Profiles in courage: Samantha Fuentes

The bravery of the young survivors of the Florida shooting forces our respect and admiration.
Somehow, after the horror, they found the strength to lead.
May it inspire all of the rest of us to step up too.
There have been many, many, many mass shootings in America. But this is the first time we see a movement like this.
The strength of these young people is inspiring. It is the first time since the election that there is reason for hope.

Monument to children killed by guns in America

We need a wall.
A glowing black wall of names,
the names of each and every child whose life was ended by a gun in America.
First name, last name, chiseled in white.
To stand in our country’s capital,
Where we can come to run our fingertips over the letters etched in stone as cold and dead as the child it names,
And weep,
And remember
And regret,
And vow to do better.
For the innocents
whom we failed to protect.

The Experience Gift

The Experience Gift

by George Sampras

Jeanie loved Christmas. The tree, especially, with its foresty smell and twinkly lights , magically conjuring beauty and life out of winter gloom. And the children: round eyes, round mouths, round cheeks so kissable in their little round faces mad with excitement and desire and hope. Every year, the same tradition: the selection of the tree, the layering of the decorations (garlands, then lights, then crystal birds and horses and snowflakes, then the shiniest gold and silver ornaments, then, to top it all off, the Christmas angel), the acquisition, wrapping and installation of the presents, the hanging of the green and red embroidered socks (“Sam”, “Trish”, “Mom”, “Dad”), the night of little sleep, as a succession of Santas tiptoed in, to secretly contribute a small wrapped trinket or two to each sock, then the morning, first long and slow then short and fast, with a mad jumble of sweet and salty foods, flying wrapping papers, and instances of joy and disappointment, more or less well concealed according to the maturity and blood sugar levels of the recipient. It was something they had done together, without fail, every year since entering the world, as miraculous as Jesus, one starlit night.

Jeanie hated Christmas. The rawness of the emotions. The vulnerability of so much desire. Expectations, high in childhood, had risen even higher. Of course they were still a family, but it was at Christmas, that they came together, atoms touching, in the same physical space. Here they crowded, like expectant concert goers, in a preordered spot at a preordained time, their hearts tremblingly exposed, exit doors unmarked and too small in case of attack. Where to take cover? There was no cover. It was an act of faith, this communion, an invocation of the spirit of childhood, of family, of love. But such powerful forces, once stirred, never come alone.

Jeanie picked a torn piece of shiny silver wrapping paper off the carpet and placed it in the Hefty bag. Three armchairs had been pushed awkwardly together to make space for the tree, leaving the room off kilter.  We are sitting ducks here, she thought.
If lucky she had – what - maybe twenty Christmases left on her celestial time clock? Time, she resolved, to make them count.

George Sampras lives in California. His, novel, The Experience Gift, will be published in 2018. 

Hope for heath care from Amazon

Amazon Disrupt: Has Jeff Bezos only just begun?

Can one of the world’s most innovative companies actually do good? Amazon’s announcement that it was turning its attention to healthcare caused panic in the bloated, inefficient, and vicously greedy market that is American health care. In other words, a market ripe for total disruption.

Books, clothes, household items, groceries, films, TV, music and cloud services - the logistics and IT geniuses at Amazon have nothing more to prove.  They could just sit back and let the profits roll in. Perhaps even pay out dividends to shareholders.

But what if, what if, all this innovation was just prelude? What if the real, ground-breaking innovation is only begining now, in 2018, with Amazon’s foray into the debacle that is American health care?

As a multinational with offices in all kinds of countries, Amazon management has experienced first hand the nearly unbelievable disparity in health care access, quality and cost throughout DEVELOPPED countries.

Presumably its employees in France can give birth and navigate accidents with excellent care and no cost, like everyone else in France. Multinationals like Amazon know that their French employees do not worry about losing their homes because of a health crisis. They are not innondated with dozens if not hundreds of separate, terrifying bills from an inexplicable array of doctors, labs, suppliers, catering services, and God knows what else itemizing blood tests, cotton swabs and pots of yoghurt consumed, all at prices that defy commmon sense. They do not stress because some life-saving procedure turns out to have been performed by an expert « out of network » and so will cost the equivalent of three years salary....

Amazon, like other global firms, knows well how perfectly awful the American health care system is, combining the unjustifiable administration cost of the most bloated bureaucracy with monopoly-style price gauging and airline level abuse of customers.

How can a system in which vultures like Shkreli make fortunes jacking up drug prices out of pure, unbridled greed not be ripe for disruption?An industry so exaggeratedly evil that Pixar studios created a superhero whose first act of defiance was to whisper to an elderly lady the secret for getting an insurance company to pay out on a justified claim?

Charles Dickens would find a worthly subject in the American health care system, so filled with corruption, greed and cruelty it is.

Enter Amazon.

Amazon knows a thing or two about innovation. About customer care. About logistics. About value for money.
Amazon knows how to streamline a process. Meetings to coordinate, Bezos knows, are a sign that the process is flawed. In a truly well designed process, coordination should not be necessary; communication should flow naturally.

We at Mature Women welcome Amazon to the health care industry. Disrupt has never been more needed.

