Things Happen For a Reason

It's kind of funny that after all these years I should learn a lesson about why things happen, going all the way back to my teen years. I was adopted as an infant and grew up knowing that fact, along with knowing I had half-siblings "out there" somewhere. I was seventeen when I first expressed a desire to meet my birthmother and any other members of my family who were willing. At the time, we faced a stone wall. At that age, it was hard for me to hear and even harder to process.

The years wore on and I thought about the situation, but there wasn't much I could do about it. About a month before I was to be married, when I was 27, all that changed. Without going into too much detail, things fell into place and I finally met my birthmother.

My initial inclination was to extend an invitation for her to attend the wedding. None of my siblings except one even knew of my existence, so that wasn't really feasible. But I thought it would be great to have my birthmother there. I didn't discuss it with a lot of people, but mentioned it to one friend who must have thought about it for about an hour, then told me that she didn't think I should do it.

She made two points for me to consider. First off, it would be different if I had more time where everyone had time to digest the situation. Second, it was my wedding, and something my mother had looked forward to since I was a baby. Throwing this into the mix so soon before the date was likely to be a topic of discussion amongst both families, even though there was never any secret about my being adopted. Would it be fair to my mother to do it where the focus would shift on this very important day?

I pondered her points for quite some time. Although my mother had always been very open about my being adopted, I didn't know how she would feel. Did I want to have the discussion with her?

In the end, I decided this was a time when I would put aside what I wanted and do what I thought was the right thing at the time. My birthmother didn't attend my wedding, although we have carved out a relationship since then, as well as with my siblings. Over the years, I have lamented that decision. I've wished I had asked her to come or that we'd managed to meet when I first wanted to at 17. I attended three of my siblings' weddings and in some ways it ached to be there.

It's only recently that I've begin to see that things worked out for the best. A 44 year-old can learn that events that took place decades before happened for a reason. Meeting my birthmother at 27 rather than 17 meant that I had a maturity level that I likely didn't have in my teenage years. I was able to consider other people's feelings and the effect on them in the situation, rather than just my own feelings and what I wanted. I realize now that I very easily could have handled the situation poorly, and probably would have hurt people I care about quite a bit along the way.

While I still lament that I didn't have my birthmother and siblings at my wedding, I can appreciate better that a 17 year-old was probably not mature enough to handle all the baggage and emotions that are involved in such a difficult situation. I grasped at 27 something that some people don't grasp their entire lives: sometimes your feelings and your desires aren't the most important thing in a situation.

A Year Later, Reflections on Hope

It’s been a year since Barack Obama was elected this nation’s first African-American President..

For many of us who didn’t like the path our country was taking over the previous eight years, his election was like a giant sigh of relief.

The country he inherited from his predecessor hardly resembled the country that had been handed over to George Bush. Instead of prosperity we had economic free-fall. Instead of respect around the world, we were seen with contempt. Instead of a country where citizens looked to the future and felt secure, we had seen a culture of fear cultivated.

A year might seem like a long time, but just like anything else, building or rebuilding something takes a lot more time and effort than destroying it.

At the same time, I have to admit that the hope I had a year ago has faltered quite a bit. To be fair, I don’t know that all of the blame for this can be shouldered by President Obama and the things that have disappointed me.

One of the benefits of living in the first-in-the-nation primary state is that we get quite intimate interactions with the candidates. Two local town hall meetings with then-candidate Barack Obama had impressed me quite a bit. He was a straight talker who didn’t create fairy-tales when he talked to people. He was honest that a President is not a dictator and if we believed in the policies and the vision he had for the country, we also needed to send people to Congress who would support that.

For the most part, that has happened. Yet we still seem to be fighting with ourselves.

The economy is not in recovery. The economic free-fall might have stopped, but there isn’t a recovery happening and I don’t see one happening for quite some time unless we change our ways. By “we” I mean the people of this country and not just the leaders who we’ve elected. For the sake of getting cheaper goods, we have sent millions of jobs overseas, primarily to our biggest creditor, the Chinese. It’s pretty hard to enact stricter trade regulations when the country you would like to raise tariffs against happens to hold the mortgage on the country and you’ll likely need them to sign off on more debt in the future.

