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Making the decision to lose weight means that you commit to making some fundamental changes to your lifestyle. It won’t necessarily be easy, but it’ll be worth it, because being overweight is an unhealthy lifestyle and making the decision to live healthily will improve not only your physical wellbeing but your mental and emotional state as well. Personal relationships will improve, you will find yourself more confident about your self-image and it can even play a big role in furthering your career.

So in order to get you started on that path towards a better, brighter and happier you, we’ve laid out the hard facts and simple truths about weight loss.

Set Your Goals

Without setting realistic goals, you will find yourself quickly discouraged and back on the couch. Everybody wants to lose weight quickly – as marketers well know with their promises to make you “Lose 100 pounds in a week!” strategies- but the truth is that our bodies aren’t wired to make such drastic changes in a short amount of time.

That’s why the first step is being realistic about your weight loss – to lose weight you will need to approach it with the same dedication and focus that you would use to approach a large project. Set your goals, allocate time and track your progress. Scheduling time is particularly important as we’re hardwired from birth to get to school on time, tune in for our favorite TV shows on time and live according to the clock. So if you wake up every morning with the time already scheduled for taking a run or lifting weights, you’re much more likely to stay on track and make progress. This is one of the reasons that joining a regularly scheduled weight-loss clinic can be a very good idea.

Plus, by setting realistic goals you feel much more rewarded when you accomplish those goals, and that sense of accomplishment will only encourage you to continue with your plan.

Real Exercise Yields Real Results

Everybody knows that exercise is essential to weight loss. The fact is it’s extremely difficult to lose weight without exercising. But what some people don’t realize is that there’s a difference between doing a few sit-ups before breakfast and seriously dedicating time to do some hardcore workout. That’s because there is a good amount of truth in the saying “No pain, no gain.” If you’re not sweating and breathing heavily, you’re not losing weight -and there are several things you can do to make sure you’re getting the most out of your workout.

For starters, don’t take breaks. Taking breaks in between workouts slows your heart-rate and makes it harder to keep up a fast pace. Think of the gym like you think of the workplace – you have to do your best and work hard to succeed in your career and it’s no different with your exercise.

Another effective strategy is to get a workout partner or personal trainer who’s more fit and experienced with exercise than you are. This will motivate you to work harder and hopefully get you up to par with your partner.

And of course the most obvious way to ensure you’re getting a thorough workout is to join a gym. Treadmills and Thighmasters are great for home workout, but it can be difficult to fit all the equipment necessary to ensure a comprehensive workout in your home.

Motivation is Key

Now I know what you’re thinking – “Intense exercise is great and all but it’s easier said than done.” The truth is- it’s easier done than said. You can procrastinate your weight loss until the day you die – or you can take a few simple steps that will provide you with the motivation to work your butt off (literally).

Some popular motivational techniques include taking before and after pictures, hiring a personal trainer, joining a weight loss clinic or even signing up to an online weight loss forum. Reshape your life so that every aspect of it reminds you of your goal – getting fit. With enough motivating factors, it becomes easier to work out than to skip it.

The reason that weight-loss clinics and personal trainers work so well for encouraging weight loss is because of the social and competitive nature of human beings. If we see our friend losing weight at a faster rate than us, we will want to best them. If you are logging on to a weight-loss forum every night and bragging about the amount of reps you accomplished, you will feel pressured into living up to your accomplishments.

Also, tell your family, friends and co-workers about your latest endeavor to lose weight and keep them regularly updated. Surround yourself with positive people and make them proud of your progress.

You Are What You Eat

In your quest to lose weight there are two enemies – laziness and temptation. The laziness is defeated with exercise but then there’s one more foe left to fight – the temptation of certain tasty foods. And while both are formidable opponents, temptation might just be more dangerous than laziness as an entire day of exercise can be cancelled out by a single pizza dinner.

This is why eating healthy and avoiding bad foods is the other golden pillar of weight loss. It’s the yin to the exercising yang and it requires some drastic changes to your way of living and your outlook on food.

To eat right, you must start by reading labels and restocking your fridge and there are plenty of simple changes you can make off the bat – such as buying whole wheat bread and pasta, low-fat mayonnaise and reduced fat milk. But also invest in a weight loss book that doesn’t promote easy solutions to big weight problems and research what kind of foods affect what areas of your body. For instance, high-fat cheeses and milk will increase your tummy fat more than anywhere else on your body.

