The Global Conversation

Tag: women’s rights

  • When it’s not selfish to be selfish.

     

    Dear Therese,

    I am a young stay at home mother of two, happily married, and I am a fairly spiritual person.  My life is really good, but I still feel kind of depressed.  I read CWG saying that my life isn’t about me, it’s about others, so I give all I can to my children, my husband and I do volunteer work.  I think I need some “me” time, but I feel guilty because that might take away from my giving to others.  What am I missing?  Aren’t I supposed to feel better because I am giving?

    Ann in Missouri

     

    Dear Ann,

    Yes!  You are supposed to feel better, but it isn’t your fault that you don’t.  Cultural influences around the world tell us that women are not supposed to be selfish, that they are not equal to men, that they should be ashamed, and that time for themselves is time they should be using to give.  They have it backwards.

    Ann, you are one of the “others” that you can give to.  You are certainly an “other” to those who know you.  Are you trying to do all of this alone, or are you reaching out and taking help when it is offered?  I know that I thought I had to be strong and independent…but it only isolated me.  It is not weakness to ask for help.  If it is okay to give to others, it is also okay to give to yourself.

    Let me expand on that.  If you do not fill yourself up, do you realize that you are not really giving as well as you think you are?  When you are running on fumes, even if you are giving all that you are capable of giving, the person to whom you are giving still knows they are not being given the very best you can give.  They may not know why something doesn’t feel right and true, but they know it, and don’t accept your efforts in the way you think they should…which means your effort was inefficient at best.  We do no one full justice when we do not give ourselves full justice.  When we are insufficiently full, we give insufficiently.

    It is not selfish to have “me” time, if the intent of that time is to make yourself whole, so that you may give of yourself well.  That is the mistake we make in our cultures.

     

    selfish |ˈselfi sh |

    adjective

    (of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.

     

    Sweetie, you do not fit the description of “selfish”.  You do fit the description of tired, and needing to fill yourself.

    Taking “me” time can take many forms.  The first form I would suggest is simply using the word “no” more often.  If you are like me, the kids will invariably come into the bathroom whenever you are there…close the door!  I even wrote a poem once called, “The Temple That is my Bathroom”!  quiet, personal time, consciously taken, does not need a special space.  Take a bubble bath, or long hot shower, and shave those legs or use that loofah for more than 10 seconds…consciously enjoying the delicious time taken just for you.  Meditate…there are many ways of meditating that don’t require you to sit for an hour, including simply being aware of your breath, or stopping for a moment and noticing who you are with respect to your surroundings.

    There are grander things, of course, like taking a short vacation by yourself, or with your spouse to get reacquainted, going to two movies in the same day, auditioning for a play (not volunteering, unless it allows you to move into an area of joy you don’t usually get to experience), or sending the kids off to grandmother’s for a week.  Consider going on a retreat.

    “Me” time is essential…and you should also thank your depression for helping you to be aware of what is not working for you.  Depression gets a bad rap in this world.  Yes, there are people who are clinically depressed, and that is a very different thing, but most of us are called by depression to do something very simple…to stop…and listen to our bodies and our spirit, and recognize what is not working.  Pay attention to it.  It could also be a sign that you are not eating well, BTW, so remember that you are a mind/BODY/spirit being.

    So, sweet Ann, be selfish.  You just might find your full magnificence if you are!

    Therese

    (Therese Wilson is a published poet, and is the administrator of the global website at www.ChangingChange.net, which offers spiritual assistance from a team of Spiritual Helpers responding to every post from readers within 24 hours or less, and offers insight, suggestions, and companionship during moments of unbidden, unexpected, unwelcome change on the journey of life. She may be contacted at Therese@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

    (If you would like a question considered for publication, please submit your request to Advice@TheGlobalConversation.com, where our team is waiting to hear from you.)

  • Thanks for the call, my friend…
    you really made my day!

    A Republican friend texted me this morning, “Congratulations.”  That’s all.  Funny….she usually has so much to say.  She must have been really busy.  I am sure what she really meant to say and would have said if she had time was…

    CONGRATULATIONS TO WOMEN! Our rights were not sold to religious politicians who do not know or care about women’s bodies.  And congratulations to women for still being able to get birth control so we, and not some congressman, can choose when we will have children.

    And CONGRATULATIONS TO HISPANIC PEOPLE! Who have lived here and worked hard all of your lives, and who call America home and have children in school.   I am so happy that you can continue to live the dream, because your tears burn just like mine.  Your hopes and fears are just as powerful as mine and because you deserve a good life just like me.

