was about 2 1/2 when I swatted his diaper and he turned around very quickly and whacked me on the shin.

After the last time I posted the incident, a couple of members here replied that I should have come down even harder, that I was encouraging him to think it was OK and contributing to his disrespect.

But that, clearly, was not the way I perceived it.  It was the last time I ever administered corporal punishment to any of my children.  I have said that I realized I was teaching him that violence was an acceptable way to solve problems.  Let me go into more detail about that.  My first instinct was to punish hm further, but somewhere inside my head, I heard a voice saying:  "David is only doing what you are teaching him to do."  That voice stipped me long enough to take a breath and think.

Who taught us to "spank" our children?  We did.  They did not learn that it was OK to strike another person from anyone else.  The title of Alice Miller's book that related Hitler's history was called  For Your Own Good.

And it seems that my response was cut off about half-way through.  An action that I managed to cause .  I am using my Kindle browser at the moment, and am still adjusting to typing into it.

That response was every bit as admirable as that fish that got away.

Basically, our beliefs are formed by childhood experiences, and if we never challenge those early beliefs, we are tied to them.  Attempting to challenge those beliefs can produce guilt, and guilt promotes defensiveness and fear-based reactions.

Words like "always" and "never" tend to lead to extreme ways of thinking and are generally not valid.

To say that violence is never acceptable is one of those extremes, and I am not innocent of having said it.  There are always exceptions, and those exceptions apply not only to parenting practices.  They can also apply to international circumstances, like the insistence that military force is never acceptable, even when an unconscionable ruler is using weapons that are clearly forbidden according to existing international law, and killing children witin his own country.

I regret ever using corporal punishment on our children.  I grew up with it--experienced it and witnessed  far too much of it at home and at school. 
Enough is enough.  I am proud of the fact that I never gave anyone permission to use it on our children.

One day my carpool occupants got to me.  Our car air freshener was knocked down and I asked who did
it.  Mr Teenage Mouthyman startled me by yelling," WELL, IT WASN'T ME!"  Reflexively, I hit him in the mouth,there was no force to the action and he was not injured just surprised , as was I.  I immediately apologized and asked him for  his mother's work number and the minute I got home I called her and told her what had happened. I said I was very sorry and did not think we should hit each other's kids.
She was very nice and said. " Alice. I know you and I know him. Let it go."   We got  along fine after that.

My schedule is off-kilter today.  I got up in the wee hours of the morning to watch a ball game, of all things, then went back to bed and slept far longer than normal.  One result was that I only just checked in to this inspirational website.  Normally it is one of the first places I go in the morning.  I was amazed at how close the daily message was to what I was attempting to write here.

http://www.dailyom.com/articles/2013/40068.html

Madison Taylor; Daily Om wrote:

Our experiences color everything. The events of the past can have a profound effect on how we see our lives now and what we choose to believe about our world. Our past experiences can also influence our emotional reactions and responses to present events. Each of us reacts to stimulus based on what we have learned in life. There is no right or wrong to it; it is simply the result of past experience.....

Between stimulus and reaction exists a fleeting moment of thought. Often, that thought is based on something that has happened to you in the past. When presented with a similar situation later on, your natural impulse is to unconsciously regard it in a similar light. For example, if you survived a traumatic automobile accident as a youngster, the first thing you might feel upon witnessing even a minor collision between vehicles may be intense panic. .....

If you have time, take a minute to read the whole thing.  It presents some positive answers.

As they say, everything in the universe works together when we develop awareness.

I have started to respond to this subject and all the starts have related to my own childhood, which was exceptional, I hope. 
There is a difference between a swat on the butt and and outright slap or punch.  There is the eye contact to be considered, as well.  What hate can be delivered eye to child with the slap or punch. 
I feel that void of love in the look to this day from my 2nd year. 

I do not hit anyone.  If someone were to hit me, I would never forgive it.  I never forgave it from my childhood.  To be hurled across the room at two with one swat, there is not one excuse that can forgive the everlasting hurt.  Not just the eye that swelled from the bed post, but the ....

Off I go,  I am better now..You would think that all that child hood hitting would not matter any more.  It has changed me, though.  I would never hit anyone unless it was self defense.
Love,
Betty

Betty wrote wrote:

There is the eye contact to be considered, as well.  What hate can be delivered eye to child with the slap or punch. 

That is the thing I remember. That, and the labels - the demeaning remarks  that told me I would never succeed at anything, that I was an ugly idiot who couldn't do even the simplest task correctly.

I learned to avoid the slaps by accepting the words.And all this went on behind the doors of a "respectable" household.  My dad would tell me with a sad and disappointed expression that if I would only do what she told me to do.  What he didn't seem to get was that even though I tried,what she wanted was always changing.

My "enlightened witness" was my mom's housekeeper, along with a couple of teachers.

And my stories. At first, I wrote them down, but they would be found, ridiculed, and torn to shreds, so I kept them in my head, and didn't write them down anymore until I was grown and not living at home.  Thank God for having a creative imagination.

Annie

9/13/2013

                       God Bless The Child..

                      Cheers...Joe...

Ann,

I had no idea you were that badly treated. I am so sorry.  You certainly rose above it.

Your mother was sick and Betty, your mother was clearly over her head.

I have talked about it here before, Alice, but not often and even less often these days.  I repeated it here to make a point and give support, but I do not like being anyone's victim, so I focus on who I am now and how I survived and got beyond it.

If we allow our past to define who we are, then we cannot grow.

then they win.

That is what forgiving is really about, I'm starting to learn.  It isn't something we do for those who abused us so much as it is about doing something positive for ourselves.

Of course, the old stuff gets triggered now and again, especially when we are dealing with someone or something that reminds us of those old persecutors, but there is no peace in resentment or hanging on.  Anyway, I have heard that the best revenge is living a successful life.

Thing is, our lives today are not about them,  They no longer have control.  We are free to be ourselves, to be successful - in the way we measure success - by our own personal standards - not theirs.

When we can define ourselves, rather than being defined by those who would judge us, we are free to live lives based on the simple joys of just living and being.

I don't have to condone to forgive.  I just stop being frightened or angry about the actions of someone who was sick and tormented to the point they had to torment others.

So don't be sorry.  Besides, you had nothing to do with it.

Annie