My Trip to Argentina, some ideas..

My parents were waiting for me, in the building lobby. I called them before I left so they knew exactly at what time I’d arrive at their apartment. I didn’t want them to wait in vain or more than the necessary.

You may already know that old cities have lack of space. The city rises up, seventy years ago sky crappers pop up and this tendency didn’t stop, no yet. Nowadays the lots of the few old houses left are use to build more high constructions. Buildings with fifty stories aren’t uncommon.

The builders of the past where worried about room and closeness. One’s has to live close to the center or downtown of the city, nobody wanted to be far away from where they worked. Few people owned a car, not only for the cost of it but for their impracticality. Buenos Aires doesn’t have much parking space, the streets are narrow, mainly because BA is a city that wanted to imitate the cities in Europe. I guess because the people who moved to Argentina came from there and not only did what they knew but also missed their own places of origin.

The country is big but the mentality is small. There are not places, there are people. People is what makes the difference. The result is a big and beautiful country that is almost empty. The major cities are cramped and crowed. People live one on top of the other. The streets are the same way, on top of that streets are used like garbage cans. The same with dog poop, in spite I saw a small improvement about that. There wasn’t plan ahead or thinking in the future and there is not room to grow, the process is accumulative but nobody is leaving but more are arriving, especially from other borders countries. This phenomena intensify the problem.

I’ll continue later, I have to walk the dog.

Yes, I Do

Statistically the rate of divorce in The United States is around fifty percent. At first sight this could look very bad but thirty five percent of the same people remarry (we are not considering the ones who live together), some of them twice and a little percentage more than that.

In this side of the western world, marriage rates and the need to create a family has diminished, as it is the case in European countries and Latin America. In my last trip to Argentina I discovered people doesn’t marry anymore. The most serious go and live together and marry after many years. There are many socioeconomic factors that contribute to it, not in this article thought. In Europe government forthcoming the aging of the population have created new policies to incentive people to get marry and have children, at less more than one as it’s the actual quote.

Simplifying this phenomena is not the right way to have an idea of what is going on. We have to considerate so many variables like income, beliefs, etc. In third world countries, no matter in what hemisphere is it, poor people have more children, but in Eastern countries this is also supported by their religious beliefs. In India, for example, people accept their fate with calm resignation, you have to stay for life in the caste you belong to by birth. Of course they don’t see day way, their beliefs are so opposite to Western beliefs of personal progress, improvement of life conditions, a more individualist point of view.

I understand people that think religion can be used to dominate and control people. It work both ways.Looking at history,  we must remember that the first thing Communism pursuit was forbid religion and erase people beliefs but they ended up hiding away to pray. For people in the Communist countries their faith, Christianity the most, meant freedom and hope, also their beliefs liberated them  of the immediate reality of the oppressive power of a totalitarian regime.

That is why you have to be in control of your beliefs and exercise free will, if God wanted us to believe in him blindly and without doubts, most certainly he should have created robots instead of human beings. This is more challenging for us because we have all the responsibility but still I can choose and I could not belong never to a religion that doesn’t have sense or goes against my safety.

My common sense will always prevail and I don’t think God will disagree (by the way I don’t believe that the world is ending any time so China is another exception, the law prevent them for have more than one. Other problems arise like the lack of females because of the abortion rate of girls. It is true that this will contribute to a lack of pregnancies too or they would have to mix with women of other countries and the China population that is very homogeneous would have to change. They are very strong in that sense, women marry other men but Chinese men prefer Chinese women.

Socialism is not the same in all the countries, Europe socialism is different from China or Latin countries. The latest have government that help the poor with a lot of benefits, especially if they become parents and even more help for those who dont have a job, however what really is happening is that you give help to poor people without a plan to take these people out of their poverty margin. The result, each year there are more poor people who live from subsides and not light at the end of the tunnel, how we say in Argentina “until the money lasts….”and the party is over.

