Category Archives: THE WORLD

How Anderson Cooper 360 saved my life

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Even though I have mentioned Anderson Cooper’s maddeningly, intense coverage of everything large and small, he did save my life once although we have never met. 

This episode happened a little over a year ago.  I was having a really bad day at work.  Everything that could go wrong did, in fact, go wrong.  There was an enormous amount of colleague in-fighting, and nasty in-fighting at that.  And, everyone came to me to settle the arguments and assess responsibility.  All that meant was that everyone then blamed me.  My son was having issues at school and I had to meet with the principal.  A dear friend of the family was falling faster into the swirl of dementia and I was part of the “first response team”.  The economy and my business were under severe pressure — showing the signs of the great crash that was coming. 

I was scared and I was tired and I felt a little hopeless, and everything started to boil over.  I understood in that moment that normal, ordinary people can fall off a cliff.   But I stopped and thought about how this would play on the 24-hour news cycle:  a panel of experts — white, gay and Jewish — would be disowning me as not white (someone would figure out something), not gay (because I was once engaged to a man) and not Jewish (reform, shreform) while another panel of experts — NRA supporters and ultra-right — would look into my background pointing to all the ways that, had I followed, their doctrine, I would have been ok.  And then there is the blogging through commercials.  So, I decided that I could not put my beloved family through that circus and I left the office and worked from home the rest of the day.  And that is how Anderson Cooper saved my life.

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Michael Jackson — why all of him matters

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No one fits neatly into the pigeon holes our society creates for us.

Look at my statistics:

I am not married to the mother of my child but we live together (we are waiting for same sex marriage to be legal) so we have a “child AT RISK” .  “At risk” for what is never spelled out but clearly it is beyond what a civil society can bear.

I have a high paying job and we own our home so we are upstanding members of the community.

I am a finance lawyer so I am a blood sucking parasite who doomed our economy.

We have our widower fathers over to dinner on Sunday nights along with my sister and brother-in-law so we are the Cleavers or Ozzie and Harriet.

We are members of a synagogue, so we are righteous.

We have never railed against heterosexuality, so we are prophets.

We are lesbians so we are dangerous to family values and a scourge.

We love this nation and we were against the Iraqi war, so for 8 years we were unpatriotic enemy sympathizers.

Call me Sybil.

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Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson

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So don’t deaths happen in threes? Michael Jackson, a complicated legend who lived as a child until his death, and Farrah Fawcett, a 70’s cultural sensation as a giggling detective (in a bathing suit) in the age of the feminist movement. I don’t know these people but they bookmark points in my life. Just their mention evoke memories of times and places — some good memories, others not so much . Since the child molestation accusations against Michael Jackson, I have not been able to listen to his music. I am not in a court of law and I do not choose to separate the artist from the alleged predator. Others will disagree (but this is my blog).

The silver lining is that Jon & Kate will fall off the news cycle. I have never seen (or wanted to see) the show. All that I have learned about them is the result of Jon’s infidelity. (Hmmm. Another thread running through stories, huh, Gov. Sanford). The bad news is that Iran, North Korea, Myanmar and health care, global warming and financial system reform and other critical issues will also fall off the news cycle.

All as we mourn people we don’t know but think we know. I guess I understand mourning people we don’t really know. I was very sad when the former Chief Judge of the US Bankruptcy Court for the SDNY, Tina L. Brozman, died. She was an incredible role model for me as a young lawyer appearing before her. She had the self-confidence to be polite and gracious in her courtroom. She was fiercely intelligent. Once she dressed me down in court. She taught me many lessons. I remember lighting a candle for her along with those for my mother and grandparents on Yom Kippur the year that she died. Because I guess people, even unintentionally, impact the lives of others. It is an awesome power, really. That each of us could be a role model for good or for bad to those around us. What a powerful connection that ties one human to another.

So bad things happen in threes? Let’s hope the third casualty is Gov. Sanford’s career.

