Over-Consumption and the Bloating of America My husband and I just took a road trip from here is the San Francisco Bay area up through Oregon, Washington, Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and camped on the way home down the coast. What was remarkable was the amount of obesity we encountered. Some of these encounters were more memorable than other. On a ferry, we saw an overweight couple eating ice cream and feeding a young child under one year its own ice cream cup. Another at a rest stop was seeing a family arrive in two vehicles because they couldn’t fir in one vehicle- not because of numbers but because of size. My husband once exclaimed “look at that poor tiny woman!” which caused me to turn around and see this very small-boned woman with a giant belly protruding and an apron of fat descending. In the San Francisco Chronicle pink pages( Sunday Datebook) from yesterday, a question to movie critic Mick Lasalle included “Do you think movies reflect their times not only in their content, but in the way they’re produced? For example, too many of us eat too much, drink too much, spend more than we can afford. And too many of today’s filmmakers seem to think that if they just throw money at a film it makes up for lack of craft.” Mick LaSalle’s response included ” Your question introduces an idea I’ve never considered, that the bloat in our films is related to the bloat in our people”. [...]
Geneen Roth
Madoff as Teacher not Devil
Madoff’s Lesson For Us My friends, Matt and Geneen, lost all their retirement savings in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Instead of being victims, they have used the experience in very constructive ways for themselves. I am not talking out of school here, because they have each publicized their plight in their own ways: together as a couple on the Today show, author Geneen in an article in the Huffington Post (What I Gained By Losing in Madoff) and award-winning inspirational speaker Matt in Youtube (What Bernie Madoff Couldn’t Steal From Me) . One of the common ingredients in their stories is their willingness to take responsibility – not only for what happened- but ongoingly. As Matt says, Bernie Madoff stole money from them, but it was up to them to ensure that he didn’t steal the rest of their lives. Too often we stay locked in the past and try and change it. We obsess about how it should have been, or how it could have been if…..Those who are focusing on Bernie Madoff and what should have happened to him (nothing you can do to him will bring back your wealth), or, trying to find out where the money is (wake-up, it’s GONE), or how the government should pay them back because it was the SEC who messed up (Hey, where’s my bailout!) are staying in the past, are ultimately not taking responsibility for their lives. There is a new paradigm shift, and that shift requires each of us to [...]