September 21, 2020
We have lost much during the time of Covid-19. Loved ones, our jobs, some have lost entire businesses. We have been shut off from our friends, unable to hug or even shake hands, which for those of us who are huggers--is a big deal. A lot of talk has been about what we can't do and can't have. There are no crowds at football games this fall. Our favorite restaurant is closed...
September 7, 2020
For some time now we've been fighting along side Indiana Institute For Working Families to lower the interest rate cap on short term pay day loans.Anyone with a social security check, or low paying job can borrow quickly and easily from one of the many pay day loan companies that operate here. The catch is they'll pay a whopping 371 percent effective interest rate*. A rate that often saddles the borrower with interminable debt.These loans harm the families we serve, keeping them forever in debt, and without proper funds for essentials--food for their families...
August 21, 2020
I have a neighbor who started a business on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis decades ago. Business was not always easy, but they survived, employed others, paid rent and taxes, and lived on whatever was left. Just as his business was allowed to reopen after the mandated shut down, a number of homeless people camped outside his front door. Some, he said, pursued his clients. Others left deposits on the sidewalk, still others were dealing drugs. Customers called and told the shop owner they had to go elsewhere. Diving deeper in debt, he let his employees go and closed for good...
August 7, 2020
There is actually a course offered at some medical schools called Empathetics. It was developed by a psychiatrist who was working with anorexic patients--a population some thought simply refused to eat. Many young girls were dying of starvation, and the words "just eat" were not working. But when clinicians were trained in empathy and trained to listen to the often traumatic experiences that kept anorexics from eating normally, they could be helped. I know a man that is embroiled in a lawsuit with a former business partner. They were boyhood friends, the families were close. But based on some life difficulties, they had differences. Instead of using empathy and trying to work through the issues dividing them, the company is now pretty much gone...
July 21, 2020
I've got to stop watching the news. It's too hard to see the violence and hate. An argument over a Black Lives Matter vs. all lives matter ended in a woman being shot in the head--right here on the Canal Walk in Indianapolis. She was a mother with two small children, and whatever any of us thinks about her views, her murder is tragic. Have we all gone stark raving mad?
July 7, 2020
This is a thing. It is really a thing. recently heard a man talking about how white people are putting signs up in their yards that are nothing but virtue signaling. Virtue signaling? That intrigued me. According to a web site called Simplicable, virtue signaling "is the conspicuous communication of moral values and good deeds, believed to be motivated by a desire for social status and self-satisfaction." Wow. And, all this signaling apparently comes in various forms...
June 22, 2020
Most of my friends are still very worried about COVID 19. I admit…I am not. I am so over it that I can hardly see it in my rearview mirror anymore. So much has happened that is more concerning to me. More shootings here. More first responders leaving their jobs. And still and forever, the dark cloud of the George Floyd murder and the plunder that followed...
June 8, 2020
Is there a need for anything else to be said about George Floyd's public humiliation and murder? Frankly, I've been stunned into silence--a rarity for me. But I ask myself: Can anything I say matter now? Maybe not. We can't change what happened, but maybe we can join the mourners across the country who feel powerless but want to take some kind of stand…want to go on the record with all those who have been damaged by the actions of a bad cop. I read an editorial about Floyd's murder by my friend Oseye Boyd, editor of the Indianapolis Recorder. She wrote about how personally hurt she was by the disregard for human dignity and cruelty surrounding Floyd's death. Her soul was wounded...
May 21, 2020
Have you ever noticed that the word "silent" has the same letters as the word "listen?"I have a friend who never says much. She waits to see what other people think on any given subject before she expresses an opinion--or says nothing. I think she loves the safety of keeping her own counsel and undoubtedly doesn't want to alienate anyone. She is an occasional visitor to a coffee shop group I attend a couple of times a week at which the news of the day is often discussed, and when she is there, she is primarily a listener. We are not alike...
May 7, 2020
When an opinion columnist at the New York Times asked readers to share the status of their mental health with him in April, a few weeks into quarantine, he received more than 5,000 replies. While many said they were "hanging in there," the rest of the responses were more like a "river of woe and agony." All over the country, people who were at first happy to have a break in their busy lives, angling for bulk toilet paper online, are by this time frustrated, bored, and lonely...
