TerryWalstrom

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Posts by TerryWalstrom

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  35

  Sexual Depredation as a function of male society by men of a Certain Age

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i would like to remind those folks younger than i that it was very few years ago when almost the entire planet earth was run by and for the benefit of men.women have throughout history been the property of men.due to religious restrictions, teachings, and fundamentalist doctrines, women in the largest societies on earth right now (muslim, chinese, n.korean) have almost no human rights at all.next year, in june, women will, for the 1st time, be allowed in arabia to drive---but--only if they are 30 years old or older, and for only a few hours per day!the old testament laws (read through them sometime) are horrifying reflective of prejudice toward gender, bodily cleanliness, guilt-tripping, and anonymity.

  (what was noah's wife's name?

  lot's wife?

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  TerryWalstrom

  The last company I worked for supplied videos emphasizing the precise definition of sexual harassment.
  It went like this:
  IF the other person thinks what you said or did was harassing, IT WAS.
  I remember being a bit dumbfounded by such a subjective definition.
  I made the terrible mistake of asking, "Should we view our pay scale by the same standard?"
  The point I was missing (probably due to my age and social conditioning) is that certain people just don't get it.
  I still don't get the subjective part entirely, but that doesn't mean I'm exempt from observing company policy.
  One fellow who worked at the same company seemed to get away with the most egregious behavior simply because his persona made him acceptable.
  He'd stand next to a female worker who has hunkered down shelving books on lower shelves (we were a bookstore) and pretended to unzip his pants as he said, "Hey--while you're down there--could you do me a favor?"
  His name was Alan, and no female employee ever found his actions degrading or insulting. Therefore: I guess they weren't.
  But, REALLY?
• 
  35

  Sexual Depredation as a function of male society by men of a Certain Age

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i would like to remind those folks younger than i that it was very few years ago when almost the entire planet earth was run by and for the benefit of men.women have throughout history been the property of men.due to religious restrictions, teachings, and fundamentalist doctrines, women in the largest societies on earth right now (muslim, chinese, n.korean) have almost no human rights at all.next year, in june, women will, for the 1st time, be allowed in arabia to drive---but--only if they are 30 years old or older, and for only a few hours per day!the old testament laws (read through them sometime) are horrifying reflective of prejudice toward gender, bodily cleanliness, guilt-tripping, and anonymity.

  (what was noah's wife's name?

  lot's wife?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  TerryWalstrom

  Those who are most "surprised" by Weinstein are probably the least informed, i.e. "young".
  I'm so old (70) I remember the water fountains marked "WHITE" and "COLORED".
  I remember "people of color" riding only on the back of the bus.
  I remember when the only people hanged (i.e. lynched) for rape were black.
  Until the late 1950's the word "rape" was never spoken aloud. It was actually whispered. But then, so was the word "pregnant"!
  Society was filled with cigarette smoke on buses, airplanes, in restaurants (while you were eating somebody with a cigar could light up next to you) in elevators, in grocery stores, etc.
  Litter was everywhere you looked.
  People BURNED their garbage in their backyard!
  Oh, I could go on and on about the positive changes in society during my lifetime.
  It isn't too surprising the sexual changes necessary (power/sex/harassment) is the last bastion to erode.
  When we look at the amount of time it took from the freeing of slaves until Civil Rights Act legislation, we shouldn't be too surprised if sexual harassment takes another century of unmasking and prosecution to make much progress.

  In fact, I won't actually BELIEVE anything is changing unless Weinstein does time in jail.
• 
  35

  Sexual Depredation as a function of male society by men of a Certain Age

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i would like to remind those folks younger than i that it was very few years ago when almost the entire planet earth was run by and for the benefit of men.women have throughout history been the property of men.due to religious restrictions, teachings, and fundamentalist doctrines, women in the largest societies on earth right now (muslim, chinese, n.korean) have almost no human rights at all.next year, in june, women will, for the 1st time, be allowed in arabia to drive---but--only if they are 30 years old or older, and for only a few hours per day!the old testament laws (read through them sometime) are horrifying reflective of prejudice toward gender, bodily cleanliness, guilt-tripping, and anonymity.

  (what was noah's wife's name?

  lot's wife?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  TerryWalstrom

  I would like to remind those folks younger than I that it was very few years ago when almost the entire planet Earth was run by and FOR the benefit of MEN.
  
  Women have throughout history been the property of men.
  Due to religious restrictions, teachings, and fundamentalist doctrines, women in the largest societies on Earth right now (Muslim, Chinese, N.Korean) have almost no human rights at all.
  Next year, in June, women will, for the 1st time, be allowed in Arabia to drive---BUT--only if they are 30 years old or older, and for only a few hours per day!
  
