Has it been unpacked yet? by Annette Weir

 

Emotional baggage has a host of pieces to it.  If you travel and get on a plane, for example, there will be a chance that you will see a person boarding with a puppy, cat, or whatever other animal is permitted to give that person a sense of comfort.  However, when another passenger boarding has had a “few too many” to support their comfort, that’s when they proceed to unpack that host of emotional baggage that they’ve been carrying for so long, creating havoc for everyone else.  This is not to say that there aren’t people that need emotional support, because I saw firsthand an example of how this works when the district attorney in our town decided to use a German Shepherd that was trained to comfort people in the courtroom, when a witness had to testify.  The results were overwhelmingly positive.  So yes, there are times when some comfort is necessary to keep things stress free.

The recent videos of people breaking out in fights over dumb things like food while on a cruise have led me to believe that these people were just looking for an excuse to unpack their baggage of annoyances onto everyone else. We even see it in restaurants, fast food places, car washes, and yes, on flights. Then of course, there are the fights that break out in the streets at night for no apparent reason other than one person who didn’t like the way the other one looked at them.  What is going on?

It is my contention that, (aside from the feeling that much of this is orchestrated), with the onset of social media there are people that hide behind a screen in the dark of their basement typing away at anything they feel gives them satisfaction, while they become emotional cripples maintaining a sense of comfort in anonymity.  We don’t speak to anyone face-to-face because we have texting or emails to take care of that annoying chore.  We don’t face each other in restaurants because we need to check our “smart phones” – (an interesting name for something that makes some of us numb) - and if we happen to get into a confrontation with someone on the outside, we ignore them. After all, they’ve encroached into our safe space. And of course, we have our phones ready and waiting to video anything we deem as newsworthy as long as we’re not the ones being videoed. Then there’s TikTok to highlight these actions repeatedly like its pure entertainment.  No wonder there are people seeking some sort of emotional support.

We are experiencing a new generation of people that are devoid of the ability to control, or want to control, their emotions.  Just look at the labels we put on children in school whenever they act out.  They’re labeled as students that have emotional issues that can only be controlled by medication.  Once they’re off that med, well, then we must pay the price for their erratic behavior repeatedly.  This isn’t to say that there aren’t children, and some adults, who don’t need help with medications, but it sure seems like we’re seeing more of these behaviors that are uncontrollable lately, making me wonder where it all started.  We have become a society that believes in the right to say and do what you want regardless of how it may impact anyone else so that we can feel comfortable.  In other words, we have the right to unload our emotions regardless of who it may offend.

The abuse of drugs has contributed to this world of emotional cripples whereby anyone that feels down can always get something to make them feel up.  Then there are those people that don’t feel that work is necessary, therefore, they live with their parents and do absolutely nothing to improve their lot in life. Once they get out into the real world, they face what they find uncomfortable and must find a way to cope. College campuses are loaded with professional students who just go there to party and protest whatever flavor of the week is available. Then, when they finish their “education,” they find that the party atmosphere doesn’t succeed in a mature work environment. That’s when they seek some form of special accommodation, or safe spaces at work to make them feel secure and help with their emotions.

Of course, there will always be generations that claim that they were living in much tougher times than we are.  Thinking back to the 20’s, when the gangs were picking each other off to gain turf and push their booze, it seemed like that time would have been considered the worst to live in and the only way to control your emotions was to keep it to yourself.  When you go on to the 30’s and the depression, - talk about emotional struggles at that time of poverty - and you see a generation of people that were devastated with their losses, and nowhere to turn for comfort.  As we moved on to the 40’s we were in a war where some of our troops came home with what we call PTSD today, and bodily injuries that made them unable to function properly, making their situations extremely stressful without any place to go for assistance.  

This led to many of them taking their lives with suicide. The 50’s brought about race issues that were difficult to even imagine today, and it left the country with mixed emotions about what they were experiencing at that time. What was acceptable at that time showed the ugliness of our society, and one can only imagine how black people dealt with their emotions. The 60’s started to mess up the minds of people to the extreme. Those were the days of living your life the way you wanted, doing LSD and getting high, while abandoning right and wrong as long as it made you feel good. 

