The car was parked but the engine was running. Just like me – My body was idle but my brain was running.
As I’ve mentioned before, I love to accompany my husband to various stores, but prefer to let him run in to pick up whatever we need while I wait in the car. I have another companion while he is gone – Public Radio.
I have a friend who is a talented stand-up comic. She’s not in the “big time” but plays the circuit of comedy clubs across the country. One of her routines is about the time she and her then-husband (you’ll see why they divorced in a few moments) stopped at a convenience store for gas during a cross-country trip.
While husband was inside paying for the gas, my friend decided to go inside for a cold drink or a candy bar. She wasn’t dressed formally, by any means – her hair was up in rollers to prepare for the evening’s performance, and she was wearing sweats. Read more on Funding Science Should Be A Priority…
Filed under Education, Government, News, politics, Religion, Science by on Feb 7th, 2012. Comment. 
I remember vividly and will never forget when a home-made bomb blasted the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was April 19, 1995, and I was in the midst of morning rounds at a major hospital’s inpatient psychiatry unit.
A lot of people were “decompensating” — going psychotic, had beliefs the world was coming to an end and needed extra medicine.
They called it the worst homegrown terrorist attack on U.S. soil up to that time in our country’s history.
I thank the basis of my personal belief system that I was not closer to the explosion at that time, and that I was not personally involved in the later and more catastrophic attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 2001. Read more on Which Should You Choose — Therapists Or Friends?…
Filed under News, Psychiatrists, Psychotherapy, Religion by on Oct 5th, 2011. Comment.
While taking my psychiatric training at the University of Kansas, Wichita – the so-called “Buckle of the Bible Belt,” I often saw patients who told me freely they did not think I could help them because I was of Jewish origin.
Most could deduce because of my name, and most were not shy about asking point-blank. I had nothing to hide and was not ashamed.
They would quiz me about my belief in Christ, and despite my protestations that a prescription pad looked pretty much non-sectarian to me, some would request/demand to see someone who was at least marginally a Christian. Read more on What About The Brain Of The Born-Again?…
“Nations make their histories to fit their illusions” — Walter Lippmann (twice Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper columnist).
I remember years ago taking care of a Vietnam war veteran who told me, “what everybody says is wrong. There ARE atheists in foxholes and they is me.”
To be a member of the wrong religion is a very dangerous condition, as many Muslim-Americans have found out in this new millennium. Read more on Thank God I’m Not An Atheist…
Filed under News, politics, Religion by on Jun 8th, 2011. Comment.
I am old enough to remember having briefly met then-senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, at a synagogue breakfast in my hometown – a suburb of Boston. He had donned a skull cap, and shook hands with my parents as well as with me. I talked little in those days, which is a testament to how young I was. I could stand unaided, and the senator shook hands with me.
Bill Clinton courts the Jewish vote
Years later, his was one of the first presidential elections I tried to follow. People were very worried that he was Catholic. In our neighborhood, anybody I knew who was not Jewish seemed to be Catholic. It had never bothered me. I remember seeing on television some news-reporting-human asked him about his need to be obedient on the Pope, being a Catholic and all, and how that could limit his ability to serve. He gave what I thought then was a good answer, about not being obliged to do anything the Pope happened to say, but saying his service to the people of the United States came first. I had thought that a good answer at the time.
My parents had all kinds of concerns, as did many Jews of their generation, even though they habitually voted Democrat. Read more on Whose Beliefs Do You Follow? Your Own!…
Filed under Religion by on May 12th, 2011. Comment.
I do remember when I was a university student seeing the glassy-eyed young students selling second rate (a bit dry or petals missing) flowers on the major thoroughfares of Boston. I remember reading all the newspaper accounts and finding out these people were somehow part of a “cult,” before I understood what that meant.
I learned about Sun Myung Moon, now in his 90th year and somewhere in South Korea, who some may have thought was the Messiah of the second coming.
There are all manner of myths and confusions and business about the “moonies.” Let us say, there are at the very least serious questions raised and I would not counsel going near this group. A cult is simply an organization where those who are at a point of great transition in life, and thus prone to a great insecurity, find themselves seduced into a group membership. This is not a difficult thing to do. Read more on Being A Quitter Isn’t Always Bad — With Cults…
Filed under News, Religion by on Apr 25th, 2011. Comment.
I guess people have to worship something.
I certainly have seen people idolize people before. Sometimes, to my amazement, when my parents managed to get me in the newspaper as a child for some alleged academic achievement, it was even me. Religion is something I generally avoid with patients. I sometimes will admit that I say things like “God love you.” As a matter of fact, I remember that my mother-in-law, Carolyn of blessed memory, said that sometimes, and I liked the feeling, and I suspect that is when I integrated it into my conversation, at least with patients who had limited time with me and wanted to discuss religion.
Filed under News, Religion by on Apr 21st, 2011. Comment.
We have chosen collectively, as a society, to use the year-end holidays to mark the passage of our years. This means that both memories and emotions seem to pour out of the heavens and clobber us all. None of us has had, to my knowledge, a Thanksgiving that looked anything like the Norman Rockwell painting of everyone sitting at the table being fed by a loving grandmother — a reality that has been soundly parodied.
Despite efforts at legislating “political correctness”, there are plenty of people who are not Christian suffering through Christmas — especially those with children who watch television and assimilate its methods. When I was very young and going to a Jewish religious school, the intensity of the group identity made it easy, even though there were several group activities my parents did not let me participate in. They were mostly the Sabbath-oriented ones, as we drove in cars and turned on lights and did other things the very Orthodox, who ran the place, did not do. It was clear even to a very young psyche, that Chanukah was a warm and light-filled time, with special games and special treats and special songs and special joys. Read more on Christmas For Religious Minorities…
I can’t believe that my dear husband, who suffers from “crowd-o-phobia” actually took me shopping on Black Friday. It just proves that nobody is immune to a good sale.
Pittsburgh, whence comes this Black Friday article, is really no different from anywhere else in these United States. I remember when growing up, my brother of blessed memory and myself were told by our parents that the Friday after Thanksgiving was simply a strange ritual in which Christians had some sort of mob-fever, and if we stood out of downtown Boston and the bigger shopping centers, as a family, probably nobody would get hurt. Now, shopping seems to have a fervor previously reserved only for religion. I think this year is the first time I ever heard the term “Black Friday” which I think is a perverse one and sounds rather too goth for my taste. Rest assured that people have spent a lot of money on the study of applied psychology of what makes people buy things. After all, people who sell things for a living have a highly vested interest, even though I have heard of nothing but enormous margins in retail sales, and this article insists they are small. Read more on Shopping And Gifting — A Substitute For Sex?…
Filed under News, Religion by on Dec 3rd, 2010. Comment.
A few weeks ago I was flipping the channels on TV and discovered something disturbing. In fact, I think it took me this long to cool down before I could write about it. Apparently, I discovered “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” quite accidentally. I’ve heard that if a preacher in the pulpit talks about politics, his or her church can lose its tax-exempt status. This always seemed to me to be a way to separate church and state.
Considering that most of the Founding Fathers, as is well documented elsewhere, were mostly Deists or Unitarians and some were on a road barrelling toward atheism, as well as the large number of people who came to the colonies for religious freedom, this has always made cosmic sense. Apparently, people were given free rein to talk about politics in the pulpit from 1788 (ratification of the U.S. Constitution) until the Johnson Amendment in 1954, which a bunch of Christian lawyers feel is unconstitutional, because it is an abridgment of Freedom of Speech. Read more on Religion And Politics Shouldn’t Mix…
Filed under politics, Religion by on Oct 19th, 2010. Comment.