    And CONGRATULATIONS TO PEOPLE WHO LOVE SOMEONE WHO IS THE SAME SEX AS YOU! Because you should have the right to love whoever you choose and you should not be treated differently because of whom you love.  You should be able to get married, and celebrate your love, and provide insurance for one another and have all of the rights that allow you to take care of each other and your family just like I do.

    And CONGRATULATIONS TO PLANET EARTH! Because we are not going to continue raping you so big oil companies can get rich.  We are going to find other ways of providing for our needs!  Ways that honor our planet, mountains, streams, oceans and prairies, and all the creatures that live here.  Because our planet and all of its creatures means more than stripping and destroying our world so someone else can be rich.  And Congratulations, also, because we recognize that we are creating global warming and we are going to learn more about it so we can fix it before it’s too late.

    And CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MIDDLE CLASS!  Because your children are going to be able to get a quality education!  And the rich are not going to keep getting richer at your expense.   And you are going to have the honor of rebuilding our nation by building bridges, roads, and manufacturing products the whole world needs!

    And CONGRATULATIONS TO MILLIONAIRES! Because you are going to have the proud honor of paying your fair share to help your country become great again!  And that should make you feel better about yourselves  than buying another mansion or private plane!

    And CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR MILITARY!  Because a lot of you are going to be coming home where you belong and where we can cherish and care for you like you have cared for us!

    And CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF US!  We saw a way forward to collectively become the greatest version of the grandest vision we ever had for our planet.  And we chose it together.

    Thanks for the call my friend. You really made my day!

    (Amiee Laun has studied with Neale Donald Walsch, Charol Messenger, and Barbara Marx Hubbard. She was among the first graduates of Barbara’s Agents of Conscious Evolution Training.  She lives and plays in the powerful Black Hills of South Dakota where she is active in many women’s spiritual circles and groups.  You may connect with her at amiee@rushmore.com.)

  • CONGRESSMAN SAID THERE’S NEVER
    MEDICAL REASON FOR ABORTION

    The GOP is in trouble again. Republican Congressmen Joe Walsh, representing Illinois’ 8th District, declared last Thursday night that there is never a single instance when there is a medical necessity to use abortion to save a woman’s life.

    The congressman’s remark came in a televised debate against his Democrat opponent, Tammy Duckworth, and was reported by writers Bob Secter and Deborah L. Shelton in a copyrighted stored in the Chicago Tribune.

    The Tribune article was picked up and widely distributed by the Washington Bureau of McClatchy News Service and can be found here.

    Asked about the statement after the debate, Mr. Walsh stood by his assertion in his response to reporters. “With modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which an abortion would be needed to save the life of a mother, the Republican said.

    The Tribune story said that “medical experts sought to refute Walsh’s initial claim,” the newspaper reporting that “The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said 600 women die annually in the U.S. from pregnancy and child-birth related causes.”

    By the day after the debate, Mr. Walsh was retreating from his first remarks made both during the debate and afterward, the Tribune story said. “Those comments had created a firestorm,” the Tribune article said, and the paper reported that Mr. Walsh, who the newspaper described as “a tea party icon,” was “in damage control mode.”

    “At a hastily-called news conference, the rookie congressman backed off that sweeping assertion, slightly, acknowledging ‘very rare circumstances’ where life-saving abortions might be required,” the Tribune story said.

    The Chicago newspaper continued its report by quoting Dr. Erika Levi, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Tribune story said that, according to Dr. Levi, life-threatening medical conditions that can lead to terminating a pregnancy include infections of the uterus or the amniotic sac surrounding the fetus, some heart conditions, and pre-eclampsia, a rapid rise in blood pressure that occurs during pregnancy and in the period right afterward.

    “All of these conditions can occur throughout the pregnancy,” the Tribune quoted Dr. Levi as continuing. “If these conditions occur prior to viability (of the fetus) then, at that point, abortion can become the only option to save the life of the mother.”

    The Tribune story also quoted Dr. David Grimes, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who, the paper said, “added others to the list, including complications of diabetes, pulmonary hypertension, and cancer, which he said sometimes can require termination of the pregnancy before treatment can proceed. Cases severe enough to require abortions are rare, Grimes said, adding that he nonetheless sees several a year.”

