Trump should have been their last warning signal. Instead, he’s their God.
I’ve been a follower of politics all of my adult life and and I’ve finally come to the sad realization that I’ll never understand Republican women. Forget about Republicans in general; they’re lost to me for good and ever. They’ve worked their way over the decades into the worst kind of antigovernmental ‘saviors’ and the only time I want to think about them is when I’m stewing over which of them is going to jail for their dirty deeds.
But the women are different. They’re one of us. I’m one of them. And I’ll be honest here: I could never…
I worry it’ll become an addiction.
I woke up again worrying about why nobody liked what I had to offer, worrying it could be me and not them, wondering what there was about me that made me think I was pretty special when nobody else seemed to see it, and after much thought — all about me — I finally had to laugh. I was doing that very thing I’ve warned writers against so many, many, many times: I was navel-gazing.
Seriously. And because I was really getting into it — in the middle of the night when nothing was stopping me — I went looking…
Neither did I. Let’s talk.
I spent most of the day at the hospital yesterday, waiting while my husband had a procedure that would tell us whether or not there was any recurring bladder cancer. There wasn’t.
Breathe! Celebrate! Whew!
After we settled in at home, relieved but exhausted, I went to Facebook to see what was new, especially in the Medium Binders, and was floored by the news. One by one, many of my Medium friends were rejoicing over unexpected bonuses they’d received from Medium, to the tune of $500. Five hundred dollars. Out of nowhere. Incredible!
I was happy for them. (And still…
But honoring laborers shouldn’t be relegated to nostalgia
Today, May 1st, is May Day, also known in labor circles as International Workers Day. It’s the day when workers around the world traditionally rally to show solidarity and support for one another. It’s the real Labor Day. While our own Labor Day has become a holiday, a day of picnics and celebration, May Day is and always will be an international day of protest — a reminder of worker rights and worker dignity in a world gone mad with greed.
Labor in America has been under siege like nothing we’ve seen in this country since the 1930s. Whatever wage…
It’s the craft we’re interested in. Bragging about your bank account isn’t writing.
The issue of bragging about incomes from writing on Medium keeps coming up, and I’m going to weigh in. I apologize in advance if feelings are hurt, and I do understand that there are two sides to this, but I’ve been sitting on this for a long time and I see no signs of it slowing down. So here goes:
Medium isn’t like other publications, where writers have a general idea of pay rates before submitting. Medium writing income is a crap-shoot. …
It’s as if I’ve lost her all over again.
My mother was 19 when she had me. I was an only child until my brother Michael came along when I was nine years old, but by that time I was firmly ensconced as my mother’s daughter. She influenced my taste in music, in art, and helped me develop my own love of words.
She came from parents who barely spoke English, from a community where English was not their first language, and she struggled, with just an eighth grade education, to make sure she spoke well. She took delicious pleasure in finding the meanings of new words. We had…
But you think maybe you shouldn’t.
I’ve been writing for many decades now and I’m finally going to say it: I love a lot of what I write. I love it so much I go back and read the good stuff over and over, just because. It’s like rereading a good book. There’s that woozy satisfaction, every single page, even though you know what’s going to happen. It’s like listening to the same good music, over and over. It moves you. It makes you happy. It’s as if it’s there just for you.
That’s the way I feel about my own writing. When it’s good.
I…
We’ve seen it and we can’t turn away. Now we have to do something.
For centuries humans have pleaded for tolerance, for acceptance, for love. That’s because for centuries we’ve warred with one another, mainly over things that could be resolved if only we cared about each other.
We war over territory because somebody else is where we want to be and it should be enough that we want to be there.
We war over differences that are mainly meaningless — like language or culture or deity choices or even skin color — because we’ve been led to believe that some humans are better than other humans, and we, of course, are the better…
If you’re a blogger who writes opinions, you’re a member of the media. What is your obligation?
Is the New York Times more important than the Podunk News? How about the Washington Post? USA Today? Would anybody say anything but ‘yes’? Yet, hard as it might be to believe, there are people in this country who have never seen an issue of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or USA Today, and don’t feel the least bit deprived.
Do those newspapers have a wide reach? Sure. Do they influence people? You bet they do. But so do city and local news outlets. So do internet websites. And so do writers who blog.
We’re all part of…
Six things the media really has to stop doing while on the disaster beat.
Disasters happen and reporting them is essential, but there’s always that dead air — when nothing more is happening and we’re awaiting more news. That’s when the dread ‘human interest’ stories fill the time, the reporters turning from the real story to look for victims who will try to answer the unanswerable questions: “How did you feel?” “What went through your head?” “Did you think you would ever see your family again?”
The injured — many of them still traumatized, still hurting, still trying to figure out where they are and what happened — are forced to face a camera…