Another technique is to start checking the caloric content in your food and compare it with the calorie loss displayed on modern treadmill machines. When you realize that one chocolate chip cookie could undo a half hour on the treadmill, it becomes a lot less appetizing.

But more than anything – you have to control your portions. Everybody may slip up and indulge in a cheeseburger every now and then, but the trick is eating only half of it. Additionally, you can take simple steps that reduce the amount of food you eat on a daily basis.

One effective technique for reducing portions involves tricking your body into thinking that you’ve eaten more than you have. To do this you can try eating slower and chewing your food for longer. Another way to do this is to eat more fiber, which studies have shown makes you feel fuller, longer. You can also try using smaller forks and plates or even throw your silverware and a dirty napkin onto your remaining food to make it appear unappetizing and signify the end of the meal. These techniques highlight the importance that psychology plays in losing weight and staying fit.

Don’t Lose Hope!

Finally, remember to never lose hope. Just like in anything we do, there will be setbacks and the results won’t be immediate. Try to remember that good wholesome feeling that we all experience after a long workout. Remind yourself of that nasty, depressed feeling after a fatty meal and focus on long-term goals rather than short-term pleasures. After all, life is too short to go through it feeling self-conscious about your appearance and avoiding fun physical activities such as hiking, biking and sports. Everybody deserves a healthy body and it’s up to you to exercise your right to exercise.

RESEARCHING “EAGLE RISING”

One of the tasks I enjoy the most about writing my historical fiction books is the research involved in crafting a believable story.  It is those little details that create a sense of time and place, and though they may sometimes be little noticed by the reader, they are largely responsible for the feeling the reader experiences of being immersed in another era.  And as a bonus to myself, I get to learn all kinds of interesting facts and stories, often running across nuggets I wasn’t looking for but which make it into the book anyway.

For instance, although it is established early in Eagle Rising that the town of Timber Fork has a doctor, you will notice that there is no mention of summoning a doctor to attend a childbirth.  For medical matters, I relied heavily on a book entitled Bleed, Blister, and Purge:  A History of Medicine on the American Frontier by Dr. Volney Steele.  It states that a normal childbirth was not considered to be part of the medical realm, and in fact, was regarded as a waste of a busy doctor’s time.  Not a well-known fact and certainly not something for which I set out to search.

Old West-era guns was a subject that took up a lot of research time and held some fascination for me.  I spent probably more time than necessary watching a moving animation on the internet of a Gatling gun to determine how it could be disabled quickly.

In Eagle Rising, the main character, Nate Hunter, spends much of his time amongst the Cheyenne people where undoubtedly all of the dialogue would have been spoken in the Cheyenne dialect.  Obviously that wouldn’t work in print, but I did like to include a few words here and there in the Cheyenne language.  Don’t even try to pronounce them unless you know the language!  Phonetically they sound nothing like the written words.  They appear in the book solely for effect.  Meanwhile, the English words in those scenes may sound slightly unnatural for dialogue.  My intention was to convey how the words may have translated into English.  I avoided the use of too many contractions and leaned toward a simpler vocabulary.  The unusual method I used to help me was to imagine the English words appearing as subtitles at the bottom of a movie screen!  If I could see the print as subtitles in my mind’s eye and it matched the feel of the scene, I put it into the book.

My own fascination with astronomy shows up a couple of times in Eagle Rising.  A simple planisphere was a tremendous help and sometimes a distraction for me as I held it above my head till my neck hurt trying to imagine the sky as Nate and Tara saw it before towns lit by artificial light came to the frontier.

Late in the book you will very briefly meet the character of Sergeant Travis Van Deen.  He shows up as an ‘orderly of the day’ at Fort Mason.  In my reading about military life on the frontier, I learned that this was a very coveted position that the soldiers vied for each day because it was easy and got them out of doing any serious hard work.  They were often chosen based on how well they were turned out in uniform.  A true story is told of two soldiers between whom the commander could not decide for orderly of the day.  Both were dressed immaculately and according to the rule book.  Finally the commander had them lift the bottoms of their pants to reveal their socks.  One man’s socks did not match, thus he lost the job to the other one. 

Pay attention to Sergeant Van Deen in Eagle Rising.  I am setting him up to be a major character in the next book.  He even has a secret, to which I alluded in Eagle Rising, although it is so subtle I am certain that no one will get it!

