Serendipity

Corruption...Fraud, Gambling, Prostitution, Extortion, Drugs, Physical/Emotional/Sexual abuse… It sounds like your everyday criminal activity, right? It is, but in a place you’d least expect it. Inside prison walls. The very place we send those to stop this kind of criminal activity. But it doesn’t stop them. They are criminals after all. I hate to burst your bubble but it’s not the inmates that I am talking about. I am referring to the criminal activities that are committed on a daily basis by the correction officers themselves. The very officers we hold to a higher standard and believe they risk their lives daily while working in these prisons, keeping control of the “criminals” sentenced there. Some of us look at these men and women officers with a high degree of respect. We have all seen commercials on TV or heard ads on the radio telling the state and every community how they risk their lives every day asking us to donate money and support these officers that work f...

Four years and 8 months ago, I moved from my brother's home into my own apartment with my then boyfriend. It was great! We had no kids, we could come and go as we pleased, and do as we pleased. Life was good. Until I learned different things about this man who I had gone to school with back in junior high and senior high. Red flags popped up here and there, but I thought we were still in the getting-to-know-you faze.  Time passed. I learned that this man had a temper, a rotten attitude and a foul mouth that as time passed only got worse. And worse. And every time we argued, it was MY fault. Something I did...or did not do...made him mad. VERY mad.  I would cry. A lot. He would taunt me, calling me a "baby". Name calling would bring the tears and he'd say "they are only words". But I have to tell you that in all my years on this planet, I never cried as much as I did with him. Words hurt. They aren't the minute things we were taught in scho...

Last night, I finished reading, "Secrets in the Cellar", by John Glatt, and it has had my brain churning ever since. When this story broke, it shocked the world and it still shocks me because of the horror that one man can inflict on others. I have always believed that we all have a darker side to us, but most of us can keep that in check throughout our lives. But one has to wonder if such evil is not the result of childhood circumstances but rather something built into some individuals.  Because of my own therapy over the years, I have learned that our childhoods can and do have a bearing as to how we turn out later in life. However, I am not so sure with men like Josef Fritzl, Charles Manson, and many of the other serial rapists and murderers. There HAS to be a glitch in their mental wiring some place. We live in a world today where diagnoses run rampant, there is a name for about every affliction on earth. The way I see it, is there is one diagnoses that doesn...

Every week we are bombarded in the media with articles about teachers going too far in one way or another. For some time though, they have been mostly about teachers that have done the unthinkable: gotten into some kind of romantic and/or sexual affair with a student.  This morning though, I came across an article about a teacher who is also a coach, that went too far in a different way: making "insensitive and vulgar comments in front of students and players", as well as picking on the students that have come down with the mystery illness at Le Roy school in upstate NY. It seems that his insensativity led him to make up a chant while his basketball team (York) was playing against Le Roy's that went:    “One, Two, three, Tourette’s!” And supposedly this was said in the locker room and not on the basketball court. Falk reportedly qualified his ‘joke,’ telling his players, “I’m just kidding.” Well, his kidding cost him...he was removed from the coach pos...

Wooden spoon for spanking? Last week a YouTube video went viral on the internet, showing a Texas judge using a belt on his disabled teen daughter, which then caught media attention. If you haven't seen the video, this is it:  (Warning...very disturbing footage.) When I first watched this video, I could only stomach the first 30 or 40 seconds of it and then had to stop it. This is beyond appalling, and this by a judge who decides the fate of others in his courtroom?  Unbelievable! This is a beating in its truest form...the judge didn't care where he hit his teenage daughter, man-handled her like she wasn't even his child, and wasn't satisfied with one or two or even three strikes...he just kept going on and on.  The child's mom then joins in and gets her whack in...for what purpose, it's unclear, but you can hear the mother say to the teen something to the effect of 'turn over and take it like a woman'!  (I wonder if mom could have t...

Do they? Really? Over the years, it has become a pet peeve of mine as well as a great concern over how a child should be disciplined. Maybe it's something that comes with age...but maybe it's something that no longer seems right...because doesn't violence breed violence?  I'm not talking about spanking a child with your hand on their butt...I'm talking about hitting them with a belt or paddle. What the law now refers as corporal punishment.  Where did we humans get the notion that hitting a child with something hard was discipline? "Spare the rod, spoil the child".  Biblical reference?  Not at all.  In fact, it came from a 17th century poem titled “Hudibras” by Samuel Butler. The actual verse reads:  “What medicine else can cure the fits Of lovers when they lose their wits? Love is a boy by poets styled Then spare the rod and spoil the child.” At the time that this was written, it referred to the spanking of a woman,...