It's All in a Name

I've had several people ask me why I chose "The Sweet Choice" as the name of my blog, and I believe it might require some explanation so people don't get the wrong idea.

When my husband was a child, his family had a Boston Terrier dog named Dolly.  I don't know if you've ever had a Boston before, but they are the most amazing dogs.  Like most dogs, they are loyal to a fault, but Bostons are also highly intelligent.  They were originally a cross breed of Bulldogs (English and French) and the English terrier, which is now extinct.  Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they were originally bred to be fighting dogs, like Pit Bulls.  When they bred Bostons, however, they didn't get much of a fighting dog because Bostons have wonderful and sweet dispositions.

When my husband's parents got her, they named her Dolly: The Sweet's Choice, which is cute given that their surname is Sweet.  Sweet was not originally my last name, of course; I got it when I married into the family.  And when I did, my husband's parents gave us each a book for our wedding.  In the inscription in mine, they wrote that I was now "The Sweet's Choice."

I feel so very lucky and blessed to have (1) married a man with the last name of Sweet, and (2) married into such a warm and loving family.  I always had this thought in the back of my mind as I was growing up and thinking of my wedding day, even before I met my husband, Raven--if my soon-to-be-husband's last name was something I didn't care for, I was going to keep my maiden name and just tell him that I was all about keeping my own identity as a woman.  I'm not sure what feminists may think of that because the second I knew Raven and I were going to marry, I knew I was going to take his name.  How could I not?  Candy Sweet?  It was too good a name to pass up!

Raven's mom and dad have been so very wonderful to me over the few years we've been married.  And while his dad, Frank, has passed away now, I still remember him quite fondly.  I am tearing up now thinking about how warmly and kindly he accepted me into the family.  When he wrote in the book that I was "The Sweet's Choice," it was like they had all chosen me, not just Raven.  I wish now I had told him how much that meant to me.

So that is the reason for the blog's name.  It's my way of reminding myself how much I am loved by a family that is so kind and loving.

We have a Boston Terrier of our own now, Geddy Lee Sweet, and he, too, is "The Sweet's Choice," just like me.

He even has his own twitter account:  @Geddy_of_Boston.

All People Matter

Someone recently asked me if people matter.  Do all people matter, or are there some people that the world would just be better off without?  My initial response was—of course, all people matter!  But I try to teach my students that a statement without evidence is just an opinion.  Something that is fact is much stronger than a mere opinion.  (This I learned from Mortimer J. Adler:  The Radical Academy).  My gut, my heart, tells me that each and every person matters, but I need evidence before I can say that opinion is fact. 

I like what John F. Kennedy wrote in Nation of Immigrants:  “The contribution of immigrants can be seen in every aspect of our national life.  We see it in religion, in politics, in business, in the arts, in education, even in athletics and in entertainment.  There is no part of our nation that has not been touched by our immigrant background.”  People who are different matter because all of society is enriched by diversity. 

I have a certain kind of personality, and that personality helps to color the way that I see the world.  I was in New Orleans for a concert once, and because of how horrible our hotel was, I was spitting mad.  Ready to go home.  I walked the streets of New Orleans and saw it as an ugly, evil, hateful place, until a guy stopped me on Bourbon Street and gave me a pretend ticket for “Not partying hard enough.”  He was working for the food bank collecting donations, but his easy smile and delightful demeanor helped me to change my attitude, and then I saw New Orleans in a whole new light.  It’s like the city morphed before my eyes.  Was the city one way, and then it became another?  No, it was always the same city, but I couldn't see it at that time.  I needed another person to help me.  

I also have a set of life experiences that I filter the world through.  No one is capable of seeing the world as it truly is because we do not have limitless attention to be able to see all aspects of the entire world.  We filter things out simply because we cannot see it all, and we filter things out based on who we are and what we have seen.  The world doesn’t always fit into the scripts we create for it, and that is when we feel frustration, because we do not know the world or our place in it.

If we only read a certain type of literature or watch a certain type of television show, then we skew what we see and know of the world in a specific and limiting way.  Each and every person matters because they can tell us what they see of the world and in the world.  When we add that to what we already know, then we can start forming a clearer picture of the world.  The more we know, the more we can see how it fits together.  We learn more about ourselves and our place in the world when we truly understand the experiences of others. 

