The State of My Mind

Gotta keep moving forward…

American Travel Dignity Act – “Enough is Enough!”

New TSA “Enhanced” Pat-Downs / When Did the U.S. Become a Police State?

Remember when all those ‘patriotic’ folks told you that the reason those religious fundamentalist terrorists were targeting us here in the good old US of A was that they hated our freedom?

Well, I suppose that we needn’t worry about THAT anymore, because we are losing that freedom every day, a little bit at a time. When did America become a police state?

I decided about a week ago to buy tickets to go see my parents in Florida. Air travel has become progressively more annoying over the last nine years, and like everyone else, I just put up with it. It’s my opinion there is no way any of this nonsense makes any of us safer, either. Gosh, remember when terrorists had to go to the trouble of taking flight lessons in order to use airplanes like missiles to destroy buildings and kill innocent people? Now, they have only to get a job at the TSA! Once they get the job, they are exempt from security scans and can bring anything they like on the plane.

Back to my upcoming flight – here’s what really pushed me over the edge. I like to wear dresses and skirts. When I travel for business, I wear a suit with a narrow skirt. Even when I go casual, I’ve gotten into the habit of wearing a cotton dress and bare legs, so I can wear flip flops that are comfortable and easy to remove for those security checks. Looks like those days are over. New TSA policies have gone into effect and skirts are now considered “bulky” attire and will often trigger a mandatory so called ‘enhanced’ pat-down.

Go ahead and google “TSA, skirt” to get an idea of what happens next. (I’ll wait.) Did you know that a TSA agent can lift my skirt, or even insist that I remove it, in order to be able to frisk me over, in front of, and between my thighs? I am serious. What amounts to a sexual assault also includes open handed touching of my buttocks as well as my breasts! If you’re a man, the TSA agent can ‘handle’ your genitals in a similar degrading manner. It is criminal for a policeman to do any of these things, but according to our government, it’s perfectly all right for a TSA thug to grope me in an airport.

What is your recourse? Um, you don’t have any. You can decide not to fly. (As if buying an airline ticket is justification for stripping us (literally) of our constitutional rights!) Believe me, after this trip, I will not be flying anywhere unless these ridiculous procedures are ended.

What are we, sheep? When does this stop?

And those body scanners – yes, the ones that are funneling millions of dollars into Michael Chertoff’s bank account – how about those? If you don’t already know, Chertoff is a former Secretary of United States Homeland Security under former President Bush, and he did a great job selling our government on these machines. Gee, I wonder if he did that so that he could make lots and lots of money? Ya think? Follow the money!

Not only are the scanners the equivalent of a strip search, we have been lied to about their capability of storing and sending those images after they are captured as well as about the amount of harmful radiation they emit. Oh, I am just supposed to trust the TSA about them? Yes, ma’am, just do as you are told, spread your legs and put your hands up.

So what can we do? Please contact your elected representatives – it’s very easy to do online. Google “Contact my Senator, Congressman, Representative” and you will be directed to a page which will ask you for your geographic info and a form will self populate for you. Tell the people whose salaries we pay that we will not tolerate this. Ask them to support Ron Paul’s American Traveler Dignity Act, HR 6416. While I have never been a supporter of Ron Paul, I applaud him for the stand he has taken on this issue.

He has stated that the American people have become too submissive. These procedures are absurd and need to be stopped. None of us would allow anyone else to subject us to this treatment, so why would we allow government employees to do so? We are not being made safer by any of this – that is a LIE. We are doing the wrong thing. Groping people at airports does not solve any problems. Putting a lock on the cockpit door and giving pilots a gun is a smart move. But accepting the notion that we should all be treated like cattle in the name of feeling “safer” is a mistake.

I know it’s been oft repeated, especially lately, but Ben Franklin sure said a mouthful:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Paranoia Can Destroy Ya or What’s All This I’m Hearing About The Social Graph?

OK, so it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. To tell you the truth, I’ve been getting a little bit antsy about being here at all. Just when I was getting all comfy about social media like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Buzzd and even blogging, and feeling like I basically knew my way around the online landscape, I found myself getting weird little twinges from time to time. So what was wrong with being open and easy to locate on the web? Wasn’t it just a basic human need to feel connected to everyone else? It’s natural, right?

Natural? What’s natural about it?

