Berlusconi Has Done It Again!!!

Silvio Berlusconi, Italian Prime Minister, seems to have gotten himself into a bit of a spot with the media, after referring to American President Elect Barack Obama as “tanned”. He reportedly passed it off as a joke and thoroughly blasted a reporter who seemed to be insinuating otherwise. The result? Many people believe Berlusconi’s comments were racist.

Do I agree with this conclusion? Not necessarily. It would certainly take more than a thoughtless joke in poor taste, to convince me that someone is racist. Maybe a little insensitive……okay, a lot. Especially when it came out of the mouth of a man, who many times in the past, has uttered statements that provide irrefutable proof that he is quite outspoken, and would do well to practice thinking before speaking.

After all, this is the man who made a vulgar gesture, “corna” behind the head of Josep Pique, a Spanish foreign minister, and dismissed it saying he was only joking around and trying to lighten the atmosphere. He compared Martin Shulz, a german SPD Member of the European Parliament, to Hitler saying, “Mr Schulz, I know a movie producer in Italy who is making a movie about Nazi concentration camps. I suggest you play the role of a Kapo. You are perfect for the part!” Also in 2005, he caused controversy at the opening of the European Food Safety Authority in Parma. He said that in order to convince Finnish president Tarja Halonen to locate EFSA in Parma instead of a Finnish location, he had to “dust off my playboy skills.” To make matters worse, a member of his cabinet released this statement, somehow believeing this would clear things up, “anyone who had seen a picture of Halonen must have been aware that he had been joking”. Too true!

Even worse, in 2006 he somehow found a way to defend his assertion that Communists used to eat children. Let’s see what he came up with. He explained that if you look in the Black Book of Communism, you will see that in communist China, they did not eat children, but they boiled them in order to fertilise their fields! HAHAHAHHAHA! Sorry, this man knows how to make me laugh! I mean it is silly! Then to back up exactly what I believe about Berlusconi, he said, “It was questionable irony … because this joke is questionable. But I did not know how to restrain myself.”

He did not know how to restrain himself. He still does not know, as he has proven so, time and time again and recently with his comment about Barack Obama..

Is he racist? I do not believe so. If he is indeed racist, then I’d have to say, he’s also sexist, (he did say that right-wing women were better looking than those in the left wing and therefore, the left had no taste in women and even criticized the Spanish Government because they have an equal number of men and women in their Council of Ministers) and basically…anti-non-italians. From what I’ve seen and read he’s made unsettling comments to and about everyone who existed and exists under the bright yellow sun.

If you’ve read my other pieces I’m sure you know that I am black, or rather West Indian, and if anybody should have been insulted by his comments, I should have been, definitely. But I was not. Actually, I read the article, and when I got to the “tanned” line, I laughed. I then thought, this is the big deal? This is what all the hoopla is about? Really? And I’m sure Barack Obama is probably wondering the same thing. It was obviously a joke, not necessarily a good one or well thought out one, and I will not even say it was taken out of context. There was no reason for it to be taken out of context, other than for some person who seems to like bacchanal and controversy, to use it do their own deceitful purposes.

I believe people in the media, though we all like juicy stories, must not try to squeeze too hard to get it. Or atleast if we want to get the juice out of the coconut, we should find out if there is any at all. Don’t be content to observe it from the outside, and surmise that since the coconut is yellow, there must be something inside. We must dissect it, dissect the story, and extract the truth.

“I will try to help relations between Russia and the United States where a new generation has come to power. I don’t see problems for Medvedev to establish good relations with Obama because he is young, handsome and even tanned, therefore I think that a good cooperation can be developed”

It’s obvious, no matter how bad it may have sounded when he said it, that he was comparing Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev. They are both young Presidents 44 and 43, respectively, they were both recently elected in their respective countries this year, they are both good-looking men. And I supposed in some warped way, if you squint your eyes really good, they’re both “tanned”, I guess. He was saying because of this they should get along very well and it should help to establish a good relationship between Russia and the United States. Other than the “tanned” part it would have been a somewhat good comment, I think and being someone who likes to go overboard, he had to add a punch line. Except this time, maybe there was too much punch.

I hate having to defend people who do not think before they speak, but that is the way of life of a politician. I refuse to be ignorant and believe everybody is out to get the blacks and that people never say things that end up being misconstrued. Even President Elect Barack Obama made his blunders, saying in a press conference, that he had spoken to all the living presidents. Then he added smiling, “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any seances.” A joke, I might add, that was in very poor taste and was quite correctly answered with resounding silence from his then audience. I understand, though, why he though it was a funny thing to say.

However, I will say this; Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi could definitely learn to put a lid on it. He was definitely wrong on this one. He demonstrated very poor judgement or rather a lack of judgment altogether. I would recommend that he try to mentally run his comments through some sort of sensitivity filter. Everyone has one, Mr. Berlusconi…..yes, even you. But I am sure you know this already, and so I will not be wasting my recommendations on you.

