Sunday, December 21, 2014

The Mason Missile, Decembe 21, 2014

Greetings! I bid everyone a happy and prosperous new year, for ourselves as individuals, and as a nation. We could do with it, since our nation is still mired in racism and class division. During the ‘seventies, the media available to me, such as Reader’s Digest and Time, told us that racism was over in this country, after the Civil Rights movement, and African-American people no longer suffer discrimination. To me, it’s an exercise of saying “We don’t want to deal with it anymore.” Our political-social-economic elite (and their media) don’t want to deal with racism, they don’t want to bring about peace and reconciliation between the dominant white group and non-white peoples-except, of course, to use racial hatred as a political propaganda tool; using racial stereotypes, like “welfare queen,” “urban crime,” to infuriate whites; and our elites, working through the government they supposedly despise, cuts taxes on corporations and allows said corporations to close down factories and set up factories in poorer nations. This way, workers are unemployed, taxes are fewer for local governments to collect, and such services as police, fire, schools, highways, etc., cannot be paid for and so have to be cut back on and become diminished in quality. And the conservative “private-sector” advocates tout the “free market” as a the cure-all to reduced government services-privatize schools, liquor stores (in Pennsylvania), Social Security, water companies, prisons, you name it. And since many governmental employees are in unions (yay!), the corporate-media-political machine calls unions the problem, makes them the scapegoat-they’re overpaid, their pensions are too big (don’t I wish!). And so unions are told to cut back on pay, benefits, pensions, health insurance, and job security, so that you can’t pay your mortgage, you can’t be sure of a comfortable retirement after working your ass off for someone else for decades, you can’t afford to pay for visits to the doctor and the hospital so you can lose your health and your life, and you can lose your job due to the bad mood and ego trip of some twerp of a manager who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Yes, you CAN lose all these great things that unions, those dastardly unions, if the corporate types have their way. Private corporations are to make a profit-okay, I’m cool with that, it’s the nature of the capitalist beast. But there are some things that CAN’T be handled by the private sector: with schools, you need educated and experienced teachers with college degrees teaching kids, and that required money to pay them, and you can’t have any old person watching the kids. With water treatment, the private company would replace trained technicians with people barely making minimum wage to sanitize your drinking water. Like I said, these corporations are for making a profit, and they make their profits by cutting back on pay and personnel, and skimping on purchasing equipment, to boost the quarterly profit-the be-all and end-all of American capitalism. Welfare? We have had the bailout of the savings-and-loan companies in the early ’nineties amounting to $500 BILLION, and the bailout of the same investment banks that led us to the current financial crisis also in the hundreds of billions, and there are NO lectures at “lazy welfare bums who need to get themselves together.” And with the billions sent to them by the Federal Reserve, their executives still treat themselves to million-dollar bonuses and corporate perks, along with million-dollar severance packages to CEOs who screw up the company-can you get that if YOU screwed up on the job? Oh, no, you would be fired, and called a “lazy bum” on Unemployment Compensation, and you can’t have an extension of UC, “it would make you lazy and lose your incentive to work.” THIS is the reality in this country. Race, like I said earlier, also remains a reality, the unfinished business of America. The killing by police of Tryavon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, highlight how minority communities relate to their municipal police, not very well. There was a belief that with the election of Barack Obama, this proved that racial hostility is over, and that we’ve moved beyond racism. That has been disproved by the disrespect Obama received from the Republicans in Congress, in the form of the idea that Obama should not come to the House chamber for his next State Of The Union address, and the idea floated that he should lose his Air Force One privileges; and in the signs in Tea Party rallies depicting Obama as a pimp or a witch doctor during the health insurance reform debate. But I’ve just scratched the surface. Race and class are the realities we have to deal with, at the same time, it’s not either-or. Low-income whites have been pitted against African-Americans, telling them their skin color is the source of their superiority, no matter how under-paid or under-educated they are. They are taught to see their Black brothers and sisters as their enemy, the completion for “their” jobs, housing, education, etc., thus having the two sides battle for the scraps and crumbs the oligarchy drops on the floor. It doesn’t have to be this way; we MUST and we CAN reclaim our governments at all levels to make them work for all the people, not twist it around for the plutocrats. On that note, I announce that I will, finally, be going to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for Master’s work in Labor Studies; I will be up there for two weeks then return and do the rest of the class work on line. It’s a new system I can and will adjust to. I will apply education to advance the cause of working people. I bid everyone all the BEST in 2015. Bye!

