Tag: planned parenthood

Is WOKE Brain-Dead

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

Got feedback for my novella, A Marriage Fable, from a reader.

Pam L (She/Her) 3:55 PM

Thanks Jeri! I actually read it and enjoyed it. I just hesitate to review because the husband calls the therapist a muslim I think it was, in a nonflattering way, and never takes it back later in the book. It just didn’t sit right with me.

A Marriage Fable is a fantasy romance of a typical husband nearing his 20th anniversary, and the powerful genie that inspires him to be a better man. The “muslim” Pam is referring to is the genie. The husband is a sexist, narcissistic asshole in the beginning of this fable, and does indeed refer to the genie, who he thinks is a therapist, as a Muslim because he’s mad with his wife for asking him to participate in her session with Dr. Boggs.

This fable is a modern twist on the classic Dicken’s novella, A Christmas Carol. I used Arabic words for the opening of each stave, and honored the legends of Marid Djinns throughout the writing. I, Jeri Cafesin, did not slam Muslims. Andrew Wyman did, the MC in A Marriage Fable. To show, (not tell in exposition) that Andrew was a self-absorbed dick, he indeed used ugly language, as he, like most men these days, was not violent. Words were his weapon, and his complete lack of interest in anything but his career.

Pam deciding not to leave my novella a review is beyond WOKE, it’s brain-dead. She’s so into being politically correct, following the masses, a ‘believer’ she’s being ‘good, respectful, polite,’ she’s stopped actually thinking for herself. She enjoyed my novella, but can’t leave a review because the Woke community, to which she is a card-carrying member, says using the word Muslim derogatorily in all cases is wrong. And she’s bought that crap. She’s so unsure of her own mind, so afraid of her own racism that she has to call out a fable showing an arc of a character to protect her self-image. She must follow the crowd she’s picked — falling off the boat left-wing. Her behavior is equal only to the far right of the Trump coalition, which she likely despises.

I used to be a Democrat. I am not anymore because of people like Pam who can’t think beyond their rabbis, priests, and the will of the crowd they’ve picked so they can look in the mirror and feel good about themselves. Fuck that. TRUTH changes things, not all this PC bullshit.

So, let’s get down to some TRUTH, and face some facts about humanity. WE ARE ALL RACISTS. We are all BORN RACISTS! And until we all wrap our heads around that FACT, we are doomed to stay racists!

At my writing group the other night a guy read 1500 words out of his historical novel about WW2. In his book, he quoted Hitler, and other Nazis using racial slurs. Several group members had “a problem” with this. They found the language offensive and suggested he take out the terms. Instead, he was advised to use the PC version of describing the terms without using the actual slurs. Again, brain dead! Are these people so scared of the TRUTH that they cannot face the FACTS of what the Nazis did/do. Wokes must sugar-coat it to swallow it down? There is nothing sweet about Nazism! It was/is ugly in the extreme, and this writer in my group was showing this. It wasn’t his job to be politically correct as to offend NO ONE EVER. It was meant to offend! Ignoring history, we are doomed to repeat it, and we ARE with Trump and the current Republican party, and the other side, the Woke party.

Fiction writing is a fine art. Should someone have told Edvard Munch he shouldn’t paint The SCREAM because it may give some kids nightmares? It did me! Should books like Ulysses, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple not have been written because they may offend? Of course not. Art is supposed to be controversial, get people feeling first, then thinking about what they feel and why.

My father used to call me Marco after the MC in And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street because I’ve been a storyteller since I was a little kid. I’ve read it to my kids to spark their imagination because that is what the story is about, not a ‘Chinaman (original wording) who walks with sticks’ (and by the way, the TRUTH is, Chinese in China still use chopsticks), or a ‘Rajah with Rubies.’ The Woke community has robbed children forward of a method to reach and spark their own imaginations.

