Sheila's LiveJournal

After wasting too many hours worrying over the Google settlement -- should I opt in or out? -- and trying to make sense of the (deliberately?) confusing settlement, and after getting advice from my lawyer daughter who read the settlement and said, "It *seems* as if it *might* be a good idea to opt out" (and she's rarely this wishy-washy in her advice)...

I decided to throw up my hands and go by the default position of staying in. Sigh.

Each day that I walk through the doors of the hospice where I volunteer and enter the warm, peaceful atmosphere inside, I am angered by the Republican attempt to derail health care reform, preying on the fears of the elderly by lying to them about end-of-life discussions. For one thing, it was never suggested that such discussions be mandatory, only included if a senior wants them. But more aggravating to me is the pernicious idea that such advance discussions are a bad idea, leading to euthanasia of the elderly.

I’ve had an advanced directive on file with my health provider for well over a decade – Kaiser requires you to state what procedures you want or don’t want in order to keep you alive when you go in for surgery. I see nothing wrong with it being MY choice whether I’m hooked up to machines that do my breathing for me, or being endlessly resuscitated only to continue on as a vegetable in a sterile hospital ward, wasting my family’s money and emotionally draining them too.

What I’ve learned in almost five years as a hospice volunteer – where you’re asked to make those decisions upon entry, or have a relative with power-of-attorney make them for you if you’re unable – is that the overwhelming majority of patients are happy the issue is settled. Some come to us from a hospital where “heroic efforts” were made to prolong a life that was obviously terminal. (I don’t blame doctors here; their training and their mission is to save lives.) But at some point, our lives are over and to my mind it’s better to face that fact and make sure the remaining days or months are calm and peaceful – and pain free.

In hospice, a patient gets palliative care; by and large, that means as much or as little painkilling medicine as the patient needs or wants. Some opt for less, dealing with a little pain so they can stay conscious to talk to relatives, achieve reconciliations, settle outstanding matters. It’s their choice! In addition, they and their families get all kinds of support from the staff, nurses, chaplains, social workers, and volunteers who have the time to listen to stories and even take the more ambulatory patients on outings to the park or the mall.

Wells House in Long Beach, where I volunteer, has two resident cats, visiting greyhounds (mine), musicians who play “Oldies” at lunchtime every Thursday, or a DJ who plays Rock and Country outside on the pleasant patio, a Karaoke afternoon, and birthday parties for the residents. And the promise that when the time comes your end will be a peaceful transition – and you won’t be alone.

What’s wrong with that? If the health-care bill will pay for more people to have that discussion ahead of time, then it’s beneficial to my way of thinking.

For me, these words exemplify the gulf between the former administration and the present:

"We exercise our leadership best when we are listening, when we recognize that the world is a complicated place and that we are going to have to act in partnership with other countries, when we lead by example, when we show some element of humility and recognize that we may not always have the best answer, but we can always encourage the best answer and support the best answer."

Browsing in the bookstore for something to read, I picked up THREE CUPS OF TEA by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. I'd heard people talking about it, but thought it was going to be another of those lesser stories about Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan published after KITERUNNER became popular. I was mistaken.

In a kind of “as told to” fashion, this is the story of a climber who failed to make it to the top of his goal, K2 in the Himalayas, but by doing so found another more powerful goal for his life – building schools for girls in forgotten villages in the poorest parts of Pakistan, and later, Afghanistan.

But it's more than a tale of bringing schools to the world's poorest citizens. It's also about the fact that the only sure way to counteract terrorism and bring peace to the world is through education. Mortenson's insights into the how and why of the madrassas' teaching of radical Islam scared me – as it should scare all of us. Unfortunately we've spent the last eight years fueling the fires of hatred against us. This well written, absorbing book shows us a glimmer of hope of what can be accomplished by ordinary people meeting and helping other ordinary people, sowing peace country by country.

Highly recommended reading!

Barack Obama has chosen a woman, the Reverend Sharon Watkins, to preach the sermon at the National Prayer Breakfast in DC, and a gay bishop, Gene Robinson, to lead the inauguration prayers.

I don't know much about Sharon Watkins, but Gene Robinson (Episcopalian)is a very spiritual man in a committed relationship. These choices make me happy.

So we finally come to the end of the election season – a period that has lasted far too long, exhausting all of us. I hope you don't feel too exhausted to go and vote tomorrow.

