Thought of the Day

I think it is fine of people want to be homophobic as long as they do it in their own homes and stop being so flamboyant about it. But I for one don't want my children to see homophobia. It's disgusting.

I tried to resist getting political but ...

Some family members were having a discussion about health care reform recently. The conversation petered out before I had time to weigh in, so I decided to put the response I had been writing into a blog. Here goes:

A few things need to be cleared up:

First of all, the current bill would not establish government-run health care in any form. Government-run health care and the actions in the proposed legislation are two totally different conversations.  I am personally disappointed that this reform bill does not establish a government health care system. I believe it is something this country sorely needs. However, this bill is a small step in the right direction and I am glad that it appears to have passed (although as of this writing the Senate must still approve a package of amendments before anything is official).

I have been a proponent of universal health care since long before Obama came onto the national stage. My opinions on this issue have nothing to do with the unique cult of personality that has developed around this politician. I like Obama. I voted for him, but the expectations placed on him by both the right and the left are irrational.

Back to health care, even if the public option had remained in the bill, it was an option; not a mandate.   Likewise in countries that presently have single-payer systems or other forms of government health care (i.e.: all other industrialized nations), citizens do have the choice of opting out of that plan.  (I do not know if this true of ALL such systems, but it is true for some.) 

Government health care does not necessarily mean the demise of private insurance companies. The systems vary from country to country and there are many different approaches. Each approach has its flaws and benefits. In the United States, we need to stop talking about "perfect systems" and find a better system.  It seems like any time a single potential pitfall is discovered, people want to discard reform all together. That is unreasonable.

It’s instructive to consider the real reason we do not already have government health plans in this country: Racism.  Truman's government health care bill was defeated because it called for desegregation of hospitals, and it died because none of the Southern states supported it.  Race was also a factor in defeating Nixon's health reform bill.

I have not been able to research every system, but I can say with confidence that Canada and Germany have thriving private health insurance industries. They are also top performers in terms of health care quality, according to the World Health Organization.

Germany was the first to introduce government health care, it was an incentive for unification proposed by Otto Von Bismark to the various German states. Their system actually uses private insurance companies as contractors to run the program. These companies are heavily regulated. This is regarded as a more difficult and complex method that single-payer models.  

It’s important to note that government health care is not necessarily "free" health care. The Canadian model, for instance, has co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses associated with it. To cover these expenses, Canadians also carry private insurance, usually as a benefit of employment similar to those Americans who are lucky enough to have such benefits. 

Before anyone mentions Canadians coming here to get health care, let's address that.  On average, 20,000 Canadians come to the United States annually for health care. By and large, these are for MRIs and elective surgeries. Thirty-two million Canadians stay home, and report satisfaction with their health care. Canada has struggled with wait times for some elective procedures.  Again, no system is perfect. It's just better. Copious amounts of peer-reviewed research has not found any evidence that these wait times adversely affected patient outcomes. Incidentally, Canada was also the only country that did not follow the U.S. lead and deregulate their banks and financial institutions. Wouldn't you know it ... they are also the only Western nation that has not had bank fail in the last three years. Regulation works.

For those Canadians who do come here: For a fee of about $150 to $200, a Canadian citizen can be covered by their government health plan when they are out of the country. In short, when they come here, most are still covered by their government insurance. They do not come here because they find it liberating to be sick and bankrupt.

Conservatives like to point to the small number of Canadians who seek health care in the United States as a reason why government health care doesn’t work.  It’s a dishonest claim. Most Canadians do not seek health care here, and most are satisfied with their care. Hey conservatives, 60,000 to 90,000 Canadians report regular heroin-use … does that mean we should all do it?

Another reason this conservative talking point is absurd: Presently, an estimated 200,000 Americans seek health care overseas in countries like Singapore, India, France, and others because of the excessive costs in this country and because of the quality of health care. (This is 10 times the number of Canadians who come here for health care.)   A few  thousand Americans emigrate every year to Mexico, to take advantage of their health care system.  In U.S. border states, it's very common for Americans to cross the border for dental or health care. All of these countries consistently out-perform the U.S. health care system in terms of cost, reduction of medical errors, and patient outcomes.