In the USA, people still caress the idea of falling in love, marrying and having a family. This is also a bussines that put food in a lot of tables of so many households, as so many others. I can respect that. Work is dignity.

Lately, surveys have been showing that this tendency is decreasing, while more couples live together and women start a family later in life (problem is the chance of getting pregnant after thirty five decrease) so surely they don’t have many children because the time frame for women to conceive is shorter than for men.

It looks like people is thinking a little more about those things that used to come naturally like the “Facts of Life” before but the desire to settle is still alive because human need certain order to have a plenty, efficient and satisfactory life where we can feel contain and with our needs fulfill.

Raising a family is challenging and rewarding at the same time, it’s the more fantastic and daring thing that might happen to human beings, even tough I think we have to be able to create the best conditions in order to do that, individually and in the world..

When I see two people fall in love and make a commitment, what I really see is two people that believe that the world is a good place to live, two people who have hope for a better future. People who are together, not only are strong economically speaking but they hold each other in their arms when the things get tough, being together is a better way of surviving, families that work together have more chances of being successful. Summarizing inside families persons are taking care of and take care of others or at least this is the way it should be, if not, we cannot call it a family because is not accomplishing the mains purposes.

I think that while people still think in getting marry and start a life together, we will still have a good chance that the world will continue running so I am very happy to live in a country that honors marriage and family. I hope stay that way.

 

Love, Last Part

Love is a word that is misused often, love is the opposite of selfishness, a selfish person cannot love. In our society people say all the time “I love you”. The judges in a popular TV show said that to the contestants when they like something about them, we know they don’t mean it. If we asked them how many sacrifices they are willing to do for the contestants to show their love they would be disconcerted.

I remember a dialogue in a movie I watched a long time ago where the daughter told the mother who was going throughout a divorce,-”Mom, don’t tell me that you love me,  you love yourself and your needs, your hairdresser and then you love me”-That was a comedy and the scene it was mean to be a funny one, but in many ways is so profound because is real, it is what happens with people all the time.

Love is not something that comes only from our hearts but from  our minds and our will. When we think only in ourselves and what is more convenient for us all the time, we are not ready to love others, our world becomes a very small one, a world of one person and we will discover within time how isolate we might feel and how sad and pathetic our live is.

But when we open our hearts and minds to all that surrounds us our one person world becomes rich and full, and we understand finally what is really important. When we remember somebody we love but isn’t with us anymore we remember their smiles and all the happy moments we have had with that person, we miss their company, we don’t remember the material things they had but the way the made us feel.

God didn’t abandon us for ourselves, in spite that we reject him every time we behave like a terrible person and we are selfish to say the least. He gave us a route map called love. With it we can live and also compensate for what we lack.

Love is the only thing that survives death. I’m not talking about romantic love only but the superb feeling that is to care for others in an empathic way, the supernatural connections we are able to awake in us and comfort, embrace, and involve other living things, and the compassion we can feel that can cure maladies of the spirit.

When we love we are doing God’s job and we become manifestations of the divine and love cannot be defeated.

There is a lot of LOVE in the world and that is the reason WHY THE WORLD IS STILL STANDING.

Love, Part II

The written note said that Abbey was already in Heaven and that she was playing and doing all the things dogs do and that she wasn’t sick anymore because living things are not sick or old in Heaven and it isn’t that they have a physical body like we do have on Earth. Still, Abbey remembered her and loved her the same and some day they will be reunited.

The letter and the good Samaritan that took the time to write a letter back to the girl , probably somebody in the post office, had gotten to me dearly. It makes me want to enjoy life more and live each moment more intensely without worries. I try to love the most I can because most of the things we think are so important, are not.

Life is so short and we are ephemeris creatures, for the lucky of us who have their faith and look for eternal life ; probably being because we are so ambitious, more likely because we cannot believe that such sophisticated beings can be created in a random way, without purpose. Or because all of our struggles and sufferings should count for something or because we cannot understand death as the end.