Everybody’s Doing It: Shacking Up, that is

Do not let the statistics fool you

According to recent statistics, the divorce rate in 2005 was 3.6 (per 1000 people) in the United States. This a decrease from 2000′s rate (4.2) and from 1990′s rate (4.7). Furthermore, the Associated Press notes the highest ever divorce rate at 5.3 in 1981. This is something to be happy about, not so? Don’t these statistics seem to indicate that more couples are staying together? Not necessarily, according to the marriage statistics posted at divorcemag.com.
You see, what the divorce statistics do not show you is, that while the rates are dropping, so are the number of marriages that take place each year. Divorcemag.com reports, that there were 2,230,000 marriages in 2005, a drop from 2004, where there were about 49,000 more marriages. Why, if there has been an increase in the American population, by approximately 2.9 milllion, has the number of marriages dropped?
The answer lies in the link between the two, the divorce rate and the marriage rate. Consider this, if less marriages take place, then over time the number of existing marriages declines, therefore leaving less couples with potential to become divorced. Hence, the declining divorce rate is not a result of more couples staying together and working out their problems. Most likely, it results from there being less marriages, and more “shack-ups”. After all, there cannot be a divorce if there was never a marriage in the first place.
More and more, we see and hear of couples deciding to move in together, and becoming apprehensive toward marriage. Even in Hollywood, many stars, such as Brad Pitt, the Ocean’s Eleven actor, have decided against marriage. He has refused to marry his three-year girlfriend, Tomb Raider actress, Angelina Jolie, despite their having six children. Life and Style quotes a source as saying, “Brad’s divorce from Jen (Jennifer Aniston) was painful. It was hard on on his parents and he considers it a major failure in his life. His big excuse for not marrying Angelina is that he hates even the possibility of something like that happening again.”
We have certainly come a long way, since just twenty or thirty years ago, a couple could not live together without being married. If it ever happened, it certainly did not go without ridicule and extreme negative response from the public.
USA Today reports, Rickie Lockhart, 56, of Sacramento was married at 18 and didn’t live with her ex-husband first. “You didn’t do things like that back then. You got married,” she says. “That’s what everybody expected.”
“The nature of cohabitation has changed,” says Jay Teachman in an USA Today article. He is a sociology professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham. “Cohabitators 20 years ago were the rule breakers, the rebels, the risk takers — the folks who were perhaps not as interested in marriage, and using cohabitation as an alternative to marriage.”
In a poll taken by USA Today, 49% said living together makes divorce less likely.
“If you’re living with someone, you actually get to know somebody more than you would not living with them,” says Christopher Sekulich, 37, of Melvindale, Michigan, reported USA Today.
While it may make sense that living with someone in order to get to know them allows for a split, without the hassle of divorce if it did not work out, consider this; cohabitation could make couples more likely to breakup, after all, unlike marriage, there is no real commitment, nothing to anchor the relationship. When conflict arises, what will stop one person from running out on the other instead of trying to work it out for the sake of the relationship? Hence the reason for marriage and marital vows in the first place, the vow to work it out no matter what.
One thing is for sure, less people are getting married, and less children belong to married parents. What does this mean for the future of America? Hopefully not greater depletion of family values and structure. Along with everything else going haywire in the world, we certainly do not need that. So we must decide quickly whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. We must weigh the pros and cons, because there is another thing we do not need. Nasty surprises.

