At least for now....

I have every intention to keep the blog up and running (at least for now).  Its finals week so please have a little patience with me as I won't be posting this week, but do have a little something in the works after finals are all over! :)

Bundy Controversy video

I saw this video on Facebook and felt that she sums several things up very nicely so I wanted to share. The last minute (though we all know it wasn't the National Guard that was sent in) she says something important "we don't have to agree" and I believe that several of my posts try to make that point.

The Bomb

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend and we started to talk about my blog.  As I explained the point of my bog to her, I shared with her that there was one particular word that I had been wanting to write about because you hear so many people using it for shock value.  Without even telling her, she knew exactly what I was talking about because she too knew many individuals who dropped it in for shock value.

The f-bomb!!!

How many times a day do you hear someone use it? "F" this or "F" that.  It has become one of those words in society that people use so interchangeably that the meaning of the word has gotten lost!  I have always understood it to be slang for sex, when I dug around I found more than a few humorous explanations. First, way back when, you needed the King's permission to make babies. Once you had his permission, you were given a sign to hang on your door (cause we all know how important it is for everyone to know your business) "Fornication Under Consent of the King".  Another site linked its beginning to Colonial times and the oldest profession (for those of you who do not get that...prostitution). Stating that it stood "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge"  and a sign was hung on the stock where the prisoner was held.  What's my point, it boils down to this: it is just slang for sex! So next time you let it drop, replace it with the word sex and see how much sense you are making! NONE!

Yes, I am completely aware that people use it in all kinds of context.  I however, through the course of writing my blog have come to a different understanding and look at roots of words and their original meanings, not the meanings modern society has given to them.  I use to be one of those people who dropped it in there (just about every other word), but it has been well over 20 years since I have last uttered the word and surprisingly my vocabulary gets along fine without it!  So, if you are around me and drop it in there for whatsoever reason, don't be surprised if I start to laugh!  After all, it's about having the smarter mouth!

Family

Fam·i·ly

1          1.     A group consisting of parents and children living together in a household

            2. All the descendants of a common ancestor

While these are all well and good, I would like to add another;

            3. Those people who through whatever reason you were brought together and you have bonded with them on a deeper level.  Through thick and thin you will be there for each other.

      I have been married for almost 19 years and the oldest of my four children will be 17 later this year, but I can honestly say that the past 10 years have best shaped my definitions of family.

     Ten years ago, we lived in a four-plex that lovingly became known as "the compound" to those who lived within its walls.  The families that lived here became extremely close after a serious of tragic events.  Within 2 months one family lost their grandparents and the other family lost a child. 

Handen and Elaine

     Elaine was born with congenital heart defects and had to endure more than any sweet child should ever have too.  Elaine was my son's best friend.  I am a firm believer that you always tell the truth; no matter what.  So when Elaine went into the hospital in heart failure, I sat my little Handen down and told him the best I could that Elaine's heart had an "ouchie" and she had to go to the hospital to see if the doctors could fix it. Come this Saturday (April 19th) it will be 10 years since I had to do the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life; I had to sit down and tell my son that his best friend went to Heaven.  With tears streaming down his face, he looked up at me and told me that it would be ok because "Elaine's heart was all better now!" I will forever be amazed at the tender mercies of a 2 1/2 year old boy.

   

             We started out as four individual families willing to help out the neighbors who needed help in a time of need, but we ended up as one big family. There are no words to describe what exactly took place, but we all know that regardless of where life takes us, we will always be there for each other.  As one of the members of the “compound” would so eloquently put it we are “brothers/sisters from another mother”.  I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I am closer to these individuals then I am some members of my own "blood" family.

     Nothing hurts worse than knowing that you have an entire family who wants nothing to do with you.  Just a few short years ago, I learned that I had an entire tree of family that I did not know existed! For years I had a name and had been trying to find out more but came up continual brick walls. Than one day I received an email that blew all those brick walls down!  Attached to this email was a family tree that was given out at a family reunion and written on it was acknowledgement of a child and wife that for many years everyone had denied. (It isn't me).  I found a lot of information from that simple email and have even made contact with several individuals.  Someday, I hope to meet all of them.  It might never happen but I am pretty stubborn and I refuse to give up hope.

             

     These two events have truly shaped what I believe family is and what it can be.  A family is tough, loving, friendship, valuable, amazing, forever,caring, difficult, comfortable, crazy and I wouldn't trade any of them for the world!