Sunday, November 23, 2014

The Mason Missile, November 24, 2014

Greetings! Yes, I was disappointed at the republican takeover of the Senate and the retention of the “House of Representatives”-some members being wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate interests. From what I understand, though, this would be a false victory for the Republican right-wing tea-party element; the reality is seeping in about gerrymandering of congressional districts, voter ID suppression efforts, and voter apathy. We have to understand that this IS the only government we have, it DOES run our country and DOES effect our quality of life. The libertarian fantasy of being by yourself and the corporations running everything is an illusion; we don’t live by ourselves, we ARE indeed dependent on each other. One of the favorite conservative propaganda lines is “You can’t have the government do everything for you.” that’s not the point; the point is, WHO is the government working for? What government functions are the conservatives objecting to? From the actions of the Reagan administration to today, the targets for “cutting waste in government spending” and “fighting excessive regulation” have been food stamps, occupational safety and health (OSHA), environmental protection (EPA), civil rights, health insurance, school lunches, to name a few. But military spending and the police state? No problem there. The aforementioned programs came not from the generosity of the federal government, but after long and hard struggles by dedicated activists, working from the neighborhoods and streets, to have the federal government listen to the people, listen to the plight of workers, farmers, women, and distressed minorities, and not to be owned by the corporations. That was the situation back in the post-Civil War period, where corporations owned politicians and thus the government, and the military and police power of the state was used to put down workers who literally risked their lives for such now-commonplace things as the eight-hour day, child-labor laws, anti-discrimination laws in jobs and housing, regulation of corporations to hold them accountable for misconduct towards American consumers and workers (the same thing). Alas, we are heading backwards fast towards plutocracy once again. And it has been scientifically proven in a report by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northeastern University Professor Benjamin Page, from studying public policy, that the United States of America is definitely an oligarchy, not a democracy, since, according to the report, "A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time,” while “a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time." Now, hopefully, we can surrender the idea of the United States of America as this this magical place where dreams come true. Inequality affects such things as health care, education, housing, and how you and your children will fare in the future, whether you continue to live in a decent house or a cardboard box over a steam vent. And once we learn this, we can begin to resolve it. One form of the creep to oligarchy/plutocracy is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an evil twin of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A part of TPP is Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), where a corporation could sue for “potential loss of profits” due to governments trying to protect their citizens from abuses by corporations; these cases would be heard by tribunals staffed by-guess who?-corporate attorneys. Phillip Morris has sued Australia for strict cigarette-packaging laws; the French firm Veolia has sues Egypt for raising the country’s minimum wage; and the Swedish firm Vattenfall has sued Germany for phasing out nuclear energy. With the TPP system, US corporations, like with NAFTA, would close its plants in THIS country, thus closing down workers’ paychecks and their communities; workers spend money in local stores, thus keeping the economy alive. The corporations would now set up shop in nations, like Viet Nam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Peru, which have corrupt governments easy to pay off, and no effective regulations worth mentioning, and with armies and police who can beat down any effort of workers to organize. These are the good old days conservatives want to restore in this country; and these are the people who run our economy and own our politicians-people who think of nothing but the bottom line, the next quarterly profit, the next bonus and pay raise, due to the back-breaking labor of workers they would have murdered for asking for a living wage. These people who run our corporations, and thus our politics, know nothing about education or learning, they know no ethics or morality, no loyalty to any nation. I hope that the American people hear the wake-up call, for their lives, their families, and their futures. Bye!