Looking around me and seeing how life is everywhere, how it challenges everything, diseases, wars, devastation and still we discover that a little something starts to grow where we think there is nothing left, because life is a force that cannot be stopped and that is why I like to think that life are synonymous.

You can exterminated it here and there, but it will come back, because it can’t be destroyed though we may try hard.

Life is a tremendous force and love also is a powerful force. For the people who believe in God, death is a big warning sign and because I’m Catholic I think that death shouldn’t exist, death is not meant to be, it isn’t what God had in mind when He created our souls but we, at some point, we lost it.

We have lost our own purpose, this is, to be divine.

Love Part I

Few days ago I received a letter from one of my friends telling a story about this girl whose dog Abbey died recently. She was very upset because she didn’t know if God would know that Abbey was her dog and how much she loved her. The girl decided to tell God to be sure He recognizes Abbey and receives her in Heaven because she had been such a good dog, but more important than that she loved her and love was what counted after all.

In order to let God know about her intentions she asked her mother to help her in writing a letter to God so that was what they did. Once she wrote the letter, including a picture of Abbey-”to be sure”- she told her mother. She also added-”Mom you have to put a lot of stamps in the envelope because the road to heaven is long and far, how the girl explained later. They did that too.

Those words are the ones that struck me the most. I started to imagine myself like an envelope that needs a lot of stamps in order to get there. How I read some time ago, human beings are a piece of work in progress, I’d change the word progress for process because some don’t progress much. In the innocent soul of a child there are no doubts about it.

What happens when do we grow up? How do we become so confused?

That is one of the reasons that children should be protected at all costs, because they are our connection to the divine, with absolute certainty. Where love is, God is. Of course not everybody is religious but to believe in God you don’t need to be religious, to be good and have a decent life you don’t need to be religious because God transcends structures and lives inside all of us, it doesn’t matter whether we choose to believe or not. That is the reason he gave us free will. If He would want us to be simple followers He had the choice to make us robots or a different kind of creature and we would not be able to access to any knowledge. He made a point to make us responsible for our choices.

I’d not know how I’d live without some sense of immortality, thinking that I will die some day and that would be all. However, it’s true that death levels out us and make us be conscience of the “unbearable lightness of the being”. This knowledge should make us more humble.

The story of the girl doesn’t end when she went to the post office and sent the letter to God. Many days afterward, she received a package with  a book on it called “Where Do Pets Go When They Die” by Mr.Rogers and also there was a gold envelope with a note and the picture that she had sent previously.

New news

There is not such a thing like a new news. Since the moment is out there news get old very fast. Last week I was writing about the protesters and still they are there but our minds are in something else…black Friday and the Christmas shopping. It isn’t fascinating how fast we can go through  modern life. I guess that is because modern humans have developed a shield that protect us of everything that may threat our lifestyle immediately.

First thing in the morning I watched the news, mainly to know the weather will be. I turn off the TV after I drop off my younger son at the school. It’s only a small amount of screen I’m able to tolerate. A dosage of TV should be enough after certain age, I don’t think too much information is healthy, my mom is in her 80′ and I advised her to not watch the news because she has known better times. Although maybe old times were not better but people didn’t find out so quickly and know less about what was going on in the world. She can’t assimilate food very well less to say..the world.

When I saw the coverage of the nine-nine percent protesters, for a split second I wasn’t sure if I still was in Argentina. I had a flashback. The occupied parks are so close to my heart. I didn’t participate in many because I soon realize the iniquity of the whole thing. It’s good to show the discontent and discomfort to the rulers of a country and we should not go silent with ours concerns but after we do that we have to accept that few things would change in the order of things if we only do this, go to the park to protest. There are many ways to change things if you look at history you will see.

Also we can change things be ourselves the change we proclaim.