Have you reviewed your privacy settings on Facebook lately? Maybe you’d better. And have you heard the term “Open Graph” yet? It’s the idea that we can all be connected online through our social connections. Facebook started out by telling us it was a portal for us all to connect to our friends. Well, it’s looking more and more as if Facebook is making some very aggressive moves to do a whole lot more than connect people to each other. Facebook now has the ability to amass a whole lot of personal data involving not only how you are connected to other people, but about how we are connected to things, tastes, activities, likes, dislikes, buying patterns, places — in short, everything. It’s making me nervous. It’s one thing to post a review about something on a website. But what if every time you did anything online, Facebook could tap into that?

When I was a little kid, one of  my favorite stories was Alexander Pushkin’s “The Fisherman and His Wife.” It was about a magic fish caught by a poor fisherman who granted all kinds of wishes in return for the fisherman letting it go. This fisherman had a super greedy wife who didn’t know when to stop, either. Kind of like a Ruth Madoff/Leona Helmsley type. The moral of the tale was not to be too greedy, lest you get nothing at all.  Too bad it didn’t work that way for Ruth or Leona. I am hoping, however, that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg may absorb the lesson before he finishes taking over the world.

I suppose it’s wrong to blame him. Didn’t our mothers warn us not to put anything in writing we wouldn’t want to see in the newspaper? But, wait a minute. Does anyone still read newspapers anymore? Being a Luddite is beginning to look a whole lot more attractive…

Twitter Hacked by Iranian Cyber Army?

What the sam hill is going on? I’m home from an extraordinary day spent at three (count ’em, three!) networking events on Long Island, happily posting away on one of my Twitter accounts (not the @2dreamit one) when a message, red on a black background comes up:

Iranian.Cyber.Army@gmail.com

Very interesting. Meanwhile, the site is inaccessible to me so I use SocialScope, my favorite Blackberry social media app, to do a quick search and find a few other posts on Twitter having been hacked. (By the way, the best aspect of Twitter happens to be this real-time search feature. I see this as the jewel of the platform. Anyway…)

Will Facebook be next?

Social Media and Self Censorship

A lot of us are drawn to social media due to what I believe is a shared human need – the need to connect with others. So if I’m to be found here on this blog, and on Twitter and such, why wouldn’t I feel free to open up and tell the world what’s on my mind?

Let me tell you a story. I have been on a few job interviews lately and one of them was with a well known not-for-profit entity that is associated with a particular religion. My recent background is in digital advertising sales, so an interview with a non profit is slightly discordant to begin with, but nothing I couldn’t manage. Here’s the rub: I went home and wanted to ‘tweet’ a link to a newspaper editorial, and then stopped myself cold. How would that piece ‘play’ to my prospective employer? (Not that my interviewer would necessarily even know what Twitter IS, but you never know.)

That’s just one example. How about this one: I politely decline an invitation to something I have absolutely NO interest in by apologizing and saying that I’m already booked that night. Then I have to go and note my calendar NOT to go to Facebook that night and post an update like “Watching Goodfellas for the 65th time and eating pizza – good times!”

I’m home sick with a cold and as I follow the health care reform bill, I have thoughts I consider sharing, but then decide not to. During the last presidential election, I watched heated debates take place all over various social media channels, and I stayed on the sidelines. It looked like most were just preaching to their own particular choirs anyway. And when there were the inevitable clashes, the results were usually horribly polarizing.

People used to say that there were three topics you needed to avoid in polite company – politics, sex and religion. It seems like when I am faced with this whole self censorship battle, the reason is generally traceable back to one of these topics. But I have never been one to shrink away from any kind of battle, so why does this one seem more difficult?

Does anyone else out there struggle with this or am I being silly?

How Do You Know If You’re Ready or Not?

Change is wrenching, isn’t it?

One of my all time favorite American novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald opined: “There are no second acts in American lives.” I have to respectfully disagree. I’ve been through at least three acts so far, and I think I can still shake out at least one more.

Becoming a parent definitely splits your life into ‘before’ and ‘after’ acts. If you go through a major career change, or even totally re-invent yourself, I’d say that counts for an act as well. The most difficult part of making big changes in one’s life, it seems to me, is getting beyond that moment after you look, but before you actually leap. How do you know if you’re ready or not?

When I was a child, my Dad gave me his blueprint for making any kind of decision. He favored the time honored method of making a list of pros and cons, and then evaluating the list in order to make the best possible choice. Good as far as it goes, I suppose. But what about that emotional ‘X-factor’ — that feeling of creeping doubt that seems to freeze you in place at the precise moment you need to take some decisive action to put your plan into play? I’ve actually come to think of this moment as a kind of ‘psychic threshold.’ Either you stay where you are, on your side of the door, or you throw it open and leap into the darkness. This requires great faith — in yourself , in your abilities and in your assessment of the challenges that await you.

