God bless the child. SJ Dodgson. MJoTA 2012 v6n2 p0722
Ah, ah, ah. Right, 4 pictures that I adore. My heart is soaring like the golden balloon.
These pictures, and all the others in these 2 columns, I took Saturday morning Jul 21, 2012 at Brooklyn's Flatbush Caton Market, which is New York City's only indoor Caribbean market, and the center in the North East United States for the Caribbean community.
At the Market you will see all over pictures of the Queen of Brooklyn, the indefatigable Hon Una ST Clarke, the first councilwoman from the Caribbean, and the mother of the spectacularly adored Congresswoman the Hon Yvette D Clarke click here.
The Hon Congresswoman Yvette had been a member of New York City Council for this district, as had the Hon Una before her. The Congresswoman's worthy successor was Belgian-trained physician son of Haiti Councilmember Mathieu Eugene MD click here.
Councilmember Dr Eugene was there yesterday with a smile and encouragement for everyone. His picture at Bed Stuy Vollies when we were all on alert to go to Haiti after the earthquake click here.
I arrived early at Caton Market to be of use to the wonderful ladies who set up and run CACCI events so smoothly. And saw 2 well-dressed, well-groomed, well-behaved children waiting next to a box. D asked me to carry the box inside, I did and came back, and asked the kids if they were waiting for their mother. They did not exactly say yes, but did not deny it, and realized they were with D.
I congratulated D on her lovely kids, she told me they were kin, she is their foster-mother. Ah. These beautiful kids were given a bad hand of cards for life, but they have been blessed with life, and now with a lady who cares for them meticulously. As soon as I saw them, they became my kin too.
Ah. Love the child. Every child. I have heard that anyone doing anything horrible to a child is treated brutally in prison by other prisoners. Hurting a child is so against our souls, our spirits, our ability to love and care.
Yesterday, Saturday morning, as the meeting was being set up and the 60 people who showed up gradually wandered in and started chatting with each other, I hung out with the kids.
After an hour of being really good and sitting still, and showing me all their treasures in their backpacks, they were ready to go running outside.
The little boy is a true New Yorker, he already knows how to hustle. He saw balloons outside and tried to untie one. He was going to get a balloon by stealing, talking, whatever it took. The realtor with the balloons at his information table produced 2 from his car and blew them up. A golden yellow one for the boy and an orange one for his sister.
The little girl's orange balloon broke after about 3 throws in the air, but the little boy's golden balloon kept on going up and being caught and kicked.
And finally the golden balloon went up, and up, and I didn't think it could possibly return, but it did. And the way the balloon soared, I want the little boy and little girl to soar. God bless them both.
------------------------------------
And I am so glad the statue of the late Joe Paterno was knocked down today, Sunday morning before church. He was the Pennsylvania State University head coach who happily
covered up sex scandals of his coach and little boys.
Reminds me of the
April day in 2003 when US marines pulled down the statue of Saddam
Hussein. Evil is evil. Shooting people with guns, allowing little boys
to be harmed: evil is evil. We have only 1 life to lose. The death
penalty by judicial order for ending early 1 life or a million is the
same: an evil person can only be executed once.
And a child can be rescued. God bless all who love and honor children.
------------------------------------
Taking away guns won't stop humans murdering other people by accident or on purpose, but it would be a great start.
Having the right to bear arms so that your government doesn't murder you doesn't always work and implies a looming threat, which we don't have in the United States.
My German father-in-law had guns, a lot of guns, and he never used them even while his government was sending his wife's family to gas chambers. Roses for Ruth, click here.
The young man of 24 who shot dead 14 in a Colorado midnight showing of a Batman movie had the same training as me.
I got my PhD in physiology and pharmacology in 1978 when I was 26. The young man was doing well and then suddenly he was out of the program, and nothing was in place to steer him into a life that worked for him. I would say this is a huge failure of the counselors at the university, and they should be held accountable for this tragedy.
I cannot imagine how upset I would have been if I had been kicked out of my PhD program. I married at the beginning of the program, at 22, and after 2 years I was not happy at the thought of having to choose between my husband and my career, because I knew that whatever happened to me, my pursuit of my career was always going to win. I was always going to chase a golden balloon. And I am still doing that.
The situation in Australia then was that my PhD made me unemployable, and I knew I would have to move to a country that employed scientists. Meanwhile my husband was training for a career as a physician and he needed to put down roots for a successful career in Australia.
I was young, my mother-in-law hated me and I hadn't watched any Nigerian movies that would have told me this was normal, so I made a lot of bad personal choices that ended my marriage to a good, decent man, but launched me as a scientist at an Ivy League university, the University of Pennsylvania.