The World Health Organization ranks the United States at 37 out of the 50 richest nations in the world in terms of overall health care quality.  We are No. 1 in two areas: We are the most expensive, and we have the most medical errors.  In one key measure, Avoiding Preventable Death, the United States is dead last (no pun intended). This means that patients with a life-threatening illness or injury are more likely to die in a U.S. hospital than in a hospital in any of the other 49 richest nations.   Currently, we have a higher infant mortality rate than Ecuador, Cuba and other third world nations.  The national compliance rate for hand hygiene standards in U.S. hospitals is currently at 50%.  Meaning that half the time, U.S. health care providers don't even wash their hands as often as they are supposed to.  

For this, 250,000 Americans go bankrupt every year. Most of these people HAD health insurance. But the mission of an insurance company is not to pay for your health care, it's to collect premiums and do everything they can to get out of paying for health care. Or to use the industry's term "medical losses."  The top performers from the industry's perspective are those companies who bring in the highest premiums, while denying the most payments.

Our system is broken.  It's true that we won't all die if health care reform isn't passed now. It's true that many of us can afford to wait. But the estimated 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance, they can't wait. Evidence demonstrates that plans similar to the one proposed in this bill reduce cost and improve quality. The current legislation is modeled after state plans that are in place in Hawaii and Massachusetts. These two states have the best health care in our nation, and they have reduced costs. Hawaii has had government health care for 40 years. The people there are not less free than any other U.S. citizens.

The problem with a so-called "free market" solution is two-fold. First, there is no such market when it comes to health insurance. Insurance companies have divided the nation into regional monopolies and have adopted so many of the same practices that there is little distinction.  

The second reason is that the players in the market do not want to solve the problem.  They are the only ones who benefit from the current system; they are raking in massive profits, and are accountable to no one. It works for them.  Profit is their only concern, not America, consumers, or public health. So why should they care?

By the way, I would like some one to explain to me what this "freedom" is I keep hearing about, pertaining to health insurance. Very few people are healthy or wealthy enough to purchase their own health insurance, and those who are able to do so don't have many choices because of the regional monopolies and standardized industry-wide practices.

And again, it's not a rich vs. poor issue. A middle class or wealthy individual who has asthma, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, depression  (or any other of the conditions on the industry's 30 page list) is no more free to purchase health coverage than someone who is dirt poor. This is not freedom.

Most Americans either get their health care from the government anyway--Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, etc.--or their health insurance is tied to their employment. In these cases, the details and cost of the plan are decided upon by the employer and the insurance company. Individuals have no say in these negotiations and their only choice is to take or leave what the corporations decide to let them have.  This is not freedom.

Incidentally, even employment-based health care is falling apart. Fewer and fewer employers are offering health benefits, effectively ending the only way most people have to getting health care. The number of small business employees who have health benefits has declined 58% percent during the past 10 years.

People don't want the government to "come between them and their doctor?" Why is it preferable for a corporation to be there? The options your physicians give you are the ones your insurance company will pay for. I can point to situations in my own life in which insurance companies have denied care, treatment, or services that a physician ordered. Doctors have instructed me to see specialists that my insurance company refused to cover.  I have burns and eczema on my hands. I was unable to purchase the necessary medication at the time these injuries occurred because my insurance company denied the claim (saying it was "cosmetic") and the bottle of topical medication I needed was $200. When my wife had a car accident, the pharmacy refused to fill the full amount of pain medication her doctor ordered because the insurance company would not cover the number of pills the doctor prescribed. That’s right, an insurance account rep who may or may not have a high school diploma can countermand your doctor’s orders. If that’s not “coming-between-you-and-your-doctor,” what is? This is not a viable system. This is not freedom.

Insurance companies routinely compromise patient's health to suit their own interests, and patients have absolutely no recourse. This is not freedom. Well, ok, it IS freedom--for insurance companies. And they enjoy their freedom at the expense of the American people. This is backwards.

I have heard it said: "What the government gives the government can take away..."  Are we to believe that this is not true of a corporation? These are profit-driven enterprises. Their sole mission is to take as much as they can while giving as little back as possible. Insurance companies "take away" all the time.  You can refer to the above examples.

You can also refer to the recent case of Assurant Health, which made it standard practice to cancel patients’ insurance policies on spurious grounds as soon as they got sick. The practice came to light as a result of law suit that one cancer patient filed after her policy was canceled because a nurse mistakenly wrote "2001" instead of "2002" in handwritten note in the patient's medical record.  The file was full of correctly-dated material. The company falsely, intentionally claimed the patient had a "pre-existing" condition as a result of this handwritten note and canceled her policy, effectively denying her access to necessary health care treatment.