At this juncture, is it a good idea to consider the implications of possible failure? Perhaps not. Or better yet, what if you didn’t classify unwished-for results as failure? What if you decided that whatever happened, the result meant you’d acquired knowledge?

This summer, I’m in the process of readying myself for change. I’m writing myself another ‘act’ and trying to see around every corner, which of course, I can’t. I’ll have to remember that no matter how it goes, I’m going to learn a few new things, and in the end, that’s how we grow, right?

Leaping into the darkness yet again — frightening, yes. But always exhilarating!

Can you really go home again?

I attended the funeral of a ‘black sheep’ cousin two weeks ago. I looked around and it hit me hard that my extended family is getting smaller. When I was a kid, I remember times when we’d host big parties that were attended almost exclusively by family members. They’d all be laughing like hyenas, telling stories and sharing opinions while eating a lot of fantastic food cooked by my Mom. Everyone enjoyed it so much and felt lucky to be a part of it. I guess we were a typical Italian family; we were all pretty close.

In those days, it seemed like people tended to stay geographically closer to each other, too. My parents’ generation had what they called, “The Cousin’s Club”. This group grew up together and caroused together, married, had children, the works. They often even vacationed together (hey, this is starting to sound like “Goodfellas.”) It was pretty amazing to have my grandparents next door, two aunts and two uncles in a two block radius, great aunts and uncles, even a great-grandfather who was local (and grew grapes for his own wine!)  Of course, this also meant hot and cold running cousins and various in-laws (and out-laws!) Man, did we have fun.

Here we are years later and we’re all flung in different corners. Some kids couldn’t afford to stay in the kind of neighborhood we lived in. And sure, people got older and more than a few have passed on. Some of the club members’ kids never married, and those that did, didn’t always have children, or fewer of them. The ‘killer blow’ — my parents, who hosted most of those gatherings, moved to Florida when my Dad retired. He’d been saying it for years – “I am NOT going to be shoveling snow after I hit 55!” And of course, New York taxes had always been a sore spot for the old man.

Fact is, my parents are really fun people. As soon as they got down to Florida, they started building a whole new network of friends, Dad jumped into local politics, Mom started teaching a tap dancing class and they both loved the people they met through their new country club. We’d take our families and go to visit them and it would be pretty funny what we’d go through to schedule visits. My parents always have house guests! You had to grab a spot on their calendar and get in there early.

Tomorrow I’m taking a Jet Blue flight to southwest Florida to visit my folks. My sister and I went out for a cup of coffee after the funeral and shared some memories. We both realized that my parents are ‘getting on’ and when she suggested we just grab a flight and go down there, I felt like it was an inspired idea. We considered taking the redeye flight so we could repeat one of our uncle’s old pranks, namely, huddling under the bedroom window at daybreak to sing “Strangers in the Night,” but ultimately decided against it. We’d just be boring and tell them ahead of time so they could come and get us at the airport.

So, even though the Florida house isn’t the home back in Queens I remember with such nostalgia, it is home because when we get there, it’s going to be just the four of us again, our original nuclear family under one roof for the first time in many years. It’s different now in so many ways, sure. This time around, my Mom is not going to take my bedroom door off the hinges (she didn’t like it when I constantly kept my bedroom door locked when I was 14); my Dad won’t come home knocked out from work and charge outside to mow the lawn. My sister and I will not be fighting over the remote control — there’s a flat screen TV in every room of that house.

But here’s the thing — they’re older now. That feels kind of strange and not a little scary. I’m going to hold on to what’s important. We’ll be together. And when we’re together, there’s always love and lots of laughter. I can’t wait to see them both. Yes, you can go home again and I’ll be there tomorrow.

Do you believe in ghosts?

I live on Long Island, which seems to be an area that attracts ghosts – or at least, folks who tell tales of having seen them. While tooling around the net, I discovered a wonderful blog that I found absolutely fascinating:

http://longislandgothic.com/

It’s written by Todd Atteberry and I spent the better part of an hour enjoying the author’s whimsical style and absolutely gorgeous photos. (Besides having a very unique voice, Todd is also a talented photographer; his photos are evocative and very much suit the ‘feeling’ of the LongIslandGothic.com blog.) The Long Island ghost stories  are certainly eerie, but there is something very unexpectedly playful about the way he tells them — please don’t take my word for all this, go and have a look!