If we want the economy to recover, we need a fundamental shift in our thinking that supports more jobs in this country. Instead of having eight pairs of shoes in your closet, maybe people could live with five that all are made in this country. A few weeks ago I needed socks. I spend a good deal of time in Wal-Mart looking for socks that said Made in the USA. I did finally find some, but It wasn’t easy and took a half hour. How much have we heard about unsafe products from China? You will get what you pay for and although no system is perfect, I have more faith in the regulations in this country weeding out most of the problems than in what is produced outside of this country.

Money has been thrown at big financial institutions, trying to prop them up. Money has been thrown at the auto industry, trying to prop them up. These problems, though, date back through the years. De-regulation is part of the issue. We have heard a lot in the last year or so about “too big to fail”. If a corporation is “too big to fail” then it is too big, period. We need to stop the mergers and break up corporations that are “too big to fail”. What if, instead of the “Big 3” automakers in Detroit, we had nine or even a dozen? What if each of those brands were actually separate corporations? Then even six could fail and we wouldn’t feel like the auto industry in this country was about to disappear.

Some of the money sent to these corporations have been paid back, but the bulk of it is gone with the taxpayers footing the bill. What if we had just allowed the corporations to disappear and put the money back in the consumer’s pocket? Perhaps that is what needed to be done - an economic system that wasn’t working needed to bottom out so it could be re-built.

Another huge problem in the puzzle is that so much of our economy is tied to oil prices. They go up, the economy will go down. My hope was to see more green energy making a dent. It’s only a year and I have seen a few signs of this, but it’s not as rapidly as I would like. I don’t believe our economy will truly recover until we are no longer dependent on foreign oil and the ups and downs of that market. I know ten years ago I saw fuel-cell vehicles on display by GM with the promise that these would be on the road in ten years. We’re there now - where are the vehicles?

I worry about the deficit, quite a bit. I get the concept that with the economy the way it is, we need to spend money to create jobs. I just don’t feel confident that it’s happening in the most economical way that benefits the most people. I look back at what Franklin Roosevelt did with the CCC back during the Great Depression and what was created by those men back then, and think we haven’t even come close to the same achievements and we have spent much more.

In a discussion a couple of days ago about Afghanistan, I said that I understood why the President was waiting to decide what to do. He is waiting to see what happens with the elections over there. I am not saying I agree with the delay and keeping our soldiers in suspense, but I understood why he was waiting. At the same time, after the poor care our soldiers have received courtesy of our government over the last eight years, I haven’t heard of any great strides made in the care of the veterans who have been injured both physically and mentally.

Then there’s health care, which epitomizes a lot of what’s wrong in this country. We need strong health-care reform that benefit’s the consumer, not the health-care insurance companies. In the name of bipartisanship, there were early concessions made. While many of us just saw that as useless, it seemed like it took those in Washington way too long to figure it out.

None of my criticism, though, means I would ever “switch sides”. As much as some don’t want to hear it, there is quite a bit of racism in the level of hated and obstruction directed at our President. I am not saying that everyone who disagrees with him is a racist. What I have seen are people who were politically moderate all of a sudden become rabidly against anything President Obama says and wants to do or does. These people seem to skewer reality even when the truth is pointed out to them in various ways. As someone once said, When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however improbable--must be the truth. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case in the deep-seeded hatred that seems directed toward our President that wasn’t even exhibited by these same people against President Clinton, and I thought that was bad.

The worst thing I could see me doing is losing faith enough to decide not to vote at all. I have thought about that. I have thought about just letting these people have the country they think they want and seeing how bad it would get. We wouldn’t be a democracy, we would be run by the corporations who are buying the candidates on the right. I have said more than once that in many ways, I regret having brought kids into the world. What’s being left to them is a horrible mess that I honestly believe will end with this country no longer a world power and no longer relevant to the rest of the world.

I had pragmatic hope a year ago. I still feel we are better off than if someone else had been elected (especially considering who would have been a heartbeat away from the Presidency), but I don’t have the same sense of optimism that we had really turned a corner both socially and in our policies with the election of Barack Obama.

Life is Not an Episode of 24

Political discussions can be a minefield. I don’t mind participating in them as long as it’s with people who are reasonable and can think. Those who pull out the straw man or wave the flag (if you disagree with me it somehow makes you less patriotic) are those who I will just back out of the discussion with. There’s no point - it’s like teaching a pig to sing.

