Category Archives: Life

Reclaiming Love

March 27, 2006

Multiple Personality:  A dissociative disorder in which two or more distinct personalities   exist in the same person, each of which prevails at a particular time. Also called split personality

 

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

In 1974, walking down the mall at Arizona State University could be a highly unpleasant experience for young women.  The mall was the central thoroughfare for all college traffic.  It featured an intersection at the Memorial Union and Library, where four paths led off to the colleges for business, education, science and liberal arts.

Around the library, a two-foot high block wall served as a mid-day “home” to a group of fraternity men, a perfect perch from which they could survey women walking by.  These frat jocks, elevating the sport of girl-watching to a new level, had created a set of large score cards with bold black numbers 1 through 10.

Their system was meant for entertainment, not for human compassion.  For the “lucky” women walking by, winks, laughs, calls and whistles would “reward” her with a row of perfect 10s.  But, with the same compassion of Simon Cowell, these winks, laughs and calls from the frat men could just as easily produce score cards of seven, six, five…or zero.

Thankfully, this crass frat game died out in the summer heat, never to reappear.  This was the Age of Aquarius when peace and love were painted on torn jeans.  Women were busy exercising their new-found liberation, and in this new world, there was no place for a game that trivialized women.

Alas, in the short span of forty years, these same men and women of my college years are now parents to a new college generation weaned on the lyrics of such rappers as Snoop Dog, Ice-T, and Eminem.  Tepid cards with numbers have been replaced by crude lyrics that describe women and sex in violent and abusive slang.

How did we get here from there?  In 1974, college women were insulted by a rating system that traded respect for a few cheap laughs.  In 2004, college women seek hoots and whistles by pulling off wet t-shirts in public bars.  How did the sixties in America fail to produce the fruit of peace and love?

On television, Lucy and Rickie have been replaced by Sex and the City, which unlike the frat scorecards, did not fade away into summer reruns.  In its sixth season, Sex and the City churned out episode 76, “Great Sexpectations” where Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte continued to tryout and discard men like last-year’s shoes.  If one day they ever do find “true love,” they will probably end up cast as characters on Desperate Housewives.

Abstinence educators daily witness the impact of this cultural shift.  As they work to reconnect our children with the truth of what love means, their greatest handicap is the American dissociative order which allows us to believe that the two distinct personalities of love and hate can peacefully co-exist in the same heart.  America suffers from multiple cultural personalities.

In one world, we work to teach adolescents the connection between love and sex.  Classroom lessons help students analyze situations between girls and guys, distinguishing between abusive and controlling behaviors and selfless, caring relationships.

In the other world, like switching the channels with the remote, we infuse our children’s hearts with entertainment based on abuse, control, violence and disrespect.  In the darkest moments, we write comedies where kids laugh at crude and destructive behavior as easily as we once did over Gilligan’s Island.

We have lost the understanding that a house divided cannot stand.  Integrity is now passé.  We chafe at morality, rejecting the idea that good must be good all the time in order to be good.  Instead, our life is a tortured contradiction where good can be bartered for whatever suits us at the moment.

If we want to restore the future happiness of our children, we must restore our culture.  We must reclaim our integrity.  We must pull together our cultural personality into one house, undivided, that stands for peace and love at all times and under all conditions.

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice, Confucius said.

And as an author on divine unity, he teaches a singular method for coming together into one undivided national personality.  To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

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October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

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A Failure to Love – Part 1

March 13, 2006

Hot…cold.

High…low.

Slow…fast.

Love…_______

How would you fill in the blank?  What comes to mind when you picture the opposite of love?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

If you chose “hate” as the opposite of love, you have Merriam-Webster on your side.  Their exhaustive list of antonyms is a litany of hate:  abomination, hatred, loathing, rancor, allergy, animosity, antipathy, aversion, disfavor, dislike, abhorrence, disgust, repugnance, repulsion, revulsion, misanthropy.

Yet, as much as I respect Merriam-Webster as an authority on language, there is a word missing from their list.

______________________

In 1964, 38 residents of a Queens, N.Y., failed a test of love.  In the following days, weeks, and months, as their story was repeated in the news, no one could find any example of hate, dislike or revulsion in the hearts of these people.  Yet, as the ultimate example of man’s failure to love, this story has lived on for over forty years.

On another March 13th, in the middle of a quiet night, “along a serene, tree-lined street in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York City, Catherine Genovese began the last walk of her life.”  Twenty feet from her apartment door, “she took notice of a figure in the darkness walking quickly toward her.”