In this particular time in the history of US I would like that these demonstrations would happened when the governments bailed out the banks. I think that the protesters are outdated, is old history.

Why people didn’t react before? I only can guess..

Why do they do it now? I only can guess..

This last topic goes farther.

The question is, do legalize abortion make abortions more frequents?

Is legalization  a validation or may be a solution only, or both?

Societies need rules, standarts and a set of values to follow to be successful, and effective. A society has to work for everybody and I know this is the ideal. It isn’t that way but the ideal keep us on track of what is desirable.

Women should ask for more choices, than poor choices, but still abortion is legal and they can decide what is the best for them without to have any stigma. Women are the one who always pays the highest prices but I wouldn’t exclude men. A good deal would be one who include the father of the baby too. This would be good because men would became more careful about their behave.

The spectrum is so vast. What do you think ?Is it the same for an educated woman of thirty something  to decide to have an abortion because it isn’t the right time because she prefer to pursuit her career instead that for a thirteen years old raped by her father or any other member of the family who got her pregnant?

These two extreme situations not have nothing in common although both are seeing abortion like a choice. There’s an abyss in between. We should concentrate in low the amount of abortions and most of all low the non-desire pregnancies and we need to be more aggressive to this regard, easy ways out are never an answer because patch the problem but don’t fix it.

Women should empower women starting with the young girls, teaching them self-worth, self-awareness and go deep with them to understand what it means to be a woman. We have to teach them that with rights come responsibilities, there isn’t one without the other.

There are part of the world where women are stone sometimes only for suspicious, in some cultures women are castrated when they born so they cannot feel pleasure and in this way tempted men.In some countries they are forced to hide their faces or their bodies for another ridiculous reasons.

In the western culture women had walked a long way that lead us here. It wasn’t random, our gender predecessors worked and fight for that but we are lucky in so many ways that we live in this culture but in spite of that, often this is forgotten and some of us go to unhealthy  extreme behaviors. I don’t think that this it was what the women who asked the right to vote envisioned.

We don’t have to probe anything, neither we have to imitate men. It’s good to have sexual freedom but this too can become a burden. Regarding  jobs, this is fantastic but we should be able to chose not to work if we have others priorities like became a mom and take care of the family that it isn’t something easy or worthless at all, but also if we have a fantastic career and our other half want to take our role at home may be a non-conventional role for a man but still I think this can work ( roles are changing). We have to make the best of it but always women and men like partners in an equal relationship, helping each other like in a team, like two faces of the same coin.

Men and women are not alike by nature, we have instincts that work differently, we see the world and the things with a different perspective, but also each of us have a set of skills that characterized us and that are unique and difference us from others, some of them go beyond gender. I use to tell my sons that be men don’t prevent them to understand the concept”clean-after- you” or “put your dirty clothes in the washer”or explain them that add laundry detergent don’t disable them at all.

I don’t like to limited the characteristics of human beings by gender but my experience show me that there are things that some men do better and things that women are best fit for but not exclusively, culture has to do a lot with these roles too.

I know I started to talk about one issue and ended up talking about other but everything is connected and I’m always this way where one thing lead me to other, I can avoid be myself.

I want to finish with something that worry me the most. We have to understand that the social-economic status of a woman is very relevant and make a huge difference and will make women considerate abortion with a different perspective (I’ll talk about this another time because this is a full topic).

A long time ago, a pregnancy out of the wedlock was considerate sinful, no the pregnancy itself but the fact that the pregnancy showed that you were having intercourse and probably stigmatized because you were not a virgin anymore. Those women have to rid off the baby without thinking much in the moral or another consequences. If they were lucky enough to have an understanding family they were sent it away to have the baby in some other place and gave the baby away. It was a huge cover up. In those times a woman was defined because of her virginity and purity was an exchange coin when the family were looking for a suitable man to wed the daughter. There are cultural reasons base in practical reasons that explain this.

