Empathy

A 53 Year-Old's View of the Upcoming Election (and this 53 year-old is a little scared)

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With Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, this election has become very personal for me. In this posting, I’d like to share how the field looks from my perspective, using my 53 year-old lens, colored by my life experience and where I am in life right now. And, I think there are a lot more people like me that might want to take a glance at their choices through my lens because I am beginning to agree with the pundits, that this is one of the most important elections in a generation. I’m a 53 year-old gay man, Jewish, married for over 20 years to the same Presbyterian husband, living in a “ticky tacky house” on a hill in Daly City that’s around five years from being paid off. I started life in the housing projects in Rockaway New York, subsidized apartments built to help the working poor.

Culture

Are Judgments Wrong?

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For myself, based on years of learning, practicing, and teaching, I can say with definite clarity that I prefer the consequences of speaking without judgments to what happens when I use judgment words.

Culture

Expanding the Circle of Care

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Q: What is the ultimate in codependence? A: You’re drowning, and somebody else’s life is flashing in front of you. So runs a joke that captures something fundamental about so many people’s difficulties in putting their own life, needs, and well-being at the center of their attention. At some point in my life in the early nineties, someone suggested to me that I might want to consider the possibility that I was codependent myself. Because some people very close to me were getting tremendous benefit from other 12-step programs, I decided to check it out.

Education

Philanthropic Photography Celebrates SF’s Warrior Mothers

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There is citizen journalism and then there is photographic philanthropy, and they each serve a purpose. I have been covering Occupy events in my area by shooting photos and making them available on flickr, as well as tweeting them around. A few publications have asked me to post to their sites as a citizen journalist, but I haven’t taken that step yet. April 26, though, I shot an event that wasn’t about Occupy. It was a photographic exhibit called “Facing Forward” by volunteer Marsha Guggenheim that displayed beautiful profiles of women who had graduated from the Community Health Worker Training Program of the Homeless Prenatal Program, alongside short blurbs about their success stories.

Empathy

It’s Not So Easy to Be Rich

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I had my first true inkling that being rich might have its own challenges in the mid ’80s, when I was in a relationship with a millionaire. At the time I was living in a tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, which was still in the early phase of massive gentrification. More than once, I remember him standing at my window looking at the people walking up and down the street, and saying: “They all want to be where I am.” More than the words, it was the unmistakable tone of melancholy that I heard in his voice that affected me. Nothing in his demeanor resembled happiness.

Culture

The Human Right to Love

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Lately, when women are underpaid, or uneducated in our seemingly progressive society, the world erupts in anger. Most state that women are entitled to same human rights as men. This sense of anger continues to elevate when we discover the statistics of homeless and malnourished children in the world. We automatically assume that these numbers are horrifying, for satisfying our stomachs is simply another human right that should not be forgotten in life. Just recently, a national issue appeared before our eyes in the state of North Carolina; our human rights were challenged, but somehow defeated in one day.

Empathy

My Jewish Voice in the Spectrum of Interfaith Narrative

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The Jewish tradition has been rearticulated in response to many intellectual revolutions, from the rapid spread of Hellenistic thought by Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago to the invention of the movable-type printing press just half a millennium ago. Yet contemporary Jewish leaders are still working, and often struggling, to give voice to our belief system in the Information Age. Even as our Rabbinical Texts are filled with pithy phrases, we struggle to revive them in 140 characters. Even as sacred parables are relatable on blogs, we seem loath to post them or add hyperlinks to related stories. Even as our prayer books are available online, we seldom (with some notable exceptions) see iPads displaying them in our synagogues.

Education

More About Bullying

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by Miki Kashtan

There are people in this world who can show their wounds only by inflicting them. — Aurora Levins-Morales

I have been deeply touched by the many responses to myrecent post about bullying. So many questions and topics have come up, that rather than responding to specific comments, I thought I would collect them and respond in one post. I see the entire question of bullying as deeply significant, capturing in it so much of what I want to transform in how we overall relate to each other in the world, and to our children in particular. I imagine that every child learns deep lessons from the prevalence of bullying and from seeing how bullying is handled.