  The Old Testament laws (read through them sometime) are horrifying reflective of prejudice toward gender, bodily cleanliness, guilt-tripping, and anonymity. (What was Noah's wife's name? Lot's wife? Practically all the women we remember/who are named/ are "bad").
  Eve, Delilah, Jezebel, Athaliah, etc.
  
  In my childhood, wives knew nothing about how much money their husband earned, where he kept his insurance, or--often--who he banked with or what he invested in. Women stayed at home and worked as housekeepers, nanny's, cooks, errand runners, and concubines.
  Law everywhere permitted husbands to beat their wives and it was deemed impossible (legally) to rape her.
  The Atlantic magazine mentions:
  "...those repressed and much pitied 1950s wives—their sexless college years! their boorish husbands, who couldn't locate the clitoris with a flashlight and a copy of Gray's Anatomy!—were apparently getting a lot more action than many of today's most liberated and sexually experienced married women. In the old days, of course, there was the wifely duty. A housewife understood that in addition to ironing her husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was—with some regularity—going to have relations with the man of the house."
  ___
  The fact that Western society has rid itself of many evils (slavery, smoking, racial epithets) is miraculous.
  
  The eventual purge of sexism adjustment is not complete and WILL NOT BE until everybody my age and slightly younger, has DIED and those who reared their children in sexist latent prejudices and mindsets have died also.

  
  Sexual domination and white male superiority is everywhere in old movies and especially comedies.
  Why? IT WAS NORMAL!
  
  I didn't realize this completely until I sat my kids down one night long ago.
  I wanted them to see a movie I "remembered" as being hilarious: HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE with Jack Lemmon.
  As we watched it, I was suddenly horrified.
  The movie not only wasn't funny AT ALL, it was so blatantly misogynist and mean-spirited, my kids were disgusted with it---and by extension--ME.
  I say all the above to point out to those who aren't aware, the way Harvey Weinstein operated is NOT unusual for a wealthy man in power. It is in churches, it is in politics, it is in corporations, and just about anyplace Men of a certain age have the inclination and opportunity to cash in.
  _____
  The plot of the comedy is simple: A cartoonist gets drunk and married and immediately regrets the fact his bachelor days are over. He takes out his frustration by filling his cartoon panels with a plot to murder his wife by drugging her and dropping her body in the Pucketa pucketa machine. When his wife disappears, he is charged with murder. In the scene depicted below, he is defending himself in court by a very strange appeal to male attitudes toward women and marriage which are pretty cold-blooded by today's standards. Back then however, it was hilarious.
  
  WATCH THIS CLIP
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhoRLHUGBmE
• 
  48

  Paradise? Was it?

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  paradisewas it really paradise to be in paradise?adam and eve never were held by a mother, never cuddled and sung to with a lullaby nor nursed or coddled with tenderness or any human familial embrace.

  the first humans (adam and eve) never learned to toddle surrounded by brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents cheering them on.

  the entire experience of childhood was excised surgically like a trauma patient awakening from an accident with amnesia.adam and eve were never in a neighborhood with other kids forming friendship bonds for life and exchanging dreams and hopes for a future they were building in their community.

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  TerryWalstrom

  David_Jay2 days ago
  Why argue with me?

  TerryWalstrom3 days ago3 days ago

  Not to be argumentative...
• 
  48

  Paradise? Was it?

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  paradisewas it really paradise to be in paradise?adam and eve never were held by a mother, never cuddled and sung to with a lullaby nor nursed or coddled with tenderness or any human familial embrace.

  the first humans (adam and eve) never learned to toddle surrounded by brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents cheering them on.

  the entire experience of childhood was excised surgically like a trauma patient awakening from an accident with amnesia.adam and eve were never in a neighborhood with other kids forming friendship bonds for life and exchanging dreams and hopes for a future they were building in their community.

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  TerryWalstrom

  My last marriage lasted 18 years. I married into a Jewish family. Nobody in that family had ever married outside of the "chosen":)
  I found these particular Jews to be among the finest human beings I have ever met as far as their attitude toward family and others. Their private efforts toward helping non-Jews, ordinary people, anonymously shocked me. I suppose because JW's are exceedingly non-charitable (in my experience.)
  
  Tikkun olam (world repair) is not only extraordinarily practical, it is more genuinely spiritual in that it applies human efforts toward humanity rather than wasting effort on impressing an already perfectly whole super being.
  The big difference between JW's and JEW's is the missing "E" which is empathy.
  Also, the fact Jews are not evangelical is remarkable. They are not selling Judaism like a retail business with brokers and it only illustrates to me more clearly how feckless Christian aggrandizement has become.
  