New York Times had an article about transgender conversion a couple weeks ago. For once, the left-wing rag, wasn’t. They actually had the balls, in our politically correct version of the world now, to call out therapists who are pushing children, as young as 10 years old, to change their sex. In their extensive research, the article points out that the Woke community is selling kids on medically ‘reconfiguring’ (the PC term) their bodies, a decision that will affect the rest of their lives, and in many cases negatively. Personally, I don’t care if an adult decides to become the opposite sex. It is an adult decision. Blind support of a child wanting to change their sex after seeing some YouTuber trans who is saying how great their life is now, is ugly in the extreme. It doesn’t make you a good therapist to always be ‘supportive.’ It makes you a bad one.

Oddly, well, maybe not, the same Woke crowd is calling out Trader Joe’s for using Trader José on their Mexican label beer as racial appropriation. I don’t understand why changing sex later in life isn’t sexual appropriation. A man changed to a woman at 18 or later didn’t have to grow up with the slings and arrows I faced as a girl or a woman in the workforce. They have no idea what it means to be constantly hit on from the moment you get tits, groped, assaulted, get pregnant, paid less, and a girl better be pretty, and thin, or she’s lonely. And I was. The damage sexism did to me will be with me for the rest of my life, regardless of the sex I later become.

And THEY is more than ONE. Unless a human is two people in one, like Siamese twins, what does someone calling themselves THEY even mean? Using ‘THEY’ as your ‘personal pronoun’ WON’T STOP SEXISM! This will — the TRUTH is a good place to start.

Politically correct doesn’t help humanity become kinder or more equitable. Activist groups like LGBTQ have powerful lobbyists who help change discriminatory laws. The Gay Liberation Movement (GLM) in the 1980s got Congress to invest in AIDS research. Black Lives Matter (BLM) forces us to investigate systemic racism in our police forces across the US. These organized groups send representatives to DC who actually fight for legal change. If you really want to be politically correct, actually do something to help make us a more just society, join one of these organizations, and help end discrimination.

It’s hip, slick, and trending Woke these days to say “I’m Pro-Palestine.” In fact, my own daughter said this to me the other day.

Hmm, I thought I taught you better than jumping on the Woke train, I told her. Do you even know what it means to be pro-Palestine? All her friends are. All her friends are Chinese and Indian students at UCSD. Literally. She is White and has no White friends. Many of these friends are on visas and have no voting rights in this country. And they too have no clue what they are talking about when they claim to be pro-Palestine. My daughter’s friends are feeling disenfranchised. They’ve been the target of racism here and are justifiably angry. But instead of dealing with that TRUTH, they’ve lobbed onto a crowd — the PC community — that lets them express their internalized anger by getting behind causes they have no clue about.

Do you know that Hamas, the government of Gaza, launched an unprovoked attack on Israel from Gaza, killed over 1,200 people, and kidnapped 253 in October of last year?

No.

And did you know Hamas was raping 12–48 yr old girls and women they kidnapped, then posting it online to terrorize victim’s loved ones?

I haven’t heard that. All I heard was Israel was bombing civilians in Palestine and killing mostly women and children.

Do you know that the government the Palestinians voted in are using their women and children as cover for their terrorist shit, and that is why they were getting killed in Israeli bombings?

No. But it doesn’t make it right that Israel is killing kids.

No. It doesn’t. I didn’t say Israel is right. There is no right here, baby. Both sides are wrong. I’m not pro-Israel. They know that Hamas is sacrificing their own children, yet instead of targeted strikes against Hamas, they are wielding an iron fist. Badly. Ugly. For sure. 100%. My beautiful daughter, I told her, siding with one side or the other is divisive in the extreme. It perpetuates the problems there, and creates more here, between us. Call out bad behavior, like Israel knowingly killing civilians regardless of their reasons. Or Palestine voting in a fanatical religious government with an agenda to kill all Israelis. Neither is right. Call out bad behavior. Do not get on the PC train because your friends are and you wanta fit in. Do the research before taking a stand. Blind faith means turning off your brain. And that is never OK.

I get writing this essay is going to piss off a lot of people. While I understand and support the underlying tenor of being PC is to stop discrimination in all forms, the Woke community has no clue how divisive and ugly they are when they call out everyone who isn’t on their train. They perpetuate racism, sexism, and flat-out stupidity so they can look in the mirror and lie to themselves they are righteous people.