Finally, I am most excited to share with you that in Eagle Rising, you will be a rare witness to an authentic Cheyenne sweat lodge ceremony.  This scene probably required more research time and thought than any other, for not only did I need to capture the emotional intensity of the ancient ceremony, but for the first time in either of the Eagle Shadow books, I had to get in touch with Nate Hunter’s true religious feelings.  It took some time for those feelings to manifest themselves to me, but when they did, the scene flowed smoothly and easily.

It is my hope that I can convey to you, the reader, the power of this story as I felt it while researching and writing it.

The pallet truck scale is a portable version of the floor scale and provides the user a great option to measure the weight as it is moved from one place to other. In other words it can be rightly called as a floor scale on wheels. This type of weighing scale is basically a pallet truck, which has an inbuilt measuring system that displays weight readings of the objects placed on it. The pallet jack scale has a robust design and made from stainless steel and Zinc coated with chrome plating. The stainless steel provides weighing scale, the tenacity to withstand heavy duty loading while the chrome plating protects it from corrosion and imparts a long working life. The pallet truck scale consists of a fork that that is made from hardened steel. The goods are placed on the wooden or plastic pallet and this pallet is lifted off the ground to some height, by the fork, of the pallet jack scale. An LCD display unit records the combined weight of pallet and the goods. The weight of pallet, which is already known, is deducted from this combined weight to give the true weight of the goods. This all can be done as the goods are moved from one place to the other in the factory or warehouse and is a great feature that saves time. The result is reduction in labor overheads and the resultant increase in the productivity of the firm. The pallet truck scale can be moved manually or is battery driven. The manual type pallet jack sale requires less maintenance because it does not have batteries that need to be recharged at regular intervals. While on the hand the battery driven pallet truck scale speed up the weighing and stacking operations because a driver can drive around and conduct handling operations quickly. pallet truck scales are designed to weigh and measure heavy loads safely without compromising the safety of the workers and the accuracy of the weighing operation. This is a specialized machine that provides material handling solutions to large warehouses and manufacturing facilities where time is of essence. You can know more about pallet truck scales at www.paylessscales.com.

There are a total of 4 specialist training sectors in the full CompTIA A+ syllabus, of which you’ll need certification in two subjects for competency in A+. We would advise however that limiting yourself to 2 of the study sections could expose flaws in your knowledge when applying for a job. Choose a course with all 4 subjects – for greater confidence in the world of work.

A+ certification in isolation will mean that you’re able to mend and maintain laptops, Macs and PC’s; ones that are most often not part of a network – essentially the domestic or small business sector. Should you be thinking of looking after computer networks, add the excellent CompTIA Network+ to your A+ course. Taking this course as well will enable you to get a higher paid position. Other ones that might be interesting to you are the Microsoft networking qualifications (MCP, MCSA and MCSE).

Workshops can be offered as a strong aspect by some training schools. When you chat with the majority of computer industry trainees who have used them, you’ll find they generally end up being seen as a waste of time as they hadn’t properly considered the following:

* Repeated visits to the centre – very long trips a lot of the time.

* Requesting time off work – most training companies only offer availability during weekdays and link several days together. This can be hard for a lot of working people, especially when travel time is included.

* With just 4 weeks annual leave, giving half of them to study workshops leaves us with very few opportunities for days off.

* Training classes often become quickly full, giving us the only option of a less-than-ideal slot.

* Tension is sometimes created in the classroom where the right pace for one student is not the same as another.

* Many students speak about the high (and unexpected) costs associated with travelling back and forth to the training centre while forking out for food and accommodation gets very high.

* It’s important to maintain privacy. We should never risk losing any lift up the ladder that could awarded to us because our employer knows we’re retraining.

* We all find it difficult to ask questions in a room full of our fellow attendees – who wants to look like they’re the only one who doesn’t get it?

* For those of us who need to occasionally live away for part of the week, imagine the increased difficulty in reaching the needed workshops, when time is at a premium.

Why don’t you watch a video and learn with industry specialists one-on-one from filmed modules, working on them when it suits you – not somebody else. Ponder this… With a laptop then you could work in any location you choose. And 24 hr-a-day support is only a web-click away if you hit challenges. Irrespective of how regularly you feel you need to repeat something, video-based tutors won’t ever lose patience! And remember, as an added bonus, you can forget taking notes. Everything is already there for you to use. Put directly: You save money, avoid hassle, don’t waste time and completely avoid killing more trees.