    The paper said that “Grimes took issue with anti-abortion politicians, Walsh included, who view ‘women as some kind of Tupperware container that holds the fetus for nine months’.”

    “I am flabbergasted that he is that out of touch with science,” the Tribune quoted Walsh’s opponent, Ms. Duckworth, as saying. The Democrat supports abortion rights, the paper said.

    Rep. Walsh’s comments drew rapid comparison with the now widely repeated statements by Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri, who is in a race against Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill for a seat in the United States Senate. Mr. Akin, like Mr. Walsh a staunch opponent of abortion, proclaimed that a woman’s body would automatically stop her from becoming pregnant in a case of “legitimate rape.” The statement outraged both men and women inside and outside the political arena, and caused Akin to immediately lose funding and support.

    The ongoing statements from both Republicans, and other members of the GOP across the nation, on the abortion issue have led to stern words of protest from women across America, and have caused considerable trouble with the female voting block for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Mr. Romney has sought to distance himself from extremists within his party by announcing repeatedly that his own opposition to abortion includes exceptions in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.

    GOP Congressman Walsh’s first statement that modern medical science has completely eliminated the last-case scenario, and his follow-up retreat that such a circumstance was, in fact, possible, but would be “very rare,” could be bringing a bit of election angst to Romney campaign headquarters, and to that of other Republican candidates for lower public office throughout the nation.

    The issue has become a political hot potato in the 2012 campaign season, as both citizens and their political leaders struggle to find a place for government, if any, in the highly personal circumstance of a woman facing the question of whether to have an abortion. There are those who argue that the decision is a matter of women’s rights, while others declare that abortion is akin to murder and should be made illegal in all cases by the government.

    Mr. Romney has flatly declared that if elected he will push to eliminate all funding for Planned Parenthood, and has indicated as well that he would appoint pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Such a move, observers say, would no doubt tip the delicate judicial balance that has kept intake the Roe v Wade decision, which is the landmark Supreme Court case which struck down many state laws restricting abortion.

    Women, and those men who support women’s right to an abortion and their right to make that decision without government interference, fear that should Mr. Romney be elected president, Roe v Wade will be overturned with his appointees in place.

    Looking at how the New Spirituality might be overlaid on this issue, it is noted that Conversations with God says that freedom is a perfect description of the nature of Divinity. In a perfect society of highly evolved beings, CWG says, there would be no laws of any kind, and all behavior would be regulated individually by each member of such a society, automatically and without requirement bringing them into harmony with, and awareness of, the highest good of all concerned.

    The question for our Earthly society in the 21st Century becomes: To what degree is humanity ready and able to live with such freedom? Business owners, for instance, want freedom from government regulation, while at the same time many of them want government to regulate what a woman may legally decide about her own body. Human society is still trying to work out the contradictions.

    And your thoughts?

  • MANY VOTERS KNOW LITTLE ABOUT
    THEIR COUNTRY OR CANDIDATES

    The saddest aspect of the democratic process in America is that so many people don’t know—and don’t seem to care—about facts. It is not Truth that matters, it is ideology. And when Truth flies in the face of what a person believes, many people insist that the Truth is a lie, thus making it possible for them to stick with their beliefs no matter what.

    For instance, U.S. President Barack Obama recently said: “After a decade of decline, this country has created over half a million new manufacturing jobs.” The Truth: Since he took office, the country has lost about a million such jobs, and has regained more than half of them during the economic comeback. When a football team loses 15 yards of first down, then regains 8 yards on  second down, that is not exactly called progress.

    For instance, Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney said in the second debate: “We have fewer people working today than we had when the president took office.” The Truth: the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month when Mr. Obama took office as a result of 8 years of President Bush’s administration—so holding Mr. Obama to a net job creation standard means he would have to have made up for massive losses that were out of his control entirely. AND….he has done it. The Bureau of Labor statistics show that across the four years of the Obama Administration there has been created a net positive 125,000 jobs.

    Item 1 above was taken from a fascinating article in Time magazine’s Oct 15 issue, titled Blue Truth/Red Truth. The second item came from a story by reporter George Nornick published Oct 17 by The Nation headlined Romney’s Seven Biggest Debate Lies. Here’s another…

    Mr. Romney said in the second debate: “I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives.” But back in March, when Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri introduced a bill that would allow employers to deny contraceptive coverage to employees based on the employer’s religious beliefs, Mr. Romney said: “Of course I support the Blunt amendment.”

