Uncategorized

Will Your Children Be Responsible Adults?

A basic law of physics states “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” If you push on a something, it will move, or push back. A ball will roll; a wall will push back and hold you up.

The same law applies to interpersonal actions. If you do something, there will always be a response, maybe not something you expected, but there will be a reaction. No action occurs in a vacuum.

When dealing with people, our actions can sometimes be misread, with others feeling everything from humor to anger. It would be easy to suggest that we have no responsibility for the  reactions of others to our actions, but this is not so.

If you smile, you will often receive a smile back, but not always. Sometimes the person you smile at will frown at you or growl. Usually, though, you can expect a smile.

If you hit someone, you can expect two or three things to happen. The person who was hit may cry or curse or be startled. He may fall or wobble. Most likely, he will hit you back.

From the beginning of time, Adam and Eve were given the right to make choices, to act as they chose. They were also held responsible. They chose to eat the forbidden fruit and were not allowed to continue to live in Eden. Their lives were changed for themselves and all their posterity.

It has continued to be the same since then. People make choices and must be responsible for the consequences of those actions. Focus on seeking wealth at the expense of family will distance them until the love and closeness is gone. A choice to be honest in your actions and pay your bills allows one to have good credit and trust from others.

Children must be taught responsibility for their behaviors. Children who do not receive this instruction become difficult to live with. They believe the world owes them a living. Nothing is their responsibility, the fault belongs to others.

Children have a right to learn to be decent adults. Though difficult, parents are expected to ensure their children have opportunities to learn responsibility. If they are not taught, society will suffer from more adults who blame others and expect special attention. For some it is too late. Some may learn. Please teach your children.

Uncategorized

Will Your Children Be Responsible Adults?

A basic law of physics states “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” If you push on a something, it will move, or push back. A ball will roll; a wall will push back and hold you up.

The same law applies to interpersonal actions. If you do something, there will always be a response, maybe not something you expected, but there will be a reaction. No action occurs in a vacuum.

When dealing with people, our actions can sometimes be misread, with others feeling everything from humor to anger. It would be easy to suggest that we have no responsibility for the  reactions of others to our actions, but this is not so.

If you smile, you will often receive a smile back, but not always. Sometimes the person you smile at will frown at you or growl. Usually, though, you can expect a smile.

If you hit someone, you can expect two or three things to happen. The person who was hit may cry or curse or be startled. He may fall or wobble. Most likely, he will hit you back.

From the beginning of time, Adam and Eve were given the right to make choices, to act as they chose. They were also held responsible. They chose to eat the forbidden fruit and were not allowed to continue to live in Eden. Their lives were changed for themselves and all their posterity.

It has continued to be the same since then. People make choices and must be responsible for the consequences of those actions. Focus on seeking wealth at the expense of family will distance them until the love and closeness is gone. A choice to be honest in your actions and pay your bills allows one to have good credit and trust from others.

Children must be taught responsibility for their behaviors. Children who do not receive this instruction become difficult to live with. They believe the world owes them a living. Nothing is their responsibility, the fault belongs to others.

Children have a right to learn to be decent adults. Though difficult, parents are expected to ensure their children have opportunities to learn responsibility. If they are not taught, society will suffer from more adults who blame others and expect special attention. For some it is too late. Some may learn. Please teach your children.

Life

Join the Semicolon Project–Save a Life!

In April the mental health community is celebrating the semicolon project. This project hopes to save lives of those with depression, anxiety, or who have contemplated suicide.

Why semicolon? The period ends the sentence, the semicolon suggests there is more still to say and do. Those who struggle with self-harming and/or contemplating suicide need to remember the events of today are not the end of the story. Rather than using a period, add a semicolon.

If you know someone who struggles, or if you are the one who struggles, remember the trials and problems of today are not the end, there is always more to your story.

All stories, including life stories, include challenges and struggles to make them interesting. The story doesn’t end in the middle of the struggle, it would ruin the story. The main character of the story grows and learns as they are challenged.

The same is true of the story of your life. No one lives a “happily ever after” live, who would want to, it would be boring!

We learn as we struggle and we grow as we confront challenges. It starts at birth. Little children fight and struggle to hold their heads up, to crawl, to walk, to eat, to be self-sufficient individuals.

The challenges don’t end as we reach a certain age, they only change. We have learned to walk, to eat without making a huge mess, and to take care of ourselves, but there continues to be challenges to face, trials to overcome. They make our lives interesting and help us to be better.

Even after the time comes that we are called home to live in another existence, we will face challenges as we improve our lives, to become better and grow to be the best we can be, to borrow an Army quote.