Those that are drawn to this type of work are often very practical, and won’t enjoy sitting at a desk in class, and struggling through thick study-volumes. If you’re thinking this sounds like you, use multimedia, interactive learning, where learning is video-based. We see a huge improvement in memory retention when we use multiple senses – experts have been clear on this for years now.

Find a course where you’ll receive a selection of CD or DVD ROM’s – you’ll learn by watching video tutorials and demonstrations, and be able to hone your abilities through virtual lab’s. It’s wise to view examples of the courseware provided before you make your decision. The minimum you should expect would be videoed instructor demonstrations and interactive modules with audio-visual elements.

Opt for physical media such as CD or DVD ROM’s if possible. Thus avoiding all the issues associated with broadband outages, failure and signal quality issues etc.

Does job security honestly exist anywhere now? Here in the UK, where business constantly changes its mind on a whim, it certainly appears not. We could however discover security at the market sector level, by probing for high demand areas, mixed with shortages of trained staff.

The Information Technology (IT) skills deficit in the UK currently stands at roughly twenty six percent, as noted by the latest e-Skills study. To put it another way, this highlights that the United Kingdom can only locate three properly accredited workers for every four jobs that exist now. Appropriately qualified and commercially grounded new workers are as a result at a complete premium, and in all likelihood it will stay that way for many years to come. Quite simply, retraining in Information Technology during the years to come is most likely the finest career direction you could choose.

The behavior of America’s leaders in this first year of the Obama administration has been less than stellar; name calling on the floor of the Senate, open mockery of the office of the President, death threats made to congressmen are just a few of the more questionable behaviors that have reared their heads in these last months.

More disturbing is that as the deadline for the potential signing of HR3590 drew closer, more vocal rhetoric and in some cases outright slander and overt racism in the case of the Tea Party and the Christian militias (which in the last year went from 180 groups to over 540 groups and growing) continued to grow and spew forth vitriolic venom both on the ground and in the airwaves. Glen Beck’s screams of “Progressivism” and Rush Limbaugh’s continued polarization of the GOP’s base seemed to fuel a frenzy of national hatred that culminated with the final signing of the health care legislation.

The question begs to be asked: What exactly could cause such a major swing in the overall mental state of the nation that would cause social groups to abandon all sense of propriety and what was once considered to be common sense and human decency? And this transition did not happen overnight. I can find articles describing this phenomenon years before Obama came into office.  How is it that even children can see the behavior of every adult whether they be “tea-bagger” Republican or liberal “bleeding-heart” Democrat has been a travesty worthy of school yard bullying complete with arguments about policies that no one has read in their entirety and cannot even begin to really understand the ramifications of, for years in the future; each group claiming to be more right than the other and willing to kill to prove it. Is this what good government is supposed to look like? No wonder our children want nothing to do with the idea of government – its is a regression to the schoolyard of their youth where nothing got solved, everyone was right and no one could apologize for fear of appearing weak and losing face.

So how do we begin to make a transition from this fear-enabled, angst-filled, respect-stunted, violence-prone and civility-impaired nation of fools without the ability to hold even the most basic of conversations without resorting to ad hominem attacks about Progressivism, Socialism, Marxism, conservatism, Nazism, racism, or Communism and get back to a nation powered by ideas, fueled by innovation, guided by clear vision, charged with enthusiasm for the future, and with the idea that only as a nation of real equals do we have a chance to tackle a potentially troubling and very challenging future filled with perils aplenty – a constantly growing need for diverse and renewable energy sources, better food to feed an obese and sedentary nation, a more even educational system providing higher quality education at lower costs, handling a crumbling technological infrastructure in all of our cities, ever-rising debts in the management of said cities, mass transit systems, school systems, prison systems and local governments, a reduction of our nation’s status as the leader in technological innovation, military might, and national idealism, wars all over the globe, some of which we take part in and other we shamefully allow to take place without intervention because our assets are not yet imperiled. Do we not have enough to deal with without the people and particularly the leaders of our nation acting as if we had simply gone mad?

No need to break out your DSM IV

As much as I would like to say that this is a mental health issue, I cannot agree with that assessment. Nor will I say that this is about the Left versus the Right and which has the nation’s best interests at heart. And I will not allow people such as Limbaugh, Beck and Stern (and any other raving media lunatic) the option to say that he has had the power to move the minds of men toward madness.