This is a message for those of you in California in particular. Consider that you have a chance to vote against the last vestiges of prejudice and discrimination by striking down Proposition 8.

What is it that we heterosexuals fear by allowing gay couples to marry? In my volunteer work, and at my church, and where I live, I've come to know dozens of gay couples – law-abiding, Christian couples, many of them in committed relationships that have lasted longer than my marriage to my husband.

Don't be misled by the threats made by the Yes on 8 campaign. No church is forced to marry anybody, even now. If you aren't a member of the congregation, the minister will probably tell you he won't marry you or baptize your children. This isn't going to change. And I really doubt gay couples would insist on being married in a hostile church anyway. Why should they? Many churches, the Episcopal church among them, support their gay parishioners. Gay marriage is no threat to straight marriage; rather, the opposite is true. We should all hope for more committed, stable marriages for the good of society. And no, domestic partnerships don't give the protection and the rights marriage does; otherwise, maybe we all should forgo the ceremony and register as domestic partners.

The material you may have seen on TV about heterosexual families being forced to let their kids learn about gay marriage in school is also vastly overdone. I'm not going to go into the distortions about that book one child's parents objected to, or the lesbian wedding other kids went to (by the way, most of those parents angrily denounced the ad, saying they were asked and were happy to let their kids attend). But even if the schools do teach about homosexuality, so what? How is that a threat to anyone? (It's not a life-style choice a child is going to consider making, but something they're born with, like left-handedness or blue eyes.) Either God created everyone – and that includes homosexuals who have existed in stable percentages of the world's population across the centuries – or there is no God and so why does it matter?

“Separate but equal” was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States many decades ago. Shouldn't we hesitate to go backwards and legislate discrimination against a group of our fellow citizens? Please, vote NO on Proposition 8.

One of the saddest stories to come out of California's upcoming battle over the issue of gay marriage appeared in my newspaper yesterday.

Obscene amounts of money have been pumped into the “Yes on 8” proposition seeking to amend the California state constitution to deny marriage to any but heterosexual couples. Most of this money has come from fundamentalist churches, with the Catholic and Mormon churches the biggest contributors. That's not surprising, given the richness of their coffers and the narrowness of their religious views. But the story I read yesterday was different.

A middle-class family with a stay-at-home mom and five children between the ages of three and twelve, living in modest circumstances in California farm country was persuaded by Mormon church appeals to withdraw $50,000 out of their savings to donate to the fight against equality for gay people. That's a huge chunk of their children's college fund, their hedge against future medical needs, vacations, home improvements, whatever. Apparently, they've been persuaded that allowing gay couples the same rights as heterosexual couples is a huge threat to their family's well-being, far more so than depleting their financial safety net. You may find their decision monumentally stupid, and I wouldn't argue with you on that, but I also find it very sad.

When are humans going to get beyond the tribal response of “Us” and “Them?” This isn't just the bigotry exposed in the gay rights versus straight rights argument, old as that may be; we see its ugly presence in the rhetoric of hate being spewed in the presidential campaign against blacks, muslims and anyone with more than a high school education. “We” are – of course! – hard-working, patriotic American citizens, but “They” are terrorists, or have terrorist friends, or else “They” are commies and layabouts who rely on welfare and handouts. “They” caused the financial crisis by wanting to buy nice houses they couldn't afford.

Maybe this was an important defense mechanism in humanity's pre-history on the African veldt, but we've surely outgrown the need for it today. The ancient tribal way of fearing or even hating people whom we perceive as being fundamentally unlike us leads ultimately to excesses of violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Jews weren't like the good Germans; the Tutsis of Rwanda weren't like the Hutus, and thus deserved to die. Matthew Shepherd, whose brutal death we remembered recently, had it coming.

“God will send you all to hell!” the angry-faced preacher bellowed through his bullhorn at the passing Gay Pride Parade. But either God created everybody, not just – to appropriate the anti-gay slogan – Adam and Eve but also Adam and Steve, or if not, then there must be no god at all, so why the pious concern?

All nine Episcopal Diocesan Bishops in California have come out against Proposition 8, and that's a good thing. But I'd like to see more. I'd like to see ordinary people everywhere crying “Enough is enough!” I'd like to see an end to hate and hate-filled speech in my lifetime.

There's only one tribal response that truly makes sense in our increasingly crowded and diverse world: “Love one another.”