Yesterday, when the news came through that explosions had rocked the Boston Marathon, I immediately turned to Twitter to get updates. After all, if you want the news fast and often in first person, Twitter is where you need to be. I read and absorbed as much as I could emotionally handle, sent out a tweet of condolences in a sea of thousands, retweeted something Liz Gumbiner (@MOM101) said and then I got the hell away from social media. Because I knew. I knew like every other time something …
Rape Culture Alive And Well In Canada
One month before she committed suicide, Rehtaeh Parsons posted a picture of herself on Facebook with a quote from Martin Luther King captioning it as such: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” And in the end that is exactly what happened for Rehtaeh. It took 17 months, but eventually the silence of her friends became too much to bear and she left this world not knowing the storm of outrage she'd leave behind. I wonder if we knew 17 …
Shut Your Damn Phone Off
We live in a society where most of us are attached to our phones. I am guilty of this myself with my hand often holding it for no other reason but to feel the comfort of knowing it's there I guess. It's become my fourth appendage, never far, always charged and ready to connect me to someone, somewhere in a nanosecond. This is not a good thing. I remember what life was like before cell phones and portable tablets. It was much calmer. I suspect this is because I was unattainable during down …
Put Down Your Guns America
Back in late July, I wrote a post titled “Put Your Stones Down”. (God, was it really only July?) Long story short, it was a from-the-heart post in which I begged, probably even condemned, people who were quick to throw judgment about in light of horrific events, to put their stones down. Ultimately, it didn’t really matter why people had children at a midnight screening of Batman. It wasn’t the parents fault they were shot. …
Stop Humiliating Your Kids On the Internet Please
A couple of weeks ago, somebody brought to my attention a website called Dogshaming. People submit pictures of their dogs wearing signs around their neck that are meant to be confessions of bad deeds. As the owner of two dogs who do some pretty stupid things, I thought it was hysterical in a twisted sort of way. Shaming a dog is funny. Shaming a child is not. Yesterday I tripped across this apalling article on Huffington Post. Basically, this dad thought shaming his …