I think the 70’s on up have seen many changes too; some for the better, and some not so hot.  We began to see the rise of the BLM movement that was promoted by a former president, fanning the flames of hatred.   From there things started to explode and we saw more and more people toss out their emotional baggage on the rest of society, trying to make us all feel responsible for their lack of control, or willingness to do something constructive, other than rioting and burning down cities.

With the constant protests against law and order coming to various cities, it seems like the people that were comfortable with the chaos will always find a way to try and infect the rest of the population. After all, many of them are getting paid to be disruptive.  

Humans will always have to deal with stressful situations, that’s just a fact of life; however, how we manage our emotional baggage, either through thoughtful prayers asking for guidance, helping others without thinking about our own plight, or finding productive ways of channeling our thoughts, we will soon discover that it’s far better to be on the positive track, than to go negative.

Believe your eyes, Curtis Sliwa will win

 

Are you as tired as I am of reading about election polls that tell me who is going to win long before the votes are cast? At times it seems as though we have no need to vote at all because the pollsters have already decided on a candidate. In 2016, every news program reported that Hillary Clinton was a shoo in for president, and that Donald Trump didn’t stand a chance. I don’t know what polls they were reading, but every time I watched a Trump rally there were thousands of enthusiastic supporters cheering him on at large capacity stadiums. Conversely, Hillary was having difficulty filling up standard size ballrooms at hotels when she took to the microphone.

While Trump was unable to fit all of his attendees into those huge enclosures, forcing thousands to congregate outside and watch his speeches on large screens, Clinton was forced to invite celebrities like Madonna, Jay Z, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and numerous others from the supercilious world of leftwing lunacy, in order to entice people to show up at her meager gatherings. Nevertheless, whenever I watched a news report, I was being conditioned to believe that Trump was merely a showman doing a schtick and trying to get publicity for his vast business holdings. In other words, the media was telling me, and millions of other voters, that our eyes were lying to us. In fact, the media was feeding us propaganda on steroids! 

I see the same scenario playing out in the NYC mayoral race. Zohran Mamdani is the Democrat Party nominee to capture Gracie Mansion, and the media tells us every day that he’s way ahead in the polls. His opponents, Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, appear to have been left out of the conversation, as far as the media is concerned. Inasmuch as NYC is a leftwing media empire, it’s not hard to figure out who their choice is to run the Big Apple. “Democrat Socialist Mamdani is poised to be the next mayor,” screams a presumptuous headline, weeks before the general election. As President Reagan would say, “There you go again.” First of all, they should drop the “Democrat” part of his title, which is merely an attempt to make the “Socialist” part sound less ominous.

Meanwhile, Cuomo, who was defeated by Mamdani in the Democrat primary, has picked up some votes since the current Mayor, Eric Adams ended his moribund campaign. Still, all the polls tell voters that Cuomo is an also ran. Moreover, Curtis Sliwa is being totally ignored, even as he holds rallies all across the city, meeting with regular folks who meet and greet him with a level of excitement that says they’re fed up with the typical leftwing rhetoric that has turned the streets over to drugs and thugs. Whereas Sliwa has been a warrior against street crime as founder of the Guardian Angels, a non-profit volunteer organization that has patrolled the streets and subways since 1979, Mamdani has supported defunding the police and creating a “Dept of Community Safety,” which begs the question, “What does he think the NYPD is?” The most important job of the mayor is to keep people safe from the violent gangs and other malevolent denizens of that crime ridden metropolis.

Frankly, if residents don’t feel safe in their homes and on the streets, the whole idea of a civilized society is an oxymoron. Decent, hardworking citizens are afraid to leave their homes unoccupied as they head for their places of employment because burglars are on the prowl, day and night. It reminds me of the Rodney Dangerfield line when he jokes about coming from a tough neighborhood: “Every time I shut the window in my apartment, it’s on someone’s fingers.” He had another line about his first day in the neighborhood: “I asked a cop, ‘How long is the walk to the subway? Cop said, “I don’t know, so far no one ever made it.” Although humor can serve as a coping mechanism, it loses its comedic effect when it becomes personal.

