Yeah...and so, anyway...

I missed this program, which aired tonight. I read about it on Twitter, and by the time I saw the conversation, the show had already aired. But I don't think I can get TVOne through Comcast anyway. The comment that Michael Eric Dyson's brother made was profound: "It takes a keen eye to look beneath the rocky soil and rough exterior of a person to see the beauty of the person within." And this man is serving life in prison! Breaks my heart that some of the best minds have been locked up. I'm not saying that some shouldn't have gone to jail, or they should be let free "because the man did them wrong." I have no details about this particular brother's case. But I do know that he obviously has a sharp mind, and he can articulate his thoughts with such succinct brilliance that it is a shame of our society will not be able to benefit from his capabilities. But who knows--if it is His Will, God will use him to contribute in whatever way emerges from...

At right: Fariba Kamalabadi (Taefi) Angela's aside: We are often so besieged by news stories from all the various of media available to us that we forget that there are flesh and blood human beings involved in those reports. Their story is often trivialized by a 30 second summary of events during a newscast, or it is overly-dramatized by those wretched (my opinion) "reality" shows. This letter touched me because it is the heartfelt words of a young lady who is going through an all too familiar tragedy in Iran--family members being taken away to face a very precarious future at the hands of a cruel and unrepentant fundamentalist theocracy. These are her words,and they are her truth, not the dispassionate reading of a carefully moussed and made up newsreader, or the overly-wrought railings of a Nancy Grace-sque reality show host. It is simply the words of a girl who misses her mother. No more embellishment is needed. But they deserve a global audience so that other people ...

Florence Holway I'm starting to calm down and settle into my new job as part of Examiner.com's Religion and Spirituality group of writers,also known as the Religion and Spirituality channel. I was hired as the Sacramento Baha'i Examiner , which put me in a panic at first. (I'd rather not get into the "why" of it. Let it suffice to say that "fear, doubt and insecurity" clamped a major choke hold on my brain.) But I wrote an introduction to the Baha'i Faith, which my channel director liked in spite of initial formatting problems, and article number 2 is now up. It's called A moment from a film: Rape In A Small Town . Please check it out, and if at all possible, submit to Reddit, Digg, or any other bookmarking or "social media network" you happen to use. I would greatly appreciate it! The latest slavery story to break my heart comes via Twitter @justiceandcare: Child Slavery on Lake Volta . The worldwide slave trade WILL BE an ongoing...

Someone re-tweeted a link to this video on Twitter, and I decided to include it in this post. My thanks to the person who originally posted it and the one who sent it out on Twitter. I wouldn't have known about this song otherwise. I know very little about the group Radiohead except that my kids like their music. But I like this song. The situation with slavery in this age is one that REALLY makes me want to go HULK SMASH crazy. But even though part of me says yeah, I would feel better if I could destroy all of those slavery operations all over the world, I know that it's silly, a primordial impulse based on my very strong emotions concerning the issue. It's definitely not the answer. However, I believe that these instructions, even though it will take a very long time for humanity to realize, accept and implement them, ARE the answer: No Industrial Slavery In the Book of Aqdas Bahá'u'lláh forbids slavery, and Abdu'l-Bahá has explained that not only chattel slav...

Slavery is not something that's "over there"...if you know what you to look for, you can find it right in your own backyard. This map shows instances of forced labor close to where I live in Northern California. It's all over the United States. While reading some the latest tweets on Twitter this morning, I decided to check out @Not_For_Sale's profile and web site Not for Sale: End Human Trafficking . I have been fuming about the continued existence of that deplorable condition, slavery ever since. Let's face it, we ALL contribute to it. Think about how we are able to buy clothing or food for relatively low prices. (Yes, I know prices have been rising, but we don't pay anything near what other people in this world pay for food, clothing and other essentials.) I don't know what the specific answer is to this problem in terms of what has been done so far--political sanctions? Yeah, that worked SO WELL against Cuba, Iran, Sudan and other countries who...

Life just keeps chuggin' along, taking me with it. Half of me is very amused, the other is very humbled. It's a vague description of where I am right now, but the best I can do. Physical changes--still working a recovery program one day at a time, not perfectly, but hanging in there...weight loss still happening, but at a slower rate. That's o.k. I've discovered that I'm unbelievably resistant to any type of change, even good ones. ESPECIALLY good ones. But with the good comes the bad...a little over four weeks ago I had a horrible toothache one day after my 51st birthday...turns out that I need not one, but two root canals. The first one will be done on Monday, May 4. I'm trying not to think about it. The dentist gave me antibiotics and painkillers in the meantime, so that calmed down long enough for me to develop another hernia rupture. Yeah, this happened to me around the same time last year! And I was admitted to the hospital from ER, whisked into surgery w...