Category: Commentary

Back in 1973 I discovered the works of Raymond Chandler and spent six months or so pouring through everything the crime writer had written. First I devoured the Phillip Marlowe novels, most of which had been popularized on film by Humphrey Bogart, and then gulped-down all of the short stories the writer had written for the great pulp fiction magazines like Black Mask.

It only figures that New Age spirituality would have to grapple with the very modern issue of intellectual property rights. Sometimes the cases are downright silly and of little or no consequence. At other times, severe blocks are put in the way of serious spiritual research and study.

Back in the early 80s I was living on California’s central coast when the city of San Francisco passed one of the country’s first restrictive smoking laws. By today’s standards, the law wasn’t very restrictive at all, only requiring that large employers supply a smoke free environment for their office workers who didn’t smoke.

Jeez! Can it really be five years since this column first appeared in the pages of ESP Magazine, a weekly entertainment paper published in Greensboro, North Carolina? Five years since ESP editor Ogi Overman asked me to write an article on the Tarot, the mystical “fortune telling” cards which are a love of mine, leading immediately to a column on alternative ideas. Five years of deadlines never missed, if sometimes pushed back a bit. Five years of biting fingernails while I tried to figure out what the heck to write about this week. Five years, four computers and five word processing programs later we're still here. Who would've thought it possible? Certainly not me.

Often, when I spout-off some rhetoric from the good old peace-love-and-groovy days, I’m accused of living in the past and reminded that this is the 21st century, with the implied suggestion that I should catch-up with the times. Actually, I’m very much entrenched in the present, thank you, and if I often quote the past it’s because I learned some values there that are timeless. These are values, I might add, that are very much lacking in our current world and if we don’t find them again soon, I fear that we are doomed to fall into a deep and dark morass from which we might never return.

As any woman who's ventured outside the “pink ghetto” of traditional women's jobs can tell you, sexism continues to be very much a part of our business culture. To be sure, laws meant to protect women's rights and guarantee equality have definitely helped. Women in the board room and female CEOs, unheard of a generation or so ago, are now fairly commonplace. But for every woman who's made it in “the man's world,” there are at least two or three who've been unable to overcome the obstacles that are set in their path.

There's a bumper sticker that's been appearing on automobiles recently that reads, “The Spirit of the Taliban Lives in all Fundamentalists.” One has to look no further than the Lynchburg, Virginia based Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell to see the truth of this sentiment.

(Editor’s note: We all know that people aren’t always who they seem on the World Wide Web. The feminist bulletin boards have men who claim to be women so that they can bait the feminists, the poor claim to be rich, and adult pedophiles pass themselves off as children. However, sometimes our perceptions of others is the result of our own assumptions, as Kaya Casper points out in this essay.)

Upon entry onto the web scene two years ago, I was exposed to a world where judgments could realistically be made not on the color of my skin, but on the content of my character. Was this what Martin Luther King meant in his “I have a dream” speech? Was his dream of https and dial-up connections? I still wonder about that.

The world is in an awful state and I must say my piece. The most powerful tool I can think of for “saving the world,” or rather “saving humankind,” is to simply teach our children how to love one another. Whether it’s kids killing each other at school, or grown lunatics committing genocide, they all lack one thing: they do not love themselves.