I say this is a creeping condition. A hidden fungal infection, beneath the veneer of civility, something that has been with this nation since its beginning; an underlying sense of shame, a sense of entitlement, a sense of misplaced anger, and a sense of righteous indignation; stirred together, simmer over four hundred years, add some civil wars, some terrible recessions, stir together in a Dust Bowl, fold in some misplaced ideals (McCarthyism for example), sprinkle on a few pogroms, ladle in laws that denied what we now consider rights, place a few strategically fired bullets at leaders who saw a better, brighter world,  and the add a generous helping of landmines all over the world to deny people of their opportunities year after year. Bake until there are competitors for the world’s apparently diminished resources, bring to a boil over a burning building that collapses strangely when a plane with zealots deny three thousand of their lives and couple that with the retaliation that deprives millions more of theirs and you have a recipe for a madness that encompasses the country and poisons the world, a sickness spread through the airwaves, leaping from televisions, repeated on computers, stained to newsprint and by contagion in hidden office arguments and you have one of the most virulent plagues known to humanity, a loss of hope.

Hopelessness, of a future less promising than the one your parents had made even more futile by the actions of an elite few who want for nothing except for a connection to the human billions who do without that which their  financial billions could make right. Can we doubt that this is the recipe for madness? A sense of rage that would drive men to take up arms, kill their brothers, to sacrifice, like Abraham, anyone or anything that might make the world return to the Promised Lands of their religions. Is it any wonder that people would strap on explosives filled with nails and shards of broken glass and blow themselves to bits on the promise that the next life, which none of us could technically be sure exists, would be better than the life they were leading the day they died? Our real goal is to return people to that hope, to a future that has the potential to be better than the one they see when they look up, whether it be out of their homeless shelter or their mansion window, a future that will not improve if we cannot admit that we are wrong about the present.

So if you want to improve the future, say it with me: I was wrong.

I don’t know what it was that I was wrong about and it does not matter. Did I misinterpret what was said? Did I assume when I should have asked? Did I know what Marxism, or Socialism or Communism really meant before I said those things I said in a meeting when I might have been a bit incensed? How much do I really know about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac or the Federal Reserve or about my credit rating or how the stock exchange really relates to me or whether Windows 7 really is the operating system for my computer?

A need to be right?

Why are we so insistent that we must be right? My religion is the right one. My God told me. All other are wrong enough that I must die to prove it, unless I can kill them first. My government is the right one, because it has held power for a few days longer than the one before it, or has historically proven to be the one that raised fewer taxes or managed to make more changes that helped people or because business thrived under my government and languished under yours? That the Atkins diet is better than Weight Watchers?

STOP! Just stop!

History is great but its weakness is everyone remembers what is most convenient and important to them (relativism run amok). So when history gets people in a killing mood it is time to look toward the future and ask how what we are planning will affect the lives of people once we are gone. Yes, let’s get back to the idea of planning for a future that we will never get to see. That will make us think a little bit harder, plan a little bit better and teach our children well enough that they can have a chance to make that future happen for themselves once we are gone. Let’s go back to providing our children a legacy that will make them proud of us and still prouder of themselves for planning a better future for their children.

Enough shame to go around

You raging pundits, go home. Find something useful to do with your amazing oratory skills. Perhaps some poor neighborhoods of your choice could be inspired to greatness with those powers you currently wield without thought to their effects on the nation, on the future or most importantly on yourself. Could you live with yourself if you were to wake up in the future of your making only to find out it was the worst of all worlds, a hellish nightmare from which there was no awakening? Or are you so out of touch you would find a way to blame it on the other party, even while you were having your sandwich of Soylent Green?

You politicians, do your job. The one we hired you for. The one that, if I have my way this letter will incite people to replace you with someone who can read, who will write laws that they are not afraid to live under, who will create a responsible future that benefits everyone, not just the rich and powerful and who will consider every man woman and child under his or her constituency as precious as every drop of water is to a man lost in a desert, each drop coveted, beloved, needed and considered as important as the drop before it. Be responsible, be conscientious, be vigilant, be valiant, be leaders of men.