An investigation revealed that the company systematically concealed and misrepresented its actions when denying claims not only in this case but across the board. Investigators estimated that this practice saved the company $150 million between 2003 and 2007. These profits were astronomically larger than the fine the courts imposed in this law suit.  These types of practices are endemic to the health insurance industry. This is not an isolated incident.

And yes, you can say that a person can just go out and pay out of pocket for health care if they disagree with their insurance company. However, with costs as high as they are (Average cost of a U.S. hospital employee handing a patient one aspirin tablet: $150.00), this is simply not an option for most people.  If a service is too expensive for the majority of people to use, then we DO NOT HAVE THE FREEDOM TO USE IT. Again, this is not freedom. You can’t claim that health care is an individual’s responsibility, and then create a system that makes it impossible for them to meet that responsibility. That is the definition of injustice.

It's been pointed out that regulation often fails.  That is true, it does. This is not because there is something inherently flawed with the concept of regulation. It's because there is a large faction in our government that believes that government should not solve problems, even when it can.  These people constantly whine about how much they hate the government, and yet they keep running for office in that government and people keep on electing them.  Once in office, if these people do something right, they've proved themselves wrong.  What a great formula for success.

In my career, I have covered the Congress, the Department of Labor, state governments, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. I have been in the room when policy decisions were made. I have been in routine contact with members of congress, state officials, cabinet secretaries and other stakeholders. The fact is that regulations fail because they are weakened and watered down by antigovernment conservatives.  Penalties are lowered, programs are made voluntary, enforcement is hamstrung.  Regulation fails because it is sabotaged.

Sometimes the methods are sneaky. President Reagan, for instance, kept food safety regulations in place so he could pretend he was committed to public health, but allowed the relevant agencies to hire only 14 inspectors for the entire U.S. food production system. This is not regulation, even though rules are still on the books.  Another example: the dozens of U.S. corporations that do illegal business with terrorist states like Iran.  Even when enforced, the fines imposed on these companies are nothing compared to the huge profits their illegal practices bring in. So they keep doing it, because as I said before, they don't care about America. They care about profit and profit alone.

I’d like to have the “government is bad” crowd spend a year in Somalia and see then how they like not having a government. It is incredible to me that these people throw their hands up in rage and terror when the government tries to stop a corporation from poisoning their water supply, and then applaud when the government says two people can't get married because of a third party's religious beliefs. Are these people for the government or against it?

Meanwhile, the evidence mounts up: Workplace safety regulations not only reduce injuries and deaths, but they save employers money. Same thing with vehicle safety standards ... the list goes on. Clear, measurable results.  On the other side of the argument we have this: "What the government does is bad just because it’s the government, regardless of the end results."  And a series of paranoid fantasies, one Republican legislator said the health care bill was " the Apocalypse."  For crying out loud already.  


All the Republicans did in this debate was disgrace themselves even more that Bush-Cheney ever did. They consistently lied and made up fairy tales about what this bill would do.  If their positions are so right and so strong, why do they so rarely state them honestly? Not a single Republican voted for the bill. All that says is that not a single Republican has a shred of integrity. I respect honest disagreement. I do not respect opportunistic liars who undermine our Democracy.

Or maybe it means they don't have any balls. After all, the GOP has its ways of punishing its members who don't walk the line. See who votes with Obama on a major issue and then watch who has party leaders campaigning for them, or how well their campaigns are funded. Just watch. The Republicans passed up an opportunity to help shape significant legislation that affects virtually all their constituents in favor of a show of half-assed political solidarity based on utter bullshit. They are so obsessed with keeping their jobs, but don't bother to actually do them.

Even a cursory glance at history, as well as any current newspaper, shows that corporations will endanger and cheat employees, bilk and deceive consumers, and betray the safety and security of our nation if they can get away with it and make a buck. Enron, AIG ... my God what does it take? We cannot trust our health care to these institutions. Either we create a government system, or we regulate the system to ensure these abuses do not take place, and we enforce those regulations with strict penalties.  A government system will be a lot easier and a lot less expensive.

I have listened to, considered, and researched the conservative point of view. My views are not based on liberal “dogma.” The fact is, when put to scrutiny, every conservative objection I have heard falls apart.

My favorite was the “death panels” nonsense. Apparently, the Republicans now base their positions on Sarah Palin’s Internet “tweets.”   End-of-life counseling is patient’s right. The government absolutely has a responsibility to protect citizens from any individual or institution that would deny them that right. 