  My association with Jews and Judaism, as isolated a sampling as it was, left me with only positive opinions.
  I think, in the end, we are born with only so much capacity to love the invisible.
  I squandered my full measure by the age of 23. It's sort of like virginity. Once it is gone--it is gone forever.
  
  
• 
  8

  My Invisible (cat)

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  my invisible (cat) .

  when i was a little boy all the way up to when i was a not-so-little boy, i had sort of ...well--an invisible cat as a friend.. .

  i'll let you adjust to that thought before i continue.... .

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  TerryWalstrom

  I think the pattern of proving things using a dictionary transferred easily to proving religious things using a WT publication.
  I recall how shocked I was when I got to be a bit older and discovered the dictionary is not an absolute arbiter of language use and meaning, but rather, it is a reflection of common use over time. Lexicographers monitor the written and spoken word and make "adjustments" the same way the GB gets new light. So, opinion rules one way or the other.
  My mom died 27 years ago. She was 65.
• 
  8

  My Invisible (cat)

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  my invisible (cat) .

  when i was a little boy all the way up to when i was a not-so-little boy, i had sort of ...well--an invisible cat as a friend.. .

  i'll let you adjust to that thought before i continue.... .

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  TerryWalstrom

  It will be shortly!
  My third book, my working title (so far) is
  A FUNNY THING HAPPENED TO ME ON MY WAY TO ARMAGEDDON
  (A Memoir)
• 
  48

  Paradise? Was it?

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  paradisewas it really paradise to be in paradise?adam and eve never were held by a mother, never cuddled and sung to with a lullaby nor nursed or coddled with tenderness or any human familial embrace.

  the first humans (adam and eve) never learned to toddle surrounded by brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents cheering them on.

  the entire experience of childhood was excised surgically like a trauma patient awakening from an accident with amnesia.adam and eve were never in a neighborhood with other kids forming friendship bonds for life and exchanging dreams and hopes for a future they were building in their community.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  TerryWalstrom

  Not to be argumentative...

  
  
  How do we read the mind of a writer long since dust and ashes in the mists of time?
  Intentions? Inaccessible.
  Whose hands (and how many) have touched the malleable narratives and with what motives? Toward what end?
  Uknown merely, or unknowable?
  
  Priests are gatekeepers who hands are outstretched for payment of services rendered. On whose behalf? God? Their own spoils of unending doctrinal battles?
  Litigating for pay as all duty bound attorneys to this day, in service of some blind lady holding a set of scales, the Pharisee listens, cogitates, interprets, and adjudicates eternal "truth"--we hope.
  How is a transcendent being so needy of being served or of having 'needs'?
  Why entrust any eternal purpose to a scrofulous finite creature of narrow intelligence such as a priest?
  And yet, all holy writ has the amanuensis (tampering?), blunting, editing, shaping away like a blind sculptor with a chisel in hand and---motives so pure?
  We know not.
  All of which to say, finally, rabbinical traditions (oral Torah) are all we really have like "Homer's" eternal heroes and villains, dancing across history fully imagined as indelible moral touchstones of eras bygone and crumbling.
  Each new generation re-re-re-re interprets this little jot and that pesky tiddle toward some fresh application, accretion by accretion ever onward, (seldom upward)--one size fits all.
  
  How do we know what THEY imagined is not purely human entirely and irrevocably?
  Counterfeit bills are easily "spent" as long as nobody calls the cops.
  
  
• 
  48

  Paradise? Was it?

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  paradisewas it really paradise to be in paradise?adam and eve never were held by a mother, never cuddled and sung to with a lullaby nor nursed or coddled with tenderness or any human familial embrace.

  the first humans (adam and eve) never learned to toddle surrounded by brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents cheering them on.

  the entire experience of childhood was excised surgically like a trauma patient awakening from an accident with amnesia.adam and eve were never in a neighborhood with other kids forming friendship bonds for life and exchanging dreams and hopes for a future they were building in their community.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  TerryWalstrom

  Well, I probably did a poor job of placing proper emphasis on the dehumanizing state of existence which was Adam's existential fate.
  The first few generations (taking the Bible for what it says without critical bias) of humanity were bereft of what makes all the rest of us truly "human."
  Even apes have more filial and community camaraderie and bonding than Eve or Adam had.
  EVE, in a peculiar sense, was 'mothered' by her husband!
  I meant or intended to mean we need an out-sized magnification of contextual IRONY when we read the Adam and Eve in Eden (pleasure garden) to jolt us out of the mythos momentarily.
  A few moments of forensic deconstruction was what I was attempting more than anything else.
  It's like the time I spoke with the fellow on Starbuck's patio who was a self-styled

  exorcist.
  I asked him how big a demon is.
  Simple question.
  If an entire LEGION can infest a man, rationally and logically, they must be infinitesimal, right?
  I observed this man struggling to reject the question to save himself the adjustment of internal objective analysis. Or so I imagined.
  Things, ideas, concepts float about unmoored in our brain UNLESS we have imposed an organizing principle upon them. This calls for measurements, calibrations, comparatives, and extrapolation.
  
