Hasta La Gadget!

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell which encloses your understanding”
Kahlil Gibran

When my son Ross came out to our family as gay eight years ago, my hurdle towards a major crisis of faith began. I had to re-examine everything I had previously thought and at times thought I knew with certainty to be true. There is nothing like seeing a precious child in despair over the knowledge that the plan of happiness he had been taught to strive for, which included the opportunity for temple marriage and parenthood, the plan that is the bedrock of our theology, would be impossible for him to attain as his authentic self. It upended my notions of truth, happiness, obedience, loyalty, and in fact all that I held dear, including my perception of the character of God. And I, for a long moment, wondered if I would be able to stay with a theology that had unintentionally made my child feel inherently unworthy of God’s choicest blessings.

Ross began having panic attacks in February of 2007, his senior year of high school, shortly after being offered a scholarship to BYU and the nagging fear that had been encroaching on my sense of well-being began to loom larger. My suspicions were confirmed when I sat him down at the kitchen table one warm June night that year, while his brother and father were away at scout camp.

I asked and he answered, pouring out years of grief and heartache and shame. Wishing it wasn’t so, wanting to be just like “everyone else” and knowing he was not. I assured him of our love and understanding, our unwavering support and loyalty, but when in absolute despair he said, “What’s the point of going on? I can’t ever marry in the temple and have a family. How do I get to the Celestial Kingdom? What happens to me?” I had no answers. I could not advise him to keep coming to church, to hope for peace in the next life. There are graveyards full of young Latter-Day-Saints who have tried. I would rather have him alive, living an authentic life, true to who he is, than to live a stalwart steadfast lie that backs him in to a suicidal corner.

If I had previously entertained any doubt that sexual preference was a choice, those doubts were completely erased as I held my sobbing teenager that night in the kitchen, as he chanted over and over, “I just want to be normal, go on a mission, get married, like everyone else.” And all I could think of was, “What kid in their right mind would choose ridicule over acceptance, would choose to be a pariah in his own religious community?” I received a firm conviction that night as I held him in my arms, that this was my beloved child and that our family would rally around him and support him, and we have.

He no longer attends church. He had to walk away, to find his own path that would somehow help him want to stay alive by not asking of him to be alone all his life, but affirm his desire for love and companionship. He has spent the last eight years as an out gay man, trying to make up for all those years he felt he had to hide his painful secret, and he is learning to discard the shame and self-loathing that his religious doctrine and culture imposed upon him all those years. I am hoping that he can finally see himself as I know God sees him.

My conventional faith has taken a hit since my child came out, but my capacity for love and empathy has increased ten-fold. All of my beliefs have been upended and rearranged. Here in my community people have been incredible supportive, including a fabulously affirming bishop and an incredibly well-educated and enlightened stake presidency, but the doctrine remains the same. And young gay Mormons are dying to get to heaven where they hope life won’t be so cruel. We are losing whole families who are pushed out by intolerance and bigotry.

I had no answers back in 2007, but I have answers now. And they are loud and clear and not just for my child, but for all the gay kids I have learned to advocate for. I want to find every struggling gay Mormon child and cup their faces in my hands, and tell them how loved they are, AS they are. After having a front row seat to the anguish of my own beloved child, I must work to prevent others from having to face a potentially even more perilous situation, wherein their church leaders or even their own families reject them. Because this does happen. It happens in our church.

That is not part of God’s plan for them. This is not their test or trial here on earth. They will not become straight in the next life. This is how a loving father created them, with the desire and capacity to form a lifelong bond of love and companionship with someone they are madly in love with. This is my testimony, and I will fight for love and acceptance. For compassion and Christ-like understanding for these valiant souls from their fellow saints and the community at large.