When Sliwa meets with neighborhood groups, from every racial and ethnic background, homeowners, apartment-dwellers, business owners, and working families, crowd around him in the streets, yelling, “Curtis for Mayor,” and “make NYC great again!” They’re the law-abiding, tax-paying people who are tired of being ignored, as politicians cater to the subhumans, who neither obey the law nor pay the taxes. If fear is as strong a motivating factor as I think it is, then Sliwa’s election should be a no-brainer. Let’s keep in mind that Mamdani’s Democrat primary win was a victory over a disgraced ex-governor. Additionally, about three times as many people vote in the general election, as compared to the primary. Furthermore, in the general, a candidate can win by a plurality, meaning he doesn’t need 50% plus one vote. Consequently, in a hypothetical case, Sliwa could win with 34% of the vote if Mamdani and Cuomo were to garner 33% each. Unless my eyes are lying to me, Sliwa has at least that many voters willing to save their city from the radical Marxist, slouching toward Gomorrah. 

 

 

Currently Revolting: Smoke Filled Room Ep. 21

Is it real, or is it acting? by Annette Weir

 

After watching an NYPD Blue series recently, I was amazed at how good the acting was, and at how realistic the story lines were.  Now I’m not a good critic of movies or acting because frankly, I don’t like to watch them because my interest level and attention span at times is limited.  I like things to get to the point quickly without all the fluff and filler that so many shows and movies put out.  However, this particular series got me wondering about how much of the character that the actor must portray spills over into their personal lives.

Robert DiNero, for example, who in real life is a very angry man, has always played the heavy, and he did those parts very convincingly.  He’s been known to say publicly that he would like to punch the President in the face because he vehemently disagreed with him, and he always reverts to profanity laden comments on almost every interview he’s been in.  I started to wonder if all those “heavies” that he had to portray on the screen were really a part of what he’s like and acting in those roles wasn’t much of a stretch.  He’s been married 4 times, which speaks for itself, and has very strong liberal ideas, and would never shy away from spouting them out in public.  Could this be why some actors/actresses turn to drugs and alcohol because they can’t adapt to a saner style of living after being known for such strong characters?

This isn’t to say that all actors/actresses have problems getting back to reality once they leave the studio; but it does make you wonder how much of what they are required to do on screen to convince the public spills over into the way they handle things in their daily lives or how it invades their personalities. 

Some of the actors from way back in the past, like James Stewart who served in the military, and had a stable home life with family; and James Cagney, who wouldn’t drink or smoke, didn’t seem to have problems with their personal lives.  Certainly, there are many more that fall into this category, but with the heavy demands that Hollywood has put on actors these days, it seems like their lives – regardless of how much money and fame they acquire – are always at risk if they start to take themselves too seriously.   

When I think of how the actor must prepare themselves to get “into” a role emotionally, that seems like a bit of stress on the system.  Sure, once they get off camera they can revert to something else, but there must be some strain on the system to lose weight for a role, gain weight for a role, or getting violent on screen when you must do this over and over again.  Hence the need to find stability somewhere, or for a drink or two I would suppose.

Celebrities in general thrive on attention – think Madonna, Sean Combs, Jennifer Lopez, and a host of musical entertainers making the news every day for some sort of nonsense – and suddenly you see a pattern forming.  Multiple marriages, relationships, children out of wedlock, and the list goes on and on.  Could this be because they are told every day by their publicists, and the public that buys their products, that they are above everyone else?

If you think back to the many actors that died because of drug overdoses in the last 5-10 years, it becomes very clear that they either wanted to maintain the image of the parts they played on screen in their daily lives or they couldn’t handle it.  That’s when they saw themselves losing the public’s attention and resorted to drugs to get them through each day. 