Join the semicolon project, for yourself and for your loved ones. Do all you can to prevent the premature periods in the lives of people we love!

Together, we can save a life, or many lives!

Uncategorized

How Can Artists Protect Themselves?

In 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA was signed into law to protect intellectual property. The main thrust of the act is to protect copyrighted works particularly in connection to technology—the internet and other digital media. If intellectual property is illegally copied, the website must remove it immediately, and publishers of intellectual property cannot distribute stolen or copied works.[1]

All this sounds like a great idea to me, as I am working on my first novel. Those of us who participate in the arts have an underlying fear that our work will be copied or otherwise stolen and used for the financial gain of another, to our loss.

To comply with this law, a DMCA Takedown Notice is sent to the site in which intellectual property is copied, demanding that the offending copied material is removed, or taken down. If the content belongs to one person and is claimed by another, the owner of the content can legally request it be removed, and expect that it be removed.[2]

I read something scary about this today. A novelist recently had her book blocked from Amazon and Smashwords because someone had sent in a DMCA notice, and as these companies obey the law, her work was removed.

The problem is, it was her work and the DMCA complaint was sent by someone who had cheated, lying that this work was not hers, for some unknown reason. Perhaps this person wanted to ruin her life, or steal her money. Perhaps she wanted to blackmail the author.

The purpose of this false accusation is not as important to me as the fact that her work was claimed by another, though it had been copyrighted. And the simple fact that it was copyrighted had no bearing on the take down. It is all one person’s word against the others—a classic “he said, she said” problem.

I’ve read a lot by other authors who worry that their work will be stolen and reprinted and sold on other sites, with the benefit of the sale going to others rather than the actual author. I see multiple examples of copyright infringement on photos and paintings, as well as music. This international Act was passed to protect the artist who created the property.

What do we do when someone uses the act written to protect us as a weapon against us? Can I share any of my work with another for help as a Beta Reader if I always worry about theft? How can I share even a small portion of my work in progress if I fear someone will copy it and then claim the total as theirs?

This is a problem for all artists, not just authors. What do we do?

What would you do? Do you have suggestions for me, an unpublished, yet, author? How should I handle this huge problem?

Please respond if you have a suggestion.

[1] Copyright Office Summary

[2] DMCA: Protect Your Content website

Lifelong Learning

How Long Do You Want to Live?

Life extends easily into the eighth decade and it is not unusual to hear of one living past 100. Over our history, life expectancy has varied dramatically. In the recent history of the last two or three hundred year, men and women were lucky to live to be 50 or 60.

Women especially struggled to survive through the births of their many children, facing unsanitary conditions and the resulting infections and fevers. Men didn’t fare much better, facing hunting accidents and war injuries with less than sophisticated medical knowledge and technology.

Even in the last century, accidents were fatal. Stories of men or women burning to death from accidents resulting from kerosene lamps are not unusual, nor are stories of death and injury caused by other accidents.

The question is: how long do you really want to live?

In the far past, it was common for people to live much more than 100 years. Abraham lived 365 years; Methuselah was the longest lived man on record, living 969 years. Adam and Eve lived well into their ninth century. That is much longer than I want to live!

Our lives are easier than theirs; we have all the benefits of electricity and electronics. Easy travel and rapid communication join with near effortless work in the home, food production, and other occupations, especially in comparison to lives just a century ago.

Our lives are more difficult in some ways. Consider the intensity of the challenges of hate, immorality, and evil that inundate us. It is difficult to get through a day without facing scantily clad people caught up in fierce expressions of lust, unless you stay in bed with the television off. Violence, hatred, pornography, abuse, immorality, and many more symptoms of a failing society abound, throughout the world.

Ancient days were not much better. None of the modern conveniences were available. All the work we depend on electricity to do was done manually, often by servants or slaves. Cleanliness would have been difficult. Medical knowledge was adequate, but certainly unable for its practitioners to cure or prevent infections and diseases.

Worse, battles between men were hand-to-hand, face your enemy, and slash him to bits before being destroyed. Women whose husbands and sons went to war could only hope and pray theirs would be the lucky ones to return without injury, if they returned at all.

Women who lived in those early could expect to be attacked and raped without protection of husbands, fathers, or their hired guards. Most men in nearly all ages believed in their right to have sexual relations with about any woman, while holding their wives and daughters to a stricter standard of sexual purity.

Violence and evil of every kind surrounded these people—much like it does today.

Eve struggled in her time in learning to survive a new, uninhabited world. Everything was new requiring thought and effort to overcome the problems, often failing and needing to try many different solutions before finding one that worked. She, too, faced the grief too many of her children who listened and succumbed to the voice of evil.