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

The Mason Missile, October 21, 2014

Greetings! As we are still in the month of Tishrei, the month of Rosh Ha-Shona and Yom Kippur, along with Sukkot and Simchat Torah, I wish every one a happy, and prosperous new year. A bit of a brag-Reconstructionist Press, the publishing arm of the Reconstructionist movement of Judaism, had a contest for people to submit a haiku for the new year. I submitted, and I WON! The prize was a new Machzor, the prayer book for the High Holy Days. That is a valuable lesson, to do those things, try a contest-who knows, you might just WIN. One thing I’m being careful about is what in the Jewish tradition is called loshan ha-ra, speaking negatively about a person-even if that person is yourself. In spite of the silly old “sticks and stones” rhyme, words do indeed have a real affect on a person’s mind and behavior; verbal abuse is just as devastating as physical abuse. Let us be careful about speaking negatively about others, and especially about your own self. I have remained active in the Moonstone Arts Center (moonstoneartscenter.org), operated by Larry Robin, owner of the late, lamented Robin’s Book Store. The localized arts communities are the incubators of much important cultural activity, and they must be supported. Their web site is moonstoneartscenter.org. I was appalled by the unilateral action of the School Reform Commission, meant to supervise Philadelphia’s school system, to void the contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT). That body has demonstrated terrible arrogance in its dealings with the public; I remember watching a news clip of a session of the commission in action-citizen’s were demonstrating, chanting, holding placards, while the commission went about its business as if the public they are supposed to serve were NOT there. It’s a good sign, though, that students from the Creative and Performing Arts High School, the Science Leadership Academy, and the Franklin Learning Center went on strike in support of their teachers, showing these kids take their education seriously-they want to be prepared for the adult world. Election time is upon us; I go by the words of my dear late mentor and father figure, Harry Hyde Jr., “Vote as you please, but please vote.” Efforts to take away the right to vote, by reactionary Republicans in state legislatures, and under the control of the Koch brothers and other plutocrats, have passed laws that would only allow certain types of identification to be allows inside the voting station, such as current driver’s licenses and, in some states, hunting licenses; many low-income people and students don’t have any such ID’s, and thus they would be barred from voting-IF we give up, which, from everything I’ve seen, we have not done, and never will. There remains among white people in less urban areas the subliminal message of racial hostility, which is one of the appeals of the voter ID laws. I recall the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon, who used the leftover racial hatred of southern whites, angry with the Civil Rights movement, to get elected and reelected President. This was the strategy expounded in the book The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin P. Philips, and after Nixon’s passing this strategy was treated like political wizardry; instead of trying to unify the country and heal national wounds, reconcile one another in this country after the Civil Rights movement and Viet Nam, the tactic was to have “decent” people hate “those freaks and weirdoes.” There was also the element of nostalgia, a longing for a better time in the past-whenever that was-before all the upheaval and the drugs and the rock and roll, before “those people“ made themselves known and asserted their rights. People have to understand that those halcyon days when you can beat up anyone you like because they are of this or that demographic, or deny them a job, or evict them from a house, are long gone. This is all covered by Rick Perlsteins’s history of the late ‘sixties-early ‘seventies Nixonland. The so-called “left-liberal biased” news media, instead of challenging the Nixon Southern Strategy, or the idea that the social programs of the Great Society was merely “throwing money at problems” and did nothing to alleviate poverty and created a “culture of dependency,” repeated them until it became a popular gospel in the mews media and thus in public discourse. In spite of the conservative propaganda, the news media is comprised of larger and larger media corporations consolidating each other, and so no alternative voices can get through, except in the limited, localized way of locally based alternative presses. The news media, being comprised of large corporations, thus defers to the conservative viewpoint, since it is the most socially acceptable, being based on things as they “always” have been, thus being commonly accepted belief. But history does not stand still. In 2004, the news media looked at the religious right movement defeating referenda in several states that would have approved same sex marriage; this proved, said the commercial media, that Americans are overwhelmingly conservative in their “moral” values and are not motivated my economic issues. Now, ten years latter, we have same-sex marriage approved in the majority of states (including Pennsylvania) and the District of Columbia. This came about through the tireless work of activists over several decades, working in their local communities, advocating on specific issues and developing political skills and interpersonal networks-and planning for the long haul, further down the road from the next election cycle, a thing the news media does NOT do, preferring to treat presidential races like football games or horse races-spectator sports, and not opportunities to change governments or affect public policy. Please remember this as you vote. Your vote, and your participation in the system, does count. Bye!