            

  

Dumb, Jack, Kick, Fat and Smart

Thought I would touch on a very common word, that I hear uttered many times throughout my day on campus, ass!  To be completely honest when I hear the word,this shirt flashes in my mind.  (This belongs to one of my teenagers.)  If I am called a smart ass I usually quip back a snarky thank you.

I think that most people think of the 6 things when they hear the word ass; the five listed on the shirt and the one that we sit on. When you look ass up in a dictionary three things come up, the animal, the slang and stupidity.


A type of donkey or mule
Slang for buttocks  (don't worry its a cake!)

A stupid or dumb person (Since Ancient Greece the word has typified stupidity)

According to oxforddictinaries.com a  racist is someone who believes that a particular race is superior to another.  Racism is the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. Doing a little digging I found that the first time (that is cited) racism was uttered in this country was in 1902 by Richard Henry Pratt who was railing against the evils of racial segregation.  He said “Segregating any class or race or people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow.  Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.” Ironic isn’t it?  For those who are not familiar with Richard Henry Pratt, he is seen as the father of the boarding schools for Native peoples to assimilate them to “white life” and is famously known for saying “Kill the Indian in him, save the man.”

What I find particularly interesting is how one-sided racism in America seems to be. Unfortunately we live in a society in which the media outlets help feed the problem.  The door called racism swings both ways, yet the lame stream media (this is my preferred name for CNN, FOX, etc…) have a tendency to only see one side of the picture.  Are the people of this country so blind that they don’t see how horribly one sided it is?  Since I could not say it any better myself, I took this little excerpt from urbandictionary.com “If you're a white man, this is what you are. It doesn't even matter if your wife is black and you have an adopted child from India, or how many black friends you have, somehow you're going to end up being a racist according to how the media portrays the white man as "racist whities".  

 Is this not hypocrisy at its best? The white man is the one that is stereotyped as being racist; it is hypocritical to assume that only white men can be racists?  So digging right in to this hypocrisy; let us examine a few individuals who I believe are fine examples of this….Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  In recent history both of these men cried foul when a black kid was killed by a Hispanic. (Regardless of the color of skin it was a tragedy.)   It was they and the lame stream media who made the issue about race!   Where are they and where was their outrage when two black teens beat a WWII Vet to death in Seattle? What seems typically of them, they stay silent because it doesn't serve the agenda they promote.  I truly believe that these two men (and many of their followers) are themselves extremely racist!  Why, because when you listen to them talk they belittle everyone who does not see their particular agenda.   If they really cared about the betterment of the inner cities why are they not crying foul regarding all the black on black violence in Chicago?  If they really cared about the people’s equality they should be greatly concerned and using their influence to get these issues out into the public.  I was surprised to see recently flashing all over the internet that Nick Cannon dressed up in “white face” to promote his new record.  I was not surprised to find that people

 were angry about this, but I was surprised that not one main lame stream media reported it.  All the reports I could find came from online sources like the Huffington Post.  Only when looking for a response from Cannon did USA Today bother to report.  I believe that this only proves my point that the organized lame stream media only reports per an agenda.

In an organizational behavior class I learned a little bit about the Implication Associate Test (IAT).  When people took the race IAT, many found that they have a biased one way or another.  I thought, hey why not take this test and see if maybe deep down I do have a bias.  (I grew up pretty isolated on an island in Alaska…so maybe!)  So I began the test.  The way it works is that on the left and right side of the screen there are words, in this case the words were European American and African American.  First pictures of people flash across the screen and you are to place them into the appropriate category (pressing E for the left side and I for the right side).  Next two words are added to either side; in this instance it was good and bad.  Good was paired with European American and bad was paired with African American.  My first inclination was “this is just biased in the first place” obviously if African American and bad are paired together you are going to put any word that is “bad” in that category.  However the next round did a flip flop and African American was now paired with good.  My guess is that for one reason or another; a lot of people struggle to put those words together.    I will have to admit that I was a little worried at first when my results were being figured because I had read via the classroom chat that many of my fellow students had taken it and much to their horror found that deep down they did have biases.   Finally, the results………the test showed that I have an automatic preference for African Americans compared to European Americans!   

 If you are interesting in checking out this little test click on this link  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html .

Personally, I feel that we are all created equal and should be judged by our merit not our ancestral background!

When did being anatomically correct become offensive?

I was sitting in class last week, when our professor shared a great story.  Long story short, he said vagina (he was making an announcement about an on campus presentation of The Vagina Monologues) and about 100 or so people in the audience got offended by the word vagina.  As he spoke, my mind started to spin; why on earth would people find the word so offensive?  Then it dawned on me, that in many communities throughout the United States (and the world I am sure) we are taught from an early age that vagina is a dirty word! The question I had to pose to myself and I pose to all of you is simply WHY? 