Court testimony at the trial held three months later confirmed the news stories that had shocked a nation.  One neighbor, Miss Picq, said that she saw Catherine Genovese lying in the street. “The poor girl got up slowly, walking to the parking lot,” she said tearfully.  “I heard two last screams for help, but couldn’t see her then.”

Another neighbor, Robert Mozer testified that he had yelled at the assailant. “I hollered, ‘Hey get out of there! What are you doing?’ He jumped up and ran like a scared rabbit, took off real quick,” Mr. Mozer told the court.  But the attacker returned.

In all, 38 neighbors of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese let her brutal murder occur without as much as picking up the telephone to call the police.  Over thirty minutes passed.  Kitty was stabbed 17 times under the windows of her neighbors.

“We thought it was a lover’s quarrel!” said one tenant. “Frankly, we were afraid,” said another witness. One woman who didn’t want her name used said, “I didn’t want my husband to get involved.” Others had different explanations for their conduct. “We went to the window to see what was happening, but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.” There were lots of excuses. Maybe the most apathetic was the person who told reporters, “I was tired.”

Kitty’s murder has become a textbook case for sociologists, psychologists and criminologists.  They have their theories.  They have their explanations.  Dr. Iago Galdston, a New York City psychiatrist said “I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis in which we live which makes closeness very difficult and leads to the alienation of the individual to the group.”

You could say that.  It’s just that Dr. Galdston, with all of his fancy words, misses the key explanation.

The indifference of these people was just as effective as the rage of the attacker in bringing about the death of Kitty Genovese.  They failed to love.

Love is known by its action, not its feeling.  Indifference, “marked by a lack of concern for something,” is the ultimate choice to let harm happen because we are not moved to love another human being as ourselves.

Love that leaves us unmoved by the need of another human being is more than the absence of love.  Indifference is the opposite of love.

______________________

Jesus said love one another. He didn’t say love the whole world.
Mother Teresa

October 15, 2004 –  Where’s Poppa?

October 22, 2004 – Bringing Poppa Home

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The Science of Wisdom

February 27, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

It’s a strange memory, but a vivid memory.  Christmas afternoon 1964, my sister, 11, and I, 13, sat in the family room watching news.  Not because we wanted to watch the news.  But it was the only show my father would let us watch on our new Christmas color television set.  It was the only show in color.

Color television had been available since 1953.  The first commercial television program on color film was an episode of Dragnet, followed by such milestones as a live telecast of the Tournament of Roses parade the following month.  As with all firsts, history tracks the first color broadcast of a president (Dwight Eisenhower in June, 1955), the first color coverage of the World Series (Dodgers vs. Yankees in September, 1955), and the first colorcast cartoons (the Flintstones and the Jetsons in fall, 1962).

Yet, my family along with most other American families continued to watch television in black and white.  The first RCA color sets cost $995, the equivalent of over $6,500 today. In 1954, it was enough to buy a car, and nearly enough to buy a modest house.

By the mid-1950s, every company with the exception of RCA stopped manufacturing color televisions, and few produced color programming. Yet, losing some $65 million over a decade, RCA persisted in developing and marketing the technology.

 

The premier of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in September, 1961, was a turning point.  It was a magical experience to see the peacock’s tail unfold in red, orange, green and yellow.

 

Finally, in 1964, the tide turned, and RCA began to profit handsomely from its investment in color television.  It had taken 25 years for color television to go from its earliest prototypes to mass acceptance. According to Alex Magoun, director of the Sarnoff library holding RCA history, this is about the time every new technology takes to really catch on.

Today, a teenager is probably unable to conceive of a world where we would not be  able to watch live color coverage of downhill skiing at the Turin Olympic Games from 20 different camera angles.  In a child’s mind, television has always been here.  Like snowflakes, pine trees, and sledding, color television is and was and always has been.

In the short span of one human life, it is hard to maintain the long view.  Technology is easy to follow, with every detail recorded many times over in tech manuals and corporate profit and loss statements.

But televisions, computers, and air travel are not the only “new fangled” inventions of modern man.  Even our ways of thinking are marked by radical shifts that we have lost track of.

One mental shift has made an impact every bit as dramatic on modern life as color television.  It is hard to conceive of a university without a department of sociology, but in fact, no sociologists even existed to set sail and land on Plymouth Rock with the Pilgrims in 1620.