Let’s all get off the PC train and focus on how to tackle our differences by getting honest with our own feelings — our fears of THE OTHER, of looking stupid, of not fitting in, of being alone and lonely. Let’s start sharing how often we fail, in our careers and our relationships, instead of perpetuating the happy-ending lie. I’m so sick of almost every businessperson I talk to saying they’re doing “just great!” and then their biz failing the next year.

Want to end discrimination? Then let’s start sharing how it feels to BE HUMAN since we all FEEL THE SAME THINGS.

How to End SEXISM

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

My father raised me to believe my mother was ignorant. “Your mother, (implying like most women) is irrational. Fickle. Full of love and lightness, but not really a [deep] thinker.”

All women were (are) not as… capable as men, according to my father, as the woman’s primary job— her role in society of mom, caretaker, homemaker— isn’t like a real job and doesn’t take much brain power. He actually said to me, “Isn’t it odd that women can’t walk and talk at the same time,” and stopped to tell me this in all seriousness, while we were walking.

My father thought he was inherently smarter than my mother, or any woman. He was a MAN, after all. He claimed to be well read, had to be for business in the real world, unlike silly homemakers. (My mother read the newspaper daily, news magazines, new non-fiction and fiction monthly. My father read only Popular Mechanics, and watched TV. Cop and detective shows mostly, where the main white male character was rescuing ditsy, busty women.)

My mother graduated high school at 16, and attended Florida State University two years before most of the classmates she left behind in New Jersey. My father has no degree beyond high school.

My father went through five or more businesses, several of which failed, none of which ended up in substantial wins. My mother started a pilot magnet program at Cabrillo Marine Museum for underprivileged East L.A. kids, to teach them marine science. For almost 20 yrs she touched thousands of lives, many of whom I met personally, in the store or mall, when they stopped my mom to gush that they were now oceanographers and scientist because of her program. As a woman, she made 1/3 of the men whom she worked beside, offering comparable programs.

What is SEXISM?

Sure, most of us will agree equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender is an important step in ending sexual inequality. According to Variety, the top paid actress for a single film of 2021 was Jennifer Lawrence, at $25M. Actor Daniel Craig, made $100 million. Women had only 34% of the speaking roles in major movies, according to Women and Hollywood. (Women are half of the human population, yet no actress is even close to #2, 3, 4, in equal pay or presence in film.)

In 2020, almost 60 years after the United States passed the Equal Pay Act, Pew Research says a woman earns only 84% of what a man makes.

So, why, even today, are women fighting so hard for equal pay, which most of us agree is one obvious step to ending SEXISM?

BELIEF. Both sexes still believe women are ‘less’ than men.

My father was born in 1929, when MEN WERE MEN, and everyone ‘knew their role.’ His mother, my grandmother, was a homemaker. His father, my grandfather, was a pianist for the New York Philharmonic, and the breadwinner for his family. To make it through the depression years, and the harsh realities of being a Jew through WW2, each family member had a role, a function to fulfill to assure the family unit was maintained—literally stayed alive, however modest an existence.

From caveman days through the 1940s many jobs required physical labor suited to a man’s physiology, as technology wasn’t here yet. Humans, not robotics, built our vehicles and appliances, and manufacturing was a man’s job even after the war, before it went offshore.

Fast forward to present day. Last Sunday my husband is reading me an article on the feminist #MeToo movement in the New York Times, while I cook pancakes for him and our two teens. At the end of the article he sighs heavily, his ‘this is absurd’ sigh, and says, “It gets so tiresome hearing women complain how hard they have it. It’s equally hard on men, and always has been.”

I looked at him incredulously, and said, “How many times have you been sexually assaulted on the job?”

He didn’t respond to my rhetorical question. I already knew his answer. Zero. He didn’t turn my question around. He knew an investor in my very first startup tried to rape me in my office at our Christmas party, then fired me that night for not letting him assault me. He knew my second job out of college, as an Art Director for 1928 Jewelry Company, the CEO came into the empty conference room moments after me, introduced himself, and instead of taking my outstretched hand, squeezed my breast, as if checking the firmness of an orange. I’ll never forget, he said, “Mmm, Nice!” before I pulled away, shamed as others I’d yet to meet walked in.