So, now I find myself Googling like crazy, trying to find something that might give me a little bit of insight.  I have spent countless hours surfing the web only to find myself more and more irritated by what I am finding; extreme feminism, blaming of conservatives for not wanting to teach age appropriate anatomy, etc…, but no solid answer.   The extremism doesn’t bug me nearly as much as the blame game.    As a conservative and a parent I believe it is my job, not the school systems, to teach my children about their bodies and the anatomically correct terms.  According to what I have found online it is believed that it is my fault the word vagina is seen as dirty because I do not want lawmakers legislating how or when my children are taught?  Not only do I find it irritating, but I find it an insult to my intelligence!

From an early age all of my children have watched the movie Kindergarten Cop and the word vagina is used multiple times, in fact a kindergarten student is the one using it!  Is it a dirty movie? No!  The child is being anatomically correct.  Did questions arise; of course they did, and as parents we answered our children’s questions appropriately for their age. I found it particularly funny to find out that some popular movie editing companies that were in my area a few years back actually edited out the parts of the movie where the word vagina was used appropriately, but left the violence. Isn’t this sending the wrong message?  I believe it is! Because there is nothing wrong or offensive with using a word appropriately!

Back to my professor; in the after-math of what he dubbed vagina-gate, the then President of UVSC (now UVU) asked him to write an apology letter to the community.  My awesome professor, Phil Gordon has graciously allowed me access to this letter and better yet, has allowed me to share with the world his thoughts.  This is magnificent because I cannot find anywhere online (or any books) that have a better explanation of why vagina is not a dirty word!

What’s in a name?

When a rose is not a rose.

            Why does The Vagina Monologues have to have the word vagina in it?  Why did I repeatedly use the word when announcing a production of the play a couple of weeks ago?  Apparently some in the town have been offended by both.  I regret that the play and my words were taken offensively. 

            The intent of the use of that word is not to offend, or to be “dirty,” but to undirty the word, to take it back from the pejorative connotations that equate women’s sexual identity with shamefulness.  This is no trivial matter.  The shame associated with the word is related to the perpetuation of sexual violence against women.  It feeds the hatred of women by making them simultaneously objects of desire and disgust.  It inhibits discussion about sexual violence, and thus the accountability of victimizers and the healing of victims, by making it that much more difficult to talk about sex crimes.

Of course, I understand that it is a provocative word, attached to anxieties, awkwardness, and contempt.  But those attachments are not necessary, automatic, and eternal.  They are cultural.  Saying the word is meant to be an act of cultural intervention.

Repeating it, boldly, flagrantly, sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully, is to wrestle the meaning of “woman” away from the misogynists.  It is part of the struggle against sexual violence. 

            The social science literature is clear on this matter.  Making women’s sex organs “unmentionable” is obscurantism falsely dignified by the name “modesty,” and it has a range of devastating effects, from the late diagnosis of illness through the inability to experience sexual pleasure to the host of calamitous consequences of hidden violence.  Research shows that children who can correctly identify their sex organs are less likely to be victims of sexual abuse.  In a study I conducted with a colleague at the University of Illinois in the early 1990s, we found that rape victims identified the practice of putting their experience into words and sharing it with others as their primary means of recovery from their attacks. 

            The specific features common to sexual assault: the shock and denial; the pressure to keep silent; the misattribution of responsibility; the maze of fear and shame rape victims are forced to navigate; are all addressed and worked through in the act of talking to supportive people about them.  In telling their stories, victims take control, come out of denial, name their assailants, absolve themselves, heal relationships, begin to trust, and help other victims progress from states of denial, misunderstanding, and turmoil, toward states of acceptance, understanding, and newfound strength.

            Though my words and the play sound, at times, crude, there is sometimes a high purpose to low talk.  I wish I could have articulated more clearly then what I am trying to clarify now.  Violence and silence are related.  Speaking is healing.  The body is sacred.  But do we sanctify something by obliterating the word for it?  The prohibition against speaking publicly about sex matters does not restrict sex practices or sex crimes.  It restricts only understanding of, and healing from, violent sexual experiences. 

Is it ever the intention of activities at UVSC to offend the community?  Definitely not.  Is it ever the intention to air provocative ideas and challenge commonly held ones?  Sometimes, yes.  And that is a perfectly appropriate thing for an institution of higher education to do.