    Mr. Romney also said in that second debate: “As a matter of fact, oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land.” And, reporter Nornick points out, it is true that drilling on public lands dropped 14 percent in 2011. But it went up 15 percent the year before. So overall, oil production on federal lands is up under Mr. Obama. Says The Nation article: “Romney is being extremely dishonest in singling out the one year that it dropped.”

    Meanwhile, the Time magazine article pointed out that Mr. Obama has asked on the campaign trail, “What rights would Romney deny (for gay couples)?” Then he has answered his own question: “Adopting children together.” The magazine points out that this is simply false. The article in Time corrects the record, pointing to the fact that Mr. Romney “supports adoption rights for same-sex couples.”

    But the problem is about more than what the candidates say. It’s about what the American public actually knows. In the Oct 17 issue of USA TODAY writer Katrina Trinko, a member of the paper’s Board of Contributors, reports that “only 34% of Americans can name even one Supreme Court justice,” citing an August survey by FindLaw.com. She also reports that in 2011 Newsweek magazine asked 1,000 Americans to take a citizenship test—and 38% failed.

    And a 2006 study by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum “discovered that only 28% could identify even two of the First Amendments five freedoms,” Trinko continued.

    But it’s not only constitutional provisions or civic questions that too many voters know little about, it’s “what’s so” in American life itself. For instance, Trinko reports, “a 2011 CNN survey found that the median estimate for the percentage of the budget that was foreign aid was 10%. In reality, it was then under 1% of the total federal budget.”

    The writer says that “it’s the same story with public broadcasting,” touted by Mr. Romney in a debate as a place where he would cut expenditures, saying he “loves Big Bird,” but the cost of PBS had to go. The public’s median estimate of the PBS portion of the federal budget was 5%, “while actually it was 1/100th of 1%,” Ms. Trinko’s article said.

    It’s becoming sadly clear that many people don’t like it when “fact checkers” take the sting out of their candidate’s charge, or the lift out of their candidate’s claim.

    They like it when Mr. Romney says he wants to “keep our Pell Grant program growing,” allowing young people who might not otherwise be able to afford it to go to college, and they hate it when fact checkers like Mr. Nornick point out that the budget of Mr. Romney’s own running mate, Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan, would cut Pell Grants for up to one million students.

    They like it when Mr. Romney responds to a debate question about where he stands on equal pay for women by saying that he actively sought to bring more women into his cabinet when he took office as governor of Massachusetts, and they hate it when fact checkers point out that he actively and vocally opposed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.

    (And they totally despise it when Mr. Nornick reports on a Boston Globe story revealing that there were no female partners at Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s—and that even today only four of forty-nine of the firm’s managing directors are women.)

    People like it when Mr. Obama’s campaign charges that the way Bain Capital reorganized “cost the government and the American taxpayers $10 million,” and they hate it when fact checkers at Time magazine point out that “Bain wrote off $10 million in debt to a failed bank at the expense of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC)—which is funded by banks. Taxpayers paid nothing.”

    In just a few days now the people of American will decide: What part should Truth and Facts play in their decision regarding who shall be the next President of the United States? But the real question is, are there enough people with enough intelligence to even care?

    A few days ago, when Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showed that the unemployment rate in America is now lower than it was when Mr. Obama took office, right wing Republicans ran around claiming on all the talk shows that the latest statistics where artificially skewed in a vast internal conspiracy within the Obama Administration. These are the same statistics that those same Republicans considered extremely reliable when for the 43 previous months they showed a high unemployment rate.

    The conclusion of the Far Right: When the numbers support us, embarrassing the President for 43 straight months, the Administration could do nothing to hide them or skew them, and so those numbers are reliable and you can stake your life on them. When the numbers oppose us, showing the President has made some gains on the problem, the Administration must have at last found a way to secretly pressure or force the Bureau of labor Statistics to report false numbers, and so the new stats are the result of a conspiracy.

    People believe what they want to believe. The New Spirituality calls for complete transparency in all matters, public and private. Will we ever see that in our political campaigns? Not in 2012, apparently. And worse yet, not enough people seem to care.

  • Why do you think it has been so difficult for women to achieve equal status with men, even after thousands of years of humanity looking at this issue?

  • GLOBAL NEWS MADE BY MAJOR
    REVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT

    The High Court of Botswana has this Friday ruled, in a revolutionary decision, that women have the right to inherit property. The decision overturned an earlier verdict that had gone against three sisters who were living in their father’s home during the years between the father’s death and the time that the property was inherited by the sister’s nephew.