No, living for multiple centuries is not enticing. Seventy or eighty years is more than enough for any of us!

Neighborhood Divisions

Refuse to Check the “Ethnicity” Box!

Each time children register for school, or someone completes employment paperwork, there is an obnoxious little box quietly demanding to be checked, demanding self-revelation: What is your ethnicity or race?

Ethnicity? I know, some think it is Hispanic, or Black, or Eskimo, or Native American, Asian, or some other “color” people. Aren’t we all people? Don’t we all live here in America? What difference does it make where our ancestors came from?

Yes, money is added to a school or organization from the government if sufficient numbers of these “Ethnicities” are included.

All this sounds a bit biased. It has become almost shameful to check that box hiding on the bottom: Caucasian. My check doesn’t add money to coffers of the organization, or give them needed diversity.

Each time I see this box, I want to write in “Human”. Most American families can trace their heritage back to many different countries around the world. But the nasty little box doesn’t want to know your family arrived in America sometime in the 1600s, making you as much an American as about anyone else, except Native Americans. Many can follow their ancestry into multiple countries and more than one continent.

But, look! That naughty little box doesn’t offer “American” or “Descended from Multiple Countries”.

The United States is again becoming divided by “racism” even though it has been proven scientifically that there is no such thing as race. We are all humans. That should be enough. All the honoring of different groups of people sounds good, but in reality, it divides. Identifying differences causes everyone to notice differences. It is more important to recognize similarities.

Our communities need and want to draw together. We want to know our neighbors; we want to have friends around us, people we can visit. We need to be aware of who lives next door so when something that shouldn’t be, it can be stopped. Fear of others, caused by divisions of differences, does not help neighbors to interact.

Join the movement, refuse to mark that obnoxious box!

Uncategorized

Will You Let Your Fears Hurt Your Children: Measles and Vaccinations

The big measles outbreak has captured the attention of the country, as even little babies are becoming ill with this disease that should have been extinguished years ago. We were told it was gone, at least from the United States.

In the past decade, there were less than 100 cases of measles in most years. Most of the people who contracted the disease were unvaccinated, and came in contact with people from other parts of the world where vaccinations are either unavailable or unused by the majority of the population. Often the cause is lack of vaccination serum or lack of funds to pay for it.

In some poor countries, mothers walk with their children for miles to join long lines for vaccinations, when offered by a humanitarian group. They understand the severity of the disease.

A vaccination was developed for good reason–children die from the measles and its accompanying fevers. The fevers cause mental disabilities if not controlled. Children have been lost to this “childhood illness”.

Some children can’t handle the vaccination. It makes them sick. But this is just a small percentage of children. Most are protected from the side effects by the vaccination.

In 1998 a British doctor wanted his name in the news, and published a paper suggesting a connection between these vaccinations and autism. Autism causes major problems for parents and children and some parents saw the connection after the report was published. Like wildfire in dry grass, fear of vaccinations spread. Parents stopped ensuring their children were vaccinated, using excuses that it went against their beliefs, most often the belief was a fear of autism.

In earlier years, people who carried measles were not a major problem, for nearly everyone was vaccinated. Now, when someone arrives in the United States carrying the disease, it spreads, and even little babies catch it.

We in the United States have no excuse for not protecting our children. Most of us have insurance that will pay for these essential vaccinations. If not, public health agencies will provide them for little or no cost. I have never heard of a shortage of measles or the more common MMR vaccine. We don’t have to walk miles and stand in long lines.

We live in one of the strongest nations in the world, but we allow fears to keep us from protecting our children. There haven’t been any deaths, yet. With blessings from God, there won’t be, but will there be other challenges because of the high fevers?

Uncategorized

Will You Let Your Fears Hurt Your Children: Measles and Vaccinations

The big measles outbreak has captured the attention of the country, as even little babies are becoming ill with this disease that should have been extinguished years ago. We were told it was gone, at least from the United States.

In the past decade, there were less than 100 cases of measles in most years. Most of the people who contracted the disease were unvaccinated, and came in contact with people from other parts of the world where vaccinations are either unavailable or unused by the majority of the population. Often the cause is lack of vaccination serum or lack of funds to pay for it.

In some poor countries, mothers walk with their children for miles to join long lines for vaccinations, when offered by a humanitarian group. They understand the severity of the disease.

A vaccination was developed for good reason–children die from the measles and its accompanying fevers. The fevers cause mental disabilities if not controlled. Children have been lost to this “childhood illness”.