End-of-life counseling empowers them to make their own wishes clear and inviolable, sparing their children or spouse the agonizing decision of whether or not to “pull the plug.” It is a tremendous benefit to patients and their families.  Both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill contained provisions that established a new payment structure through which Medicare would reimburse health care organizations for end of life counseling. 

Neither version required organizations to provide the counseling. Why would it? It’s already required.

Physicians who are reimbursed by Medicare have been required to inform patients about the availability of end-of-life counseling since 1990, under an amendment to the Social Security Act approved by President George H.W. Bush. This is also required by all major medical accreditation bodies, numerous state governments, and by health care industry consensus standards. It’s incredible. Not only are Republicans frantically trying to stop something that has already been done, it’s something they did themselves. Why does anyone still take these people seriously? And let me ask, since this requirement has been in place: Whose grandmother has been euthanized? Who has lost their freedom?  Gimme some names … anyone? Bueller?  It all makes me so tired.

Conservatives trying to mislead the public through dishonest scare tactics is nothing new. In fact, it's been decades since these people have thought of anything new.  Reagan, the senile hero of the right wing, during his candidacy for the California governorship had this to say about the creation of Medicare:   The government would soon tell doctors where they had to live, and from there we'd be "a short step to all the rest of socialism" where a person would have to "wait for the government to tell them where he will go to work and what he will do." If a Medicare passed, according to Reagan "one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."  Did any of these things happen? Absolutely not.  Neither will all the horrible things Republicans are predicting now. They are liars.

The heart of Reagan's campaign for California governor was of course opposition to civil rights. Truly, if not for racism the Republican party would have been laughed off the national stage decades ago.

Conservatives have cooked up their usual tired one-trick-pony ideas: Tort reform and tax breaks. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the notion that these actions would reduce health care cost or improve access for those who don't have insurance. The one specific tax-break proposal--McCain's--offered a tax credit for individuals to buy private insurance.  The proposed amount was far less than the average annual cost of health insurance premiums, and it ignored the fact that if you have a pre-existing condition you can't buy insurance whether you have the money or not. This program is designed for inevitable failure.

As for tort reform, we DO need it. But not the kind of reform the Republican's propose.  Caps on damages are not a solution.  More than 60% of malpractice suits that are not immediately settled are thrown out of court before they go to trial. Of the minority that do get into a courtroom, 90 percent are ruled in favor of the clinician or health care organization. The remaining tiny fraction or injured patients who actually receive damages are not the problem. These are mostly victims of gross negligence. And an award that may seem huge really isn't when you look at the details.  Let’s say a family is awarded  $100 million because a surgeon made mistake as a result of gross negligence, and a 40-year-old patient came out of surgery with brain damage. That patient may need 30 years of long term care, and in our system that $100 million may not cover it. If the patient can no longer work because of this surgeon’s negligence, then the patient should be compensated for lost wages. Should the patient’s children not go to college because some doctor screwed up? Should they not have food, or access to health care because of this doctor’s negligence?

I liked Hillary Clinton’s tort reform proposal that adapted non-judicial review panels currently used in some Scandinavian countries. In those countries, this model has all but eliminated litigation, reduced costs tremendously; it engages health care providers in the process and has reduced medical errors.

The United States may very well be the greatest country on earth, as it is so often said to be.  But what does that really mean?  Does it mean that we can all sit back in smug complacency, smirking about how much better off we are than the Congo or Yemen and call it a day? No. It means that we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to the highest possible standards and strive for continuous improvement. It means that nothing can ever be called “good enough” and left alone. We must work to make it better. In the area of health care, we have failed to do so. I hope that is starting to change. The Republicans had a chance to be part of the solution and contribute to honest debate, but they didn't take it. I hope the people who vote for these clowns have learned something. 

Audiolicious

So ...

As you may know  I dislike cars and driving. I spent most of my life in Chicago and during that time bicycle was my primary mode of transportation.  I don't like being penned up in a car, sitting in traffic, wasting resources, and being dependent on a machine.   I do enjoy the freedom of moving under my own power. 

Now that I am in the suburbs temporarily. I have to do more driving than I used to. I have found that listening to audiobooks in the car is a great way to distract myself from all the negative things that I associate with cars.  I started getting audiobooks from the library last year and it's enabled me to make good use of otherwise wasted time.  I've listened to some exceptional books, learned a lot, and have been entertained.  I find that having the book read aloud can add something to the experience of "reading" it, especially if it happens to be read by the author. I get to hear the exact intonation the author intended as he or she set pen to page to coin a sentence.