Women didn’t have many choices, they couldn’t afford to feel guilty or immoral. They did what they have to do but these times are not those times and women have to be smart and educated themselves and others to live the best life we can live, and became the best person we can became and also set the bar high for women and men too, after all men come from women’s wombs.

I meant..

Women are hostess, babies are the guests.

Everything has became too political

Because I.m a religious person people is interesting in knowing what do I think about hot topics where moral is involve. It’s seems that always moral is involve when you have religious believes but in reality moral is involve always if you are a human being, it doesn’t matter if you believe in something else that is not  being focus in your own existence, in this case, your world would end when you die.

Nowadays one of the most popular matters is the  contend between people who support “pro-life” versus the supporters of “pro-choice”. I still surprised that women let this happens. I just gave this topic a lot of thought and still I come up with new approaches.

First of all, I don’t like the use of the terms of neither of them because it’s very simplistic, to enclose the complexity of this in two words.

Let’s start with pro-life, who is against life? Few people really mean it and those probably had killed themselves or try too if they were serious about it. “Pro-life” isn’t a counter position to “Pro-choice”. In spite what that term was chose for, to express the rejection of abortion, the term is so general that may include anything. Probably the most of us are pro-life, including the “pro-choice” followers. If we don’t smoke, and we don’t drink much or if we don’t do drugs or anything that put us in danger or do crazy risky things, we will be pro-lifeses.

My point is that it shouldn’t exist this term at all but let the pro-choicers define themselves, thought be a “pro-choice”is a total fallacy too, and here it’s where the political thing intervene.

First, women had always the choice to do an abortion, this is not about the choice, what really is about if who will pay for the surgery. In socialist countries, the governments with the people money pay for this, but this have sense for them because is cheaper to pay for an abortion, to ride off the baby that to pay for his or her education and health, so in economic terms that is the perfect solution.

Women had aborted since the world is world with different methods and for different reasons maybe it wasn’t made in the open, it wasn’t something that people needed to know and it wasn’t something that women did happily at less the most of them. Until no long ago to hide the fact that this kind of event had happened in the life of a woman it was a must.

There’s a lot of controversy about when life starts, but to me life starts when it starts, from the beginning, I don’t have doubt about it. This kind of discussion only serves to the purpose of explain if “to kill” is more justifiable in a  one month pregnancy or later.

Second is the moral issue. This will be of a relative  weight depending of the person and the circumstances and the circumstances of the surroundings, the believes of the society where that person lives and the options she has. Example of this is China where women are forced to abort (they have an option but the extra children will be out of the system).

Thou should not kill, one of the ten commandments, our society would be a different society if we respect the 10 commandments. This set of rules that are very practical in any way  you see it, yes, these laws are universal and are common sense rules but humans have to complicate it all. Life would be so much easy, but sometimes to kill is justifiable when we don’t have more options or we think we don’t have.

Third, “pro-choice”instead to help women to enhance themselves and have a better life, reduce them to be in an awkward position. I wonder who is behind this, probably it was a man who had the brilliant idea of feed women with the idea that they were owners of their own bodies. I read that in the beginning this was a narrow solution for women who were forced to have children by her husband against their will. Somebody took this idea to the extreme becoming a political issue that come up in every election. Are you pro-life or pro-choice? My answer would be, neither.

Meanwhile, we have women who believe intensely in their rights to ride off any life that they could create only because of the fact that their bodies are their property, and it’s partially true because our bodies belongs to us until we get pregnant. At that point, our bodies became hostess but with the aggravation that if women discharge the host, the host inevitable die. A baby it isn’t a roommate or a renter, a visit or an stranger. We have the choice, but before. We have the choice to be responsible with our bodies, what I’d call the pre-choice.

Nowadays where women have so many options, cheap and expensive to take care of themselves, with so much information and help, more generational communication about tabu topics like sex , with so less prejudices alike past generations  and organization that give children in adoption when a mother can’t take care of her offspring. Yes, abortion should belong to the past with the exception of health issues. Like always, exceptions confirm the rule.