Let Amazon succeed, not with gadgetry and picking just a few obviously low hanging fruit, but by a complete revolution. Why not, for that matter, a French revolution?

France does a pretty good job of delivering on the promise of free universal health care. Let that be a starting point. The French system, though not perfect, serves 60 million people, and has the merit of existing.

Does this tax plan make me look fat?

One of life's great mysteries is why perfectly intelligent people fall again and again for the same cons. Say the words "tax cut" and it works like a magic incantation. Sounds great! Let's buy it! Like that saleslady who exclaims how beautiful you look when you can't even get the zipper up. ("Madonna never zips it up all the way either!") the Republicans pushing the tax bill don't really care what happens to you when you go out on the street. It's all in the commission.
Pity the poor guys at the Washington Post who took the trouble to try to analyze Trump's tax cut to see what it means for middle class taxpayers.

"it is hard to find a tax plan that has done less for the middle class"

 All the facts and numbers and charts and graphs in the world have an uphill battle against the perfectly understandable desire to believe the nice saleslady. If you're on a fixed income, prepare to go naked into winter.

What We Talk About When We Don't Talk About Trump

Sea rolling in as the sun rises above the waters

Love, longing, loss.
The joys of children, the terrors of children.
Hopes for the future, fond memories of the past.
Regrets.
Resolutions.
The desire To. Be. Better;
Food. Sex. Exercise Regimes.
Fidelity. Cheating. Secret fantasies.
The beauty of a fresh sprung rose before sunrise.
Swans.
The sweetness of a baby's breath.
Love. Death. Grief.
Surviving.
Learning.
Growing Stronger.
Dignity. Grace. Faith. Reason.
And love....

Is Marijuana Tourism The Next Big Thing?

Flipping through my iphone the other day I came across a news item that stopped me dead in my tracks:
A marijuana company purchased an entire town in order to turn it into a "marijuana-friendly" destination.
Dial back the speedometer forty years and imagine all the jumping up and down and shrieking with joy. Cool! No more sneaking around and wearing sunglasses at night (red eyes) or worrying that your Mom might accidentally scarf down all the special brownies before a board meeting. An entire destination! Stoner heaven, right?
But then, with another swipe I was immersed in a very depressing analysis of the impact of all that screentime on kids. They don't go out anymore, the author explained. Don't drink. Don't drive. Don't party. Don't have sex. Don't sneak around at all hours doing God knows what. They don't even leave their bedrooms. An entire generation whose social life takes place on their phones, posting photos and clicking on "like".
For God's sake, one exasperated teen replied, decide what you want! You spend all your time warning us we're going to get kidnapped, or paralyzed in a car accident, or riddled with disease if we so much as open a window, and now you're worried about us because we're staying in our beds under the covers with nothing more lethal than a phone?
I could see her point. And yet, I remember (fade into sepia) hanging with my friends, physical bodies bursting with adolescent imperfections which had not yet developed into adult imperfections or, even better, old people imperfections, talking about this or that, laughing, sneaking a beer or a joint, roaming aimlessly, going swimming in rivers with no supervision, camping in forests, in deserts, in friends' guesthouses, spending days at the beach, the ice skating rink, walking the city, the canal, the roads at night, stepping onto the soft shoulder of the road to avoid an oncoming car, cruising, going to stupid sports events and laughing and cheering, and hanging out, on a living room sofa, in a kitchen, in a bedroom, in a backyard, on a porch, in a pool, just hanging out, talking or saying nothing, joking or arguing, just passing the time in the warmth of each other's company like kittens, and taking some undefinable pleasure in it, and I felt sorry for the girl, that she would, it is true, know none of that.
How is it possible, I wonder, that anyone believes in progress anymore? There used to be such a thing, sure. Dying in childbirth at 16 is, in the USA, a thing of the past, thanks to advances in all kinds of areas. Or, to be more exact, it used to be a thing of the past, all bets being off for the future, given that current focus seems to be more on engineering more "likes" than actual physical health. The depressing study concludes that the more time teens spent on screens the less happy they were, that kids were sleeping with their phones, harassed, in a never ending marketing effort of their own selves.
Remember the tamagotchi?  It was a "handheld digital pet" that idiot parents gave to their small children because it was heavily marketed and everyone had to have one, the attraction of which was that it enslaved the recipient by demanding to be fed, or changed or read to or some such nonsense (nonsense because it was not a live thing but an electronic toy) and if the child failed at some point to take care of it, the little tamagotchi declared that it had died.
That, my friends, was the thin edge of the wedge.
Now these tiny electronic death happen millions of times a day: each time a photo posted on social media is not "liked". I'm amazed Disney hasn't made a classic animated film about this yet (the tweet, lifeless in the rain).
I swipe back to the marijuana resort story and wonder: was this our dream? Will the new generation appreciate it? Will they allow cell phones?

- by Jim Carnes August 4, 2017 Los Angeles

(photo credit:  SuSanA Secretariat [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

see also:
A marijuana company has bought a California ghost town to turn it into a pot-tourism destination by Melia Robinson 3 Aug 2017 Tech Insider from Business Insider

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? by  Jean M Twenge The Atlantic Monthly Sep 2017