Sociology is actually a relatively new academic discipline which evolved in the early 19th century. It usually concerns itself with the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, and institutions.

Motivated by an interest in our behavior as social beings, sociologists began to quantify any number of human actions, allowing these academicians to perform their intricate analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street and to expand their theories to the broad study of global social processes.

A related trend in sociology, emerging since the late 1970s, attempted to make it a more “applied” discipline, applicable in areas such as non-profit organizations and nursing homes.  The results of sociological research have been used by educators, lawmakers, administrators, and others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy, through areas such as survey research, evaluation research, methodological assessment, and public sociology.

In other words, if we want to know what’s wrong…and if we want to know how to fix what’s wrong…ask a sociologist.

So, what was the world like before sociologists began to engineer and quantify human behavior?  How did humans seek solutions to human problems?  How did we organize life?

This is not idle speculation.  As a nation, we have nearly stopped thinking and acting unless we can open our briefcase and pull out a 3-inch file of social statistics and research to support our views.  Consider the following.

Solomon’s wisdom is often cited in a famous incident in which two women came before him with a baby, each claiming to the the mother.  Solomon ordered the child be cut in half, and by observing each woman’s reaction, determined the true mother.  Today, we have case workers, MSWs for sure, who interview the entire family and neighborhood, cite studies on mother love and bonding, and make their final report in triplicate.

Or in September, 2004, behavioral research on 1,792 adolescents proved that teenagers who watch a lot of television with sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse than those who watch few such programs.  Katie Couric’s reaction was a brief, “Duh?”

King Solomon was a bit more expressive.  Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.  Put away perversity from your mouth; keep corrupt talk far from your lips.  Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you. (Prov 4:23-25 NIV)

For all of our numbers and studies and statistics and analysis, have we really advanced beyond the centuries-old wisdom that informed men’s hearts and guided their steps?  And is it just possible that social scientists have found ways to add and subtract research that would justify why a lemming should follow his brother over the cliff?

Sociology has not always existed.  Thankfully, great minds and human wisdom are not modern inventions.  They are, they were, they always have been.  Even before sociology.

October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

September 10, 2004 – Duh

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Teaching the Value of Love

February 20, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

“We don’t teach values.”  Sex educators fond of promoting condoms and birth control to teenagers are also fond of making this claim.  “We are values-neutral!”

It’s never been really clear to me just why they take such pride in these claims.  It seems to be a sideways admission that one has lived on the face of the earth for nearly forty years and has been unable to come to any conclusions about what really matters.

This prideful admission that no values are important enough to single out for passing on to our children was birthed in the 60s.  Bored with tradition, and encouraged by our relationship with science and the brave new world of space flights and men on the moon, America launched into an artistic love affair with hopelessness.

I distinctly remember crashing into this dark fantasy in 1969 as a freshman at Arizona State University.  A group of us freshmen on the sixth floor of Manzanita dorm packed into a car one Friday night and headed for the drive-in to see Midnight Cowboy.

From beginning to end, watching the movie, I couldn’t understand why this film had won the heart of America.  While viewers found it elevating to see the naive male prostitute Joe Buck and his sickly friend Ratso struggle to survive on the streets of New York City, they had to overlook the fact that Joe Buck and Ratso were lying, thieving thugs.

Their story could have been more cheaply and honestly told by standing a camera in the middle of the worst, dark New York crime infested streets and filming the muggings, beatings and killings that hurt people and landed perpetrators in jail.

In one case, real-life criminals were given cells and prisoner numbers.  Their attitudes and behaviors were considered hostile to civilized society, and they were expected to reform.

In the other case, celluloid criminals wore fancy duds paid for by wardrobe, showed up in Hollywood limos for a red-carpet walk down the aisle between the rich and famous, and walked away with an Oscar.

Our love affair with the crass and dark and hopeless and brutal and profane is also a love affair with failure.  We are failing to stake a claim on what our responsibility is for raising the next generation of Americans…our children.

The latest episode of focusing on failure is taking place at Orono High School in Maine.  Out of the hundreds of thousands of books available for educating freshman, the English department settled on “Girl, Interrupted.”  The school is defending their choice as “real.”  These memoirs of author Suzanna Kaysen’s hospitalization in a mental institution at age 18 contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts and suicide.

Is this the best picture of the “real” we can offer our children in a literature class?