The key to a workable audiobook, of course, is the reader. A good reader makes or breaks the audiobook.  One book in particular I had to stop listening too after just a few tracks because it was read by Richard Gere and he was awful.  I did pick up that book in print and enjoyed it.  Fact: A bad reader can ruin the experience of a good book.

What I didn't realize was that a reader can be TOO good, and this also can impair a listener's appreciation for an audiobook.  I recently had this experience with a recording of William Gibson's "Spook Country."   The reader's voice was so incredibly melodious that I got lost in the sound and couldn't actually process what he was saying. The voice was like James Earl Jones' dipped in chocolate. If the physical sensation of being gently licked could be translated into audio, it would probably sound something like this sonorous baritone voice.

In general I like William Gibson's work.  I haven't read his celebrated "Neuromancer,"  but I was impressed by "Pattern Recognition," a kind of sexy cyberpunk business-thriller.  (Yes, it's possible.)   But there were a couple of other issues I had with this book that made me want to turn it off.  (Take this with a grain of salt, because I only listened to 20 minutes of an 11 hour reading.)

One of these issues was the word, "detritus."   There are two kinds of writers in this world, the kind that use the word "detritus," and the kind that don't.  I prefer the kind that don't. No one says, "detritus." Stop showing off your fancy ass words and tell me a story.

The other was his repeated use of the word "bikini girl," to describe women in bathing suits.  My opinion, a woman, even a fictional one, can wear a fucking bikini if she wants to without being made into a subculture by some judgmental narrator.

That's all I got for now.  We traveled to Galena, IL, this weekend with family and I have some things to say about that, but it must wait for another time and what not.  Today's entry had to be short.

Stay cool. K.I.T.

Warm, Wet, Naked.

I tend to think in the shower. Something about being warm, wet, and completely naked makes the neurons fire like Gattling guns. This morning I was pondering something I had read a couple weeks earlier that bothered me. I wish I could remember where I saw it. It went something like this:

"Before Welfare was created, people would rather die than accept charity. They were too proud."

This bothered me for a number of reasons. First of all, you can't admire someone for not accepting Welfare before the Welfare program existed. You have no way to know what those people would have done, given the choice. At it was, those people died often because there was no alternative. They had exhausted every option.

Secondly, I am not sure that it is praiseworthy for someone to choose slow suicide, or if they are raising a family--murder, just because they have a chip on their shoulder about accepting help. Sometimes we are in a position to give, and sometimes we need to take. Life has a funny way of being long and short at the same time. There are plenty of opportunities to do both.

No doubt, there are some people who game the system and truly do not want to work.

However, the conventional wisdom that laziness is the cause of anyone being on welfare (or that welfare is a drag on our tax dollars) is false. I took a year long course on Welfare policy from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, a group that included a number of Nobel Prize winners. Now, because the study of language and literature is inseparable from the study of history and culture, some of these courses applied toward my English degree.

Some facts: The Cadillac-driving "Welfare Queens" that President Reagan introduced to the national imagination are fairy tales. That was cooked up by a speech writer, and there is no data to support the notion that such people exist.

If Welfare were completely eliminated, we wouldn't notice it in our paychecks. The amount of tax money spent on this program is tiny. When divided across the number of tax payers, it comes to mere pennies.

Most people on welfare are on it temporarily. Most people on welfare are white. Most people on welfare (wait for it ...) WORK. That's right. They work; they simply are not paid enough to survive.

Wal-Mart Corporation, for example--one of the most profitable enterprises in the world--frequently hands out applications for Welfare and Food Stamps to their employees right in their stores.

This is ludicrous when you consider that the five members of the Walton family get an annuity of $19 billion a year--each. (And it's NOT because of any work they do.)

By deciding to scrape by on a mere, let's say $18 million a piece, the Waltons could boost our national economy, the local economies of hundreds of communities, the quality of life of their thousands of employee, and reduce Federal Welfare spending by about $100 million just by deciding to scrape by on a mere $18 billion each. But no, they'd rather pay a pittance to the people who make all that money for them and have the taxpayers make up the difference.

(Not to mention the million states spend in tax breaks, infrastructure improvements, and law enforcement to attract Wal Mart stores into their areas, money they seldom recoup. Law enforcement you ask? Indeed, a full 60% percent of Pennsylvania's violent crime takes place in Wal-mart parking lots. That's the only state I have seen numbers on so far, but I doubt this is an isolated situation)

Improve local economies? Why yes. Despite conservative hand-wringing about how poor billionaires cannot be made to suffer by an oppressive government that would force them to pay the employees who really earn those billions a fair wage... despite jeremiads and filibusters about how civilization will collapse if workers can buy enough food for all seven days of the week ... the facts demonstrate that an increased minimum wage benefits the entire community.