    The story is complicated, but deserves telling, because it marks another long overdue, major movement on this planet on behalf of female equality.

    It is difficult to believe that it has taken this long for something like this to happen. Yet is the clear that even now, in the second decade of the first quarter of the Twenty-first Century, there are cultures in place where human beings are still considered second-class citizens because they have a vagina and not a penis.

    What occurred Friday began in 2007, when the three sisters—all over the age of 65—sued their nephew for attempting to evict them from the home in which they had lived from the time of their father’s death.

    At that time, the house was willed to the father’s son, brother of the three sisters, who allowed the ladies to continue to live there. When the brother died, he could not will the home to his sisters, because the local laws did not allow females to inherit property. The brother’s will thus called for the home to be passed on to an older half-brother, who he knew would also allow the women to remain there.

    But when the half-brother died, leaving the home to his son—the sisters’ nephew—the younger man sought to evict the trio of aging ladies. In this case, instead of bowing to local custom, the ladies fought back, contesting the eviction in local court, claiming that they had paid for the home’s upkeep through the years they had lived there following their father’s death, and had also paid for an expansion project at the residence.

    The local court ruled against the women. In Botswana there is a dual legal system. There are civil courts run by the government, and so-called “customary courts,” functioning mostly in very rural outlying areas. Those courts have traditionally upheld the principle of “assumed male inheritance,” according to a story on this case authored on Wikipedia. That story can be found here.

    The women appealed the decision, but lost their appeal as well—also handled by a local court. Supported in their case by the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC), the sisters took their case to the regular government civil courts, and it eventually reached Botswana’s High Court, the article written for Wikipedia said.

    “The sisters were opposed by Attorney General Athalis Molokomme. Representing the government of Botswana, Molokomme argued that though the inheritance law was discriminatory, the ‘public mood’ did not yet support its repeal,” the Wikipedia article went on.

    The judge in the case, Key Dingake, ruled for the High Court that the local customary laws prioritizing male inheritance were not in keeping with the promise of gender equality in the Constitution of Botswana, and awarded the home to the sisters, the article said.

    According to further reporting in the Wikipedia article, Dingake stated in his decision: “It seems to me that the time has now arisen for the justices of this court to assume the role of the judicial midwife and assist in the birth of a new world struggling to be born. Discrimination against gender has no place in our modern day society.”

    The nephew who lost the case is reported to have called it “a sad day,” stating that “people should learn to respect our culture.” The Wikipedia story said, “Regional human rights campaigners expressed hope that the case would not only be a landmark in Botswana, but also set a precedent for surrounding countries grappling with similar issues,” and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa described the decision as “a huge boost to the struggle for gender equality,” while SALC’s deputy director said that the ruling “sends a very strong signal that women in Botswana cannot be discriminated against and that the days of women suffering from secondary status under the law in Botswana are drawing to an end.”

    Drawing to an end? That’s what the person said.

    All of which leads to the matter raised by the women’s nephew: Should people respect a culture’s values, no matter how patently unfair and discriminatory those values may be? And if the answer is no, on what basis can proposed laws permitting gay marriage be opposed in the United States?

    It seems to many people incomprehensible that in 2012 anybody at all on this earth could still be earnestly debating such issues. Yet the politically divisive and combative discussions go on. As an overall global culture, we just can’t seem to “get it.” So many members of the human race are still elementary in their understandings.

    What will it take for our species to “grow up?” To mature? To evolve to the point where, thousands of years after the birth of Christ, it still makes headline news when an entire culture is rattled to its bones by a simple decision to make it legal for a woman to inherit her father’s property?

    Or, for that matter, for a girl to receive an education—or to advocate for it without being shot in the head by males who would seek to preserve the backwards status quo, as was 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan the day before the court decision in Botswana.

    The Taliban publicly took “credit” for the shooting, announcing on Saturday that if the girl—whose “crime” was to write a blog calling for support of the right of girls to go to school—survives her wounds (she is in serious but stable condition in hospital), she would be attacked again, and this time, they would make sure that she was killed. And neither the government nor the people of Pakistan have sufficient will to stop the Taliban, and to say, “No more. Finally, at last, no more of this primitive, barbaric behavior masquerading as religious teachings and cultural ‘honor’.”

    When, oh human race, when will it be declared that enough is enough?