Recently I saw both of those happen in a discussion that started out about President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. I’m not certain he deserved it this early, either, but that’s neither here nor there to where the discussion went. For soon there was someone in the discussion waving the flag of his father’s military service and talking about how torture has saved Americans, and challenging those of us who disagreed with him if we would advocate torture if we knew it would save family members.

I really want to know what fantasy world this person is living in.

First of all, when someone is tortured, they will say what they think will make the pain stop, whether it’s the truth or not. Information gathered from torture methods have been proven to be unreliable (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004644 among others). So why is there this popular notion that somehow American lives have been saved and we have been protected through the use of torture?

I believe it is twofold. First of all, in general the people who believe this are the disciples of Faux News and that is the party line there. But I think part of the reason has to do with what we’ve seen in movies and on television. The central character in certain films and television shows has been shown torturing a suspect and getting information that saves the world, and that is how people want to believe the world works.

Their argument can be turned around. What if you knew that torturing someone would result in the deaths of men and women in the armed services because their friends and family would be so angry with what was done to them they would decide to take it out on the nearest and most available American target? That’s a stronger possibility than the first straw-man argument, but no one wants to hear that.

The truth is, for many people after 9/11, torturing people felt good. It felt like a way of “getting back” after what was “done to us.” And it made a lot of people in the world who were on our side after 9/11 turn their backs on us.

The same people will usually argue that torturing people is what has prevented attacks on this country since 9/11, not that there’s a shred of evidence to that argument. It’s just a nice fairy-tale people have built up for themselves because it makes them feel better. If anything, there have been more instances of terrorism since then, just not on American soil. American citizens and corporations in other countries have been regular targets of terrorism since 9/11. People just don’t care because it didn’t happen here or to anyone they know.

If the only way you can justify your side in an argument is to use “what if” and create a fairy tale, you don’t have a strong argument, despite what Faux News has told you. Life doesn’t work like an episode of 24 or an action flick.


© 2009 Patti Aliventi


Related reading:

The Fiction Behind Torture Policy

The lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited Jack Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.

This Sunday's Lesson - Inclusivity not Exclusivity

Mark 9:38-41

John said to him, 'Teacher, we saw someone who does not follow us casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ But Jesus said, 'Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.

Being an ELCA Lutheran, lately the messages are in relation to a decision at the most recent churchwide assembly regarding sanctioning same-sex marriages as well as allowing rostered clergy in committed same-sex relationships to remain rostered clergy. As most can imagine, this issue has sparked a deep controversy and some church are threatening to pull their affiliation or have done so already.

That's not what I thought of when I listened to those Bible verses or the sermon, though. As my Pastor talked about clubs and exclusivity, I thought more about hove Christian Fundamentalists often pain Christianity this way. I've heard a number of times (long before this latest bruhaha that they will cite as another reason for my denomination being akin to being a heretic) that I am not a "real" Christian because I haven't been born-again.

But here you have Jesus telling his disciples not to stop those who are healing others who aren't part of their little group. He doesn't tell them they aren't his "real" followers. He doesn't tell the disciples to go get those people and make sure they are baptized as one of them.

And unlike some of our elected officials, he simply sees it as if they aren't against him then they are for him, rather than the other way around.

For some reason, people seem to feel the need that they have it "right" and everyone who doesn't think as they do has it "wrong". It's that way in religion and politics. And it's a shame because that is what is tearing this country apart right now.

I find it ironic that the same people who proclaim themselves righteous Christians tolerate and encourage lying on the part of politicians and pundits as the means to their end.

Richard Davidson of Center Conway, NH is a Crook

Here's the story of a contractor everyone wants to avoid - he's still out there doing business. His lawyer has written threatening letters to any place I've posted about him. Funny how the victims speaking out is stifled. Hopefully this will stick and stay in the search engines:

I received a judgment in Carroll County (New Hampshire) Superior Court for $12,981 plus legal fees. With that and interest, it comes to just shy of $20,000. The judge ruled that it was due to "deceptive business practices" and "violations of the consumer protection act".

