Politics, Motherhood, and Politics

The largest angst of being a parent seems to be the tortuous decisions you have to make. A parent will question every decision made on behalf of their child. You never know if it’s the right decision until later, sometimes, you won’t know until they’re adults. The tremendous responsibility of deciding what is best for another human being, particularly one that, by choice, a person decides to nurture. One decision made by parents, particularly here in the United States, is what sports, if any, a child should play. Since a young age, I have registered my sons for hockey, karate, swimming, soccer, wrestling, ice skating, and now baseball.  I figured that as long as they end up well-rounded individuals, activities that feed the body, mind and spirit, then I am doing ok. However, to my surprise, it appears that my husband and I should have chosen a sport for them at 3, 4 or 5, if I wanted them to have a high school, collegiate or professional career in baseball or any other team ...

The war drums continue to beat louder once again, though they have been beating for a long time now, just a little quieter.  The question now is will it be Iran, North Korea or even China?  Or it is a Middle Eastern country with oil reserves and a government who is “defiant” against the US?  War is sown in the fabric of our conscience since our nation’s birth.  We were born from war, we expanded by slaughtering our indigenous, enslaving generation after generation, then fought a civil war to end the enslavement of human beings.  Since World War II, we have considered ourselves to be justified for every bomb we drop.  One of my undergraduate Political Science professors asked one time, “Why is everything a war?  A war of poverty, a war on drugs, always a war?”  After the September 2001 attacks, predictably it was a “war on terror”.   At that time, I thought maybe it was one of those “war” phrases, but this time the George W. Bush administ...

For transgender Americans, the idea that their specific causes have been brought to the American mainstream discussion is probably surprising to them.  As many issues discussed among Americans, the specific issue that has been brought to the forefront is their bathroom usage.  The questions that ran through my head were: Why does anyone care about which bathroom a human being uses?  For me, if you “look” like my gender, I usually don’t question why you are in my bathroom.  So what’s the issue if a transgender woman uses my bathroom, am I or other biological women looking to make sure? I am not.  Are other women doing the same?  Of course once I turned on the TV and social media, it was unavoidable that this actually was being discussed on controlling what bathroom Americans were using.  So much for smaller government. What was more shocking was the arguments being made by the opposition.   Discussion of Opposition The oppositional ar...