Monday, September 1, 2014

The Mason Missile, September 1, 2014

Greetings, and happy (belated) birthday to me. That is, August 1st was my biological birthday. A person could have many rebirths in his/her life. I count the time I came to Philadelphia in September 1981 as my rebirth, so in many respects I’m 33 years mature, not necessarily old. All too many “older” people could be immature. I was appalled by the US Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case, which stated that a “closely held” corporation, like those owned by a single family, has the right to refuse to provide contraceptive care, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in their health care plans. This is on top of the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions, which had taken away the limits of how much a person or a corporation could donate to a political campaign. It is as if the modern corporation has become a machine, like out of science fiction, where the wealthy enter into and they become powerful. After the Hobby Lobby decision, the federal courts received petitions from other corporations for exemption from the ACA on “religious” grounds, disproving what Justice Samuel Alito said about the Hobby Lobby ruling being “narrow” in scope. To what extent does a corporation have the right to monitor and regulate an employee’s life? The traditional model of a corporation is the small, neighborhood shop or store, which is the model presented of a business, and not the contemporary multinational corporation which brings in billions of dollars a month and reaches every continent, and hires thousands of employees the stockholders never see. Your modern corporation is as bureaucratized as any modern government. So why worry about the private lives of employees? To me it’s more of a refusal by a corporation to assume responsibility for the health and well-being of the workers who build the products and provide the services that bring in the profits for corporations; their power and reach is so vast, they not only can dispose of individual workers but whole communities and nations in the pursuit to the greatest amount of profit for the least amount of payment. They look on workers as parts of the assembly line, not as human beings that have families to take care of. We must allow ourselves some downtime, some rest and refreshment after work; going on and on all the time, while it sounds heroic, doesn’t always work. I have participated in Labor Day, the holiday honoring workers and what we have accomplished for this nation, and for our families. I also am active in the movement to reestablish May Day as a workers’ holiday; who says we can’t have both? Who says we don’t deserve the time for rest and reflection? Rest and recreation are not only fun things to have, they are necessities, it is one of the Ten Commandments, shown in Deuteronomy 5:12-”Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the LORD your God: you shall not do any work-you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your ox or your ass, or any of your cattle or the stranger in your settlements, so that your male and female slave may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the LORD your God freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God has commended you to observe the Sabbath day.” Rest and refreshment are necessary for the physical, mental, and spiritual health of a person. Well, I have rested, and I will resume the workday tomorrow, and I will prepare for more downtime to take care of myself and those I love. Bye!