Whether it was a very talented Michael Jackson that needed to live a life that was really weird, had to get drugs to get him to sleep, or family issues that made him live his life the way he did; he couldn’t escape wanting to be in the public eye either.  And, of course, we can’t eliminate the lure of making so much money that you begin to feel invincible.    

Are we the fattest country in the world?

 

No, we’re not! However, even minimal research reveals that, despite not having the highest rate, the U.S. does have a very large population of obesity among high-income countries. The World Health Organization ranks the US as the 13^th fattest country, with 43% of our people classified as obese. Keep in mind, that’s out of 200 countries on the list. In addition, the 12 ranked fatter that us are mainly small island nations in the South Pacific. That also means there are about 187 countries that are thinner than we are. France has 11% obese (149^th on the list), Spain 19% (121^st on the list), even Italy, the land of pasta only has 21% obesity (107^th on the list).

Frankly, in my day-to-day travels, I concluded that more than half of Americans are grossly overweight. Although it’s true that we’re blessed to live in a prosperous country with supermarkets galore, arranged with food aisles and specialized sections as large as football fields, it seems obvious that few people are disciplined enough to exhibit some restraint in their selection process. Walking along one of those massive food emporiums, I’m used to seeing the largest people pushing grocery carts filled to the top with an assortment of calorie-laden processed foods, all of which is indicative of their enormous girth. They waddle laboriously from one aisle to another, stuffing enough calories in the cart to feed the Dallas Cowboys for a month.

Some will refer to what I’ve written as “fat-shaming.” Well, bluntly speaking, I sincerely doubt that people who are about a hundred pounds overweight are capable of being shamed by their appearance. Over the last few decades, we have been systematically programmed to reject conformity and refuse to meet established rules or criteria that set a standard of acceptable behavior. “Do your own thing” became the motto for the most undisciplined generation in our history. Conforming to societal norms and civil conduct was mocked as being uncool, old-fashioned, or out of touch with current trends. Furthermore, when someone pointed out bizarre behavior they were called “judgmental.” That was the beginning of new paradigm that led to our current state of physical and moral apathy.

Besides, in addition to other factors, obesity is linked to serious health issues like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain cancers. Moreover, obesity incurs significant costs, with one year's medical costs for obesity in the U.S. reaching nearly $173 billion. It’s very different if someone has a medical condition that forces them to be medicated and sedentary. Some prescription drugs interfere with the metabolism making it extremely difficult to use up the calories we consume. Barring that, we all have a duty to ourselves and to the aesthetic environment to be diligent about our health and fitness.

That’s why I cheered when I watched Pete Hegseth tell the top military brass, consisting of about 700 generals, admirals and senior enlisted troops at a historic gathering at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, that the era of politically correct, over sensitive, don’t hurt anyone’s feelings leadership is over.  The Secretary of War issued new directives that will raise physical standards for everyone in uniform to a “male level,” toughen grooming standards, lift restrictions on rules of engagement, do away with racial quotas, and end restrictions on hazing for boot camp recruits. He demanded no more “fat generals,” saying all service members would need to meet fitness tests and grooming standards. “No more beardos,” he said. “The era of unacceptable appearance is over.”

The Secretary made it clear that if the men and women in uniform do not meet the male level physical standards for combat positions, cannot pass a PT (physical training) test or refuse to shave and look professional, it's time for them to find a new profession. One would think these directives would be unnecessary for those whose sole purpose is to defend our country on the battlefield. Yet, when I think back to a few years ago, during the ridiculous Biden Administration, when I saw a male Navy Admiral walk onto a platform wearing nylons, high heels and a dress, I felt like I was watching a burlesque routine at a carnival. I lost confidence in our ability to fight a war with countries that train their armies to be rugged hardnosed warriors. Our enemies gain confidence when they see fat soldiers, led by fat commanders, especially when those so-called leaders don’t know what gender they are. President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have declared that the bizarre era of “dudes in dresses” is over. Sanity has returned and it’s not taking prisoners.