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Iran

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In this country, most quietly watched the post 9/11 erosion of our civil liberties.  There weren’t countrywide protests.  When we found out our country tortured people — even possibly US citizens — mostly, we did nothing.  Maybe we thought that the Bush-Cheney regime could only last for 8 years and then it must come to an end.  But we love our voice, we lost our outrage and we retreated into our complacency.  In Iran, the protests, mostly led by women, face down weapons and the full force of a repressive regime.  But unless we commit to go into Iran, I think the President is right that we need to temper our words.  People in this country are quick to talk but not so quick to commit to act (unless it is for senseless wars).

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My mother’s wishes and her mother’s honor

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This week is my mother’s mother’s Yahrzeit.  Yahrzeits always remind me of the Days of Awe (10 days including and between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur).
 
 
I am not much into religion since my mom died and given all of the heretical things I say I am waiting for the lightning bolt to strike.
 
I am not sure why this happened, but about three years after Mom died, I started getting reminders from my parents’ synagogue about the anniversaries of my grandparents’ deaths — their Yahrzeits.  Maybe the synagogue staff finally got it together to start sending them to me but the staff wouldn’t have known where to send them unless my mother had put me down as the next recipient of these notices.  None of my father, brother and sister receives these notices.   I was overwhelmed that my mother trusted me with the responsibility of remembrance.  After all of the issues, sturm und drang, etc. about my being gay (which all were resolved 15 years ago, thank G-d), my mother trusted me with this, in the end.
 
Remembering is very important in Jewish tradition.  It is said that people live again when remembered.  That does not generally resonate with me.  But when I lit the Yahrzeit candles (Jews light them on the anniversary of the death and on Yom Kippur) this last year for Mom and her parents, I understood why.  In this world of a 3 billion or so people, a person dies every second.  I lit candles to say I remember you and you are not anonymous in this world and your life is not forgotten.  I realized that I don’t know my great-grandparents’ names and no one remembers them.  And so, maybe my son’s grandchildren (should he be so lucky) will not light a candle for me.  Maybe, remembering two generations is more than anyone should have to do, because it dilutes meaning of remembrance if these dead people are strangers.  But this Friday I will remember especially my grandmother on her Yahrzeit.  She was a life force for my mother, a woman who suffered greatly in Europe and was often a prisoner of those memories.  And on Friday, my grandmother will not be an anonymous dead person.  Because I will remember. And, now, I get it.  Remembrance.  A commandment under Jewish law to remember and, by remembering, to honor.  And by honoring, to make sure that your loved one isn’t relegated to a statistics of unknown and unnamed lives and deaths year in and year out.

 

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To have a voice in this chaotic world

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I often wonder why I wanted to start a blog. Probably because in this loud, crowded world I wanted to carve out a space for my voice. Today was a weird day for me. We are a gay family — two women with a young boy.  Our synagogue sent a general email burst to tell us that a religious hate group — the same group that celebrates every death in Iraq and picketed at Matthew Shepard’s funeral — were coming to protest at our synagogue this morning. Now, let’s think about that. We are a family and members of a synagogue, and today we were having a birthday party for our son. Imagine, the Cleavers (only not so much) with the Beav — we work, we pay our taxes, we are good neighbors, we have the grandparents and aunts and uncles to dinner every Sunday night, we do and give charity, we try to balance career with family, our son’s education and health comes first and his job in life, among others, is to do more for the next generation than we did for him. Why again is anyone protesting my life? My loving family somehow undermines the lives and futures of a poverty-level family without health care and without job training? If I were Republican I could see how my political, social and economic views would undermine that family. But I am a Democrat, willing to pay extra in taxes for universal health care, for prenatal care, for job retraining. And I assure you that amount I pay in taxes every year would shock that family. So, I am a tax-paying (and willing to pay more), synagogue going, hard-working, family woman who loves her partner and her son more than anything in the world. Oh, I am a lesbian. Ahhhhh, THAT’s it. Whaaaaaat?

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