Doctors Do Not Know Everything: How Not Knowing Can Kill You

Some months ago, I found that late at night, I would experience burning sensations in my chest. I had the distinct feeling it was heartburn, and so I left it alone. About a month later, I realized that, this burning sensation had ceased somewhat but had been replaced by a dull but niggling pain on the left side of my chest. What bothered me about this was not only the fact that my heart is located on that side, but that I was experiencing this pain almost always, not just at night. So finally I picked myself up, and went to the doctor’s office.
I hate the doctor’s office. I feel as though every time i go, I receive bad news. But I had to know what the problem was. So, when I finally went in to see her and I had described my symptoms, she said that it was heartburn, as I had suspected. I was hugely relieved, that nothing was wrong with my heart. But that was not the end of it. She prescribed me two medications, only one of which I remember namely because it could have killed me.
The first day I took Maxolon, I felt nothing, no reaction. I certainly was not expecting any type of reaction. Neither did I have the box with the label to read about the side effects, after all, I only needed a few of the pills. But I did realize, late at night when I went to bed, that my tongue felt funny, almost as though it was blocking me from swallowing. However, I dismissed it as having to do with the medication, since I had no reason to believe that it had any side effect, and I knew that I suffer from Bruxism. That is, I would bite down my tongue during the night, sometimes making it hard for me to swallow food or speak clearly during the day.
Needless to say, two days later, I was still taking this medication. Until one night, as my parents were getting ready to go out, and I sat watching the Discovery Channel, I felt the strangest thing ever. My lower jaw and my upper went in two opposing directions. One was literally pulling to the left and the other to the right. Now, if you have ever recieved a blow to the jaw, from say a football, and I have, or any type of hard object, multiply that pain by ten and prolong it for, lets say ten minutes. That is what I was feeling. Further more as time went by, the pain intensified.
Scared out of my mind that I was going to die, or that I had somehow sustained some sort of brain damage, I ran downstairs to my father, who was in a worse state than I was, because he has a tendency to lose all of his mental capacities in these types of situations. He was ridiculously calm, though I am sure vacant is probably a more suitable word, for his lack of emotion or physical reaction. He went up to my mother, and I quickly followed hoping for sure she would know what to do. After about a half hour of dilly-dallying, and deciding what to do, we went to an emergency doctor’s office nearby. I thought we would have gone to the hospital, but some people just do not think straight in emergency situations.
This doctor seemed to be a total waste of my time and pain, seeing as I had to wait maybe a half-hour before he arrived, and  he did not have a clue what was the problem. First he got annoyed because I would not answer his question, before realizing I could not swallow and therefore could not talk with a mouthful of saliva. When it dawned on him my tongue was swollen, he then said maybe my tongue was infected due to Bruxism. We all then realized that the “jaw thing” alternated with the “swollen tongue thing” and they never occured together. Next he proceeded to force my jaw into place with his hands, denying that the medication I was taking had anything to do with it.
Then came the third symptom. My neck became weak and I could not hold my head upright anymore. Anytime he held my head up and let go it just fell backward. It felt much like I had just had an intense weightlifting workout, except I used my neck. Then came the words I did not want to hear. “You must take her to the hospital, I suspect this must be a neurological problem.”
So we rushed down to the hospital; thank God my aunt was a nurse there, or else who know how long it would have taken me to get the attention I needed. Immediately when they signed me in, they said, “Oh, it’s just an allergic reaction.” Yet they refused to believe that Maxolon had caused this.
By the time the doctor had seen me and asked me questions, my tongue got so big I could not keep it in my mouth anymore and the back of my throat was burning with fatigue from keeping my tongue out. Saliva that I could not swallow kept running out like river. Thank God for Bounty! The medication they gave me for the allergy was not working at first. It took about three hours to work. But before that I felt my jaw twist again, and the chief doctor came out, examined me, declared she had never seen anything like that in her life. Then she instructed them to give me a muscle relaxant.
After that, for the next couple of days, I took Puriton and some other muscle relaxant, and the symptoms never came back. And I know why. I did a google search for side effects of Maxolon which contains the ingredient metoclopramide, which causes the reactions. The following information was taken from MedicineNet.com.

Common side effects:
1. drowsiness
2. restlessness
3. fatigue
4. anxiety
5. insomnia
6. depression
7. sedation.

Serious neurological side effects:
1. symptoms mimicking Parkinson’s disease
2. involuntary muscle movements,
3. facial grimacing
4. dystonic reactions resembling tetanus.

Patients with Parkinson’s disease can experience worsening of symptoms with metoclopramide. Metoclopramide may impair the mental and/or physical abilities to drive or operate machinery.”

If you ever experience any of these symtoms, note that many other medications contain metoclopramide.

Had I been aware that Maxolon contains metoclopramide which could cause these reactions, it would have saved me a lot of trouble and time. From the moment my tongue felt funny I would have discontinued use. The funny thing is, the doctors at the hospital recommended I continue to use the medication because they were convinced I had the reaction to something I ate. However I did no such thing! Thank God for common sense!

Now I did not die from these complications because though they were serious, they were not fatal, but it could be different for you. I warn you; read medication labels even if you are not buying the box. Knowing can save your life!

Racism???

I really don’t know. Maybe I’m an idiot for thinking that things are changing. And maybe they are, but they’re not moving fast enough for me. Or maybe things are not meant to be changed and this is just something we all have to live with til the end. Of course I’m talking about racism, and racism in general, not just against blacks, because sometimes we believe we are the only ones who get it. So yes, I’d be willing to admit that maybe my desires are a little premature, expecting people to change their opinions over one little election. But considering the decades that have passed and all the blood spilt over this issue, you would think people would come to be a little more accepting of one another, if not for love, for the sake of peace.