My husband wasn’t at my housewarming party, when a relative accompanying an invited guest tried to assault me when I found him at my work-space on my Mac. I could go on, but you get my point. And even knowing all this, my husband is “sick of hearing women whine about how hard we have it.”

Can’t blame him, really. My father-in-law talked down to my mother-in-law, probably all their lives together, but clearly in the 20 years I’d been on the scene of their married life. He was cruel and cutting with a continual barrage of snide ‘jokes,’ if he listened to her at all. My husband tells tales of his mom going ballistic on his dad every few months, probably when she’d had enough of trying to communicate with him while he verbally slammed her, or, by and large, ignored her.

To this day, most men do not BELIEVE a woman is as ‘equal’ to them as other men.

The problem is, most women BELIEVE this too. We do not feel equal. Why would we? We get paid less for the same job. Our bodies are more valued then our minds (as so many men, especially wealthy men—think Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Fox News Roger Ailes, or Pres. Clinton—can’t seem to get their brain out of their little head). Our personal rights are being stripped away state by state as our Supreme Court dictates what we can do with our own bodies. Women are rarely taken seriously by the overwhelmingly male controlled business world, nor in our home environments.

How many women reading this post did most of the cooking and serving of your last holiday meal, even with a career/job? How many of you do most of the cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring of the kids, even working full time? The fact is, according to the 50 news articles I just read, women still do 80 – 90% of all domestic chores, including kid care, regardless of her job status. Equal pay for equal work, of course, but also equal WORK must be invested by both genders to reach sexual equality.

How do we get there from here? I honestly have no idea, other than to stand up, and say, “NO! Not OK,” whenever you are a victim, or see the action of SEXISM.

Since the mastodons are all gone, and we can now buy packaged meat at Safeway, we no longer require the muscular physique of the male physiology to survive as a race. Since most women are now bringing to the table of any union equal intellectual, logistical and financial support, men are rapidly losing their position of strength, figuratively and literally (with obesity at an all time high).

Men have dominated the business world from the beginning, and this too must change. It isn’t “locker room talk.” It is degrading, and women buy into it, thinking our value really is just in our breasts and how accessible our vagina to those that show interest. At the very least, women are made to feel we must acquiesce to this humiliating behavior men dish out to be heard at all.

This BELIEF, that women are lesser than men, by both genders must end, before SEXISM is a non-issue.

Humans, all of us, ACT as we BELIEVE.

Change the BELIEF, and change the actions of SEXISM.

Abortion and Choice

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I was 16 weeks pregnant, with my first baby, when the results of an amnio told me that the wanted child I was carrying was not healthy. I have always been pro-choice, and never considered it a moral dilemma to terminate a fetus with severe Down’s Syndrome, or other life threatening, or debilitating abnormalities. Although I was aware that my advanced age of 39 increased my risk of potential problems, I was totally unprepared for the results from this technology, and the choice I would have to make.

We received the news on a gray Thursday afternoon in late December that the baby girl inside of me had an extra X chromosome, also known as Trisomy 47XXX. While waiting for clarification from a genetic counselor on the following Monday, I spent the next three days searching for information. I sat in the old, stone library in Concord, Massachusetts, crying uncontrollably with each line I read from a Psychology Today article on XXX. “Severe learning disabilities.” “Severe emotional disabilities.” “Slow motor development.” “Shy.” “Withdrawn.” I rubbed my swollen belly, trying to feel my daughter inside of me, fear welling up and gathering momentum. My stoic husband sat next to me, silently reading along. On the way home we talked, we cried, we argued about what to do next. We decided to wait to make any decisions until we could get more information, except there was little out there, and everyone we spoke with had some kind of agenda.