Thursday, July 3, 2014

The Mason Missile, July 4, 2014

Greetings! At last! Pennsylvania has joined the roster of states legalizing same-sex marriage. Originally, the plan was to have the court, and thereby the state, recognize same-sex marriages conducted in other states. The federal court, however, took it to the next level. Bans on same sex marriage are also being challenged in Texas and Utah, traditionally conservative states. There has been the fear raised about how same-sex marriage would change the definition of marriage, that it would lead to marrying farm animals (ridiculous!). But HAS the definition of marriage ALWAYS been one-man, one-women, till death they do part? In the Torah, we have Abraham marrying Sarah and holding Hagar as a concubine-servant; Jacob conned into marrying Leah, and marrying Rachel after seven more years of work with Laban; Jacob’s wives and concubines together giving birth to Jacob’s sons; David marrying Machal, then lusting after Bathsheba; Solomon with a thousand wives and concubines to seal alliances with neighboring tribes and kingdoms. So, you can’t say “religious values” as a reason for why marriage is a one-man-one-woman thing. One book that discusses this is Sex At Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, which chronicles marriage practices among indigenous tribes in Central and South America and in the Pacific; in many tribes marriage and divorce is as simple as leaving and entering the other person’s hut, usually on the initiative of the female; many of these tribes are matriarchal, with much decision-making by the women. In more patriarchal societies, marriage has nothing to do with who loves who, but it is a matter of transferring property and sealing alliances. Echoes of this is in the new conservative Christian phenomenon of “purity balls,” featured on ABC News; the fathers pledge to protect the sexual “purity” of their daughters and vet any men that go near them. At the “purity ball,” the fathers sign a pledge to watch over the purity of their daughters “as high priest of the home.” The fathers sign it, and it resembles a marriage vow, and they conclude with a “father-daughter” dance. As far as I know, there is no similar ritual that fathers take towards guarding the “purity” of their sons; the sexuality of the young women is thus the property of the father, and it is transferred, via marriage, to the husband. All this takes place in the anniversary of the Stonewall riot of June 1969, when young Gay men, drag queens, and lesbians sat in a crummy, mob-owned bar and the police came to raid the place and arrest everyone; but, this time, instead of taking the harassment and abuse from the cops, the patrons fought the riot cops for several days, thus starting the current LGBT rights movement. There was, previous to the Stonewall riot, underground organizing of Gay men and Lesbians; there was the Mattachine Society, called a “homophile” organization, founded in 1950 by Harry Hay, who was a veteran organizer for the Community Party and the CIO; and the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955 by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. These groups were organized in the 1950s, the time of the Red Scare, the time when “”homosexuals” were considered security risks. All this could be seen in the wonderful documentary film Before Stonewall, go rent the DVD; it shows the enormous historical and political “prep work” that went on before the Stonewall incident. Really, equality doesn’t need the permission of others to happen. But still it has been fought for, usually with blood. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of three young Civil Rights activists-James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman-in June 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the “Freedom Summer” campaign to register Black people to vote. They investigated the arson fire at a Black church, were later arrested by the police for “speeding,” and then were handed over to the Ku Klux Klan to be killed. Later that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in schools, housing, and other facilities. (Voting rights were not included in the bill; it was covered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) But-The Republican party has taken over the tactic of code-worded race-baiting. Not for nothing did Ronald Reagan start his presidential campaign in 1980 in a town near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were murdered, and he included the phrase “I believe in states’ rights,” the old war cry of the pre-Civil war-south, as their mantra for enslaving African-Americans. It is a tribute to the Civil Rights movement-and to the young activists who risked their lives against official and freelance terror in the south- that blatant, public, in-your-face racial slurs are not acceptable in public discourse (which is the basis of the right-wing whine about-I HATE this term-”political correctness,” as if they would fight to the death for the right to scream racial and ethnic slurs). The tactic from then on was exemplified in the “Southern Strategy” of the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon in 1968, to play on racially-motivated fears of “urban crime’ and “welfare loafers.” After the re-election of Nixon in 1972, it was as if the country had amnesia-all the discussion about Civil Rights and reducing poverty was reduced to cutting needless government spending and kicking the lazy welfare bums off the rolls, and in general reducing the size of so-called “big government”-and including liberating corporations from the burden of regulatory agencies, while consciously not discussing the problems of air and water pollution, occupational safety and health, product safety, financial fraud, to name a few, and trusting in the “free enterprise system” to handle everything, trusting the corporate geniuses (such as Bernie Madoff) running our corporations (such as Enron) to handle everything. Remember, it was NOT the federal government deciding all of a sudden to implement from on high financial regulation, Civil Rights enforcement, occupational safety laws, consumer safety, etc.; it came from the work of dedicated activists, people like those you go to school and the job with, who worked hard at campaigning for these things-people like Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the other young brave Civil Rights activists of the Freedom Summer of 1964. We may not have to face fire hoses, mean police dogs, even meaner cops, or homicidal Klansmen, but ever time we make a stand, people will join us, and we set an example for future campaigns for freedom-and believe me, the campaign for freedom never ends. Enjoy your Fourth-bye!