Then, after freshman English, do we send our children to sex education for a lesson on how to put on a “real” condom because we tell them “real” children in the “real world” are going to have sex anyway.

And, finally, when parents come to school to demand answers and a change in the message of what “real” is and should be, do we tell them they are pushing their values on a school system where values should never exist?

Values?  Is there anything we do or say or think in our entire life that doesn’t involve making a value choice?  Values-neutral?  Who are they kidding?

If love makes the world go round, when are we going to elect this value as worth consideration in our movies, our songs, our English classes…and, most importantly…our sex education classes?

If you live in Orono, Maine, or in any other city where you care about the values we are teaching our young people, there is a great book to recommend to your high school English teachers.  The Art of Loving Well is a new and novel idea for many educators.  It is a book that knows the values that matter and takes the time to make them matter to young people.

This 340-page anthology of ethnically diverse selections, includes short stories, poems, essays, drama folk tales and myths that elevate the values that matter most for the happiness and future of our young people.

Values-neutral?  Impossible!  The Art of Loving Well lays claim to its responsibility for passing on worthwhile values to our children, helping adolescents learn responsible sexual and social values through good literature which reveals the complexity of life and love relationships.

English teachers…teachers of all kinds…are always teaching values.  “Reality” is a poor excuse for defending the kinds of books and movies we offer our children.  We offer it because it is real?

Love is real.  And if we want our children to be successful in love, then it’s about time we started teaching the values that matter most…the art of loving well.

October 10, 2005 – Wonder Love

February 21, 2005 – Sex Without Value

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The Gift of Kindness

February 13, 2006

Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.                                                                       —Mother Teresa

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

A string of pink and red balloons waves high in the air, visible from the road a mile away.  They fly, tied to the top of a 15 x 15 ft. open air tent, calling attention to the temporary marketplace in the parking lot, just outside the grocery’s main entrance.

It’s Valentine’s Day.  Churches were decorated for Sweetheart Dinners last Sunday.  Today, flowers and balloon bouquets were loaded early in the morning onto delivery trucks.  Kids all around the country drop valentines into decorated shoeboxes for their classmates.  And, on their way home, last minute shoppers can pull up to the white tent and grab a potted red geranium, a box of chocolates, and a bottle of champagne.

Nothing is too good for a sweetheart.  In the age of the Internet, there are endless ideas for that perfect gift to communicate your amore.  At Amore’ on the Net you can find it all in one spot.  Two chubby cherubs drop little hearts down the page, dragging visitors below to a pulsing heart and a list of perfect Valentine’s Day ideas.

Even Chef Emeril Lagase isn’t afraid to “kick it up a notch” with his “special treats for your loved ones.”  Who wouldn’t feel loved being served banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise?

I’m a great fan of food, and I must admit, banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise prepared a la Chef Emeril wins the day over such extravaganzas like the giant human-sized stuffed red teddy bear I saw a man carry to his car.

Valentine’s Day is a great reminder of just how important it is to tell people we love just how important they are to us.  And, in a year where we have dedicated ourselves at FROM THE HOME FRONT to a consideration of love, it seems appropriate to ask…

Why can’t every day be Valentine’s Day?

Imagine buying the perfect Valentine’s Day gift, worth a million dollars, but costing you only a moment of thoughtfulness.  A renewable gift.  No shopping required.  Handy at every moment, just when you need it, in unlimited quantities…every day of the year.

Give the gift of kindness.

Love is patient, Love is kind.1 

Love is a choice…a choice to be patient and kind.  Who can’t afford such a luxury in a modern world where we are supposed to have everything?

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.2

How nice it is to be greeted in the morning with a kiss and a Good Morning, I Love You.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. 2

Smile.  How wonderful to be greeted by the smiles, even of perfect strangers, during the day when the daily battle has worn us down!

Look in their eyes.

Pause…stop…listen.  Listen.

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn’t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.3

Without holding your response in your mouth, waiting for your turn to speak…listen.

Love is kind.

I would give up receiving a dozen, dozen red roses, just to have one person spend a week devoted to kindness in my honor.  You?  How hard it is to listen with an empty mouth!  Yet, motivated by love, I think I just might be able to manage.

We must give what we hope to receive.  Let it begin with us.

Love is kind.

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.   (Mother Teresa)

 

11Cor 13:4 [NIV]

2 Mother Teresa

2 Mother Teresa

3 Hugh Elliott

November 12, 2004 – Old As the Hills

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