You media distributors, grow up. We know your secret, if it bleeds it leads. Sensationalism sells papers, video, commercials, and other advertising, continuing to make you the most powerful force for influencing the minds of men and women. We know you will do or say anything to be at the top.  But remember this too: scum floats to the top, too. We know who you are and you are wondering why no one is happy with newspapers? Less and less in newspapers matters to people anymore. You grow irrelevant to the common man and he knows this. Continue in this pattern and you will be assured of one thing. In ten years, there will be ten newspapers for each time zone in the United States (currently there are 1,400 daily newspapers nationwide and thousands of local weeklies but that number is dropping fast). And do not think that the Internet will save you. The need for relevancy will follow you there. Find the heart of America and give it what it really needs which is hope for a future. Lead them with words that inspire as well as inform. You can let the printed word build the future or you can watch from the sidelines as “citizen journalism” replaces you with its imperfect writing styles, less than stellar grammar and polarized, biased views. But those views will be relevant to the people reading it and yours won’t be.

You elite one percent, pay attention. Your time of reckoning is at hand. This economic collapse that everyone wants to place at the feet of President Obama is not his alone. He may be in charge of the nation, but he just got here a year ago. In the seventies and eighties when lobbyists for big business and deregulation were able to convince the government that you would be more profitable if allowed to be less regulated, you were. But no one was watching you. No one paid attention to your schemes that allowed you first to run rampant here in the States and then spread your machinations upon a vulnerable yet already scheming world trying to figure out how to get markets in America whilst you set your hungry eyes upon their wretched poor trying to figure out how you could exploit them for less than you were paying your middle class and poorer brethren here in the states.

Rich foreign investors purchased American assets and you moved your factories, your manufacturing, your services overseas and left your brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers of circumstance and shared fates without resources to buy your wares. And when your wares returned from their foreign sweatshops, there was no one left here to buy them, except for you and your elite friends who lacked the purchasing power to ignite the economic engine of shame, left under-fueled by your quests for profit. I do not say that your astronomical profits were wrong, just very shortsighted; myopic, indeed.

As for the handling of the economic wealth of our nation, the dealings in land and property that allowed for some financial slight of hand to further increase your wealth and prosperity at the further expense of our brothers in arms and hunger, you suddenly experienced a moment of fear, as you watched your Brothers, Lehman struggle for life and suddenly drown in a frenzy of economic skulduggery. Capitalists that you were, you claimed that your right to make money made you immune to the vagaries of fate and that you were too big to fail and that it was up to the government and the little people you scorned so many years before to find a way to buoy you up on their backs one more time, whilst you flew in your corporate jets to plead your case before the government for Socialist or are they Marxist handouts?

Your time has come. You will not have the option of being too big to fail. You played that card and then spit in the eyes of your saviors by paying bonuses to your elite, again. You would think you could maintain your charade of contriteness for at least a year while the sting of keeping you rich faded from the memory of the poor and disenfranchised moved out of their homes which you helped them lose, into the shelters that cities can now, not afford to pay for, while your corporate jets fly over those regions who lost their pensions and are now watching their stores, towns, villages, families, and farms shutter their doors and their histories just in time to watch Glenn Beck tell them its Progressivism that is making them poor when you know that its really you. Don’t make any more mistakes, you elite, lest people remember the expression “Eat the Rich.”

And don’t think I forgot you, Average Joe; you too have a part to play in this madness, this contagion that you are spreading with your ignorance of facts, your ignorance of governance, your apathy to your children, to your community, to your own fate. Stuffing your faces full of empty calories and fulfilling fats, you watch American Idol, waiting to see which of these nobodies will get their 15 minutes of fame, 14 of which they will use up on the show and the last no talented gasp will be that 1 minute that you remember them after they leave the show and wait for the next season of unreality television. Your consumption does not stop with bad food and bad television, you enhance it with partisan television, television that is completely under the control of people who only have one mission for you, Joe; stay stupid, stay afraid, stay at work and stay at the store. And while you are at it, drink too much, exercise too little, take these white pills for your headaches, these blue ones for your impotence and be sure to get to the pharmacy for your insulin for your television or computer-induced diabetes.

No Joe, it’s not only your fault that you are subject to these ills. Judging from the fact that most of America is morbidly obese (okay maybe not most, but more than a third), I would say that the plan to keep you fat, crippled, illiterate, and underemployed is working fine; most of your fellow Americans are in the same boat. So I have to ask you, since you are angry about the things that you know almost nothing about, can you be angry about the things you can be sure of? If you keep eating the way you do, you will die, you will die poor, you will die soon and you will die uncomfortably. You will die leaving your family no legacy because you will spend every penny you have to live as long as you can with as low a quality of life that is possible in our “first World nation” with its inadequate health care and overpriced insurance; so Joe, angry yet?