We are deprived when people are silenced, whether it is because they are killed or because their voices are silenced.  And we silence people way too much.  Poverty silences.  Denying people the right to vote silences, whether through actual legislation or through practices that make them feel as though voting would be a waste of their time.  Lack of education silences.

All of these things must be fought at every instance.  If we could know the perspective of everyone in the world, then we could see the world as it truly is.  If we could know everyone’s experiences of the world all at once—I think this might be the mind of God.

Blogging Again!

I wasn't entirely sure that blogging was for me until someone posted on my facebook wall that they actually enjoyed my blog.  I hope that one day I can give someone else a gift as special as that one was to me.  The end result is that I plan to keep at it.

One of the reasons I wasn't so sure that my words were important enough to try to reach people was that I didn't have a special topic that I was writing on, like kids or cooking or something like that, and I'm not sure how often I would keep reading a blog that bounced around from one topic to the next.  How important are my musings anyway?  But I have decided to persevere anyway, and perhaps a specialized topic like one of the above will reveal itself, and my blog can evolve.

Until then, I hope you will bear with me, and leave me some comments (I think I finally have the setting correct) so that I know what works and what doesn't!

So that reading this post isn't a complete waste of your time, I just learned that the appropriate phrase is "bear with me" when you want someone to show you a little patience because "bare with me" would be an invitation for them to undress with you.

A very important distinction, no?

Vigilante or Just Justice?

As I understand it, a woman in Oklahoma had her life threatened not because she murdered her own child, but because some else (allegedly) did.  She had the great misfortune of looking like Casey Anthony, and if you don’t know who she is, then you’ve been living under a rock; I couldn’t even go on vacation without seeing it on the news.  What is it about this particular woman and this particular case that had people so riled up? 

Perez Hilton

Huffington Post

People have been comparing Casey Anthony to O.J. Simpson who (allegedly) killed two people.  I remember distinctly when he was acquitted.  I was in school when they announced the verdict, and we were all in the main building watching it on tv.  Because I was young, it didn’t really bother me or affect me because I was deeply self-centered at the time, as most teenagers are.  What is clearest in my memory is a fellow student, a young man a year or two older than me, walking down the crowded hall as we all filed back to class singing, “The Juice is Loose!”

I don’t remember clearly if people threatened Simpson’s life after he was acquitted, but Anthony wasn’t even out of jail when people started began threatening her.  Are people really so quick to throw their own lives away to get what they perceive to be justice for someone else?  The little girl wasn’t their little girl, so why are they so quick to seek justice for her?

I suspect that much of the threats are simply words, with no real threat of intention behind them.  It is terribly frustrating to empathize with a little girl who never even had the chance to live a good life and to see a mother who appears to want only the freedom of having no strings attached to her apron.  That much empathy demands that something be done, but it appears that our justice system has failed us and our emotive need to see this precious child avenged.  For most people, simply being heard is enough; they only want someone to hear and understand their frustration as they vent it in chorus and in unison. 

That is not to say that Anthony’s life is not in danger because there are those people who would like nothing more than see justice—vigilante justice.  I have loved Batman for as long as I can remember, but even I do not believe in vigilante justice.  There is no longer any Wild West, and I do not see the reason to bring back a form of justice that ends up turning on itself.  We have government to protect the weak from the strong, and very often, those in power will do whatever it takes to keep that power for themselves, and carrying out vigilante justice is an awesome power.  We have a series of checks and balances in our government to prevent any one branch or any one person from gaining too much power.  Vigilante mobs do not.

I believe that in this very difficult case, people should focus not on the part of our justice system that doesn’t work, but on the part that does.  I do not believe we should sacrifice innocent people to death row just to get at the few that are able to slip through.  “Better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Here is today’s Fight Question:

Should the news have funded Casey Anthony’s defense?  Is ABC news actually responsible for this miscarriage of justice?  Is her acquittal a miscarriage of justice? 

Who Paid for Casey Anthony's Defense?