Case in point, when the state of Washington increased its minimum wage businesses did not flee the state, nor did the economy suffer. The opposite happened. Business wound up leaving the lower minimum-wage state of Idaho to invest in Washington. Why? Because more people in Washington had more money with which to buy their products and services.

Greater economic equality results in a better economy and better quality of life for everyone, not just those who benefit directly from a wage increase.

Duh.

This is one of the many reasons I will never set foot in a Wal-Mart store. That and the fact that their low, low prices are made possible by Chinese slave labor camps, where people are sent after being convicted of speaking against the government or practicing a religion and so forth.

However, I want to get back to to the opening statement, the one about how people used to be too proud to accept charity. Here's the other reason that statement bothers me: It suggests that to accept charity is cause for shame.

This has sinister implications. This establishes a hierarchy. This statement means that the person who gives charity is superior to the person who accepts charity. Charity is a virtue. It makes the world better. It stores up treasure in heaven or builds up good karma, so please you according to your beliefs. However, from a spiritual standpoint, you are better off not doing it at all than doing it if you walk away feeling superior.

If you do good for others, do it with a spirit of love and joy--not pride and contempt. This spirit of love and joy will have to be cultivated; we have to create this sensibility in ourselves. We also must be mindful of our hearts, chase away pride and feelings of superiority. We have to set an intention.

We have to guard our hearts. We slip to readily into judgment and pride. Case in point:

The other day I grabbed a quickly lunch at a noodle shop. A kid a few tables away spilled his chicken soup. He had to be about 10 years old. He immediately started screaming. I mean SCREAMING. He said things like, "NO! NO! Why did this happen? WHY?" He was throwing a fit. The poor mother was trying to soothe and quiet him and clean up the mess at the same time. The staff prepared a new bowl of soup for the boy. What was interesting were the people at the other tables. Most snickered and laughed or just stared. I overheard a few comments about discipline and bad parenting and saw some eye rolling.

Two people, bless them, got up and helped clean the soup so the woman could tend to her son.

The table gawkers had no right to judge this woman or her son. None. They do not know their story. There were two other children sitting at that table--younger than the screaming boy, and they seemed very well behaved. If this was a simple case of bad parenting, it stands to reason that they would all be out of control.

Also, this boy could have been autistic or may suffer from some other illness that causes this seemingly insignificant event to feel like a tragedy. Sometimes people, shit happens. Life is hard, and it's not always someone's fault.

The boy might have been adopted, might have been a foster child. His birth parents may have been abusive. They may have beaten him within an inch of life for spilling milk or wasting food. The sight of the spilled soup may have filled him with terror.

Here is another fact for you: When someone throws a bloody fit over spilled soup: It's not really about the soup. Nobody ever really cries about spilled milk. Something else is always behind it.

Bottom line, there was a reason the child was acting that way and no one has the right to snicker at him for it. When someone else is screaming in terror and grief and you are not, the right response is gratitude and compassion, not contempt.

The boy tried to physically prevent the restaurant staff from taking away the spilled soup. He cried out: "DON'T LET IT GO TO WASTE! DON'T LET IT GO TO WASTE!" I don't know what was motivating that statement. I hesitate to speculate. But for whatever reason, that child was afraid. He felt an injustice was being done. Wasting the food was unthinkable to him. That seemed to be the heart of the matter for him. I don't know why, and the people looking on and criticizing his mother and judging them both didn't know either.

Be mindful, people. Because in the end, we can never really judge another human being. We are always judging ourselves in relation to them. Sometimes we think ourselves superior, this leads to arrogance. Sometimes we think ourselves inferior, this leads to jealousy. Both are destructive to the heart and soul.

We must pay attention to our minds to create the right thoughts and the right feelings. When we feel pride, contempt, and envy, we have to notice these feelings and change them. Of course, avoiding pride and jealousy doesn't mean that you shouldn't celebrate your accomplishments. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't love yourself. Of course you love yourself. Just don't love yourself more than you love anyone else.

So that's as far as I got today ... Then it was time for me to get out of the shower and dry off.

More blogs are on the way, including:

How my morning coffee connects me to everything in the universe.

Tattoo ideas!!!