I know you are, you have lost a job that you had for twenty years and are now being told in your fifties that you need to train for a new career and you better do it before you lose your home to foreclosure the same way you lost your pension to a corporate escapade a few years before. I feel your pain. I would be pissed too if I expected to retire in ten years and now have to work until I die, no matter how soon or how uncomfortable that is going to be. Twenty years, on your feet for eight hours a day saying “would you like fries with that” would make me mad as hell!

I am going to leave you bigots, partisan political sociopaths and religious nuts out of this particular conversation, you are simply too unreasonable to talk to and if I do my job right, no one will listen to you again, anyway.

True Freedom

No one has to be angry anymore because you are now free to be wrong. Your urges to be right have forced you to say things you did not mean, to do things you knew were wrong and take risks that were completely unnecessary. Go to your boss and tell him or her, that you have no idea of anything you said in the last meeting was actually true and that you were likely going to have to do something illegal to make the numbers that you promised. We’ll wait. Now, don’t you feel better? A huge weight is lifted because you know you will not have to lie tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Lies that compound daily do not lead to a harmonious and stress free life. Lies compounded daily lead to coming to work with a couple of handguns and blowing your boss and likely yourself into the next life. It will now be okay to admit you don’t know anything about black people’s lives in America and the fact that you hate them is really based on the fact that your father hated them and his father before him. You hate them because it is the thing to do, something you know, not something you know anything about. You hate because you don’t know anything else to do.

I say America, you need a time out (I would recommend a spanking but to administer 300 million spankings would take me quite some time). You need time away from your television and those raging pundits, time away from your media and their constant urge to create a fear of everything around you. I want you to take time away from your Blackberries, your iPods, your computers, your twittering masturbation, your media frenzy. Put down your Xbox controller, your PS3, your Wii-motes, remotes, and get up from your sofa. Stretch. Go outside. If it’s unpleasant weather, bundle up, go anyway. If you have a dog, take it out. If you have a cat, chase it out. Grab your kids, your wife, your husband, your girlfriend. Go to your nearest neighbor and introduce yourself. Then get them to go with you to your next neighbor and do the same. Do that until every house and every door that you can see from your door has a name on it. Then go home, sit with your family and marvel at their tales of their day. Savor the food on your table, if you do not have a table, remember when you did, and visualize the day that you will again.

Let go of the false divisions that the media use to keep us polarized. Those false divisions of race, creed, color, religion, political party, economic status, class, degree, and neighborhood are all created to keep us at odds. They are truly false. Turn off the lights and all people become the same. If you have a problem, close your eyes and put yourself in the place of the person who is asking you for your time, your support, your largess, your succor. You would hope he will be as helpful for you as you will be for him. Ultimately humans are herd animals, seeking shelter in the collectiveness of our cities and towns. But as herd animals if we can be divided we become prey to any unscrupulous predator that happens by. Nearly anyone who provides a major service to you can be a predator in the right light.

None of us will be free of this madness until we remember that we are all in this together. Gene Rodenberry’s fictional but highly logical race, the Vulcans, posited the IDIC – Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, an idea that promotes that true intelligence promotes and accepts diversity to spur innovation and invention. We would be wise to consider this idea. There are no strangers, only friends we have not met yet. Once we realize that each of us is all of us, we will be able to be angry but only for a moment. The same way you are angry at your husband when he does not take out the trash, but forgive him when he remembers to help with the dishes. We will be able to realize that each of us is imperfect and yet perfect just the way that we are.

We are all bound together through that ultimate equalizer, Time; “it slays kings, ruins towns, and brings high mountains down.” We are all mortal and none of our works will last unless the least of us is as important as the best of us. We have an entire world that is looking to us to be our best. And since we are so fond of claiming that America is the best, shouldn’t we be finding new ways to prove that? I do not fear the future. I am confident that we can overcome all of the mistakes that have led us to this fork in the road. We can continue down this road we are on, self absorbed, lost, angry, fat and apathetic or we can opt to notice that the Future is coming. Get up, put on your best, think, learn what the future requires and then build it. Grab a friend or two to help you. Hurry up; it will be here before you know it. Who has time to be mad?

Thaddeus Howze © 2010, A Matter of Scale, All Rights Reserved

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