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

The Mason Missile, April 10, 2014

Greetings! I stand corrected-A reader questioned me as to whether it was Idaho or Iowa that legalized same-sex marriage. Here is a list of states where same-sex marriage is legal, and they include the District of Columbia: California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Maryland, Washington. (Utah’s ban on gay marriage was overturned by a federal court, but reinstated by the Supreme Court pending a review.) Quite a wide swath of the country, and its citizens, have called for an end on banning same-sex marriages. (Pennsylvania-not yet, but eventually…) But back in 2004, while America was mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, commentators kept saying that the only thing that worried voters was same-sex marriage; Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political advisor, arranged for referenda is certain states that would specifically outlaw gay marriage, and that would turn out the religiously-oriented conservatives to vote. Now, same-sex marriage is growing in acceptance, in public consciousness and in law; what a change in so short a time. The movement is also growing to legalize the recreational use of marijuana-Colorado and Washington are two states that have legalized it, and there are also movements in other states to start small, with medical marijuana. ( I DO have a slight cold, heh heh.) Ideas and causes that for decades have been relegated to the fringes of political discourse (by whom? The corporate news media? The political “leadership?”) has now arrived in the “mainstream“-by people, activists and people in general, who have decided “This isn’t working, no more of this!” Of course, politicians are going to take their time with changing these laws. Such is the nature of conservatism, a belief or idea can be proven wrong, but they cling to it anyway because it’s what they’ve grown up with and they’re afraid to think anything different. Opposing marijuana and same-sex marriage have been default mental modes in our politics and our corporate “news” media, it’s been orthodoxy for SO long. Forgive me for being away for so long, I have had problems with my computer, my electricity, and my furnace all through the winter. And just as I had to upgrade my entire household infrastructure, the United States needs to upgrade its own infrastructure of road and highways, bridges, levees, airports, and railroads. This has been an old issue, dating back to the Andrew Jackson administration, when it was known as “internal improvements,” at the time when capitalism was developing and farmers and manufacturers needed roads, bridges, canals, and waterways to move their goods to the market. BUT- the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has a “report card” web site, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org, which shows the decay the nations structure of airports (D), bridges (C+), dams, drinking water systems, levees, inland waterways (D-), harbors, public transit, (D), railroads (C+), highways, solid waste treatments systems, and schools(D). A serious program of public works repair and upgrading, like what went on during FDR’s New Deal, would employ workers, and they would have money to provide for their families, and they would spend their money in locally-based stores-THIS is how you revitalize the economy, from the bottom up, and not by giving tax breaks and grants to billionaires. BUT-the Republicans in Congress have constantly refused to vote for the money to pay for such projects. Thus the economic well-being of American working families is imperiled by the most foolish economic game-playing. Keep these things in mind in November, so we can FINALLY vote these idiots out of Congress. What have I been up to otherwise? In March, to help recover from the miserable month, I joined my wonderful congregation Leyv Ha-Ir (leyvhair.org) for Purim, the wild and crazy holiday which commemorates the Megillah of Esther, which tells of the beautiful queen, married to the not-too-bright king Ahasueras, who foiled the plot by the evil prime minister Haman (BOO!) to massacre all the Jews in the Persian empire. It’s the holiday where arrogant power-mongers are taken down a few notches. This month, we will commemorate Pesach, or Passover, the time of the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, known in Hebrew as Mitzraim, the narrow place, the place of limitation. It’s a wonderful time to look at our lives and find out what are our OWN places of limitation and what we are enslaved to-a bad habit or relationship, low self-image and self esteem. It’s also the holiday where the youngest person at the table asks Mah Neshanic - “Why is this night different from other nights?” The asking of questions is encouraged as the first phase of learning, which is the enemy of the tyrant ignorance. Plus, I will, later on in the month, go on vacation, rewarding myself for enduring the miserable winter and what I had to put up with. Rest and recreation are not luxuries, they are necessities, for your physical and mental health. It is a sign of good self-esteem, to know you are worthy of some fun and pleasure. I hope you out there treat each other just as well. Bye!