From where I emerged in 2005 after having given birth to 3 sons and one daughter, published one book and a score or 2 of scientific papers no-one read. I had the title of an associate professor of Physiology, I was divorced from my second husband who is a Yale graduate and an eye surgeon and I was married to my third husband, a German inventor and physicist.
For MJoTA Friday movies about the moon click here.
The life of a scientist is the life of an obsessive. We have to be obsessive to keep us in the laboratory on a Saturday night when others are out dancing.
I always managed to have a social life, which is how I managed to keep marrying wonderful men, but managed to make this part of my life take as little time as possible.
A main reason my marriages failed was because I do everything by formula. Four times, I met men who clearly liked my face, my shape, my height, and that I am the daughter of physicians and analytically sharp and can talk about anything, and I love to listen, I really do love to hear your stories. And by the next week we were on our road to marriage, because why waste time? I had discoveries to make, knowledge to create.
But when I was 24, and in the middle of the 4 years I was in the lab working towards my PhD, I was unhappy about the reality that I would have to leave Australia, leave my mother to die alone, leave my marriage to a good man I loved deeply.
Making matters far worse, my PhD supervisor was a lunatic who had psoriasis. Every time he got upset he scratched himself, and when he gave lectures he liked to dictate so that when everyone was busy writing he could scratch himself up and down the door post. When he saw me getting ready to do an experiment he got nervous and started interfering. Luckily he was exceedingly lazy, and spent most of his day out of the lab. leaving the university for the day at around 3pm because he needed to avoid traffic driven by peasants, and because he had to go to the local political party headquarters to make sure his friend the prime minister did the right thing. This man had come first in his year in medical school.
With everything going on, I was not terribly interested in living and if I had died then, I really would not have minded. Everything ahead of me seemed stupid, I did not see any advantage in completing my PhD, but had no idea what I would do other than science, I saw no advantage to continuing my marriage to a medical student, because his work suddenly seemed like it would trap me. I was deeply unhappy. So I drank a lot of red wine and swallowed a lot of Valium and made some exceedingly inappropriate friendships late on Friday and Saturday nights in the few hours I left the lab.
I remember sitting in the lab cataloging all the ways I could kill myself. I had a bottle of cyanide, a bottle of carbon monoxide, a bottle of arsenic... It would have been so easy, and over the years, I have lost a handful of friends exactly this way.
|
|
Above, daughter of St Kitts academic social worker Dr Eda Hastick her husband, son of Grenada CACCI CEO Roy Hastick and Mr Edmund Sadio sit at the top of the table for the CACCI meeting. More on CACCI click here.
Below, Chairman of the Board of CACCI. Mr Edmund Sadio, talks to us about his realty group in Century 21. He told us his is the only Black Century 21 group that has withstood the financial meltdown. He said that the meltdown was caused by absurd laws that made house loans possible for unemployed people with no deposits and no income; things have now tightened.
|
Above, son of Haiti and Belgian-trained physician (he has never practiced in the US) Councilmember Dr Mathieu Eugene addresses us as the meeting is winding down.
Below, Councilmember Dr Eugene talks with the publisher of a Brooklyn-wide community website.
CACCI CEO Mr Roy Hastick is in the foreground.
|
A
year later, 6 months before I handed in my PhD thesis, I took off by
myself for a 6-week trip around France, the last week on a bicycle I
named Framboise, but that is another story.
If,
when I was 24, I had been in a gun culture where all around me were
advertisements talking about how good guns are and that everyone should
have one because otherwise the government is getting ready to send
marines into my house to shoot me, maybe I would have stockpiled
explosives and guns and turned my apartment into a lab for figuring out
the best way to kill the most people on a single day. I am so blessed
and so thankful that I was in Australia.
I hold the university
that failed the gunman accountable. They know that America has a culture
that promotes guns and violence. Telling people to stop buying guns is
like telling children to stop playing with balloons and men to stop
lying to have sex.
I blame the university for taking his money,
or grant money, and not protecting this man and therefore not protecting
children and young adults who were watching a movie. My God. My
daughter loves going to those midnight movie releases.
How dare universities play games with a young man's life, a young child's life, my life.
Read
the independent counsel's report on the 4 top administrators of the
football team that knew and covered up the abuse of young boys by a
football coach at Pennsylvania State University, click here.
Thank
you Dr Sally Ride for a great life well lived. You chased golden
balloons always. May your grace and heroism always be remembered.
|
|
