My upbringing was idyllic for my first few years of life, but that’s because I didn’t know that after my mother died, my grandmother Nana who raised me had kidnapped me from my father’s house.
After we’d helped Nana to move to an Alzheimer’s care home, my aunt Donna and I were cleaning out Nana’s place and found letters in the old cedar hope chest that had come from Nana’s mother, Nallie. One was from the lady who’d taken care of me when I was a tiny premature baby.
Her name was Nessie (a lot of “Ns” I know). The heartfelt letter begged my grandmother to bring me back to my father’s house. She said she would take good care of me while my father was at work and my older brother at school.
I always wondered if Nana had answered Nessie’s letter.
If she had, the answer was no and it might have been delivered with a few racial slurs. She kept me and I only returned to live with my father after my grandfather Bampy died when I was 13. I called my dad & asked if I could come live with him after Nana had retreated to Bampy’s rocking chair, sitting and humming to herself all day, barely eating or responding at all.
Nessie was a big-busted black lady and my heart remembers resting my head on her breast while she rocked me in my mother’s rocking chair. Her letter mentioned rocking me in it.
The thing is, what we don’t know can hurt us, and many times, what we think we “know” isn’t true.
It’s somewhat ironic that in recent years, I’ve received significant verbal abuse and harassment from Israeli and American Zionists because having learned the true history of Israel in the Middle East, including the Nakba (I lived 60 years before hearing of it), I have become pro-Palestinian and pro-peace and have written and spoken publically about it.
One reason, perhaps the primary reason, that my grandmother kidnapped me was that my father was Jewish. Yes, anti-Semitic prejudice: the real kind. My father Eugene Glasband was a secular Jewish man born in Hells Kitchen, NYC. His parents were from Berdichev, Ukraine and escaped the pogroms there to come to NYC through Ellis Island shortly after the turn of the 20th century.
We all think we have guardian angels and I’ve come to realize that — though Nana who raised me strongly believed she was my guardian angel, the real one was and is my Grandma Mary — my paternal grandmother.
Would Grandma Mary have supported any of the violent, horrific actions that Israeli and US Christian Zionists believe are justified in Palestine today? My God, hell no. She’d be out in the streets protesting just like all other Jewish people who understand how wrong these actions are and have been, and continue to be.
We are as Westerners at the intersection of right and wrong, of human rights and decency vs. the opposite — our own personal offers at the Crossroads — deals with the Devil made to placate our fears and choose “safety,” over uncertain freedom and an unknown future —
Some people even think that any of us are different due to our external skin color. But there’s no such thing as a race-based soul or race-based heart.
We only get a certain amount of time on this Earth and did you really want to spend those brief moments eating fast food, drinking high fructose corn syrup-laden soda, wearing a t-shirt made from petroleum by-products masquerading as cloth, or attending a Trump rally?
Or watching the latest remake of Batman, Superman, or the umpteenth installment of the Star Wars saga?
I’m at an age where women are supposed to be invisible. James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) even wrote a story about it, pitting American men and an older woman and her daughter with a surprising twist ending: “The Women Men Don’t See.”
I’m not yet invisible but when I become so, whether due to double chins, jowls, gray/white hair, or sagging breasts, I will gladly crone-ize and ride my broom off into the sunset to join with the dolphins, manatees, and sea turtles.
I’ve had an unintentionally unusual life.
I’m married to a man who has also had an unusual life.
Like my Grandma Mary and my Bampy who taught me the life lessons I’ve used to navigate life’s ups and downs, I’m always been there for others.
But the key — what I’m talking about — for those of us who are the helping helpers, making up well over half of humanity is learning how to help our selves.
You’re reading something written by a sci-fi writer whose predictions of 20 years ago were not only made sincerely, but were made accurately.
Such a large amount of our lives has heretofore been directed by false fears and threats that living free of this is a very difficult task.
For example, I smoked cigarettes for many years because I was afraid of getting fat. This fear was enforced on me by Nana, who was always slim and referred to as “the most beautiful woman” in my hometown.
I chewed sugar-free gum and ate sugar-free mints for years because I was afraid any tobacco smoke breath would offend students or others, or I was covering up for being a closet smoker …
I hope you can see where I’m going with this.
Every day I receive multiple emails from groups like Credit Karma, Experian, Capital One, etc. Each gives me an idea of my credit score and provides information that’s geared toward making me …
Why do I give a rat’s ass about my credit score, again?
It’s been a while since I’ve received a solicitation for a political donation, but I’m sure I’ll start receiving them again, soon. I’ve learned how to use the block, delete, and report spam or scams on every device.
Every day growing up, I received a form of verbal and sometimes physical abuse that obscured who I was, that attempted to mold me into something that, ironically, I’ve actually become in some ways. The abuse I suffered growing up left me vulnerable to bad relationships with abusive partners since abuse was presented to me as love.