  Unless...
  unless we already know we're in fantasyland. Knowing on some subconscious level we are bullshitting ourselves relieves us of the melancholy burden of such evaluations.
  
  Don't mind me...I do tend to wander off the reservation.
  
  (See my post about the invisible cat I had as a child. That explains everything :)
  
  
• 
  8

  My Invisible (cat)

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  my invisible (cat) .

  when i was a little boy all the way up to when i was a not-so-little boy, i had sort of ...well--an invisible cat as a friend.. .

  i'll let you adjust to that thought before i continue.... .

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  TerryWalstrom

  MY INVISIBLE (cat)

  
  

  When I was a little boy all the way up to when I was a not-so-little boy, I had sort of ...well--an INVISIBLE CAT as a friend.

  
  

  I'll let you adjust to that thought before I continue...

  
  

  Okay. Ready?

  My invisible cat's name was Tommy.

  Tommy only spoke with W's.

  
  

  I'll let you adjust to this also...

  
  

  Welcome back!

  
  

  My Mom was Tommy's interpreter. I know what you're going to say. And I can't say I blame you. But this whole thing was Mom's idea.

  
  

  At bedtime, Tommy would arrive and greet me.

  I was somehow able to understand him over time the way parents adjust to baby talk or speech impediments in their kids.

  
  

  What Tommy said was, "Hi Terry, how are you this evening." However, it sounded exactly like this.

  "Why Werry, Wow war woo wiss weevening?"

  
  

  Get it?

  _____
  
  

  I'm going to assume at this point you are beginning to understand why Terry grew up weird.

  
  

  Tommy would tell me a bedtime story made up right on the spot, ad-libbed through Lillian (my Mom) his interpreter. (He called her 'Willian'.)

  
  

  Mom never read to me from a storybook.

  No no no.

  Her tales were outlandish on-the-spot concoctions straight from her extraordinary warped imagination. Oh, the strange tales from the cat with the strange tail. (Mom drew a picture of him once. Tommy's tail went on in coils forever like Rapunzel's hair.)

  
  

  I absorbed two things from my invisible friend.

  I can still understand any cat who speaks with W's and I can make up bedtime stories out of thin air.
  
  

  _____

  
  

  From an early age, I craved to become a writer and

  I set about endeavoring to improve my vocabulary.

  I once read how Abraham Lincoln (when he was growing up) would discover and memorize one new vocabulary word each day while reading borrowed books which were too hard for him.

  
  

  Being a kid wound too tight, I overshot Abe’s goal.
  I came up with my own recipe for proficiently rich vocabulary acquisition.
  I would acquire SIXTEEN new words each and every day!

  
  

  Why Sixteen?
  Old Abe Lincoln was the sixteenth President.

  Yeah. I know.

  ____
  
  

  I always carried around a book borrowed from our downtown Carnegie library. It had to be a very difficult book so I could discover extraordinarily weird, wild, and wonderful words.

  
  

  I'd pore through the book as I read and re-read the difficult paragraphs and scoop up a tasty word like a lepidopterist snatches butterflies out of summer sunshine with a net.

  
  

  When I'd acquired sixteen words for the day, I took out my portable dictionary and penciled in the definitions on my list and began writing sentences utilizing the words correctly, colorfully, and colloquially.

  
  

  My teachers in grade school were baffled and distraught by what came out of my mouth and lept off the pages of my homework!

  I could easily tell when my homeroom teacher was grading one of my papers. She'd start shaking her head side to side in puzzlement.

  
  

  "Terry, this isn't even a word!"

  "I'm afraid it is, Miss Allen. Here, let me show you..."

  
  

  I enjoyed this a bit too much I must confess to you.
  (Sidebar: I’ll share with you how I choose from among dictionaries. Any dictionary which does NOT have the word ‘asymptote’ isn’t worth owning!)

  
  

  I digress, however---
  ________

  
  

  Back to my INVISIBLE CAT who speaks in W's!

  
  

  Tommy was very real to my little boy imagination.
  By that I mean, I did understand it was my Mom creating this illusion---except--I let go of that awareness early on. Tommy became quite vividly palpable to me the way Buddha or Jesus takes up residence in the hearts and minds of devotees.
  I LOVED HIM as a dear part of childhood communion with an otherwise difficult parent.

  
  

  The day my mother died of cancer, of all the distraught and mournful thoughts racing through my mind was this extremely distressing (and ABSURD) thought which jolted me.

  
  

  Tommy too was dead.
  ________________