Some children can’t handle the vaccination. It makes them sick. But this is just a small percentage of children. Most are protected from the side effects by the vaccination.

In 1998 a British doctor wanted his name in the news, and published a paper suggesting a connection between these vaccinations and autism. Autism causes major problems for parents and children and some parents saw the connection after the report was published. Like wildfire in dry grass, fear of vaccinations spread. Parents stopped ensuring their children were vaccinated, using excuses that it went against their beliefs, most often the belief was a fear of autism.

In earlier years, people who carried measles were not a major problem, for nearly everyone was vaccinated. Now, when someone arrives in the United States carrying the disease, it spreads, and even little babies catch it.

We in the United States have no excuse for not protecting our children. Most of us have insurance that will pay for these essential vaccinations. If not, public health agencies will provide them for little or no cost. I have never heard of a shortage of measles or the more common MMR vaccine. We don’t have to walk miles and stand in long lines.

We live in one of the strongest nations in the world, but we allow fears to keep us from protecting our children. There haven’t been any deaths, yet. With blessings from God, there won’t be, but will there be other challenges because of the high fevers?

Uncategorized

Deny the Lie of Abortion

One of the saddest things I read about is the increasing numbers of women, old and young, who accept the lie that abortion is easy. They are using it as a form of birth control. They believe no one is hurt by this process. Unfortunately, abortion isn’t easy, it isn’t birth control, and there is pain, lots of it.

How can it be considered easy to go to a clinic where abortions are performed? It seems easy to make an appointment, drive to the clinic, and follow through with the appointment. I’ve even seen women who make videos of their abortion, smiling and talking about how good it was. I don’t believe it.

I’ve had “D & C” surgeries after miscarriages. It took days for me to heal enough to resume my normal activities. My body hurt. An abortion would hurt at least as bad.

My heart and soul hurt, I was sad to the point of depression. The loss of a child in any situation causes grief, even an unwanted child. I cannot believe a woman would not feel sorrow and depression after giving up a child in that manner.

Even greater pain is felt by the child as it is torn from its mother.

The saddest thing for me is that women have bought into the idea that abortion is acceptable. All life matters. An unborn child is important, at any age. Does it not seem strange that more than 60% of abortions are performed on young, poor, minority girls and women? 30% of abortions occur in black women? Why would we want to lose so many of our children?

As I have been writing about Eve, it seems to me she would be heartbroken to know how many of her grandchildren are “destroying” their children, her grandchildren. Eve rejoiced at the births of her children. The loss of any child would be heart breaking. All children of all “races” are her children, and all children matter to her.

If you know someone who is considering an abortion, do one important thing first. Have an ultrasound; see your child before you destroy her. It will change your mind and save you and the child a lot of pain.

Abortion is not a good form of birth control. The best contraceptive is abstinence. No unwanted child is ever conceived without the act. Prevent the pains of to both child and mother by avoiding unwanted pregnancies.

Abortion is not the best form of birth control. It causes immense pain to the child and both physical and emotional pain to the mother. It is never easy. All lives matter; all children matter, born or unborn. Deny the lie.

Lifelong Learning

Keep Your Brain Healthy

Regardless of our station in our life, each of us will find greater happiness if we continue to learn. Even people who no longer work for a paycheck or salary have a need to continue to learn.

Studies have shown that when you exercise your brain, diseases that destroy your ability to remember are less able to affect you. If you have a family history of Alzheimer’s or Dementia, or if you’ve been involved in an accident that damaged your brain, even if only slightly, you will want to do everything you can to protect your brain.

If you don’t learn something new, you have wasted your day. You have wasted an opportunity to grow and learn and you missed out on keeping your brain active and healthy.

So much of our lives are spent in competition, we begin to believe even developing our brains should be competitive. In some professions, competition is important, as car racing.

“Even if you cannot reach those who are ahead of you, one is bound to keep always learning, and especially acquire experience in racing and credibility.” –Aryton Senna

Racing to catch up with another car, or to catch up to the next guy, or even to learn something new can benefit you and your brain. A study I read several years ago studied nuns who worked to stay mentally active. They lived well into their 90s, mentally alert and active.

So, what do you do to maintain a healthy brain? Keep it active. Play games that stimulate it. Read. Learn something new. Complete a word puzzle. Put together a jigsaw puzzle. Solve logic puzzles. Write a book. Tell your children and grandchildren the story of your life.

I chose to write books. I hope to have my first book ready before the end of June, telling the story of Eve. She spent much of her life learning.

What are you doing to keep your brain active?

Blogs and Ancient Historical Fiction