The genetic counselor insisted that the information we had gathered over the weekend was outdated and biased. A few minutes later she called in a staff OB/GYN who showed us a picture of a beautiful 8-month old XXX baby, swinging in her electric swing on a whitewashed, sun-drenched porch, smiling happily for the camera. The doctor then asked us if we would be willing to participate in her study if we decided to “keep our daughter.” During the following week, we spoke with doctors from around the world with any knowledge of XXX, who gave us a positive or negative spin depending on their personal views on abortion. We spoke with a social worker that dealt with the parents of handicapped children, who was subtly but clearly for termination.

I solicited advice from my parents. My father (who never changed a diaper in his life) told me to keep her. My mother said not to. We spoke with parents of XXX children. All of the children had suffered learning disabilities, delayed motor skills, were withdrawn, and had required special education. They told us how exhausting it was, how expensive raising a handicapped child. They spoke about mortgaging their home, and going into debt to afford the special care they needed for their XXX child. They spoke of the constant heartache watching their child suffer with depression, anger, loneliness, growing up both physically and academically challenged. But all the parents claimed they loved their daughters.

A decision had to be made quickly, before I felt her moving inside me. I knew if I felt her I could never give her up. At just 4 months, an insentient collection of cells inside me, she was still an abstraction, even though on ultrasound I had seen her entire body, the emerging vertebrae of her backbone, the two hemispheres of her brain, the protrusions of tiny feet and hands. “The ghost in the machine,” my husband had called her. I held my belly and begged my daughter to tell me what she wanted me to do, knowing the decision would be mine, feeling the weight of that decision ripping apart the fabric of my tightly woven self-image.

What kind of person was I that I would kill my daughter because she wasn’t perfect? Faced with the probability of a slow child, spending the rest of my life watching her struggle to fit in, feel accepted beyond our family, focusing every day on the care of a handicapped child, seemed overwhelming. The cost of raising kids without illness would require both my husband and I to work till we died. And while I’d always pictured having two children, gifting them a sibling, a confident for each other, we’d have to forego having another child to afford the continual care required for our XXX daughter.

It occurred to me that most of us go through life thinking we are generally good, honest, caring people because this view is rarely challenged, as most of our actions aren’t based on critical, pivotal, character-defining decisions. From the moment I got the amnio results, I knew my life would never be the same again. Technology had given me insight, and now forced me to make a choice.

This was undoubtedly the hardest decision my husband and I would ever have to make, but it was ours to decide, granted to us alone in a state where abortion is still legal. Only we, the parents of the pregnancy, could decide what we felt capable of providing our child. If we lived in Texas, the state could force us to give birth to an ill baby, spend everything we made on drugs, specialize schools and care, and damn us to the unbearable torture of watching her struggle daily, likely for the rest of our lives.

A week later we arrived at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Waltham, and were assaulted by protesters. They held signs that read, “Save Unborns,” and “Choose Life.” They crowded around my husband and I shouting, “Baby Killers!” and “Murderers!,” preventing us from getting into the building until a cop came out and pushed them back. They were amped on self-righteous indignation, full of religious fervor. They’d go home to their Christian conservative families feeling proud of themselves for making our passage into the clinic even more a nightmare than it already was. Most were young, more men than women, in their teens and early 20s, and likely had no children at all. They had no conception of what it took to raise healthy kids, yet alone devote their lives caring for a physically and emotionally afflicted child.

Doubting our own abilities to provide for a sick child pushed us into the decision that to this day, 20 yrs later, I still find shame in. But I honestly don’t know how the other decision would have played out. One of the mothers of an emotionally and physically disabled XXX 8 year old told me that if she had known that her daughter had the anomaly before she gave birth, she doubts she would have chosen to keep her. I guess when we make a decision with no good choices, the decision we make will never be okay. While I am grateful that the choice was ours to make, the trick is, finding a way to live with that choice.

A year later, and two on that, I was graced with two healthy children, now grown and on their own. But I think of Sierra often, who she would have been, how she would have been, and the lives we would have led with her. And I still ache for her. Through all the heartache that comes with raising a handicapped child, I know I would have loved her, passionately, wholly, felt that awe-inspiring humility, that magnificent intensity of love for her that I get to feel for my kids every day. And to this day, I still question my choice not to have her.