This might sound bad, but I might understand why some white people might have reservations about a black president, or black people in general. After all we are more often than not portrayed in the media to be gun toting maniacs, content to shoot each other to death, over what I don’t know. Flip on BBC news, and they’re almost always showing some clip of some insurrection or civil war or downright massacre and genocide. People hacking each other to death with machetes in Rwanda over a stupid “race” feud that makes no sense whatsoever, because after all aren’t hutus and tutsis both black? After 9/11 I can’t tell you how many times, when i was in Canada I saw the clip of the 1990 coup in Trinidad and Tobago, which I must confess I had not ever seen, but had the priviledge of seeing it on an American news station. And I had no clue why they were showing it or what it had to do with 9/11. Please feel free to enlighten me.

The HIV epidemic in Africa. I don’t need to write a paragraph on that!
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Well, lets not even get into America itself, because while I must confess I have watched a couple episodes of Flavor of Love, I love New York  and such shows, it was merely out of my own love for seeing people make a fool out of themselves on international television and not really care. But I always find I can never watch these shows too much, because I always wonder, in countries where there aren’t a lot of black people to dispel stereotypes, or even any black people at all, what do they think about us after watching these shows?

And I am just raising these ideas as they pass through my head….just food for thought. Not necessarily because they are my opinions, nor do I condone racism or stereotypes, or think there is any justification for it. But think, if besides say, Oprah, whose show I have stopped watching since she is now talking a pack of rubbish about New World and you are your own god, and God is your feelings……if besides Oprah, the only thing non-black people see us doing is shooting people, talking about killing people, rapping about killing people, or already dead, every single music video is sex sex sex sex and more sex, and if its not sex,  it’s let’s sell drugs and make lots of money, what can we expect them to think? I mean a man gets shot nine times, jaw’s wired shut could barely talk, instead of puttin him in some rehab, he’s now on a pedestal, a hero, makin records about magic sticks, many men and candyshops. Get rich or die trying! The funny thing is, he didn’t have to try too hard. He was able to find a couple million people who would fork over $20 to the cause!

And this next dotish head idiot, Cam’ron; who would live next door to a known serial killer, but wouldn’t report it, because God forbid anyone consider him a snitch. But I guess in some twisted way, being called a snitch is worse than deliberately not saving other people’s lives…..I mean really? If you don’t want to tell on people because you’re afraid for your life, that’s fine. But because you don’t want people to call you a snitch? Now that’s cowardice. Anyone with common sense knows that the real reason no one wants to be a snitch is because usually the snitch doing the same exact thing as the “snitchee”. And if you snitch on them they snitch on you. Are these the ideals of the black man?  Even if they are, are others right to judge us or even condemn us based on this information?

After all, there are just as many reality tv shows with white people, people of all races actually, acting like total idiots, and saying stupid things. O.J. Simpson isn’t the only man who killed his wife (if he even did it. lol.) Everytime I turn on MSNBC, some white man killed his wife, or she’s missing or some nonsense. Why isn’t anybody looking down on them? But what I realize is there’s a word called “balance” and there’s another called “majority”

It would appear that the “majority” of us partake in these activities portrayed on tv, as “we” would say, “on the regular”. The reason it seems this way is there is no “balance”. There is no balance between the people who act like fools and the people who don’t in the media. So it would seem that 90% of us black women, like to shake our “bootay” in a thong, to “the whisper song”, and we all talk like Shanaynay. (dont even know if that’s how to spell it.) and on the other side, there’s Oprah or Condoleeza Rice. Is that balance? No.

Jessica Simpson on the other hand can shake her half naked butt in a video all she wants, and Britney Spears can walk around wearing no underwear. Who really cares? There are tons of other white people on tv doing the exact opposite, offsetting the others, providing a balance. I don’t have to make a list do I?

I started off writing this note because i was annoyed at the racist comments that some Facebook people have posted on their profiles in light of the whole Barack Obama thing . I was going to write about why they’re wrong to say those things and why they’re wrong to be racist. And they are wrong to be racist. But do they hate us because our skin is black? Somehow that seems silly to me….maybe because my mind can’t comprehend such a thing. Or do they hate us because to them we contribute little to nothing to society, other than to be violent, spread AIDS (according to the media) and Fight the Power! I do not know. I started off saying I didn’t know, and at the end of this note I still don’t know.

It’s wrong to hate based on stereotypes, its wrong to hate an entire race based on stereotypes. Its wrong to hate people, I believe. And while they are the ones in the wrong and should make the effort to find out if the stereotypes portrayed in the media are correct or wrong, we all know the world doesn’t work that way. Perhaps its our duty to show them, whatever their reason for hating us is……that their reasons are wrong…and that whatever their parents told them, or however they came to their conclusions, is wrong. I know that if somebody gets the wrong impression of me or something I said, I try to rectify it, or show them, if their willing to find out, that Hey! this is not so! And they always say.. Oh I don’t know why I thought that!

Or maybe I’m wrong…feel free to disagree.

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