Fourth, I wonder what happens with the rights of the men? because until I know we need two to conceive a human being.

This “pro-choice”thing is so convenient for some men and I don’t want to put all the men in the same sack because I know men who fight for the right to keep the baby in court and they lost the  case because it looks that women have 100 % of the decision leaving the father of the child outside completely. It isn’t fair at all. It should be fifty-fifty.

Men should be responsible too about a pregnancy, they shouldn’t be left behind, they are not the ones who undergo the procedure so I may understand that they can take this lightly but I cannot understand that women take this lightly. I think that is a matter of education and conscientiousness (aware). A man who has sex with a woman should considerate the possibility of a pregnancy. If a man never would chose this woman to be the mother of his children, probably shouldn’t have intercourse with her in the first place. It doesn’t matter all the things available to avoid pregnancy, those things should help us to have a better life (plan when is the best moment to have a child or at least when we think it is and chose how many kids do we want)) but it shouldn’t mean that we have to became promiscuous or behave in ways that don’t make us better persons or than worn us. Probably the most fulfill life is to live in family or/and community.

I have an answer also for people who believe that plan your family is a sin because you are standing in the God’s way by not let God make his job (like”I will have all the children God send me because that is the will of God). There is not a human power who can stand between God and the rest of the things, if really God is interesting  in you to have X amount of children (I don’t think he is) no contraceptive pill or method would overcome God will.

There are so many more aspects to this discussion but now I’m tired and I want to go to bed…and still I have to put the dishes in the machine.

Good Night!!

Castellano

Aca en USA la ensenanza de Castellano se llama Espanol. La primera vez que me hablaron del espanol les pregunte cual, pero ellos me aclararon que hablaban del idioma. Cuando tuve mi primera entrevista con la directora del colegio en el que actualmte enseno Castellano, le explique la diferencia, ya que me olvide por un segundo y le estaba hablando acerca de la ensenanza del castellano y el metodo que tengo para ensenarlo. Ella me miraba hasta que me interrumpio y me pregunto si yo sabia espanol, y ahi cahi.

Despues de tantos anos todavia me acuerdo de la anecdota.

Mis amigos espanoles que a veces vienen a visitarnos les causa mucha gracia esto, pero los americanos son bien cool, no les importa mucho, porque ellos estan en la misma pagina y eso es lo importante.

Los americanos crean corrientes no siguen otras corrientes o usos que son extranos para ellos, son indiferentes, se sienten tranquilos en su mundo, pero no es arrogancia como algunos pueden pensar. Al menos no como sociedad, como individuos es otra cosa, como en todas partes, hay de todo, pero lo interesante es analizar como la gente se comporta en sociedad, ese es un indicador de que la sociedad esta bien integrada, una sociedad integrada esta organizada, una sociedad organizada es eficiente, el ser eficiente significa que todos los miembros que la componen obtienen lo que quieren, o al menos la mayoria, que satisfacen sus necesidades basicas y necesidades espirituales y intelectuales solo y solo si les interesa pero no necesariamente.

Me gusta mucho aca, hay algunas cosas que podrian ser mejor, pero socialmente me gusta el respeto y como la gente se comporta socialmente, en grupo. Y para los que creen que los americanos no son sociales, si lo son, pero quizas no espontaneamente sociales porque creen en que las cosas que son planeadas salen mejor, aunque nosotros sabemos que no siempre eso es asi, pero cuando estan con nosotros ellos se acostumbran a esta clase de locura festiva en la cual la fiesta termina cuando el ultimo invitado se va. Y como siempre hablo en general y en California en particular, cada estado es un pais aqui y tiene distintas caracteristicas que conozco de oido pero que no he experimentado de primera mano porque solo he vivido aca, y solo me gusta hablar de lo que conozco bien.

Besos y buenas noches.