He has now taken property he owns and transferred it into someone else's name to hide it from me and get out of paying the judgement. There is one spec-house he built that still is for sale and was owned by him on the tax rolls in the first half of 2007. By the second half, he had allegedly "sold" the property and another parcel to another person - the same person! In this market do you honestly believe the same person bought two properties from him?

And we drove by the spec house. It still has a "FOR SALE" sign on it. However, the phone number that's listed at the house doesn't go to a real estate office. It doesn't go to the "new" property owners on the deed. It goes to... Richard Davidson!! Are you going to tell me he sold this house to someone else who is just trying to resell it using him and not a broker? In this 2007 real estate market?

Do you really want him doing work for you?

I am in contact with New Hampshire DES and am actively pursuing getting his septic installer's license revoked as well as an administrative hearing.

Let me enumerate what he left my property like. Keep in mind, I was new to the whole home-building thing and any time I did try to question what he was doing, I got told "I've been in the business 51 years... I know what I'm doing:

+ With regard to my septic system, the state-approved plans showed perimeter drains around the foundation of my home. These were also called for in my contract. He never bothered to install them! And yet I paid for him to do so. He tried to brush it off in court. Why should this lowly septic installer overrule the septic designer and the state on how the system should be installed?

+ Also in regard to the septic system, after it has passed inspection, it needs to be covered up with septic sand, then loam and grass seed. Richard Davidson covered it with the septic sand and some loam that came from another site he was working at. The loam was from beneath the pines. What he has put there is thin and virtually nothing grows in it due to the pine sap present in the dirt. In addition, since it was approved in October, the septic should have been covered with hay for the winter. I ended up seeding it myself, but it still needs more loam to really be "right". I was given a judgement for the loam.

+ Something that cannot be fixed. I wanted a drive-under with the harsh winters we have here. I now have a garage I cannot use for two reasons. One is that he assured me it wouldn't be an issue to have the driveway where it is that leads to the garage, but of course it ended up being that way and I could not get approval for the driveway. So now that "driveway" is blocked off by rocks. Even if I could access the garage, he made it too small for my minivan to fit in! With his "51 years of experience" he didn't allow enough room for my vehicle, or any common minivan or SUV, to have clearance into the garage.

+ In addition, he asked me at one point if he could move the house about 20 feet closer to the road. I asked what difference it would make and he assured me none. Well, since I am on the downside of the road, I have a steep slope now down into my driveway. Not only is water running toward my house and my foundation, but when it snows it can be virtually impossible to get out of the driveway. In addition, in trying to compensate for this, he put in too much fill right up against the house and water is running down the driveway and over the sill of the house into my basement. It will eventually cause the sill to rot as well.

+ He was supposed to install the garage doors and openers in my home and he never did. I had to contract and pay an outside company to come in and do that, even though I had already paid him.

+ For my house to pass inspection and get a certificate of occupancy, I needed a few things he never did. My garage (which I can't use) had to be lined with 2 layres of fire resistant drywall. I needed rear stairs. None of this was done. It was a fight on the day I moved in to get him to have basement stairs installed just so the moving company wouldn't drive off with my stuff. The judge awarded me the money I paid to finish off the garage and what it would have cost for a set of rear stairs.

+ Since I thought he was going to do the work on my second property, I had given him the money for the permits and driveway bond already in July of 2005. In October of 2005 when he walked off the job, he still had not done any of that. I had to pay a second time for those permits out of my own pocket. The judge awarded me that.

+ To build my house, he built a rock wall and then filled it in with sandy fill. My foundation went on top of that. Well, he only built the wall as high as the bottom of the foundation, and in some places not even that high. This meant that when he was putting fill around the foundation, there was nothing to hold it in place. I have been losing fill from around my foundation since day one. My deck was in danger of collapsing and has already shifted and needs to be fixed. I didn't want to pay for an engineer to come in on this, and the judge did not award me anything because of that. Considering how he is trying to stiff me on my judgement, that was probably a good decision.

Critter Patrol

I am getting grief from the animals lately. Yesterday I took our dog for a ride to where we were working. She's a good dog, been with us for 11 years, and usually doesn't wander. I was up near the house talking to people and my son was running around with the dog. Suddenly he comes to me and says "Dale went down the hill" and points to the woods across the road from the house.