My grandmother controlled what I ate and I was unable to choose the types of junky kid food all my friends enjoyed. She controlled what I looked like and what I wore. She controlled — or tried to control — who my friends were. When I saw the movie Carrie, I related to the lead character, although I had friends and was not socially isolated or bullied. The only difference between what Carrie went through with her mother and me is, Nana was not particularly religious.
I was often terrified of leaving the house, and equally terrified to stay inside. That’s part of what inspired my lifelong love of nature and being outside.
Most of all, I wasn’t allowed to make choices. My grandmother chose for me in nearly every way that could be imagined. Maybe she did it because she’d lost her daughter and her own mother within a short period of time. I’ve often wondered if she was so controlling and overbearing because she was trying to protect me.
But — that’s what abusers say — on the family level and
MY GOD
On a society-wide level. It’s absolutely everything we see and hear.
The nonstop, animalistic behaviors exemplified by the worst of the Israeli and US Zionists, as well as by people like the “Sons of the Confederacy” and Men’s Rights Advocates/Redpillers have shown me how — although all of these are on the outskirts of humanity and extreme outliers — we are beset by marketing and social messages that entrap us all in lives we aren’t well-suited for and that most of us don’t really want.
The misery of being forced to do meaningless, or even worse, harmful jobs, perpetuates a sense of powerlessness and futility.
All of this comes on top of decades of dystopian entertainment: books, films, TV shows, games about zombie invasions, nuclear apocalypse, incurable worldwide pandemics, cars that will come to life and kill us, trucks that will animate and smash us to a pulp, human trafficking that will take our children to unimaginable horrors, Skynet coming to life and sending robots to destroy every child on every playground —
That’s not life, but the opposite of these forms of “entertainment” is relegated to some children’s programming and the Hallmark Channel.
Meanwhile, day by day, decent food gets more expensive and harder to find. People are struggling to work two and three jobs to maintain the same standard of living they had 20 years ago.
With all the problems of the 1950s, people still yearn for the good things: the ability for people with normal jobs and a single income to buy a home, vacation during the summer, and spend time with their children.
It’s doubtful that any of those who are charged with “leadership” or who possess great wealth are much happier than any of the rest of us.
Nana, the grandmother who raised me, was probably one of the most miserable people on earth for much of her life.
I walked out of that house permanently at age 17 and I’ve worked since I was 13 years old.
But it took me this many decades to throw off the countless yokes that were put on me by my rigid, deeply abusive, fear-filled upbringing.
That’s our whole society: riddled with fear and hatred of foreign countries and of individuals we don’t know. For more than two decades, our society has promoted cutting off real friends and relatives over politicians or even the slogan of the day. There are no real values to any of this. Only manipulation, terror, and abuse meant to keep us all running on our little treadmills, doing what’s expected until we’re no longer needed.
Over 1 million people in the US died during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are as forgotten as the people who died during the 1918 flu pandemic, which my own grandmother told me she did not remember.
She did remember that her sister Jessie died of scarlet fever from unpasteurized milk which killed at least a dozen others.
We face fewer dangers like disease-ridden milk these days — or do we? Every day there are food recalls for listeria, e.coli, and even botulism. We are afraid of these quick killers even as we consume “safe” foods which are the primary cause of the appalling health of three quarters of adults and half of children.
If I’d had less motivation, I could have stayed with my grandmother and attended college locally. My entire life could have been devoted to her whims and interests and what she wanted me to do. As it stood, I dragged her furniture around, stored it, and remembered her stories for five decades.
Step by step, I began to live my life on my own terms. I’ve been able to change my diet and activity to become as healthy and active as possible. I’ve been able to calm my mind to recover from complex PTSD.
And I’ve come to the point where I realize just how many lies we’ve all been told for such a long period of time.
As someone put it the other day: people receiving a cancer diagnosis will take chemotherapy without a second thought, not even knowing what drugs they’re being given, but they won’t give up eating toxic foods sold to them as “healthy” or change their diet or lifestyle in any way. They will deep-six a lifelong friendship and separate from family over a politician or a political slogan.
They will look the other way as other people are wrongfully incarcerated, arrested, or — in the case of Gaza and the West Bank — bombed, shot, gassed, or run over by bulldozers.
They’ll buy any cream promised to erase wrinkles but will do nothing to iron out the wrinkles of someone else’s lies all over their own souls.
Walking out of the trap that our society has set for us is the same as my walking out of the house at age 17.
If you walk out on whatever it is that you know in your heart is wrong and is harming you (and often, many others), whether it’s your job, your diet, your adherence to political ideology, or just good old/bad old consumerism, you will immediately feel a lightness — maybe even joy.
And pursuing real joy is the key to leaving this unhealthy, deeply-troubled society and building a new, healthy, good one. The Revolution starts inside of each of us.
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