Perhaps then families like mine will not feel torn between a church they love and a child they would give their life for. I stay in the faith of my childhood with the desire to be a voice of compassion and mercy, an obligation to be a comforter, an advisor, a friend, to any who have suffered as we have, as Ross has. Maybe I can encourage a parent to affirm their child. Perhaps I can help a gay Mormon child want to stay alive. This is what my Savior expects of me. This is why I breathe fire. I am a Mama Dragon.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

“Wishing you a good death” is not the usual Mother’s Day sentiment expressed on that special Sunday in May we just celebrated.

But perhaps we should at least think it if we really want to honor our Moms.

And Dads. Or grandparents, brothers, sisters. And our own partners.

Because if we don’t discuss, plan and prepare now before incapacity and uncertainty become painful reality, we will live to regret how our loved ones die.

Just ask Ai-jen Poo. She wrote the book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America, (New Press, 2015) after watching her grandfather fade and die in a nursing home no one wanted him to be in.

“My grandfather quietly sustained the heartbreaks of my parents’ divorce, the passing of most of his friends and then the loss of his wife of more than 40 years,” Poo wrote. “After my grandmother’s stroke, she could no longer care for herself. With tremendous courage and love, for years he cooked every meal, talked to her and kept her comfortable until the end. “One of my greatest regrets in life is that we did not provide him with the same comfort and care in the final moments of his life.”

Poo won a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2014 for her work advocating for better pay and protection for domestic workers, including caregivers for the elderly. She is director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-founded Caring Across Generations, an initiative that addresses widespread unemployment, improving homecare workers’ wages and benefits and the elder boom.
Poo has joined forces with filmmakers Deirdre Fishel and Tony Heriza, who have spent the last two years exposing “the cracks in our elder care system.” Fishel and Heriza say they decided to make the feature documentary, called CARE, after facing that universal baby boomer rite of passage: Aging parents and how to best care for them. “It started from watching our own parents face frailty and the need for care. Then as we got deeper into the project, we saw how many people are dealing privately with these issues – virtually everyone we know.”

The project received major grants from the MacArthur and Ford Foundations, but is counting on a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for post-production costs, including an educational campaign with the film’s release. Fishel and Heriza, who have a long track record of making documentary films, call CARE the “most important project of our lives.” They’re convinced that the country is ready for a critical culture change in how elders and the people who care for them are acknowledged.

Being obsessed with staying and looking young has been the focus of baby boomers — myself included — for a long time. Make that a long, long time. Because we are getting old. And older.

Every eight seconds an American turns 65. That adds up to more than 10,000 a day or four million people every year. Of those new golden olden folk, 70 percent are projected to need long-term care or personal assistance.

Currently, three million professional caregivers work in the home care field and an estimated 1.8 million more will be needed in the next decade.

Trouble is, you can make more money walking your neighbor’s dog than you can caring for your neighbor’s father. $9.61 is the average hourly wage for home-care workers, adding up to an annual income of $13,000. Three of five homecare aides rely on public assistance, such as food benefits, Medicaid or help paying for housing and utilities, a study funded by Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute recently found.
Poo sees the aging demographic shift as an opportunity to “set in place a system to affirm the dignity of people at every stage of life and in every walk of life, and create millions of good jobs in the process.”

The CARE film follows three home caregivers through their daily duties and reveals how they can barely make rent. It also tracks the mounting debts of two families struggling to pay for quality care. This equation doesn’t add up. If those providing the most intimate care for our most vulnerable citizens earn poverty-level wages and those paying for those services tap out all their savings, who is making money off the final years of our elders?

Just one of many questions I hope gets answered before I get older.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

It’s Action Hero Week , which means we’re exploring how technology could give you superpowers. You know: exoskeletons , biohacking , cool stuff like that. Here’s a simpler idea: just strap on a virtual reality headset and feel like a hero without all the blood and sweat!

Read more…

Los Angeles = cinema, San Francisco = tech. And it looks like Klickitat County, Washington = unmanned aerial vehicles.

Read more…

The MinutePhysics series has always been a goldmine of interesting facts and science explainers. But prepare to have your mind blown wide open this time as Henry Reich shows you an alternate way to manually subtract large numbers—by doing addition instead.

Read more…