I was elated to find a post about Winfield Hall, which is the old Woolworth mansion out in Glen Cove, NY. On my refrigerator, a magnet holds a faded newspaper clipping. It’s a story about Winfield Hall. I keep it there to remind me of a journey I once made there (as if I could ever forget!) and possibly to goad me into making a return trip sometime.

Winfield is a 30,000 square foot Italian Renaissance mansion which sits on a 16 plus acre property. The grounds surrounding the mansion, now overgrown and wild,  once featured lush gardens fashioned after those of the Villa Borghese in Rome. A 15,000 square foot clock ktower and a carriage house also sit on the property. The main house has 11 bedrooms, 10.5 bathrooms and 16 fireplaces.

F.W. Woolworth is said to have been a strange man. He made a fortune inventing the ‘5 and Dime’ of yesteryear and was supposedly obsessed by Napoleon, as I learned from “The Magic of Believing” (a  book which deeply influenced me and which is discussed in an earlier post here). While that book did mention some  of Woolworth’s rather ‘mystical’ interests, it did not deeply examine aspects of his personal life.

I have read (in “Winfield: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths”, by Monica Randall) that one of his daughters committed suicide in the house while a party went on downstairs. She was distressed about her father’s refusal to allow her to mary as she wished, so the story goes. There are rumors that Woolworth’s remains are hidden in an enormous sarcophagus in the basement of the mansion. I doubt that old Woolworth’s body is anywhere on the premises (not so sure about his spirit, however!) , but I am certainly more than convinced that it’s a sad house.

About two years ago, I decided to go and take a look at this property. I knew I wouldn’t be content to drive around it and peer through the fences either. I wanted to really see the house — up close and personal. Here’s the story of that visit, which I posted in the “Comments” section of LongIslandGothic.com:

I have walked the grounds of Winfield late at night. I made it up to the front veranda of the mansion with a companion and we used the flashlight we’d brought along to illuminate the entry foyer and also the beautiful room with the golden ceilings (concealing the hidden chamber above).

The marble staircase was incredibly beautiful; it literally seemed to glow. At the risk of sounding like a lunatic, I have to confess that I thought I saw something. I sensed movement and felt as if my hair were trying to stand on end, because what I was seeing was a figure in a long dress slowly coming down the stairs. At the same time, I felt as if someone was advancing on us from behind as we peered into the house. We both gasped when we saw the figure, I clicked off the light, and we got out of there as fast as our feet would carry us. Later on, we found that we’d both seen the same apparition. VERY creepy. End of story.

Do you believe in ghosts?

You carry your ‘rank’ in your eyes.

What do YOUR eyes say?

Several years ago I read a book which was to change my life. “The Magic of Believing” by Claude M. Bristol posits that one can achieve any goal by harnessing the extraordinary power of one’s own belief in one’s self. As I absorbed this, it came to me that I’d put this system to work many times without being consciously aware of it. If you’re focused on a particular goal without letup, you do tend to realize that goal.

This can be as simple or as complex as your individual goals.

Over the last few years, I’ve heard a lot about “The Secret” and “Laws of Attraction.” I really like Bristol’s approach, though. He calls this area the science of ‘mind stuff’ and discusses techniques for how to leverage the power of an your mind. 

In the end, it all comes down to ideas. Everything you see around you started with an idea. Ideas require ACTION in order to bring them to life.  One needs to have a specific goal and then must “begin with the ending” in mind.

Think of planning a road trip. You decided on the destination first.  Then you figured out the stops along the way. You planned which roads you’d take, where you’d stay and what you’d see. You began with a vision about where you’d end up.  That’s how this works. There’s no mysticism involved. Bristol says “Thought attracts that upon which it is directed.” Think about it.

There is a kind of ‘magic’ in this, though. When you believe certain things, you act differently. And when you act differently, others react to you in a different way. There’s a kind of ‘electricity’ in how this takes place. You carry yourself differently when you know who you are and where you’re going. You change, and everything and everyone around you changes. It is a kind of magic.

I expect to come back to this topic again. It’s the reason I named this blog the way I did. I’m interested in a lot of different things and hold opinions about most of them. I’m all over the proverbial ‘map.’  What doesn’t change, though, is this belief I have in the power of ideas coupled with directed energy.  It’s unbeatable.

So what are YOU thinking about?