I went over there and called her. I didn't hear anything, not her chain or anything running through the brush. I called her a few more minutes and decided to take my van down the hill to where the woods cleared for the power lines, figuring she had just followed something through the woods and come out there.

I get all the way down there and I'm calling her. No dog. My son is starting to get upset and I am starting to get a bit worried because she usually doesn't disappear. She usually finds her way back, no problem. My phone rings and it's my partner, who's up at the house I was just at.

"Did you forget something???" he asks.

"No, I was down the hill looking for her!"

Sure enough, the dog had found her way back to the house, no problem. If I had just waited there a few minutes more, it would have been fine. Stupid dog.

-----------------------------------------------------------

The night before, I woke up at 3 in the morning. I swore I heard something chewing and it sounded like it was coing from the master bathroom. I went in there and turned on the light. It stopped. I went back to bed.

I heard it again. I walked tot he bathroom but didn't turn on the light. I listened and was sure it was coming from a blower duct under my sink. Turned on the light and didn't see anything. I went back to bed.

I heard it again and I heard it again. This time I checked everything , all the drawers and cabinets. There was nothing anywhere.

I told my partner yesterday morning and he said I was "crazy" and that there was no way anything could get up in there. I know what I heard.

So last night my mother is going to put something away in the stove drawer and all of a sudden she shoots across the kitchen. There was Mickey, hopping through the muffin cups in the muffin pan. I didn't see him but she did. I opened the drawer slowly and he must have scurried off. Jack, our Schwans guy, was here and he even was looking for him.

I busted my partner first thing this morning. "So I was crazy, huh?" We pulled out the drawer a little while ago and you could see his droppings. I dropped a d-con packet behind the drawer, so hopefully he won't be around much longer.

You'd think one of the two cats in this house would do somthing about it. "Fat putty" who's around 30 pounds laid down and stared at the drawer, as if to say Come on out so I can look like I know something about mice. "Psycho-kitty" was nowehere to be found. You'd think he would at least be interested in playing swat the mouse, but noooo......

They're all out to get me.

On Hearing Flight 93 Cockpit Recordings and Reading the Transcripts

Marion Britton was someone my family knew. Her brother was the Pastor at our church growing up and the families have remained close over the years. I have some very vivid memories of Marion at various functions at her brother’s churches over the years and at family functions. She was a single woman, so she was very involved with her nephews and her brother.

We knew Marion had gone down on Flight 93 a few days after 9/11. Her brother hadn’t known she was on the Flight until someone came to tell him during a prayer service he was conducting for the victims of that day at his church. Two days later, he was helping ordain a new group of Pastors, fresh out of seminary.

I read the transcripts yesterday and reports of the testimony. One terrorism expert recounted a phone call Marion made to a friend.

Up until now, it was easier to believe the stories of the heroism, and I’m not taking anything away from the stories of heroism on the flight. No one will ever know for sure what happened on the Flight nor who did what. Marion was a “fluffy” woman, and I had an image in my head of her sitting on one of the hijackers. Yeah, it made that day a lot easier to bear. Reading the testimony about her phone call was hard, to say the least. The L.A. Times reported on the testimony of Det. Sgt. Ray Guidetti of the New Jersey State Police who was assigned to an FBI anti-terrorism task force in Newark:

Marion Britton called a friend. Guidetti said the friend told her: "Don't worry. They'll probably take you to another country." But like the others, Britton was bracing for the worst. She said two people's throats had already been cut.

"It felt like the plane was turning and was going to crash," Guidetti said Britton told her friend. The friend then heard screams and the phone went dead.

Does hearing this make me angry? No. Mostly, I am just sad. Does it make me want to see Zacarias Moussaoui put to death? No, because that will make him a martyr in so many people’s eyes. Let him waste away in isolation somewhere.

And now I think about that movie being made. My visions that I had in my head of what happened to Marion are now gone. I wonder about the depiction in the film.

Everyone who’s saying it’s not right and it’s too early are right. I’m not even as close as many others to the situation and it’s been affecting me more than I thought it would.

Some things I think are better left to the imagination. Having the truth forced down our throats isn’t always the greatest thing.

© 2006 Patti Aliventi